Page 11

Emmy watched him leave. His footsteps were heavy in the hallway, squeaking every floorboard. She heard his tread down the split-level stairs. The click of the front door. Emmy was about to get started on the search when she heard a soft squeak closer by.

Pamela peered around the edge of the open doorway. Emmy smiled at her, but the girl quickly pulled back. Her footsteps were light as a mouse across the hall. One of the bedroom doors opened, then closed.

Going after her was an option, but Emmy had to weigh the fact that Pamela was a ten-year-old whose sister was missing against the probability that she had any useful information.

The girl would probably remember every part of this night.

She didn’t need to remember being terrified of an aggressive sheriff’s deputy.

Besides, the worst way to get something from a child was to demand they speak up.

Emmy started the search of Cheyenne’s bedroom with a quick visual scan in case anything obvious was lying around.

Cheyenne seemed to like pink and blue, which was unsurprising considering how she’d decorated her bike.

This wasn’t a little girl pink on the walls, though.

The color was closer to hot pink, likely chosen to annoy her mother.

The bedspread was an almost identical vivid blue to Cheyenne’s bicycle.

The sheets were an explosion of multicolored flowers.

The throw pillows were in a similar range.

Glow-in-the-dark stars had been stuck onto the ceiling and pressed onto the blades of the ceiling fan.

There was a fake sheepskin rug on the floor.

The edges were curled. A pair of deep gouges had damaged the hardwoods.

The top of the desk was almost completely covered with various types of make-up.

Three bottles of dark nail polish rested beside a history textbook.

Underneath was a yellow legal pad with doodles drawn in purple ink.

Emmy knew both girls were in summer school because they’d failed social studies during the regular year.

She checked to make sure the doorway was still empty before taking a pair of gloves out of her pocket and pulling them on.

She paged through the textbook. Skimmed the class notes.

Cheyenne’s handwriting was a girlish loop with circles instead of dots.

From what Emmy could tell, none of her notes were personal in nature.

There was a backpack leaning against the side of the desk.

She bent down to look inside. Another textbook, a copy of Romeo and Juliet , a Twix bar, an empty water bottle, a school ID, three crumpled dollar bills, thirty-two cents in loose coins, and what looked like a furry Tic Tac.

Emmy stood back up. She started with the low-hanging fruit.

Ran her hands between the mattress and box spring.

Peered under the bed. Opened the bedside drawers, checked inside, then slid her fingers along the wooden undersides.

Then she performed the same routine with the dresser drawers.

She rifled the closet shelves. Rummaged through the trash.

Searched random pockets in clothes. Looked inside the zillions of pairs of shoes tossed into the closet.

Bingo.

Emmy found a small, metal lockbox tucked into the very back corner of the closet.

She didn’t waste time looking for a key.

The box was flimsy, the sort of thing you would give a child, not engineered with a patented lock from Fort Knox.

Emmy unclipped the multi-tool on her belt and found the auger.

She jammed it into the keyhole and twisted. The box opened.

“Huh,” she mumbled.

There had to be at least 3,000 dollars in the box. She took out the bills to count them. The money wasn’t Cheyenne’s only stash. There was a baggie of weed, more seeds than stems, but still. She placed it all on the floor.

The only thing left in the box was a strip of photos like one you’d get from a booth at the fair.

Each of the four squares showed Madison and Cheyenne, arms around each other, posing for the camera.

They were dressed up, probably for a party that neither set of parents had known about.

Madison’s eyeliner was too heavy, her lips ballooned out with cherry red lipstick.

Cheyenne’s too-tight shirt gaped open wide enough to show her black bra underneath.

The gold necklace with her name spelled in script practically disappeared into her cleavage.

Madison had a matching necklace with her name, but in contrast, she was more modestly dressed, as if she hadn’t been able to fully commit to the look.

The last photo on the strip raised an interesting question.

Cheyenne was holding Madison’s head in her hands as she kissed her on the face.

Not the cheek, not the lips, but somewhere in between.

Emmy didn’t want to read too much into the kiss.

At that age, she had constantly developed crushes on girls, but there was never a sexual component.

It was more like she wanted to be them rather than to be with them.

To have Celia’s quick wit or Taybee’s unwavering certainty or Hannah’s dark sense of humor. To be anyone but herself.

