Wanted! (7 page)

S
TRANGELY ISOLATED IN THE
back of somebody else’s van and the back of somebody else’s conversation, Alice found herself able to reach the back of her own mind. The desire to talk to her mother had disappeared. The need to weep for her father had left her chest.

She began to reconstruct the day.

She’d been home by herself. Dad called. He urgently requested her to leave the house with the disk TWIN and to meet him out of town. He gave her the extraordinary order to drive his most precious possession—a car she could not drive. So Dad
desperately
wanted those disks. Did he just want them—or did he want them out of the house? Had he known that somebody else was about to break in for those same disks? If so, he would have wanted Alice out of the house.

So he did not think Alice was in danger. And he must not have thought
he
was in danger, or he would have barricaded a door, or called the police himself.

Fifteen or twenty minutes had passed before the man entered Dad’s condo. So that man could not have been very far away. In a city, however, depending on traffic, ten minutes could mean half a mile or several miles. Everybody Alice knew lived within that sphere. This did not narrow it down.

That man had spoken in a voice Alice half knew. He knew things about Dad, as if they had worked together. He had entered with a key. Presumably Dad’s key.

Alice had hid from this trespasser under the Corvette. Time had passed, in which there were strange and awful noises she could not identify, and one she could: the computer keyboard. Then the man left, driving away in that navy blue minivan.

Could the person to whom the voice spoke have been Dad himself? Could Dad have
walked
into the condo? No. He would have yelled; fought; warned his daughter somehow. Had he been carried in? Had that heavy sound, that couch-falling sound, been her father’s body when it was dropped to the floor for the police to find? Could he have been carried in unconscious? Had the actual murder of Alice’s father taken place while she lay silently sobbing under the car? Could his body have been in that condo while she was showering and changing clothes?

He was a big man. Tall and lean and strong. He was fit. It would take another big strong man to move him. And as for killing him, how could somebody as small as Alice have accomplished that?

But she did not know how he had been killed. If he had been shot, it definitely had not happened at the condo; she would have heard something. Her father possessed no guns; she, Alice, would not have had access to a gun, and her mother would know that. How else do you kill a man? Hit him over the head? Alice wasn’t tall enough. Her mother would know that, too!

But there again, the excess of cop shows Alice had seen filled her with an excess of images: You could catch a person by surprise. You could come up behind them. You could get them to stoop down to pick something up and brain them with a baseball bat. You did not have to be bigger than your enemy. Just smarter, or luckier.

But nobody was smarter than Dad!

Alice wrenched her mind away from pictures of herself, from the very pictures her mother must be forming, of the shape of Dad’s death and Dad’s killer. She forced herself to go on analyzing the events.

She had not entered his bedroom. She had not gone near his bathroom.

Alice had taken the time to shower and change and had driven away in the Corvette, as her father had told her to do.

At least an hour later, maybe an hour and a half, because Alice had no idea how long she had sat, comatose from anxiety, waiting for Dad to arrive, had come the excited claims on the radio that Marc Robie had been murdered; that Alice had sent an E-mail confession to her own mother; that Mom herself called the police; that police were looking for Alice.

Swiftly; everything had happened so swiftly. As if it had been engineered.

Next, Alice had called her mother, who, in shock and grief and horror, definitely did believe that Alice had killed Dad.

So while Alice lay flat and shuddering beneath the car, something other than murder had taken place. The murderer sent a false E-mail message to Alice’s mother. How could the murderer have known the password? How could the murderer have known that Alice signed off Ally when talking to her mother? What possible wording, what possible sentence, could make a person’s own mother say—Yes; my daughter killed her father?

Alice could hardly bear to think of her mother. The betrayal! How dare Mom believe so readily!

And if all, or some, of this were true—what vicious and terrible person had trapped Alice beneath the Corvette? A person who would not only kill Dad,
but think of a way to hold Alice responsible.

