She's Not There (14 page)

“I looked up where you work on the Web.”

“It's on the Web?” Caroline looked toward the secretary, who was pretending to be reading something on her computer. How much of her life was out there for others to casually peruse? Was there anything left that was hers and hers alone?

“Is it all right that I called there? I was afraid to phone your house again.”

“I'm sorry about what happened.”

“It's okay. That was Michelle, right? I understand why she'd be upset.”

“Do you remember her?”
Can you tell me something
, anything
, about her that nobody else in the world would know but you and me, something that isn't on the Internet, something that would prove conclusively…?

“No. I wish I could say I did, but…”

“She thinks you're a fraud,” Caroline said quietly.

“I'd probably think so, too, if I were in her shoes.”

“So, what happens now? Were you really serious about coming to San Diego?”

There was a brief pause, a sharp intake of breath. “What choice do I have?”

Was the girl for real or was Michelle right? Caroline felt a sinking sensation in her gut, remembering Michelle's predictions. “And I suppose you want me to send you money…”

“No. I already told you, I don't want your money.”

“Then how…?”

“I don't know yet. I have to figure a few things out.”

“So, when…?”

“I'll get back to you. Do you have a cell phone?”

“I have one. I just never have it on. Michelle is always after me about it. She says it's ridiculous that—” She realized she was rambling and stopped abruptly, fishing inside her purse to retrieve her phone. She switched the power on and located her number. “Here. I have it.” Caroline quickly relayed the number to Lili.

“I'll call you.” The line went dead.

“Hello? Hello, Lili?” Caroline stood motionless, replaying the conversation over and over in her mind.
She must think I'm a moron,
she thought.
Who doesn't know her cell phone number? Who never has the damn thing on?
And then more thoughts: Did this girl really not want her money or was she just biding her time in an effort to maximize her potential payoff? She'd successfully baited the hook and Caroline had greedily snapped it up. All that was left was to reel her in. Was that what Lili was doing?

“Is everything okay?” the secretary asked.

Caroline handed back the school phone. “I'm an idiot.”

“Don't say that. Just because you couldn't remember your cell phone number…” The secretary's face reddened. “You have a lot on your mind these days. All that stuff in the news recently…”

Caroline nodded, wondering if the principal had informed them of her past long ago or whether they'd just found out.

“The police in Mexico still have no idea…?”

“Nothing.”

Every lead Detective Ramos had collected over the last decade and a half eventually led to the same dead end; every suspect he'd pursued managed to evade his grasp.
If the police waste fifteen years on dead ends and Caroline endures fifteen years of false hope, how many more years will it take till she loses her mind altogether?

“Just so you know, Shannon and I don't believe for a second that you harmed your daughter…”

“Not for a second,” Shannon confirmed.

For the first time since she'd entered the office, Caroline became aware of the other secretary sitting at her desk. “Thank you.” She gave both women her best attempt at a smile and began edging toward the hall. She had to get out of here before either of them said another word.

“…or that you had anything to do with that poor boy's suicide.”

Too late. She hadn't moved fast enough. Caroline felt the color drain from her face as the buzzing of angry bees returned.

“We were just saying it was so mean of that reporter to bring all that up again. As if you don't have enough on your plate…”

The room began spinning. The next thing Caroline knew, she was sitting on the floor, her back against the wall, her feet splayed out in front of her, the room performing cartwheels around her.

“My God, what happened?” Shannon cried.

“She fainted. Call the nurse.”

“You're going to be all right,” Shannon told her, kneeling beside her and patting her hand while they waited for the school nurse to arrive. “You'll see. Everything is going to be just fine.”

“O
kay, everybody, listen up,” Caroline said. “You only have two weeks left before your final exams…”

A collective groan emanated from the throats of the twenty-two eleventh-grade students in her final class of the day at Lewis Logan High.

“…and I'd like to use these last few minutes to give you some suggestions that I think could help you make the most of your study time.”

“How about just telling us what's on the exam?” one of the boys asked, right on cue. There was always one boy in every class who asked the same thing.

“The first thing you need to do is to organize your work so that you begin with the most challenging material right off the bat. I know that might sound counterintuitive, but you can't be afraid of it. Okay? Then you start dividing that material into small chunks that you can manage easily. You'll find that things aren't nearly as overwhelming when you start breaking them down.”

“I think
I'm
having a breakdown,” another boy said, and the class laughed.

