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  I took a few clumsy steps backward and bumped into the back of the PT. Half tripped. The Xanax was suddenly working too well, as if it had just gone off in my bloodsteam like fireworks.

  Dulled anxiety clotted my adrenaline and slowed my reaction time. The truck picked up speed, and its kettle-whistle noise momentarily stunned me. I felt cornered. My second-long hesitation was broken by shouts to run from the kids at the skate park.

  I scrambled along the driver’s side of the PT Cruiser and dove headfirst in front of the car. The first layer of skin on my bare forearms grated off into the concrete. I felt a rush of wind as the truck sped by, then swerved onto the shoulder, kicking up a cloud of dust that made me choke and half blinded me. I rolled toward the passenger side, tried to squish myself under the car, and waited, my back pressed into the hot metal. Unable to catch my breath. Certain the truck was going to come back and take another shot at squashing me into the road. Or even smash into the PT, which would then roll and flatten my head. Still, I stayed there. Listened for an engine. Teeth chattering. Bones rippling. My arms burned, blood oozed into the sleeves of road dust. There was a high-pitched hum in my ears, a soundtrack to my repeating thoughts. I was almost killed for four thousand dollars.

  I’d started to inch back out from under the car when I noticed something stuck to its undercarriage. A box with a small green flashing dot. It was held there by a magnet. I pulled it off. It had PROPERTY OF WPD stamped across it. Fucking Garrett. He must’ve put it on the day I got here. How else could he know there was a box of Kleenex in my rental unless he was lurking around my car? While I sat in the interview room staring at Joanna’s missing poster, he was in the station’s parking lot, planting a GPS. He’d been tracking me the whole time. He knew I almost went to the police station at 3 A.M. the other night. That was why he was acting like he could read me, asking if I was weighed down by something. It was probably why he hadn’t arrested me for withholding information about Joanna’s pregnancy, in case I did lead them to Lucas.

  “Holy shit! I totally thought that guy was gonna hit you.” I jolted, my head bumped into the car. It was Josh Kolton, skating up to my car. I put the GPS back.

  “Did you see the license plate?” I got up, slow.

  Josh shook his head. “No way, man. He was going too fast. Are you OK? You’re bleeding— Whoa that’s crazy road rash. Do you want me to call somebody?”

  “I’m OK, thanks.”

  “I seriously thought you were gonna be like, splat.” He slapped one hand into the other. “You sure you don’t want me to call like an ambulance?”

  “No. Like you said, it’s just road rash. You didn’t get even a number or letter off the plate?”

  “Nah. I was, like, way over there.” He squinted to the skate park as if it were some distant hill. Josh skated up and down my car three times, and then he just kept going. Shaking his shaggy head.

  I flipped though the pictures on my phone. Blurry. It didn’t help either that the screen was cracked. But I thought I could make out an “A” and “7.” At least I had Josh Kolton and his stone-head, wine cooler–swilling pals at the skate park for witnesses. Witnesses no one took seriously.

  Garrett called back. “Nice timing,” I barked.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I was almost killed is what’s going on.” And then all the panic and fear welled up inside of me and I let out a blubbery, angry sob.

  “Where are you?” I wanted to answer, Really? Oh, I think you know exactly where I am. But I’d already decided that pretending to be oblivious to the fact that they were tracking me could come in handy.

  “The skate park.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  * * *

  In minutes, Garrett pulled up. Lights flashing. One look at my arms and he grabbed his first aid kit from the trunk and led me to the passenger side of his cop car. “Let’s treat this first. Now hold your arms out.” I did. He crouched down on one knee in front of me and dabbed alcohol on me; my eyes watered. He gently dug out pieces of gravel lodged under my skin with tweezers. He held on to me, firm, murmuring, “Almost there, almost.” I felt his breath on the inside of my arm. “You have a high pain tolerance, huh?”

  “Guess so,” I murmured back. He looked at me, first at my mouth, then into my eyes. Something in my stomach twirled before a stab of worry hit, that he was going to narc-out and ask me if I consumed any drugs or alcohol this fine evening.

