The Sight Read online

  “Don’t you remember?” Shay looks at Diego. “I’m the one who recommended that Rocky hire Zed in the first place.”

  We must have interrupted Detective Fusilli’s late dinner, because there’s a plastic bowl half-filled with salad on his desk. I see slivered chicken, I see noodles, I see red pepper, I see green beans. I thought police detectives were supposed to live on junk food.

  He looks up and meets Shay’s eyes. I feel the surge that he feels. I could have lived without knowing that Detective Joe Fusilli thinks that, if this were a different time and a different place, and he wasn’t in charge of a missing-child case, he would like to experience what it would be like to really kiss Shay Kenzie.

  You would never know it by his face, or his voice, or the way he looks at Shay, but the feeling is so strong I can pick it up like a megawatt radio station on a clear night. I also pick up that although he is glad to see Shay again, he is not particularly happy to see me.

  We sit. Shay very calmly hands him the copy of the e-mail I found at Zed’s shack, explaining that I, well, climbed inside.

  “I can’t take this,” he says. “If it’s evidence, it will be thrown out. I can’t even read it,” he says, reading it. He rubs his forehead.

  “Did you know that Emily had a relationship with Zed Allen?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “She never mentioned him. But thinking back, I remember something she said…”

  “What?” Obviously, Detective Pasta is not one of those listeners who doesn’t interrupt with questions.

  “That she liked the sightseeing at her father’s studio,” I say. “I didn’t pick it up at the time. I thought she was talking about boats. You can see boats from the windows,” I add lamely. “But I think she was talking about Zed.”

  He taps the paper against the desk.

  “He might still have the original on his computer,” I say.

  “I realize that,” he says. “There’s this thing I need called probable cause. Is there anything else you can give me to go on?” He speaks gently now. “I know it’s not easy, Gracie. But just now, you told me something that’s important, something you remembered and saw in a different light. Can you think of anything else like that?”

  At first, I’m impatient with this question. I don’t see how I can reinterpret something that didn’t stick in my mind. I can’t just pluck a sentence from my memory that Emily has said and shout, “That’s it!”

  But suddenly, I do remember something.

  “The library,” I blurt out. “Emily wanted to go to the library that day, the day she disappeared.”

  “Yes?” Detective Fusilli said.

  “Emily wasn’t a reader,” I say.

  “And? You think she was meeting someone?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But the library has computers. If she wanted to send a message that she didn’t want traced, she could go there.”

  Joe Fusilli nods slowly. I can see two things—frustration that he didn’t think of this already, and relief that he has something to go on now.

  I’ve given him a lead.

  FOURTEEN

  The police search Zed’s computer. It’s been wiped. There’s no trace of e-mails or websites visited, not even buried in the hard drive. When they search the library computers, they find the same thing on two of them.

  They want to talk to him, but Zed disappears.

  The days pass, and they can’t find him. Shay tells me all this after she gets home from work. Her head is in the refrigerator while she roots around for something to cook for dinner. I can see that she can’t really focus on food, and for Shay, that’s saying something. She takes out a lemon, a head of cabbage, and a cantaloupe.

  She stares at them on the counter.

  “There’s always pizza,” I say.

  “I need to cook. Want to go to the grocery store?” she says.

  I know she doesn’t want to leave me alone. Diego didn’t go to work today. He hung around the house, which he never does. We weeded the garden together, just because I couldn’t stand to see him out there doing it by himself. I felt too guilty. We watched some lame afternoon TV. Diego chatted on the computer while I stared out the window and wished I’d have another vision that would clear everything up, even if I was too scared to try. Shay got home and released Diego from Gracie duty. He scooted out to see Marigold.

  She tells me that they are checking out all the websites visited from the library on the afternoon Emily left, but so far it didn’t sound like they’d found anything. The librarian remembered seeing her, but she doesn’t remember if it was that day. If she had, she would have gone to the police already.

  Another dead end. Another day.

  But it’s just us for dinner, and it will feel good to take a drive.