Except for Errol Cruz, who sat in the last seat of the last row, chewing on the end of his pencil and staring out the side window, looking even more lost than usual. A skinny, somewhat delicate-looking boy with deep blue eyes and acne-scarred skin, he never laughed at the smart-alecky remarks of the other students or offered up any of his own. He never volunteered anything in class, although whenever Caroline called on him, he always had the correct answer ready. Occasionally he lingered after class to discuss the day's lesson or a challenging math problem he'd come across online. Or maybe he just hung around to delay going home. His father was said to be gruff and unpleasant, and neither parent had bothered showing up for the last set of parent-teacher interviews. According to his other instructors, Errol rarely completed his assignments and had almost no chance of making his year, which was a shame, because despite his failing grades, he showed a real aptitude for math. Maybe with a little more encouragement…

“It helps to begin each study session with a quick review of what you studied the day before,” she continued, stealing a glance at the clock on the wall. Michelle had a dentist appointment at four o'clock and Caroline had arranged to pick her up from school at three-thirty. This meant she had to leave as soon as the bell sounded in order to drive to Michelle's tony private school in Mission Hills and get her over to their dentist, whose office was located on Washington Street, just east of Old Town, a fifteen-minute trip at the best of times, and likely twice that during rush hour. She had little time to waste. The school had been given strict instructions never to leave Michelle alone or unsupervised, but you could never be sure. “When you're reviewing, make sure to carefully read over each step in the procedure and use a Magic Marker to highlight the main concepts and formulas. If it helps, draw a diagram to make the concept clearer.”

The bell rang. The class immediately began packing up belongings and filing out. “Goodbye, Ms. Shipley,” someone said. “Have a nice night,” said another.

“Thank you. You, too. Errol…,” she called as the boy was shuffling out of the room.

He stopped, standing motionless in the doorway, head down, eyes directed at the floor.

“Do you have a minute?” She stole another glance at the clock. She had little time to spare. Michelle would be waiting. She couldn't be late.

The boy turned slowly back toward her, staring at a point just past her right ear, refusing to make eye contact. “Is there a problem, Ms. Shipley?”

“I was just about to ask you the same thing.” She maneuvered her head into his line of vision. “I was watching you in class and I couldn't help noticing…Is there something wrong, Errol? You seem a little…I don't know…distracted.”

More distracted than usual,
she added silently.

Blue eyes shifted to the floor. A long pause, a swaying from one foot to the other. “No. I'm fine.”

“Are you sure? Because you don't seem fine,” Caroline insisted. “What is it, Errol? Please tell me. If there's something you don't understand…”

He said nothing, his hand brushing away some stray hairs that fell across his forehead. Caroline thought she saw the fading remnants of a bruise above his right eye, but when she tilted her head to get a better look, he quickly pushed his hair back into place.

“Is everything all right at home?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“You can talk to me, Errol,” she said, hearing the clock ticking off the seconds on the wall behind her head. “You know that, don't you?”

“Yeah.”

“About anything. Not just math.” She glanced toward the door. If she didn't leave in the next minute, she had no chance of getting Michelle to her dentist appointment by four o'clock.

“You have to be somewhere,” he said.

“No. That's all right. I have plenty of time.”

“Nah, it's okay.”

“Really. I have time.”

“It's nothing. I'm good.”

“Are you sure?”

The boy was already shuffling out of the room. “Yeah. No problem.”

“Okay. Well, then, see you tomorrow.”

“Bye, Ms. Shipley.”

“Goodbye, Errol.”

She watched him disappear down the hallway, then locked the classroom door behind her, trying to shake off unwelcome stirrings of guilt. Clearly, something was bothering the boy. Just as clearly, he didn't want to talk about it. What was she supposed to do? Sit on him? Force the truth out of him? Still, maybe with a little more prodding, a little more patience…She'd try again tomorrow, she decided, proceeding briskly to the parking lot.

Within minutes she was on the San Diego Freeway headed toward Mission Bay. At ten minutes to four, fully twenty minutes after she was supposed to arrive, she pulled up in front of Michelle's school to find her daughter, in the company of an older student, sitting on the school's outside steps, one knee sock up, the other curled around her ankle like a sleeping snake. Only ten years old and already she'd perfected her grandmother's look of world-weary disappointment. Caroline reached across the front seat of her black Camry and pushed open the passenger door.

Michelle waved goodbye to the other girl and sauntered down the steps. She climbed inside the car and pulled her seat belt into place without so much as a glance at her mother. “You're late,” she said.

“You're late,” the receptionist echoed as Caroline approached the counter. Caroline felt a roomful of disapproving eyes fall squarely on her back. The waiting room, a large, pleasant space shared by three dentists, was crowded, the red plastic seats lining its white walls almost all filled.