  “So, tell me what went down here.” He went back to work on my arms and I told him everything. “And the back window? The guy in the truck did that too?”

  I explained what had happened. How Tom Geller broke the window and draped himself over the shattered PT in the Target parking lot like a car calendar girl. How he picked my two twenty-dollar bills out of a puddle.

  Garrett took a break from tweezing my arms and went through the pictures on my phone, flicking on the dome light, flicking it off again, tapping the screen to enlarge the images, then shrinking them back down. He handed my phone back. “Can you e-mail those to me? The guy who does our IT stuff should be able to do something with them. Was it a Ford? It looks like a Ford in the pictures.”

  “I don’t know. It was just a big fucking truck.”

  Garrett nodded. “OK, I’ll write that down.” He gave me a half smile. “Big fucking truck.” I tilted my head forward, giving him a don’t-patronize-me look. He went back to picking at my arms.

  “Listen, I have some good news for you. The girls who said Lucas molested them have recanted their statements. They called in quick succession, blurted out a recantation, and hung up. Odd. You didn’t have anything to do with that, now did you?”

  “How could I? Well, there you go. Lucas is innocent!” So Carolyn had come through. She must have wanted her weed business more than she wanted my brother to suffer. Thank God high school weed is so lucrative. “Are you finally going to start looking at other suspects, then?”

  “Hold still. It doesn’t work that way exactly. I mean, it leaves open the question whether the girls are lying now or if they were lying before but it definitely helps Lucas, that they recanted.”

  “They’re not lying. I mean, they were lying before. They’re telling the truth now. Lucas didn’t molest them. I was literally almost killed. It has to be related. It has to be! Maybe it wasn’t Tom Geller, but someone else. I never actually saw his face. I’m getting close to finding out the truth, and whoever was in that truck is threatened and wants to take me out.”

  “You really need to hold still. I checked and Tom Geller does own a black truck. A Ford. He’s obviously escalating and trying to scare you into paying off Lucas’s debt. You’re the next best thing, because once Lucas is in jail, he won’t be able to pay him.”

  I pulled my arms away, the tweezers caught in my skin. I cursed.

  “Sorry, I meant to say if Lucas is guilty. If.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “What are you doing out here, anyway?” He pulled back like he was trying to get a big-picture look at my face. His eyes narrowed to analytical slits.

  “I wanted to talk to Josh Kolton. I wanted to hear what he had to say.”

  “Ah, the lunch lady again.” Garrett rolled his eyes, and started to wrap up my arms with gauze. “I told you she has an alibi.”

  “Do you know that Kathy Wilkes’s catchphrase is ‘Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs’?”

  “No.” He looked surprised. “I was not aware of that. I’ve never heard her say that.” He snapped the first aid kit closed.

  “Well, it is. Around the dance studio, anyway, she says it all the time. Garrett, I think Kathy set up the assault on her own daughter.”

  He made a face, and stood up. “I can’t see any mother inflicting that kind of sexual humiliation on her own daughter. Why would she do that?”

  “I think to manipulate her. I think Joanna was starting to rebel and was rethinking what she wanted to do in life, that she didn’t want to dance anymore. Kathy wanted to sc
are her, show her that the world’s a frightening place out from under her talons.”

  Garrett shook his head. “It would take a whole lot of convincing for me to think Kathy Wilkes would ever do that. A lot. And if that was Kathy’s catchphrase as you say, wouldn’t Joanna know it was her mother? Wouldn’t that make her want to leave Kathy even more?”

  “Maybe it was a threat. To keep her in line.”

  Garrett shifted. “Mia. It wasn’t Kathy. Those boys did what they did; they’re to blame. This whole thing about being paid, about money being taped under a bench, sounds like total bullshit. There’s no proof. It’s just a way to try to avoid responsibility. Two of those boys have younger sisters, and like most Wayoata girls, they could have passed through Kathy’s studio, and that could be what planted the sick fetish. Maybe one of them came home saying uh-oh, SpaghettiOs, or whatever. Who knows? But this was the boys’ twisted idea of a good time.”

