“Still, that’s pretty late.”
“For these kids? That’s when the night begins.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I thought kids under eighteen aren’t allowed to drive after midnight-twelve thirty, maybe-unless a parent or a guardian is in the car with them. If they get caught, they can have their license suspended for sixty days.”
“Is that right?” Belinda said. “She didn’t tell me anything of the kind.”
I found that strange. Alexa would never have planned to do something that might jeopardize her driver’s license, and all the autonomy it represented. Also, it seemed out of character for Belinda not to have stayed on top of all the rules. Not a woman like that, attentive to every detail, who lined her lips before meeting me at a time when she should have been a mental wreck over her missing stepdaughter.
“So what do you think might have happened to her?” I said.
Her hands flew up, palms open. “I don’t know.” She looked at Marcus in bewilderment. “We don’t know. We just want you to find her!”
“Have you called the police?” I said.
“Of course not,” Marcus said.
“Of course not?” I said.
Belinda said, “The police aren’t going to do anything. They’ll come and take a report and tell us to wait until twenty-four hours is up, and then it’s just gonna be file-and-forget.”
“She’s under eighteen,” I said. “They take missing-teenager cases pretty seriously. I suggest you call them right now.”
“Nick,” Marcus said, “I need you to look for her. Not the cops. Have I ever asked for your help before?”
“Please,” Belinda said. “I love that girl so much. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to her.”
Marcus waved a hand and said something like “Poo-poo-poo.” I think that was meant to ward away the evil eye. “Don’t talk like that, baby,” he said.
“Have you called any of the hospitals?” I said.
The two exchanged a quick, anxious look before Belinda replied, shaking her head, “If anything had happened to her, we’d have heard by now, right?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “That’s the first thing you want to do. Let’s start there.”
“I think it may be something else,” Marcus said. “I don’t think my little girl got hurt. I think…”
“We don’t know what happened,” Belinda interrupted.
“Something bad,” Marcus said. “Oh, dear God.”
“Well, let’s start by calling the hospitals,” I said. “Just to rule that out. I want her cell phone number. Maybe my tech person can locate her that way.”
“Of course,” Marcus said.
“And I want you to call the police. Okay?”
Belinda nodded and Marcus shrugged. “They won’t do bupkes,” he said, “but if you insist.”
None of the hospitals between Manchester and Boston had admitted anyone fitting Alexa’s description, which didn’t seem to give Marcus and his wife the sense of relief you might expect.
Instead it seemed that the two of them were harboring some deep-seated dread that they refused to divulge to me, that they were holding back something important, something dire. I think that gut instinct was the reason I took Marcus’s request seriously. Something was very wrong here. It was a bad feeling, and it only got worse.
Call it the gift of fear.
8.
Alexa stirred and shifted in her bed.
It was the throbbing in her forehead that had awakened her, a rhythmic pulsing that had steadily grown stronger and stronger, tugging her into consciousness.
Knife-stabs of pain pierced the backs of her eyeballs.
It felt like someone was pounding an ice pick into the top of her skull and had just broken through the fragile shell, sending cracks throughout the lobes of her brain right behind her forehead.
Her mouth was terribly dry. Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She tried to swallow.
Where was she?
She couldn’t see anything.
The darkness was absolute. She wondered whether she’d gone blind.
But maybe she was dreaming.
It didn’t feel like a dream, though. She remembered… drinking at Slammer with Taylor Armstrong. Something about her iPhone. Laughing about something. Everything else was blurry, clouded.
She had no recollection of how she’d gotten home, to her dad’s house, how she’d ended up in her bed with the shades drawn.
She inhaled a strange musty odor. Unfamiliar. Was she at home in bed? It didn’t smell like her room in the Manchester house. The sheets didn’t have that fabric-softener fragrance she liked.
Had she crashed at someone’s house? Not Taylor’s, she didn’t think. Her house smelled like lemon furniture polish, and her sheets were always too crisp. But where else could she be? She had no memory of… of anything, really, after laughing with Taylor about something on her iPhone…
She only knew that she was sleeping on top of a bed. No sheets covering her. They must have slid off her during the night. She preferred being under a sheet, even on the hottest days when there wasn’t any air-conditioning. Like that awful year at Marston-Lee in Colorado, where there was no air-conditioning in the summer and they made you sleep in bunk beds and she had to bribe her bitch of a roommate for the top one. The bottom bunk made her feel trapped and anxious.
Her hands were at her sides. She fluttered her fingers, feeling for the hem of a sheet, and then the back of her right hand brushed against something smooth and solid. With her fingertips she felt some kind of satiny material over something hard, like the slatted wooden safety rails on the sides of her bunk bed at Marston-Lee that kept you from falling out of bed and crashing to the floor.
Was she back at Marston-Lee, or just dreaming that she was?
Yet if she were dreaming, would she have such an incredible headache?
She knew she was awake. She just knew it.
But she could still see nothing. Total perfect darkness, not even a glimmer of light.
She could smell the stale air and feel the soft yielding mattress below her and the soft pajamas on her legs… her fingertips scuttled over the soft fabric on her thighs, which didn’t feel like the sweatpants she usually wore to bed. She was wearing something different. Not sweatpants, not pajamas. Hospital scrubs, maybe?
Was she in a hospital?
Had she gotten hurt, maybe been in an accident?
The ice pick was driving deeper and deeper into the gray matter of her brain, and the pain was indescribable, and she just wanted to roll over and put a pillow over her head. She raised her knees to gently torque her body and flip over, slowly and gently so her head didn’t crack apart…
And her knees hit something.
Something hard.
Startled, she lifted her head, almost an involuntary reflex, and her forehead and the bridge of her nose collided with something hard too.
Both hands flew outward, striking hard walls. A few inches on either side. Her knees came up again, maybe three inches, and once again they struck a solid wall.
No.
Fingers skittering up the sides and then the top, satin-covered walls barely three inches from her lips.
Even before her brain was able to make sense of it, some animal instinct within her realized, with a dread that crept over her and turned her numb and ice-cold.
She was in a box.
She could touch the end of the box with her toes.
She started breathing fast. Short, panicked gasps.
Her heart raced.
She shuddered, but the shuddering didn’t stop.
She gasped for air, but couldn’t get more than a few inches of air into the very top of her lungs.
She tried to sit up, but her forehead struck the ceiling once again. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t change positions.