Finding Forever (6 page)

“This is a special person, Brooklyn.”

“Wait. Special?”

“Yes,” the caller said. “Very.”

“Okay, but to be clear—and please don't take this the wrong way—do you mean disabled kind of
special
, or just, you know, a special person to you?”

“Special to a lot of people, Brooklyn.”

“If she's so special, then maybe you better just call the cops.”

“Brooklyn. . . . It's really not that simple.”

Brooklyyyn . . . realaaay . . . simpuhl.
The lazily drawn out back ends of words always gave away that Hollywood Girl twang. It suggested a person who got more manis and pedis than the usual girl. It suggested someone who did so using Daddy's AmEx. In Twin Oaks, most girls talked with an accent that sounded more hick than Hollywood. Twin Oaks didn't look far from L.A. on a map, but the city of 55,000 people surrounded by avocado and nut farms and oil fields in many ways had more in common with, say, Kansas than California.

“Just trying to help,” Brooklyn said. “Cops find missing people, right? But that's not what I do. I cover celebrities. I break news. I'm not a detective.”

Brooklyn got tweets every day from readers, most of whom she answered with a polite thank-you. Most asked for a link to their blogs or to follow them on Twitter. Or they just wanted to know where they could meet a certain star or whether some random rumor they'd heard was true.

Some tipsters, though, offered “actionable leads”—gossip, photos, or other tidbits of information that she could report
on. Brooklyn treated every tip seriously, even if the tipster turns turned out to be a total flake. Which happened a lot.

This current caller claimed in her email last night to have a scoop she could not share over the computer because it was “too sensitive.”

“Listen,” Brooklyn said. “I can't help you if you can't even tell me who exactly you're looking for. So I'm going to have to just say thanks for reading my blog, I appreciate you thinking of me, but let's just call it a
—
”

“No, wait! Please. Don't hang up. You're the only person who can find her. I mean, the cops could, I guess. But they can't know everything. I just need you to do it.”

“So you're telling me some
special
person is missing, but you won't tell me her name, or anything about her for that matter. You're afraid to go to the police for some unspecified sketch reason, and come to think of it, I don't even know who the hell
you
are. Put yourself in my shoes. How am I supposed to take you seriously?”

“The thing is . . . Can I trust you to keep this secret? Between us?”

“Sources come to me with scoops all the time.” Though this was the first time anyone had ever called Brooklyn with what amounted to a missing person's report. “And I never, ever would burn a source.”

“Okay, okay.” The tipster exhaled. “It's a girl. And, um, you actually know who she is.”

Brooklyn perked to attention. She stopped typing. “Okay. Go ahead . . .”

“It's Taylor Prince.”

“Hold on. Let me get this straight,
the
Taylor Prince?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“She's missing?”

“For the last two days.”

“No offense,” Brooklyn said, “but this could be a load of lies. In the last few years, there has hardly been a day when I didn't know where Taylor was. And my sources have already told me she's supposed to be taking a birthday vacation in Mexico. In my world, being MIA in Mexico doesn't qualify as ‘missing.' It qualifies as being on vacation.”

“She
was
supposed to head to Cabo yesterday, but that never happened.”

“Bull.”

“I'm sorry?”

“B-U-L-L,” Brooklyn spelled out. “You know, as in you're full of it.”

“Listen, I can assure you that I am definitely not—”

Brooklyn spit out a laugh. “Wait! Is this Tamara? Oh my god. It
is
Tamara! You almost got me!”

“Tamara?”

Brooklyn slapped her knee. “You got me
again
. You even perfected your Valley Girl voice—”

“I'm not Tamara—my name's Simone. And I really wish I was kidding. But I'm not.”

“So,
Simone
, how exactly do you know Taylor Prince is missing?”

“Because I am close to her. Very close. I was with her when it happened.”

“Wait, you're Simone
Witten
?”

“Yep,” she said.

Brooklyn pushed her ear buds further in. She sat up straight.

“That's why I know so much about you,” Simone said. “Taylor and I will be on a set or something, and before we even get out of her trailer to shoot the first scene, you will have pics of her on your site, plus a detailed schedule for the entire day. You're good at what you do, Brooklyn. Scary. But good.”

Brooklyn still didn't feel convinced. Everyone knew that Taylor's longtime personal assistant and BFF was the tall, blonde Simone Witten. Simone sat beside her boss at awards shows, was thanked in her acceptance speeches, and shadowed Taylor virtually non-stop.

“How do I know you're not some weirdo?” Brooklyn asked.

“I get it,” Simone said. “Working for a celebrity, I see a lot of oddballs. But honestly, the last twenty-four hours have been the craziest of my life. And I don't want to waste your time—or, more importantly, Taylor's. . . . You know, I can come meet you in person if that would make you feel better.”

Brooklyn knew her worrywart mom would ground her for life for meeting up alone with a total stranger—especially one who had reached out to her from the blog making some pretty out-there claims. But what if Taylor Prince really had gone missing? It would be Brooklyn's biggest scoop yet, sending her number of daily unique visitors to over a million and putting her on the map with the big kahunas of Hollywood blogs—all just in time for the journalism school applications she had to start filling out next summer.

“Come meet me at the Frontier Valley High stadium,” Brooklyn said. “Tomorrow morning at ten thirty.”

“Where's that?” Simone asked.

“I'll text you the address. And then if you are for real, we can start.”

“Start what?”

“The investigation.”