Follow Me Down Page 4

  Reluctantly, heart pounding in my chest, I had gone along with him to urge the police to investigate what he thought might be a staged accident, but luckily, Pruden was no Marge Gunderson. Before Lucas could even finish what he’d been referring to as his opening argument, before he could wave the black glove around, Chief Pruden cut him off. “The roads were icy. Your mother was drunk and wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Let’s not pretend she didn’t ever drive in that sort of condition. Just be happy she hit a tree and didn’t kill some nice family.”

  Case closed.

  Except, during those months before leaving for college, if we saw Pruden around town, my brother would eye him up and down. Make menacing but harmless gestures, like rubbing his middle finger on the bridge of his nose or, once, the pow of a finger gun. He’d tell anyone who’d listen that Pruden was an incompetent asshole. He was seventeen and angry and felt he’d been ignored. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if Pruden hadn’t held a grudge and was taking pleasure in pinning something on my brother.

  I stood up again, opened his closet, and looked for an empty space from which a suitcase had been taken, where he’d packed his spare toothbrush and spare razor. Nothing was missing but Lucas.

  And his ATM card. The reminder was a gut-punch. He could technically just buy it all, toothbrush, T-shirt, jeans. He could empty his account in one fell swoop after crossing the Canadian border and then really disappear. He would go to Canada, wouldn’t he? I mean it’s right there. Only if he was guilty, but he wasn’t.

  I sunk down into his bed. What the fuck was happening? I was reeling. I truly understood what it meant to reel now. I felt cold and feverish. The dim ceiling light pulsed. I rolled over and cried into the pillow that still smelled like my brother’s hair gel.

  3

  DAY 2

  THURSDAY

  I woke up after a chattering, flimsy sleep with a coiled stomach. I made Lucas’s bed, pulled the sheets tight, plumped up the pillow. I called in to work and began using the sick days I had hoarded up. I bagged up the pizza boxes and cans of beer, let the stained glasses soak. Picked up his oily Bulldogs ball cap off the coffee table, then put it back. It looked like it belonged there. I was focused now. Lucas was only a person of interest in Joanna’s murder. They had given him the weekend to mosey on in for an interview, so whatever evidence they did have had to be relatively weak (then again, this was before her body was found, before my brother did a magic disappearing trick). Still, Pruden said they didn’t even have an arrest warrant yet.

  Someone else had killed this Joanna girl, but whatever feeble connections Pruden had managed to rustle up, they were enough for him to home in on Lucas and not bother looking for anyone else.

  I needed information. I needed to find someone else to sic Pruden on. Another suspect.

  * * *

  I called Wyatt again, Lucas’s best friend since Little League and currently his assistant hockey coach for the Westfield Bulldogs. He was a goofy spiky-haired kid who laughed at everything Lucas said and called me Mia Diarrhea. Sometimes Mia Gonorrhea, but that wasn’t until high school. He was a bit of a try-hard. At one point he carried around two cell phones and told everyone one was for the “bros” and one was for the “hos,” but I never heard either phone ring.

  We’d stayed vaguely familiar with one another through Facebook. I had messaged him before leaving home, and when I didn’t hear back fast enough, I rummaged through my drawer of old cell phones that I had always intended to recycle and found an old phone number for Wyatt. Luckily, Wyatt hadn’t changed his number much since his bro and ho days. I’d left a voice mail asking him to call me. Followed that up with a text:

  IT’S MIA. WTF IS GOING ON THERE? HAVE YOU TALKED TO LUCAS???

  Never got a response. I could see that he’d been online since my message. He’d retweeted something and wished someone happy birthday on Facebook. It was as if he was hiding behind a glass door pretending not to be home while I rang the doorbell. But I can see you, asshole!!

  This time his phone went straight to a full voice mail.

  I did remember where his parents lived; maybe they could give me Wyatt’s address. I took it for granted that they hadn’t moved, because people here didn’t tend to move around a lot.