  “Cody said they got an e-mail asking them to do it.”

  Garrett sighed; he was starting to look really annoyed. “I know what Cody is saying. If that e-mail ever existed, which I highly doubt, we won’t know because Jesse Campbell is on his third laptop since Joanna’s assault.”

  “Could you check Kathy’s computer?”

  “I’m not doing that, Mia.”

  “So you’re not even going to consider it, are you?”

  He just looked at me. “No.”

  I felt myself verging on an outburst. I wanted so badly to tell him what was in Joanna’s journal, all that frustration. All those feelings of being smothered. I wanted to tell him that I thought Kathy Wilkes murdered her own daughter, maybe even murdered and framed my brother because there were already so many irresponsible rumors flying around that would make it easy for the police to follow, because he had the phone and knew what she did to her own daughter. I couldn’t. Not yet. Not until Garrett could be persuaded to look at Kathy as a suspect. I thought of that reporter, Vanessa Lee. Her hankering for something controversial.

  I sucked in a deep breath. “You’re there a lot, aren’t you, at the Wilkeses’?”

  “I have been. That family has been through something so horrific, so I try to be there. It makes them feel better to see how hard we’re working at finding Jo’s killer. They really are a nice family, Mia.” He glanced at me sideways. I could tell he didn’t want to get me started on a Lucas-is-innocent diatribe.

  So I asked about the ATM withdrawal.

  “We’re still gathering footage from surrounding businesses. Speaking of which, I should go. Get some statements from the kids at the skate park before they light up again and their brains scramble. I want you to promise me you’ll go home and get some rest. I’ll deal with Geller.”

  “I will,” I lied.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, while I was walking the aisles of Home Depot, ticking off a shopping list for tools to commit a break and enter, Garrett called. “Tom Geller’s truck doesn’t match your description or the truck in the pictures. His truck doesn’t have that front grille. This doesn’t mean he couldn’t have hired someone else to harass you, but at this point we can’t arrest him. I’ll keep looking into it. In the meantime, try to stay off the road.”

  19

  I used to break the law all the time. But what I used to do, swiping a pill here and there from the hospital dispensary, was all sleight of hand to avoid cameras and co-workers. Skimming off of my friends’ careless parents in college was easy enough to deny. No one ever counted their pills. If they did notice a shortage, there was always bad memory to blame: Did I double dose last week? Or even better, someone else to blame, some twitchy nephew who’d stayed too long in the bathroom. I doubted that parents ever suspected the quiet, science-loving dark-haired girl their daughter had brought home for the weekend.

  But this.

  This was something entirely different.

  I pulled into my old pediatrician’s office, parked in the back lane.

  Joanna and I (and Lucas) had shared a doctor. Dr. Bernard was the quintessential friendly country doctor, attentive, good bedside manner, and easily distracted. I’d swiped my first prescription pad off him when I was in college. I’d faked a head cold that first visit back for Thanksgiving. I wasn’t officially an adult until November 30, and around these parts you stack with your pediatrician right up until you turned eighteen (at which point you just dusted your childhood off and crossed the waiting room to the adult side of the clinic). My face turned beet red every time he renewed my birth control prescription after a stiff and awkward yearly pap test, where I’d stare at the Winnie-the-Pooh wall decals and yell at Mimi in my head. Dr. Bernard handed me a lollipop afterward with an apologetic smile. There was no way he’d upgraded to digital files, and he’d likely put up a big fuss about never doing so. He’d say charming things to his patients like It’s not broke—why fix it? or I’ve been doing this for forty years without e-mail. At least this was what I was counting on.

  I was also counting on the idea that the Wayoata medical examiner had gotten only a copy of her medical file, not the original, or else that the clinic kept back a copy and gave the police the original. There was a better chance I wouldn’t find anything at all and I’d just get arrested and there’d be no one left to find Lucas. I’d be written off for being as crazy as Mimi.

  * * *

  I got out of the car. Nervous as hell. Felt like a thousand cameras were aimed right at me, like I’d been hit with a bout of criminal stage fright.