“Sorry. The traffic was really bad.”

“Dr. Saunders took another patient ahead of you. I'm afraid you'll have to wait.”

Caroline nodded and retreated to a corner of the room where there was one empty chair. She sat down and Michelle promptly jumped into her lap. “Whoa, easy there,” Caroline said.

“What's the matter?” Michelle asked.

“Nothing. You're just getting pretty heavy.”

“Am I fat?”

“No, of course you're not fat. Who said you were fat?” Although there was no denying Michelle's propensity for junk food and sweets. It was a taste she'd developed in the aftermath of Samantha's disappearance, one indulged by her grandmother, who was always plying her with high-calorie treats. Caroline had been reluctant to say anything to either of them, reasoning that Michelle was just a child and her mother was, well, her mother. She knew this was a convenient rationalization, but she lacked the stamina to take on either one of them. A loud chewing sound suddenly reached her ears. “Is that gum in your mouth?”

Michelle's shoulders slumped as her eyes rolled toward the ceiling.

“Spit that out. You're at the dentist, for heaven's sake.”

Michelle released a huge wad of pink bubble gum into the palm of her hand. “What do I do with it?”

Caroline looked around the room for a wastepaper basket but found none. “There's a bathroom down the hall.” She gently pushed Michelle from her lap and rose from her seat. “Come on.”

“I can go by myself.”

“I'm coming with you.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“It's so embarrassing. You never let me do anything,” Michelle said, loud enough to attract the attention of everyone within earshot, which was pretty much everyone in the room. “I'm not a baby. I'm a big girl.”

“Just give me the gum and sit down,” Caroline said, her face flushing, as if a brush fire were racing through her veins. She wrapped the gum in a tissue and approached the receptionist. “I'm sorry. Do you have somewhere I can put this?”

The receptionist held up the wastepaper basket at her feet without speaking and Caroline dropped the tissue inside, sure that all eyes were upon her. But when she glanced around the room, she was relieved to see that most of the people were either engrossed in books they'd brought with them or browsing through the office's collection of out-of-date magazines.

A blond woman in a pale pink uniform entered the waiting room from one of the inner offices. “Mrs. Pearlman?” she called toward a middle-aged woman sitting next to the door. “Dr. Wang will see you now.” Mrs. Pearlman promptly dropped the magazine she'd been reading onto the small table beside her and followed the pink uniform toward the inner offices.

Caroline immediately sat down in the freshly vacated chair, its seat still warm. Just as quickly, Michelle got up from her chair on the opposite wall and plopped down on her mother's lap.

“I'm hungry,” she said.

Caroline reached to the table beside her for a fashion magazine and handed it to Michelle. “Here. Read this.”

“Mommy, look!” Michelle exclaimed, pointing at the table, her eyes as round as circles.

Caroline stared at the stack of old magazines with mounting horror. There she was on the very top of the pile, standing ramrod straight at Hunter's side, the familiar picture having been taken during the course of their press conference in Rosarito.
FIVE YEARS LATER,
blared the headline of the magazine dated last November.
WHERE IS SAMANTHA SHIPLEY?

“Why is your picture on the magazine?” Michelle asked, her finger stabbing at a tiny photo of her sister in the cover's upper right corner. “Is that Samantha?”

Caroline struggled to keep from screaming. She'd always been so diligent about keeping such headlines away from Michelle, making sure the child never caught so much as a glimpse of the newspaper and magazine coverage of either the event or its aftermath.

Not that Michelle had ever asked many questions; she'd accepted Samantha's disappearance the way a child accepts most things over which she has no control. In the beginning, she'd occasionally wondered aloud where Samantha was and when she was coming home, but after a few months even those questions had stopped. In the past year, she hadn't mentioned her sister at all.

And mercifully, the once-constant barrage of stories had also started to abate. But the five-year anniversary of the toddler's disappearance had marked a major milestone, resulting in renewed coverage.
Five years since I've seen my baby,
Caroline thought now, fighting back tears. How could that be?

“Mommy, why is your picture in the magazine?”

What could she say? What could she do? The damage was done. She'd been fighting a battle she couldn't possibly win. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't protect Michelle forever from unexpected sightings such as this. It was June, the end of another school year. She'd naïvely thought they were safe until next November. When was she going to realize they were never safe?

“Where's my picture?” the child asked plaintively, her eyes scanning the magazine cover.

“Michelle Shipley?” a voice called out.