1
The night my sister went missing, I sat in a back corridor of the police station, staring at a tinted glass window to an inner room. The lights were off in there, and so the window looked like a black screen. I remember how my insides felt as blank as that window. Itâs a good thing, that numbness, because it keeps you from spiraling into the black-hole-falling routine. Somethingâs telling you that you donât need those panic-stricken thoughts yet.
No body had washed up. The police hadnât found any blood on the pier near the spot where Casey went over. The gunshot, which had sounded more like a weather-wet firecracker, could not possibly have hit one of Caseyâs vital organs. Of course, there are always the thoughts that threaten youâlike how blood in the ocean draws sharks, and how a storm at sea had created endless riptides this week. But thoughts like that bounce in the first hours after your shock.
The good thoughts strike you and stick. Like, my sister was probably a better swimmer than I was, even though I was a lifeguard. And I thought of Casey having so many friends. None of our friends had any streak of violence. No one had any reason to hurt her.
It had been too dark to see anything but a few clusters of our friends up on the pier in silhouette, and I tried hard not to put anything in my mind that wasnât real.
The gun had been real, whether I liked it or not. But it was a stupid little collectorâs gun, a derringer, or âladyâs pistol,â as my buddies called it, brought to a dune party as a joke. It all seemed surreal now. And all of it smelled of âaccident.â Nobody whoâd sneaked up on the old pier with us would intentionally hurt Casey. Nobody.
Maybe this was all a big prank that had gone over the top. I thought of Casey painting âdrops of bloodâ out of the cafeteria this year, and also pulling the fire alarm to relieve friends from a couple of boring classes. Maybe she was holed up on some sailboat in the back bay, laughing her airhead butt off, ignorant that the coast guard and the police were searching the ocean around the pier.
I hadnât seen or heard much in the light of a half-covered moonâexcept Iâd still swear I heard Caseyâs laugh, and it was after the little Crack!
Iâd been able to relay all that over the phone to our parents in a miraculous calm. Still, they were scrambling to catch the red-eye back from L.A., where my dad had been in film negotiations with Paramount. It was the first time one of his novels had been optioned by a movie companyâand the first time our parents had left me and Casey alone overnight since we were fourteen and twelve. I was now seventeen, and I stared at that tinted glass window, seeing Dadâs cockeyed grin in it and hearing his speech about how he trusted a twelve- and a fourteen-year-old home alone far more than he trusted a fifteen- and a seventeen-year-old.
He had tried to tempt us. âCome on, Kurt . . . maybe Iâll strike it rich finally. You kids need to be there. And you and Casey could do Disneyland, whileââ
I had stopped him right there. The ârichâ part would have struck me better ten years ago, when I was first getting sick of peanut butter sandwiches for lunch seven days a week. By now I was immune to the midlist author no-frills life, and I started blathering about my job on the beach patrol. I probably could have got time off for a Monday through Thursdayâitâs weekends that are sacred for lifeguards. But my job was a good enough excuse to balk at leaving Mystic in the middle of July. The previous summer Mom and Dad had wanted to take Casey and me to the Greek isles for ten days, after my dad finally got a better-than-average royalty check. My very first thought had been, Can we take friends? I didnât ask. I just made excuses until they dropped the whole ideaâmy point being that if the Greek isles canât tempt a guy away from summer fun ânâ games, Disneyland surely isnât gonna cut it. Not that fun ânâ games is anything too awful.
I had sworn up and down, while Dad was deciding to let us stay home alone, that we wouldnât do anything stupid, and I still felt that I had held up my end of that bargain. Mostly.
All weâd done wrong was go to a dune party. My mom and dad wouldnât object to us going to a house party while they were gone. But a dune party was different. No chance of adults, good chance of a raid by the cops . . . and of course there were always the daredevils, loadies, and lovers who would risk going up on the burned-out old pier. No matter how many times the cops removed the metal climbing spikes from its scorched pilings, more would be found hammered in a week or so later.
We were all just goofing around, risking a rip-tear out on the least scorched portion of the pierâs planking, because it was fun, because of the horror tales about the place, because most people were partied so loose that if a couple of them fell through and hit the waves, they probably wouldnât feel it. I guessed weâd forgotten about the storm at sea and how big the rips were.
And I guessed the partying wasnât so good, either. But millions of kids party, and hundreds of kids had climbed up on the pier in the past twenty years, weather not a consideration. Their sisters donât get shot by some dinky âladyâs pistolâ and fall into the surf with barely a splash. That was the weirdest. Through the deepest, darkest corners of my memory, I still kept digging for the sound of a splash. I couldnât find it.
Your numbness, your denial, might make you have a flash of Peter Pan saving Wendy from walking the plank. I conjured up images of Captain Hook and Mr. Smee listening for the splash after Wendy walked the plank, but I couldnât find a splash after Casey fell backward.
