Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

My father peeked into my room. “You want a ride?”

“I’m suspended, remember?”

“Can you go food shopping, then?” He shook his head and left for work.

I checked his room for anything that might give me a hint of what he was doing while he was AWOL those two times in Marathon, New Jersey. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.

Nicole called. She wanted to hang out but wasn’t allowed out of the house.

This old lady was having a hard time getting onto the bus. I helped her. She said, “Thank you, miss,” told me I had lovely hair and my, wasn’t I quite tall for a girl.

The security guard was parked in front of Nicole’s house. Mrs. Castro met me at the door. “Nicole’s in the shower. I was worried about you.” She took me back to her studio and showed me her paintings. Abstract art isn’t exactly my thing, but as far as it went, I thought she was awesome. You kind of had to stare at it for a while, though, to figure out what she was painting; looked like a doe in autumn woods. I wasn’t sure I was right about that until she said, “They come right up to the back door at sunset. Did you get your father to sign my book?”

“I forgot to bring it,” I said.

Nicole came in. “You look horrible,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. She looked a little pale herself.

“You do look a little peaked, Jay,” Mrs. Castro said. She had fixed us some tea and handed me a cup. She closed the door behind her to leave Nicole and me alone.

The tea tasted great, then suddenly bitter, metallic. “Perugina or Hershey’s?” I said. “On your sleeve.” Nicole had a dot of dried chocolate stain on her sweatshirt. A squiggle of pink lightning arced across the studio, and that’s the last thing I remember.

She was brushing my hair back when I woke. I was on the studio couch. I sat up fast.

“Did I-”

“Relax. You just dropped into a daze, it seemed.”

I brushed my hand over my crotch. I was wet. I looked down. The one day I had to wear non-dark jeans. They were dark now all right, just in one spot. I grabbed my backpack and board and made for the front door. Nicole begged me to stay. “At least until you’re not bumping into walls, Jay. Please? You’re practically staggering.”

Her mother came at me with a folded wet towel. I slipped past her, out the side door, into the Castros’ yard. Sylvia blocked Nicole, yelling at her in Spanish that she wasn’t allowed to leave the house.

I was too dizzy to ride my board, and it had started drizzling again. I half jogged, half stumbled into the nature preserve that bordered Nicole’s house. The path was a shortcut to the road, where I could catch the bus.

I made my way through the preserve and walked along the side of the highway. I stopped to catch my breath. The day was gray, but there was a glare to the sky, bright enough that I could see the stain in my pants wasn’t really in my crotch but on my thigh, and it was too dark to be urine, more the color of blood. I couldn’t figure out how I’d cut myself or where. A car revved up to me. As I looked over my shoulder, the car blinded me, flashing its brights. It swung in front of me, cutting me off. It was the black Civic. No, the Saab, Nicole’s. She leaned over the shotgun seat and pushed open the door, and that’s when I realized the stain in my pants wasn’t blood. “It was the tea,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“I must have spilled the tea on myself when I faded out.”

“Jay, get into the car.”

The road was one muddy puddle after another. Trucks whipped up gray spray. I was cold and beat. I sank into the shotgun seat. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I. I’m not supposed to be driving. My mother made me take a Xanax just before you showed up.”

She drove fast into the empty rest area, the rain darkening the sky. The brakes whimpered as she stopped short to park. She turned to face me.

“No more chocolate stain,” I said. “Wait, you changed your hoodie.” This one was pink too, but baggier. I touched her sleeve where the stain had been. She winced and drew back her arm. “Was that blood before, on your sleeve?” I said.

“Cat scratched up my arm.”

“You have a cat?”

“The neighbor’s. She’s always in the yard. I was cuddling her, and all of a sudden she flipped out.”

A person who has serious allergies cuddles a cat? Nicole Castro was lying to me. She leaned across the seat and rested her head on my chest. I put my arms around her. The rain fell hard on the roof. “Tell me what happened to her,” she said. “Your mom.”

“Some time,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

I don’t know how long we were like that, just holding each other. Not long enough. Somebody tapped on the side window. The security guard. He drove Nicole home in the security company SUV. A second guard drove me home in Nicole’s Saab.

From Nicole’s journal:

Monday, 1 November-

I think he might know.

At four that afternoon, Cherry called with a promise of hot news. “Tell me in person,” I said. I had re-upped my anonymity settings, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain the Recluse wasn’t watching me. Cherry showed up at my apartment with Starbucks scones. “So my father’s cop friend didn’t get an ID on the woman.”

“And this is hot information because?”

“He got a lead on the car owner.” She clicked a picture onto her Droid screen: a shot of the Civic’s rear bumper. “A traffic camera picked up the car.”

“Okay?” I said. “We already had the plate number.”

“Right,” she said, “but we didn’t have this.” She zoomed in on the plate. “The plate itself is bad, yes, but not the plate rack, the kind the dealer gives you to advertise the dealership.” Cherry tweaked the picture, magnifying the plate rack: Vardy Dealership.

I nodded. She left the scones on the counter and hurried for the door.

“What’s the rush?” I said.

“Work.” Cherry DiBenneditto was a very cool girl.

A little after 4:00 Tuesday morning, I cracked the Vardy database. The company had resold four hundred and sixteen 1990s model Civics in the last fifteen years, and none of those went to anybody named Vratos or Wood. By now I’d hacked the class list for Sabbatini’s chem lab. None of the last names matched.

I created a map that covered Brandywine and the Hollows outskirts, and I checked the addresses of the Civic owners with Google Earth Street View, one by one. It took hours. Around 11:45 Tuesday night, about three-quarters of the way down the Vardy list, I found what I was looking for, a dumpy little house not far from my apartment building, in lower Valedale, still in the Brandywine school district but definitely low rent. The black Civic was in the driveway. The stolen plates had been swapped out for the ones registered to the address, but I recognized the car by the gash that ran across the driver’s-side doors. The Civic owner’s name was Roberta Lyles. I tapped up her Facebook page.

Bobbie Lyles listed herself as divorced. She was probably in her early thirties but the lines around her eyes made her look a lot older. She had long blond hair, but she couldn’t have been the woman I saw in the Civic hauling out of my parking lot. That woman was thin, and Bobbie was not. Still, she looked familiar. Those eyes. . I tapped up Chrissie Vratos’s page. At a stretch, she and Bobbie could have been distant cousins. Maybe they were friends, and Chrissie had simply borrowed the car? Took me about half an hour to go through Chrissie’s posts and albums, and I didn’t find anything that connected her to Lyles. Bobbie’s page took half a minute to scan. She had nothing up there except a handful of pictures, all of crocheted objects. She was using Facebook primarily to promote her home business, handcrafted scarves, sweaters, blankets made to order. She had six friends, and none of them linked her to Chrissie. I tried to connect Bobbie and Marisol Wood and came up empty there too. I tried to link her to the suspects I had already eliminated from my list, Mr. Sager, Kerns, Dave, Schmidt, Sabbatini. I crossed my fingers when I tried to link her to my father and sighed relief when I couldn’t. I couldn’t link her to Marathon, New Jersey, either. I had to dig deeper into that and find out what my father was hiding down there, but not yet. I had one more name I needed to cross-reference with Bobbie Lyles. I hesitated. I forced myself to do it.