  At least I’d remembered to drop the GPS off at the apartment. I stuck it to the side of the winter plug-in. (In college I’d have to explain to those from more temperate states that I was not referring to a Glade plug-in but that cars in North Dakota really needed to be plugged in overnight if you planned on going anywhere because it kept the engine from freezing over. The block-heater itself was a Grand Forks invention—how could it not be?) I then spent fifteen minutes in the parking lot rewatching lock-picking videos on YouTube. A technique called lock bumping looked easiest; you slid a key into the lock, and then hit the back of the key with the handle of a screwdriver and somehow (I forwarded through the boring mechanical explanation), you could turn the key and unlock the door. Armed now with a screwdriver, I stood at the back entrance of Dr. Bernard’s clinic and went through my key ring. Only my own apartment key slid partially into the lock. I took a deep breath, felt like I was tipping over the edge of a cliff. Looked behind me again. Brought my arm up and hammered my key with the screwdriver. Way too hard because my key broke off. One end of it clattered into the dark back lane.

  Fucking hell. Now what?

  I eyed a window.

  Good thing I had also bought a flashlight, heavy-duty metal, for backup. I pulled the car up closer to the building, climbed onto the hood, and knocked the flashlight against an exam room window, expecting it to shatter into nice icy chips. But it just made a loud thunk. Not like the movies, or maybe I was weaker than I thought. It took three tries, my face turned the other way, my legs skittering on the hood like it was ice. (And here I got a vision of myself falling and knocking myself out, waking to a future as the star of a stupid criminal video. Why, why did I not think to wear a balaclava?)

  I doubled-handed the flashlight like a baseball bat before I managed to smash the glass. I reached inside, unlocked the window, and slid it open. Setting off a high-pitched sound. An alarm. How stupid that I hadn’t expected that! Five minutes—I had to do this in five minutes.

  I climbed inside headfirst. My arms and legs tangled in the dusty aluminum blinds.

  I stepped out of the exam room. It was so dark. The screech of the alarm was narrowing every single blood vessel in my body. I was going blue. I had to be. Felt turned around. Blinded by panic. Couldn’t figure out where to go.

  Right or left? Left. Gawd, get it together. Don’t get caught standing here like a deer in headlights.

  Files.

  Get the file. Get out.

  Go, go, go.


  I raced down the hall.

  Next to the receptionist’s desk. A wall-length bank of files.

  I flung open the heavy drawer marked “W” so hard the cabinet shuddered. Found it. Wilkes, J. Sandwiched between Ben and Madison’s much thinner files. I tucked it under my arm and was about to make a mad dash back out the window when I took a stunned second to glance into the waiting room. The long cartoon ruler where Lucas and I had once measured our respective heights was still there. My mother had always added a couple of inches for Lucas to make him feel better. He didn’t really shoot up until he turned sixteen.

  On the way out, I grabbed a prescription pad and a handful of lollipops.

  * * *

  I pulled in next to a Dumpster at McDonald’s and watched a single police car race by, blue-red light ablaze. I didn’t want to be seen driving away from the clinic. The dome light and the yellow glow of the golden arches provided enough light for a quick peek at Joanna’s file. Her medical history was typical, occasional sore throat, the chicken pox, a broken arm when she was seven. Until two years ago. Then things started to change. Multiple complaints of stomachaches concluded to be irritable bowel syndrome, numerous sprained ankles and wrists. A pulled hamstring, a fractured radius. In the months before her death, the injuries grew closer together. In the last six months, she had sprained her wrist twice and her right ankle three times.

  Apart from the fracture, arguably most of these injuries could have been faked, but I was sure Kathy would have caught on pretty quick if her daughter was malingering. It takes a lot of dedication to keep up the act of being hurt, limping with the same leg, or staying consistent that she could not open a jar of peanut butter or whatever and needed help. That would have been annoying for Joanna, hating her mother as she did, to need her for little things. No, Kathy brought her daughter to the clinic each time. She believed her because she was the one who had hurt her. She didn’t even bother to cover it up by avoiding the clinic. Kathy needed Joanna to mend properly if they were going to go to New York and Joanna was going to dance.