The voice had commented out loud on Alice’s clothing thrown on the floor. He’d been looking for Alice when he opened the garage door.
What if Alice had not been perfectly hidden?
What if the murderer had seen her on the garage floor? What if he had known all along that Alice was in the condo—and arranged to have the police come, and find her, filthy and sobbing and hiding under her father’s car? Having just sent a confession of murder to her own mother?

The back of the van smelled of old food: faint whiffs of abandoned potato chip bags and french fry containers. Alice was so queasy she had to hold onto her mouth and stomach. She ordered herself not to get sick. She had done that once; she was not doing it again. Dad and I were going to eat out tonight at that new Japanese restaurant, the one where you sit in a circle and watch the chef.

She thought: Dad is never going to do anything with me again.

She thought: I know where he was. He was at that number. The number displayed on Caller ID. Either he was killed there, or he was caught there.

She closed her eyes, trying to remember the number, trying to find it in her dark and angry mind. It had been a local call, so the first three digits were 399. The next four…they’d been a pair…some sort of match. If only Dad had the newer type of Caller ID, where it also displayed the name!

She remembered the last four digits. 8789.

The van slowed for a speed bump. “Uh—so—um—where do you want to get out?” called Bethany.

Alice was shocked. She had forgotten the van and the girls and the college. She looked out the window, as afraid as she had been when she first heard the voice in the condo.

I can’t get out; the van is so safe, dark, and cool.

The van had come to a complete stop.

“This is great,” said Alice, stepping forward in a crouch and yanking the door handle down. “You’re a peach,” she said.

Bethany gave her the tight, irritated smile of somebody who is not a peach and does not want to be put in this position again.

Alice hoped these girls never watched the evening news, didn’t care about local crime, but got into fights with their roommates tonight. She slammed the heavy door shut and walked away without looking back. Very difficult. She had not managed it with the Ford, but she disciplined herself, and managed it with Bethany.

What were they saying about her? What observations had they made? What would they do next?

They’ll forget me, she told herself. She shivered slightly.

Pathways crisscrossed the grass. Whatever angle you needed to go, there was cement to follow. There was not a bush, not a flower, not a tree to relieve the cement slapped down in the grass. Alice’s shadow was like a silhouette on a wanted poster.

It was hard to accept that she must hoist her body and voice and keep going. Keep going where?

The campus was its own city. Each building looked exactly like every other building. Plain brick rectangles, as if the college had not used an architect, but bought buildings off a rack. We’ll have twenty dorms, please, ten classrooms, and a lab.

Lab
, thought Alice. This campus will have a computer lab. It will be open twenty-four hours, because computer users need to be in there any hour of the day or night.

Each utilitarian building, like the elementary school, was named for a person. The Joe P. Johanneson Building. The Eunice I. McGarry Center. No clue as to the purpose of these buildings.

Shadows leaped in her face. Shadows rushed past her, and got in front of her, and suddenly Alice realized that the afternoon was late; in fact, it was nearly evening. She was going to need dinner and a bed.

Cars were entering and leaving the student parking lots. Doors were slamming, engines were refusing to turn over, gears were jammed, horns were honked, radios were blaring.

Food she could get. She had a little cash and there would be a cafeteria. But a bed?

How casual the girls in the van had been. How easily they accepted her as a classmate in need of a ride. Could she convince somebody she was just another classmate in need of a mattress?

She walked on, hardly able to tell where she had been, never mind where she was going. The similarity of each building to the next and to the last made each step seem pointless. She was on a treadmill, like one of those pathetic muscular people you saw in gymnasium ads: running, running, running, their little headphones chatting to them, their sweaty backs going no place.

In front of her materialized the Stefan R. Saultman Computer Center. They probably didn’t name a building after you unless you had a middle initial. Stefan R. Saultman had more character than the other buildings, and the doors were not ground level. She had to ascend a dozen cement steps to a pair of glass doors so heavy that at first she thought they were locked. Only when she hauled with all her strength did one open for her. She could hardly keep the door open long enough to get through it.