  Shay grabs the keys, and I follow. We roll down all the windows and the blast of air is warm and smells like summer. I like the early evenings here best, when the sun is liquid and pours over the fields. The sky turns this incredible color, a blue so deep that it seems to vibrate, and the shadows of the pines are purple.

  “The blue hour,” Shay says. She smiles, loving it, too.

  We drive to Greystone Harbor, where the good grocery store is. I trail along behind Shay as she buys salmon and greens for a salad. She picks up a tub of freshly baked cookies from the local bakery. When I used to go grocery shopping with Mom, she tossed things into the cart quickly, consulting her list. Shay never makes a list. She inhales, she peers, she talks to the fish man and the wine lady. I’m mildly bored, but the music is catchy. I hum along to “Secret Agent Man.”

  He’s giving you a number, and taking away your name…

  …taking away your name…

  I go away and come back. I don’t know how else to describe it. Something gray drops over me, like fuzz on a TV screen, and I hear Emily’s voice in my head, and she says, “He took away our names,” and when I’m there next, I’m still standing next to the freezer section. My fingertips are against the glass. But that’s not why I’m cold.

  Fear again. I feel it. Multiplied.

  Emily isn’t the only one. There are others there with her.

  Shay is wheeling the cart toward the cashier. I hurry toward her. I’m tired of visions. I’m tired of fear. I’m afraid of being here, in this grocery store, where visions can come as you’re staring at packages of frozen French bread pizza.

  I want to go home.

  Shay pays for the groceries. She came for just a couple of things, but the cart is full. A man walks over to her with a smile and starts to talk to her. I slow down.

  I walk up to them. Shay absentmindedly puts her hand on my shoulder as the man finishes his sentence, something about a memo at work that everyone got that day, and Roger fouling things up again.

  Shay introduces me to the co-worker, whose name I immediately forget. I need to be outside. I want to be home like a two-year-old.

  “I’ll load everything in the car,” I say.

  “Be right behind you,” Shay says, handing me the keys. I can tell now that she really doesn’t want to discuss Roger or the memo, but she’s stuck.

  I push the cart out into the parking lot. The lights are on now, and the blue has turned inky. The lot is almost empty now. I put the grocery bags in the trunk.

  I hear the footsteps before I see anything, even a shadow. Someone is running, a whispery sound on the asphalt. I’m just turning to see, trying to get out of the way of the trunk lid, when something slams into my body. I start to fall, but I feel hands grab me.

  I can’t see behind me, but I feel his breath. He is very strong. The force of the slam carries us both over the side of the car and, before I know what is happening, he pulls me down the slope of the grass. We roll together, over the rocks and the roots, grunting, me trying to scream. But the breath has been knocked out of me, and we spill out together underneath the dark, dark trees.

  No light overhead, no moon.

  And yet I can see him.

  I kno
w him, his face over mine, his body pinning me down.

  Zed.

  FIFTEEN

  "Just…don’t…scream,” he says. He puts his hand over my mouth.

  I nod jerkily, quickly.

  “What do they know?” he asks, his voice a hurtling ball of fury, fear. “What did you tell them?”

  I think the word who, but I can’t say it. My throat has closed from fear.

  “The police!” he yells into my face. “I know you were in my place. Don’t lie to me!”

  The fear inside me has drained me of everything I have—bones, muscles, will. His eyes are chips of moon. I am falling into the earth underneath me.

  I hear the noise of something falling down the slope, rocks sliding, someone breathing. Zed whips his head around, straining in the darkness.

  She slams into him headfirst, using her body to push him off me. I hear the thud of their bodies connecting.

  “Get off her!” Shay shouts, and she pummels him until he rolls away. She kneels next to me and scoops me up and holds me. Her eyes are wide and frightened. “Gracie?”

  I nod to show I’m okay. She turns, holding me against her and faces off against Zed. But he doesn’t give her time to say or do anything. He’s scrambling up the hill on all fours, grabbing chunks of dirt and rocks and sliding down, then gaining a few inches. Finally, he finds his feet and scoots the rest of the way, over the lip of the hill, and we lose sight of him. Then I realize that the high-pitched noise I’ve been hearing hasn’t been my breathing. Sirens.