But then, Peter Pan hadnât wandered over to the New Jersey barrier islands to catch Casey Carmody midfall off the old fishing pier. That much, you can grasp. The theory of ghosts doesnât work well either, suddenly. When my dad was a kid, the old fishing pier, which is actually pretty big, had been turned into The Haunt, an amusement pier with an enormous haunted mansion exhibit at the entrance. It had been a âmegaproduction,â as Dad called it, employing half the eighteen-year-olds on the island to dress up like vampires and headless ghouls and jump out at summer tourists and their kids. But The Haunt loomed on the far south end of a barrier island, with only a small toll bridge at the far north end. The island couldnât hack the traffic that The Haunt needed to survive. About twenty years ago it went bankrupt, and legend has it that some kid was under the pier lighting off firecrackers and thatâs how the fire started. No one really knows for sure.
It wasnât a good enough story to attract the attention of kids in high school. Sightings of vampires hovering over the burned-out foundation of the haunted house, plus two tales of the suicides off thereâone in the eighties and one in the ninetiesâthose things drew kids to the place like the moon draws water.
But island lore about âsightings of the suicide victimsâ and âthe vampires who made them do itâ didnât fit the mood in the police station, where I now found myself. Spooks are for fun in the dark. This place was lit and immaculate and stinking of floor soap, and right now, all too quiet, what with the entire police force out on the beach.
I became aware of my one shoulder being rubbed, and my eyes dropped to the knees of Cecilly Holst. Cecilly was a nice girlâusually. Put it this way: She had always been nice to me, but Iâd heard her mouth in action against certain violators of her Code of Acceptable Behavior Around Here. Picture Hilary Duff, only hired to play a mean Lizzie McGuire instead of a doofus one. There were probably a thousand ways to earn Cecillyâs scowling, hair-tossing wrath, but I had never done that, so that side of her didnât apply to the here and now. Her eyes were not scowling, but they were still sharp. I donât know why she kept watching me. But I sensed that if I broke down and cried or something, she would hug me and have no problem with it. I was glad to have her there.
Her best friend, True, sat on the other side of me. Trueâs real name is Sandra Blueman, but she picked up the nickname True Blue in high school, and then simply True. True was turned toward me, her long legs pulled together nervously at the knees and her toes turned under in her flip-flops. She was stroking her endless dark ponytail and looking lost in thought, which was fine. If two girls had been rubbing me at that moment, I would have felt mauled.
âI donât know why they wonât let you back down to the beach while the coast guard searches,â Cecilly muttered. âYou want me to talk to my dad?â
Her dad was the island psychiatrist and director of the Drug and Alcohol Rehab Clinic of Mainland Hospital. Because some of his clientele came from police arrests, he had a good relationship with the cops around here. He had enough pull with Cecilly that she didnât usually imbibe like other kids. That explained her presence here at the police station. Everyone who had been partying had steered clear of me once the cops showed up and started asking questions.
âNo . . .â I rubbed my eyes hard, not that they itched. I figured the bottom line: The police didnât want me on the beach if a body suddenly bobbed up in the surf. They might let me stay there if my parents were there, too, but the flight from L.A. wouldnât get them here until at least six a.m. I looked at my watch. 11:36. I had been here for an hour, but it felt like three. âI just wish they would let me go to someoneâs house to wait for my folks.â
âYou want to come to my house?â Cecilly straightened. âIâll go call my dad. Heâs got his cell phone on the beach. Heâll send my momââ
âCaptain Lutz told me I couldnât leave.â I shrugged. âThey took my cell phone, in case Casey is holed up somewhere and tries to call.â
âA body canât go anywhere without its cell phone . . .,â Cecilly droned to be funny, and none of us laughed.
âI already told him everything I saw. Which wasnât a lot. I told them everything I heard, smelled, thought, felt, did. I donât know why I have to stay.â
âYouâre a minor. They donât want you going off by yourself,â True muttered, bouncing a loose fist off my knee. âBelieve me, they donât suspect you of anything.â
That thought hadnât even occurred to me. But having heard True say it, I stiffened, and my mind started spitting out recent memories. Casey and I had got into a screaming match the night before. She had just started going out with another lifeguard, Mark Stern, and sheâd wanted to take him up to her bedroom to âwatch TV.â I was just being a big brother. Stern is a year older than me, with three years in on the beach patrol compared to my two. Not a guy youâd let up in your fifteen-year-old sisterâs bedroom to âwatch TV,â not without a loud fight. Had the neighbors heard my yelling? Or Caseyâs shrill comebacks? Did Stern tell the cops that I had said, âTouch my sister, and youâre both deadâ? Was he down on the beach right now, making me out to be some maniac?
Cecillyâs laughter sliced through my thoughts, and I searched her sympathetic eyes. âKurt, there were twenty people up there, all of whom would say you were nowhere near Casey, nowhere near that . . . disgusting little pistol, either. Chill down. I donât even think theyâll drug-test you. Too much stress on one family if youââ
âThey can drug-test me!â I said defensively. âI have not . . . done anything wrong!â
I knew that last line was less than true, and probably the only reason I was stone-cold sober was that the parents were away, and something kept eating at me to act like an adult. As much as possible. It had seemed like a sacrifice to the party gods not to have my usual two and a half beers, which is all you can have if youâre a puker. At seventeen youâre too old to be puking in bushes after a six-pack. Time to grow up. And I had just never smoked pot. Call me boring. Casey had, though, and I tried to remember if sheâd smoked any tonight. It seemed to me the last time I looked at her, maybe five minutes before the little pistol crack, I had seen her with something lit, but I thought it was her biweekly cigarette-at-a-party.