Inside was an attractive room with marble floors, like a state senate. How surprising to see this attention to appearance. Velvet cords hanging from low chrome posts made a little corridor within the room. These led to a second set of doors…with an electronic scanner.

INSERT COLLEGE ID WITH PHOTO FACEUP.

The second set of doors smiled at Alice, knowing that she had no ID.

No people appeared, as if she had entered some human-free zone.

Alice stood in the marble silence, immobilized by this defeat.

She nearly seized the velvet rope for a weapon when a living person did come in behind her. She tried to think of an excuse for being so frightened, but the guy who walked in had not even seen her. Even nerdier than Alice was, not just loser glasses and brand X cap and ears sticking out, he also sported pocket protector, Bic pens, and laptop. Alice was pretty sure the whole world was invisible to this guy. She prayed for him to drop his ID card, but of course he didn’t, and he passed on through and the inner door shut heavily behind him.

I could have leaped through when he did, she thought. There was time. Should I cram myself through with the next person?

But what excuse would she give for such behavior?

It was interesting that she was still worried about good and bad manners. We murderers must not concern ourselves with appearances, she said to herself, but the joke did not work, because she thought of Dad, and her silly words sewed her lips together, like a dragonfly stitching her soul. She did not believe in the dragonfly myth any more than she believed herself a murderer, and yet—

Her mother believed.

Up the outside stairs came a bunch of boys, jostling and punching and swearing and laughing in the loud way she associated with boys in junior high. She had figured by college you would outgrow this. Alice reminded herself that the worst that could happen was the boys would say No, and she said, “Oh, you know what? I’ve forgotten my ID. Can I just slip through the door with you?”

They barely glanced at her. Perhaps, like Alice, they had learned to study a member of the opposite sex in one casual, split-second flicker.

They had to line up in order to run their ID cards through the scanner, and lining up did not come easily to this kind of boy. The second-to-last boy in line put his arm out, sweepingly, like an usher about to seat a guest at a wedding, and Alice, hoping she had not misunderstood, let herself be gathered into the line, and she and the boy lockstepped through.

He smiled at her. “I forget mine all the time,” he said. “I’ve spent half the year standing outside the dorm at night waiting for somebody to let me in.”

She was blinded by his smile, or perhaps by the relief of being helped. How did people stay on the run? She had been running for only half a day, and already she was so desperate for a hug and some comfort she’d surrender if a policeman appeared right now.

She reminded herself that the police, like her mother, would be a poor source of comfort.

“Come on, Paul, move it,” said the last guy, and he, too, smiled at Alice, rather sweetly, as if they had shared something once, and the boys moved it, going down the hall in a group kind of way, bumping and talking in the code of good friends.

She had misjudged them, because of their racket and their pushing. And who, right now, was misjudging Alice?

“Thank you,” Alice called after them, but she didn’t think Paul had heard her.

Paul.

She was in high school with a computer wizard named Paul. No nerd, that Paul was gorgeous and athletic and a senior and everybody had crushes on him. He had been accepted at awesome institutes of technology—Massachusetts; California—and was trying to decide which one to honor with his presence.

She tried to imagine calling upon that Paul for computer assistance. Or any other kind of assistance. It was beyond possibility. He would not have spent a millisecond noticing Alice, the sophomore.

Of course, he was probably thinking of her now. The whole high school was probably thinking of her now.
Alice?
they were saying to each other.
Sweet dull Alice?

Not the kind of girl you expect to be a killer
, they were probably saying to the television reporters.

It seemed impossible to Alice that she could be a figure on the evening news: the kind they loved to linger on, a shocker. A bloody, cruel, awful shocker…and it was Alice.

Oh
,
like wow
, her classmates were saying to each other,
my locker is next to hers. Wonder if she’s had a submachine gun in there all this time.