Girl Taken: A Detective Kaitlyn Carr Mystery Page 10

  "And did they put that in writing?" I ask.

  He shakes his head no.

  "I'm sure they would have done it," Trish says. "I mean, they were really trustworthy. It just reminded me so much of my mom. I’m certain that if they said that they would fix it, they would fix it.”

  The earnestness on her face is hard to disbelieve.

  "And what about the survey?" I ask. "I mean, you didn't want to have a mechanic or someone who was experienced with boats check it out?"

  "Well, I'm pretty knowledgeable,” Derek says. “I've been on more than a few, some friends, family members. And when we did the sea trial, it ran really well. And I guess when it came down to it, I just trusted them. They mentioned that they'll fix anything. So, we figured why not just do it there."

  Karen comes around and offers us some fresh-made iced tea, which after the sweetness of the cookie is hard to reject. She had added a little bit of salt on top, which made the chocolate taste more pronounced and the second one harder to resist. I grab another one and wash it down with a couple of gulps of the tea.

  I ask if I can take the paperwork with me.

  "No, we'd really like to keep it," Derek says. "That's the only thing we have to prove that the boat is ours."

  "You did send this off to the DMV, right?" I ask.

  He nods.

  "Yes, but, you know, just in case they come back with any issues."

  I nod. "I understand."

  I ask if I can take pictures of the pages. They hesitate for a moment, but then Trish says, "Sure, why not."

  Derek doesn't have a reaction. I look for one, but his face is blank, and I don't know him well enough to read much into it.

  After taking pictures of all the formal documents, I go through them to make sure that everything is clear, and then ask the Carlsons for the number of the notary that they used.

  Trish pulls out her phone and gives me her name and number. She asks more questions about the Islingtons, and about their sons and how they're holding up.

  I realize that these two couples got to know each other pretty well during the process. Despite how much I want to suspect the Carlsons, I leave their house thinking that it's probably highly unlikely they had anything to do with this.

  Chapter 22 - Violet

  Before the disappearance

  Mom has always told me that there was something inherently bad about lying, that an untruth was something that would hurt both me and the person that I told it to.

  She's a romantic in that way, but also a staunch realist. When I used to think back to all the things that she told me when I was a kid, younger than I am now, I wonder how I wasn't even more messed up than I was. The only thing I ever wanted to know was about my dad, the truth, anything and everything. And that's what she kept from me.

  My life growing up was full of lies and secrets. I would hear my mom and sister whispering at night, loud whispers, the kind that get away from you when you really just want to yell and scream, but a little kid is sleeping in the next room with paper thin walls.

  Natalie and I have been friendly for a couple of months. I don't know what changed. She ignored me for a while and then suddenly it was like, "Sure, let's be friends."

  I liked it. Anything else would be a lie. I wanted her to be my friend because she was the most popular girl in school.

  Who doesn't want that?

  She smiles and all the boys do what she asks. Even the teachers. I see the way that they look at her. I see the power that a pretty girl has over boys and men alike.

  It's a scary kind of power.

  The boys in her presence look afraid, like they're walking on eggshells. The teachers are more pissed off than anything else, maybe because she's out of reach, because it would be illegal.

  They think that she has it so easy, but I know that she doesn't. She wields this power uneasily. Heavy is the crown, so to speak. She doesn't know how to use it exactly.

  I don't know why she took me under her wing. She doesn't seem like the kind to feel sorry for anyone. When we were in art class and I made a joke about Dawson's Creek, an old show that I only watched because of my sister, Natalie’s eyes got wide and big and she said that she knows that show and it's one of her favorites as well.

  We bonded over it. We gushed and I think for a little bit, she forgot that she wasn't supposed to be nice to someone like me, and I forgot that I was supposed to think that she was stupid just because she was pretty and popular.

  She wasn't either of those things, and I wasn't ugly. That was just a shell that I was putting on the way that teenage girls do, or perhaps everyone does when they feel insecure, when they aren't sure about the right thing to do.

  I like to go to the library on Friday afternoons. It's something that I started doing back when Mom and I were on good terms and it’s something that I refuse to give up just because she's there. Mom usually doesn't work on Friday afternoons. I say hi to her colleagues, and then disappear into the stacks.

  Today, Natalie joins me.

  She's never been to the library, if you can believe that. She has a vague idea of the Dewey Decimal System, which is alive and well, despite the internet. She doesn't even know what kind of books she would like. I like anything Young Adult. If the character's my age, I will read it. I tend toward fantasy, but some of the real ones set in real high schools also catch my attention.

  Natalie giggles as I show her toward the back and point to a few black covers with what passes for romance. Mom refused to show me these books or even tell me about them, but I found them out on my own. I do have an internet connection, after all. The library carries few real romances like the ones I read on Amazon, but these are pretty interesting as well.

  Since I know that she likes Dawson's Creek, I know Natalie will love and appreciate anything about relationships. Because what else is there, right?

  We're defined by the people whose company we keep. We become our best and worst selves based on who's around us. Or maybe that's not true at all, just something I've read in some book that's made up by a writer with too few friends.