It was so hard to be a fifteen-year-old girl.

She heard the hallway floorboards creak again. Emmy glanced into the mirror over the dresser. She could see Pamela peering around the doorjamb.

Emmy sat back on her heels. Again, she thought about Pamela’s furtive look in the street.

At ten years of age, Pamela was old enough to understand something bad had happened to Cheyenne, but not old enough to grasp that she really needed to help.

Any past promises or pinky swears or even bribes were inconsequential.

Pamela needed to confess it all. Emmy tried to think of a way to convey this truth without pushing the girl too far.

Cole was one year older, but probably half as mature.

The only real power you had at that age was silence.

She took out her phone and carefully photographed everything she had found.

Then she placed the photo strip back in the metal box.

Then the bag of pot. Then she started counting the cash.

Twenties, mostly. A few tens. Several fifties, which was surprising.

Emmy had been wrong in her estimate. There was closer to five grand in the lockbox.

The amount was staggering for a teenager to have hidden in her closet.

And it wasn’t as if Cheyenne could go to an ATM.

Who the hell had given dozens of crisp fifty-dollar bills to a fifteen-year-old girl?

Pamela’s shadow fell across the shoe collection.

The girl squatted down beside Emmy. She was wearing a yellow dress that was stained down the front, likely from a red popsicle.

Her knobby knees had cuts and scrapes. She had red clay under her fingernails from playing in the river basin.

She smelled almost overwhelmingly sweaty, but in that way that children could stink but still smell sweet.

Emmy kept quiet as she started counting out the bills again, placing them in stacks like Monopoly money.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Pamela pressing the seeds in the baggie like she was popping bubble wrap.

Emmy tidied the stacks of bills. She bit her tongue so that she didn’t ruin this moment.

She had spent so many hours doing busy work in the kitchen or pretending to care about dusting books on the shelves or arranging PlayStation CDs while she waited for Cole to finally tell her what was bothering him.

This should’ve been easy compared to that, but she was so desperate to find Madison and Cheyenne that her hands ached to grab Pamela by the arms and shake her.

Instead, she scooped up the fifties and started turning the faces on the bills in the same direction.

Pamela kept pressing her thumb into the seeds.

Emmy decided to take a risk. “I guess your dad doesn’t know about Cheyenne’s iPhone.”

Pamela stiffened.

“It’s not a big deal.” Emmy had seen Cheyenne with the iPhone on Hannah’s couch. The two girls had been sitting a foot away from each other and still texted rather than opening their mouths to speak. “I won’t tell anybody.”

Pamela went back to pressing the seeds. She had broken apart most of them. Emmy wondered if she knew what was in the baggie. Rather than ask, she picked up the twenties and started to face them all in the same direction.

“There’s more,” Pamela said.

“Money?” Emmy kept arranging.

“Yeah.”

Emmy waited until she had finished with the bills. “Where?”

Pamela didn’t answer. The guilt of revealing Cheyenne’s secret was obviously weighing heavy. Again, Emmy forced her mouth to stay closed, scooping up another stack of bills as her ears strained for any break in the silence.

Finally, Pamela tapped Emmy on the arm. She waited for her to look, then her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling in the closet.

The kid was a better investigator than Emmy. There was an attic access panel at the top of the closet.

Pamela stood up. She threw back the sheepskin rug and dragged the desk chair across the floor. That explained the gouge marks in the wood. Emmy was wondering how the kid managed to get to the panel when Pamela started piling books onto the seat, which was not only dangerous but unnecessary.

“I’ve got it, sweetheart.” Emmy stepped onto the chair.

She reached up over her head and pushed away the panel.

She felt blindly around the attic joists.

Pink insulation rained down into her mouth and eyes.

She coughed, using her arm to wipe grit from her eyes.

She was about to ask Pamela for more guidance when her fingers touched the edge of a plastic bag.

Ziploc. Gallon-sized. Thick enough for the freezer.

She pulled down the bag through the opening.

She blinked her eyes, but not from the insulation.

Because she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

Another giant wad of cash. A blister pack of birth control pills with four tablets missing. More pot. What looked like two eight balls of cocaine and ten tabs of Molly.

She looked down at Pamela. Emmy was done being careful. She asked, “Does Cheyenne have a boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” the girl said. “His name is Jack.”