  * * *

  I pulled up to the sprawling brick bungalow. Wyatt’s parents, the Thompsons, owned a landscaping company, Eden Green, that did quite well. I knew that because, before her accident, Mimi worked as a bank teller at the Wayoata Credit Union and she loved to talk about other people’s money. Who had what in their accounts. Their debts or lack of. Just being near money, even if she never had enough of her own, set off some kind of buzz inside her.

  The house was far less immaculate than I remembered. Nothing was planted in the raised flower bed, the grass was too long, and the driveway, between the parked SUV and silver pickup, was littered with bikes and toys and chalk drawings. The archway over the front stone path was gone. Not exactly endorsement material for a landscaping company.

  A little boy with such white-blond hair he was ghostly looking, stood in the bay window and pointed at me. The curtains flapped around his head, a girl shouldered her way in next to the boy. Same blond hair. I could see her scream something over her shoulder. Then another small face showed up in the window, then another.

  A sign, PRECIOUS TREASURES DAY CARE.

  So the Thompsons had moved. I’d started to retreat down the driveway when the front door opened. “Hi, Mia.”

  It was Wyatt all casual, like I dropped in all the time and he’d been expecting me. He was wearing sweatpants and a Vikings T-shirt. His hairline was making a fast getaway from his forehead, but he had the same two-day-trimmed-beard look as Lucas. In high school, Wyatt was always emulating Lucas’s fashion tics. When Lucas noticed, he’d switch it up, do a fauxhawk or buzz cut, and without fail, a couple of weeks later, Wyatt had the same haircut, or same sneakers in a different color. I didn’t know how Lucas put up with it.

  Wyatt came down to meet me in the driveway barefoot. Behind him, two more kids had pressed up against the glass and started making faces at me.

  “Sorry to drop in like this, but I tried calling. Why haven’t you called me back? Didn’t you get any of my messages?”

  “It’s OK. My son dropped my phone in the toilet yesterday. I should really check the messages.” A contrived chuckle. “Those aren’t all my kids, by the way.” His lips continued to curl, one part smile, one part grimace, like he’d said the joke a thousand times before and even he couldn’t stomach repeating it. “We just have two. My wife runs a day care. We bought the house from my parents. They’re in Arizona now.”

  A series of statements I wasn’t sure how to respond to. I frowned. It was a lame excuse for not getting back to me. This wasn’t how I expected to be greeted. I’d thought he would rush toward me when he saw me walking up. That we’d immediately start hustling about like two stranded islanders with a cruise ship in the distance passing us by.

  “Have you heard from Lucas at all?”

  One of the white-haired kids opened the door. “Da-daa-dee.” Another kid was pushing out from behind her and then another, and Wyatt took several minutes to corral them back inside. “I’ll be in the garage,” he hollered, fast, I guessed to his wife.

  “In here.” He pressed whatever configuration into a security keypad on the garage, and the door rolled open.

  There wasn’t a car in the garage, only a couple of lawn chairs and an elaborate workbench and a fridge. He hit the button and the garage door came down and the light turned gray. Unventilated, it smelled strongly of gasoline and grass clippings from the mower, but it had to be one of the tidiest garages I’d ever been in. This was a guy who hid out in his garage a lot.

  He motioned to one of the chairs. I sat down. “No, I haven’t heard from him at all. The police were already here asking that.”

  “I’m trying really hard to understand what happened. I just don’t get it. The police think he took
off because he was involved with that student. Lucas, murder. Like, it’s just all so fucking unbelievable. It really is so ridiculous I would laugh if I didn’t feel like crying.”

  Wyatt gave me a twitchy look. He wasn’t joining me in my tirade on the incompetent police or the whole absurdity of the accusation. Something was wrong. Why wasn’t he more upset? Why was he making me pull information out of him like this? I swallowed, felt like shit for asking, but I had to. “Was Lucas involved with that student? And please don’t give me some silent bro-code bullshit.”

  Wyatt stroked his fuzzy cheeks. “Most people around here think so. If he was, he certainly didn’t say anything about it to me, but then I don’t really know what Lucas has been up to lately.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that we didn’t talk all that much lately.”

  “But you’re coaching together.”

  The world just kept spinning off its axis. I realized I’d had this snow-globe version of my brother in the town where nothing ever changed. Lucas mentioned Wyatt all the time when we talked. They were always friends. Best friends.