  In those books, I'm reminded of the fact that I'm just a kid. I’m a kid and I get to make mistakes and I get to be this thirteen-year-old with dreams and possibilities, but also with short-term goals, like going to a party on a Friday night.

  With my other friends, we had get-togethers, but we never had alcohol, let alone drugs. It was just a way to get together and talk, watch TV, usually shows that were sarcastic and full of so-called wit that I only pretended to understand. None of them wanted to watch the type of shows that really spoke to me.

  Natalie's different.

  Natalie lives in the moment. She sneaks out a wine cooler and pulls that out of her backpack and shows it to me. I've tried a little bit of beer with my sister when I was seven or eight, but it was a joke, just a taste, nothing serious. And then Kaitlyn told me that she'd kill me if she caught me drinking, reiterating the statements that Mom made.

  But with Natalie, it seems fun. I take a sip, and then another and I start to loosen up. Natalie smiles and laughs and our voices get louder and I know that we have to be quiet, otherwise the librarian will catch onto us. But when I tell her, she just pulls away and whispers in that loud way you whisper when you don't really care.

  We get drunk that day at the library. We finish both wine coolers and it's enough for me to walk a little bit uneasy, and an hour later I feel incredibly tired and in need of a nap.

  Natalie invites me to a party later that day, but I tell her that I have to go home and check in with my mom. She looks disappointed, but she understands. She plays with my hair as I walk out. She tells me that I'm beautiful and that, with a little bit of makeup, all the guys will want to be with me. I know that I'm not as pretty as she is and that she's just being nice, but I also know that her makeup is flawless and her hair is always so shiny and perfect, like it has been blown out by a professional.

  I need her help.

  When I get
home, I try to act as somber and serious as possible, even though I want to giggle. Mom is in her own world and doesn't notice a thing. There's a grilled cheese sandwich on the counter. I'm supposed to put it in the oven to actually melt the cheese. Mom goes to her room, taking her Kindle and her iPad with her.

  We're together, but apart, as always. Mom checks out. She's not here, and when she is, she asks me inane questions and bothers me. This is better. I know that I should probably try harder, but why should it be me? I'm thirteen. She's supposed to understand.

  She's supposed to accommodate me, right?

  There are pictures of my dad all around the house, and he doesn’t age. I think about him because I have very few memories. I was little when he died, so little that you don't even remember what you remember and you wonder whether the things that you remember are just stories that someone else has told you.

  There are few videos of Dad because he was always the one behind the camera. Kaitlyn likes to talk about him even less than Mom does, which is to say never. It's about the only thing they agree on.

  The few times a year they do talk about him, they get into fights, bitter, awful brawls.

  They disagree about the worst thing that there is to disagree about, his death. Mom thinks that it's suicide. Kaitlyn thinks it was murder. They talk about the details. They go over his past. Kaitlyn calls him a drug dealer. Mom thinks of a way to explain why it's okay to sell drugs at school. He was just an intermediary. He didn't do anything bad. She doesn't believe any of this. They're just words to say, to create a narrative that makes it a little better.

  I've always wondered why Kaitlyn never looked for his killer. If she really thought that he was murdered, did she ever investigate it? Did she ever interview people? If she has, she's never mentioned a thing. Mom calls her on it and she says that she was just a kid when it happened.

  I know that she worries. I worry, too, and I want to help, but I don't know how. The few times I've mentioned it, Kaitlyn just laughed it off, pretended that the concept of me investigating something would be stupid or childish.

  But things are changing. There are girls on TikTok who are talking about their missing moms and brothers. They're reporting their stories and asking strangers for help. Most don't get answers, but one did.

  I've been following Reese Magnolia the most, watching her every post, commenting and going to her website and donating. She's looking for her little brother who was taken from a parking lot in a mall in Florida. A car pulled up, grabbed him, and he was gone just like that.

  Last night, I posted my first TikTok about my father. It got two likes, and the next one got ten. I now have 600 people who are talking to me and trying to tell me that one of these days, I'll find out the truth about him. Kaitlyn doesn't know, and neither does Mom. I don't want them to think that I'm taking Kaitlyn’s side. I'm the investigator. I want to find out the truth. Besides, as many issues as I have with Mom, I have just as many with my sister.

  I came to her for help about going to art school, and though she was a little bit more receptive than Mom, it didn't exactly go anywhere. I now know that I have to stay here until I'm eighteen, until graduation, and then I'm out. I don't know if college is in the cards, but I'm getting out of this town, and I'm not going to Los Angeles. I'm starting my life from scratch, away from all of this darkness. But before I go, I have to find out the truth about Dad.

  The only person who knows anything is Natalie. She knows about my TikTok since she helped me set it up using a fake email address. It's a whole new identity, completely apart from the one I have now. I go by the name Joey Seeks Truth, a nod to Joey Potter from Dawson's Creek. I made a new email to go along with it and I did it from Natalie's computer. That way it wouldn't be traceable if Kaitlyn or Mom tried to look through my laptop.