I had been on the other side of the pier, talking to, of all people, Billy Nast, science gleep extraordinaire. I still hadnât figured out who had brought him to this party. But Iâd latched on to his talk about just having finished a month at Purdue, and these summer engineering courses heâd actually taken there. Girls kept coming up and doing that thing with their knees, trying to collapse my knees from behindâtheir way of telling me I was acting very strange. But I hadnât wanted to leave Nast alone in a crowd that was drinking and could potentially get, um, pointed.
And besides, Iâd been having secret qualms about the Naval Academy. My getting accepted there had made me famous around Mystic. Between my parents, relatives, teachers, coaches, and the newspapers, I didnât feel I could think aloud to anyone about my qualmsâand I wasnât even sure why I would pick such a time to start dwelling on nauseating concepts such as âkilling people for a living.â All Iâd thought about for two years before the acceptance letter arrived was getting in. So I felt a little whacked out, like, wondering if I was schizoid, or if there is a devil that likes to embarrass you. Anyway, there was Billy Nast, talking enthusiastically about becoming an astronaut, giving alternatives in case I totally needed one.
Iâd been hypnotized, not only by his enthusiasm for taking college classes during the summer but also with the thought that he really wasnât all that gleepy. I sat there listening to him, wondering, What is a gleep, anyway? What does that mean?
That was all before Casey fell. Afterward I wanted to throttle him. If Iâd been doing the same old fooling around with the same old friends, maybe I could have been closer to Casey. Maybe I could have grabbed her arm. Maybe I would have seen whether this blood-rushing-through-her-fingers thing was truth or moonlight. I knew it was stupid to blame Billy Nast, and I tried not to. But the bottom line was, I hadnât been close at all, hadnât even heard Casey hit the water in the long, wily, unforgettable silence before people started screaming.
âWhy do people party?â I asked Cecilly and True. I wanted to blame someone, though it was too soon to blame individuals, so society in general seemed appropriate.
They said nothing. Some questions arenât worth trying to answer.
âWeâll straighten the cops out.â Cecilly rubbed my back some more, though her normally dead-on gaze dropped a little. âHuh, True?â
âYeah. Donât worry about anything, Kurt.â
Their lowered eyes spoke volumes, yet no way was I ready to start filling in the void. Missing from it was the ever-important question: What did you guys see? Their tones implied they had seen a lot. Their tones implied what theyâd seen was not goodâif an accident, a stupid one; a gun had been fired, and someone ought to go to jail for attempted manslaughter, at least. Their tones said they were prepared to tell the truth to the cops.
I appreciated that, as well as the fact that they werenât sitting here spewing the details into my face yet. You would think that if your sister fell off a pier after a gun had been fired, you would want every little morsel of information, and as quickly as possible. But there are times you really feel like you need the police or some adult company to give you some adult wisdom, or you might wind up going crazy.
I felt a slight breeze run over me and looked down the long corridor. The double doors were not visible from way back here where Captain Lutz had sat me down, but I knew they had opened. I walked out there, and True and Cecilly followed. Lutz came toward us with sand all over his shoes. The cuffs of his uniform trousers were wet and sandy, also.
âNothing yet. Hang steady.â He put his hands on his hips and watched me breathlessly. I searched his eyes for some sort of judgment, some I-told-you-so glare, because, in school and out, he was always blowing smoke about kids on the pier. But he looked distracted by other things, including Cecilly and True being on either side of me. His eyes bounced back and forth.
âYou girls want to give a statement?â
âYes.â
âYes.â
There was nervousness in both voices, as if they sensed they were breaking some code of ethics. I didnât exactly fault all the kids who ran. I was too numb to fault anyone yet, but I was slightly agog that even a pistol crack and someone falling wouldnât stop some of those people from their usual flight syndrome when the cops show up. I would think of that later. For now I was glad for these two.
Lutz gestured them to come with him to his office, a little farther down the hall, and he sounded grateful, if tense. âGreat. Thereâs two I wonât have to round up. Kurt, wait out here. You girls can start filling out the statement form, and then Iâll see you one at a time.â
I watched him shut the door to the back offices, which were just cubicles in a big room. It wasnât big as police stations go.
Mystic, like most barrier islands, is pencil shaped and hugs the coast. Itâs seven miles long, but only the three-mile middle section is wide enough to be inhabitable. Even there, every ten years or so, a northeast storm at full moon will send the ocean to meet the bay in the middle of Central Avenue. Water will run like a river up Bay Drive and Ocean Drive, which is why most of the island houses are built with nothing but concrete garages and a rec room on the first floor. Nearly every house has a waterline stain around the outside of the garage.
Total inhabitants: three thousand in the winter, eighteen thousand in th...