  “Well, yeah, we’d talk about hockey during the season, but that’s about as deep as our conversations went.”

  “Something happen between you guys? Was Lucas gambling again?” Maybe Lucas had borrowed money and hadn’t paid him back. They’d had a little spat. Something Wyatt was blowing out of proportion. Something Lucas would never mention to me if it had to do with gambling.

  “Nothing like that. I mean, I think he was gambling again, but that had nothing to do with anything. We just kind of, I don’t know, life happened, I guess. Different schedules, whatever. I’m married with kids, Lucas isn’t. Different priorities. I’m running the family business, so I’m really busy.” I was about to point out that a landscaping business in ND allowed for a lot of downtime, but Wyatt started in about his winter hours and snow removal. “We really haven’t been close friends for a while.” It sounded rehearsed. He stared straight ahead, same smug look he’d always had because he never had to worry about money or college or what to do next, because his future was safe.

  “Lucas made it sound like you were still good friends.” I tried to think of something specific. “You guys went to that Minnesota Wild game.” There was a picture on Facebook, both of them in red-and-green jerseys, clutching beers.

  “That was two years ago.”

  “What happened between then and now?” I pressed.

  “I just … nothing.” Wyatt brushed at his sweatpants, his ears turning red. A tell he still had from childhood that he was getting angry.

  “Nothing? Just like that, all those years of friendship fell to the wayside over nothing?”

  “I know you’re thinking I just ditched him like everyone else when people started to talk, but it’s not like that, Mia, really. Lucas wanted to go out, go drinking, hit on chicks, go fishing all day on Saturdays, shit we’ve always done, but I’ve got kids now. I can’t party it up like I did before, and you know what? If the tables were turned, I know Lucas would have distanced himself from me.”

  Wyatt had a point, but I wasn’t going to admit it. I felt a little sorry for my brother that he’d been demoted in Wyatt’s life from hotshot to that buddy who couldn’t let go of the good old days.

  “Well, if you do hear from him, please, please call me. Tell him to call me.” I stood to leave, feeling wilted and a little oxygen-deprived from the smell of gas.

  “Wyatt? Wyatt? Whose car is that?” A nasal voice, sharp and badgering and instantly familiar cut through the garage door. My skin prickled. The door started to lift, letting in a hard burst of sunlight. Standing there was a tall blonde holding a coffee mug with LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE scrawled across it. I always thought that accessorizing oneself with trite, mass-produced platitudes was the cheapest way possible to seem like a good person. I couldn’t help but believe someone had to be hiding a dark side to need that sort of prop. (I nearly dropped a friend in college after noticing her keychain read FAMILY: THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE AREN’T THINGS.) The fact that she was holding said mug just added major credence to my theory.

  “Hi, Carolyn.” That’s right, Wyatt had married Carolyn. I mean I knew that; I just tried to block it out. Carolyn Reidy, or I guessed Carolyn Thompson now, had been Lucas’s first serious girlfriend. She’d pretended to be my friend for a whole month before I finally realized why she was so insistent on coming over even when I pushed to go to her polished house (turned out she didn’t love weeknight teen dramas as much as I did). After she and Lucas started dating, I told him that Carolyn had used me. She retaliated by telling everyone that I like liked my brother in an unhealthy way. She stayed sugar sweet to my face when Lucas was in the room, so my twin decided to stay out of it. One of the rare times he’d acted like an outright dick.

  They broke up shortly after graduation. Lucas dumped her the first week into college. In total they went out for fourteen months, and the whole time I had to listen to Carolyn’s attention-seeking eating disorder. She’d eat like a pig, then disappear to the upstairs bathroom and pretend to vomit, loud and theatrical grunts followed by sensual moans. I really couldn’t tell if she was puking or masturbating, but when Lucas heard and came banging on the door, she’d stumble out of the bathroom into his concerned arms with a little triumphant smile. What she didn’t realize was that the household position of bathroom vomiter was already filled by our mother. Her second mistake was thinking that Lucas would want to hold her hair back past senior year (the Haases were not genetically wired to be caretakers).