  I have a secret folder on my phone where I’m logged into the Joey Seeks Truth email, and I've made social media accounts to match in order to talk to older people on Facebook and Twitter. Anyone who would know would probably be older than I am, my father's age, and if there's one thing that I learned from my sister, it's that you have to go where the people who know are.

  I have been doing this for a month now, and Natalie is starting to find it tiresome and a little boring. She told me to post in the Facebook groups and I did, without much success. She says that I have to talk to people in person, and I tell her that it’s not exactly my strong suit.

  When I ask her for help, she hesitates. I have a feeling that she found this idea interesting at first, but now finds it quite boring, especially since it's not a movie where everything is resolved nicely at the end.

  She finally agrees when I ask her again in art class and tell her that I'm not going to help her paint if she doesn't help me with this.

  "I'll do it under one condition," Natalie says, throwing her manicured finger in my face. I know full well that those nails costs at least forty bucks, the kind of money that I do not have for jeans, let alone nails.

  "I want you to flirt with my boyfriend. I want you to flirt with him and try to kiss him and then tell me what happens,” Natalie says with a mischievous smile.

  Chapter 23 - Violet

  When my mother was young, she dreamed of being an astronaut. She had only mentioned this once, when I saw a rocket on the back of a cereal box, and she got lost in her thoughts.

  "That was my dream as a little girl, to go up to the moon, Mars, space,” she said. “The darkness never bothered me. And I knew that I could be alone for a long time if necessary."

  She was standing at the sink, her hands wet, in the middle of washing dishes. And it was like she got transported somewhere else, lost in time. She held a dish in one hand, and she looked out the window at the snow flurries that fell outside.

  My mom grew up in West Virginia, coal country. And when she told her parents that that was what she wanted to do, they laughed at her and said, "You need to be good at math and science, and you also need to be a boy."

  She told me this part, as a matter-of-fact, with a shrug, like it was a truth that was universally acknowledged by everyone, except that she didn't know that as a kid, and it was a surprise. It broke her heart.

  She’d never talked like that before. She’d never told me other things that she’d wanted to be or do, though I knew that she liked being a librarian because she liked being alone. She liked to be with her books, perhaps dreams and imaginations and stories about worlds and lives that were not like her own. That was the kind of book she liked best.

  My sister told me that there are two types of people, ones that want to see their lives reflected in the books they read. They want to see themselves in the characters and to be seen by them. There are others who read to escape and to be someone else, somewhere else. I guess they are those that are drawn to fantasy and science fiction.

  You would think that, given how things turned out for her, she'd understand why I like art so much, and she'd support me becoming an artist. But instead, she told me that people like me don't become artists. I don't know what she meant by that exactly. Is it because I’m a girl? Or a girl growing up in a small town?

  When Mom turned eighteen, she moved away. Her parents refused to pay for college, so she took a Greyhound bus to California because things had to be better out west. She moved to Los Angeles and worked as a waitress for a while and then met my dad, who loved snow and the four seasons and he owned a house that he’d inherited from his grandfather in Big Bear Lake. Mom loved it, at first.

  They came in the beginning of summer, and summers are glorious here, bright blue skies, warm dry weather. Days were filled with swimming in the lake and going on a boat. That was a long time ago when there weren't too many visitors. It was a special little piece of paradise, and they had it all to themselves.

  The first snow came right after Christmas. The temperature was in the 60s and 70s and sunny until then. The house was just enough for the two of them. That was before my dad's addiction. That was even before she got preg
nant. Those were the years of bliss and love and the things that she'd think back to.

  Mom told me a little bit about it, but mostly I'd catch her in her room, looking at pictures and photographs in those scrapbooks that she had put together. She has so many from before Kaitlyn was born. She collected movie stubs and ticket stubs. There's even the Greyhound ticket that took her out to California.

  There are, however, no pictures of Mom’s parents. There was a postcard from a place called Wheeling, which I found out was the capital of West Virginia. I asked Mom why she never took me back there. She says because her parents didn't talk to her anymore. And then, she cried a little.

  When I asked Kaitlyn about it, she said that she remembered meeting Grandmother once, but our grandfather was against Mom's marriage to our dad, and he never got over it.

  "He couldn't deal with the fact that Mom ran away,” Kaitlyn said. “He didn’t like that she was happy in those early years and he wrote her out of his life."

  If she didn't want to be in West Virginia, if she didn't want to be part of their family, then they didn't need her. They had two sons, the uncles I've never met.

  I never talked to anyone about this. I guess I could have. Maybe I should have, but friends are difficult for me. I don't trust them as much as I should, and there's a distance that I keep. Kaitlyn is someone I can really talk to about this, but she seems miles away.

  When I meet up with Natalie again, after school at her house, I sit on her bed as she brushes her hair in front of her freestanding mirror. She never comes over to my place. Natalie’s hair is straight and lustrous, like it has been blown out by a professional. Mine, on the other hand, is air-dried and slept on, so it’s a bit frizzy at the ends and oily at the roots.

  Natalie wants me to flirt with her boyfriend, Neil Goss. She wants to catch him cheating.

  "You know you want to kiss him. Why not just try to go after him and see what happens?" She keeps pestering me.