  “Oh.” Carolyn startled when she saw me. “It’s you. I hardly recognized you.” She fake-gasped and gave me a once-over that would’ve at one time made me go puddly with paranoia.

  She didn’t clarify, but that was the point. The queen of vague statements or unfinished sentences prefaced with sounds you’d make for a puppy, Carolyn meant to plant seeds of self-doubt for you to obsess over (aw, you’re wearing a V-neck/aw, you have sandals on/so cute, you like music). She probably wanted me to think I looked so old she couldn’t tell who I was, but that didn’t work on me anymore. If she really didn’t recognize me, it was because I was twenty pounds lighter than I was in high school and had a two-hundred-dollar haircut instead of one of those rough kitchen cuts done by Mimi’s tipsy girlfriend.

  “Well, you look exactly the same.” I was trying to be equally vague, hoping she’d think she was outdated. But it was true. She was still painfully thin, still so ice-blond pretty under those soccer-mom bangs. I’d always hoped Carolyn would get fat. I really, really wanted her to be fat—like, had-to-rent-a-crane-to-be-removed-from-her-house fat—and was truly disappointed to see that she wasn’t. In yoga pants and a too-tight tank top, she had the same willowy frame. Her face, however, had the permanent wince of purging etched into it. Maybe she hadn’t been faking it; that was something at least.

  “Looking for Lucas, huh? Poor Mia. You must be a nervous wreck.” She crossed her stick arms, hugged herself as if she’d caught a chill. Wyatt came up beside her and rested an arm on her tiny shoulder. The slightest shudder passed over her face, like the weight of his hand was too much. “I never thought he was capable…” Carolyn wisely let her voice trail off.

  “He isn’t.”

  She frowned. Touched her Lululemon hairband. “Well, I guess family have to believe the best of one another. But his latest girlfriend was a former student of his. I think that says something about his taste.”

  Former student? My hands and feet went cold, but I put on my best poker face. I didn’t want to give Carolyn the satisfaction of knowing something about Lucas that I didn’t. “That’s right. What’s her name again? Where can I find her?”

  Carolyn breathed in through her nose, slow. Basking in having information I wanted. “She works at Casey’s. Her name’s Zorro or Zarah? Something like that.”

  “It’s Zoey,” Wyatt interjected, then gave Carolyn a thought-I-was-helping shrug when she shot him a look
.

  “I hope Lucas comes to his senses and turns himself in. We’re both worried about him. He’s a very sick person.” Carolyn looked up and down the street as if Lucas were creeping around nearby, wanting to peek in on her day care.

  I turned around, too quickly, to leave and knocked over a bucket full of crayfish that wasn’t there before, their pincers flicking open, shut. A boy screamed, and Carolyn rushed over and picked him up into a full cradle, though he was at least five years old. He was in a full tantrum—“She hurrrrrted them!”—by the time I reached my car.

  I cranked the air-conditioning. I couldn’t get the smell of grass out of my throat. So, Wyatt had finally graduated from sidekick status, to what? A lesser version of Lucas? He had his high school sweetheart, his job. Carolyn had someone enough like Lucas to keep her interested.

  After my brother dumped her, Carolyn had displayed some very alarming behavior. She kept showing up on campus—no small feat, considering he went to school twelve hours away. She’d go to the pubs Lucas went to, grinding up on other guys to get his reaction. He’d find her slumped against his dorm room door in the morning, still drunk, makeup smeared all over her face. Finally she enrolled there, sitting in the last row of his classes staring at the back of his head. It freaked him out. I kept telling him to go to campus security and report her, but he said he didn’t want to embarrass her. It finally culminated in Carolyn getting into his room by seducing his roommate, trashing his things, cutting up his clothes, and dumping his laptop in the toilet. She was suspended for a term. When she returned, she left him alone, joined a sorority, started dating other guys, then apparently moved home and married Wyatt. I pictured her going around town, ever the vengeful bitch, reminding everyone that she had once been Lucas’s girlfriend and, in a frantic, mysterious whisper when Joanna’s name came up, saying, Let’s just say a lot makes sense now. He lost interest in me right after high school.