  Shay is hugging me, rocking me. In the past, when she hugged me, I was repulsed by her softness. This time, all I feel is muscle. I lean into it, glad of it.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she is saying. “I never should have let you go into the parking lot like that. Alone.”

  I find my voice at last. “It’s okay,” I croak.

  “I’m sorry,” she keeps saying, crying into my hair.

  We hear the sounds above in the parking lot but can’t see it. The squeal of tires. Someone yelling.

  “Nice and easy!” someone shouts.

  Shay looks up. “They got him,” she whispers.

  My legs are shaking badly, but Shay helps me, and we get up the hill and back to the parking lot. Zed is being frisked, his legs out, his hands on the police car. Under the streetlights and next to the uniformed cops, he just looks like a skinny kid in a torn T-shirt and dirty jeans.

  Joe Fusilli is there, in another car. He sees us and hurries toward us. “What are you doing here?” he bellows.

  Shay’s worry for me now moves into a channel she can groove on—irritation at Detective Pasta. She waves at the grocery store. “Maybe, like, buying food? Until Zed grabbed Gracie and tried to kidnap her! Where were you?”

  Joe’s gaze makes that abrupt turn into concentration, and he focuses on me. “What happened?”

  I explain how I was putting the groceries in the car, and Zed tackled me. Then Shay says that she came out and saw the trunk open and got scared, and started to look around. She saw me down in the grove of trees and came after Zed.

  “We had a report he was down in Greystone Harbor,” Joe Fusilli says. “We were cruising and just happened to spot him. Can you come down to the station? Now we have him for attempted kidnapping and assault, too. Come on, I’ll drive.”

  “I have my car—”

  “I’ll drive,” Detective Fusilli says firmly.

  As we get into his car, we draw closer to Zed. The police are doing that weird thing where they sort of help him into the car so that he won’t bump his head. The gesture always seems tender to me, like what a mother would do.

  I can see his face now. He doesn’t look angry anymore. Just lost. He has a tattoo on his arm of a lily of the valley. The most delicate of flowers, little white bells.

  The image of the tattoo and Zed’s lost face fill me up with a gully wash of guilt that cuts a whole new stream of knowledge inside my brain.

  His mother’s name was Lily. I know that somehow. And I also know something else. The worry that fills him up isn’t about Emily, it’s about everything. It’s about being a loser, it’s about being lost. He is angry, withdrawn. But he didn’t take Emily.

  And there’s another thing. The guy in my vision didn’t have a tattoo.

  I stop in my tracks as Joe Fusilli holds open the car door.

  “He didn’t do it,” I say.

  Joe Fusilli looks at me. I can tell I just got to the end of his last nerve. He sighs a sigh that seems to sum up every sleepless night he’s had since this began. “Just get in the car,” he says.

  SIXTEEN

  "She really tackled him?” Diego asks me the next morning.

  We’re in the kitchen. Diego is emptying the dishwasher. I am wiping down the counters. We occasionally intersect and do a neat dance, Diego’s arms holding a plate over my head, my bumping closed a drawer for him with my hip. Disco chores.

  “Like Boo Radley jumping the bad guy in To Kill a Mockingbird,” I say.

  “Hey, Boo,” Diego says, and we giggle. Well. I giggle. Diego laughs.

  “There’s only one problem,” I say. “Zed didn’t do it.”

  Diego is stooping over the dishwasher. He straightens up. “What?”

  “For one thing, he has a tattoo,” I say. “In the vision, the guy carrying the dead girl doesn’t have one.”

  “You said you didn’t see him clearly.”

  “There were parts I saw clearly,” I explain. “And I know there was no tattoo.”

  “So maybe the vision doesn’t have to do with Emily at all,” Diego says. “You didn’t recognize the girl.”

  “It may not be Emily, but I know it has to do with her,” I say. “I just know it. It doesn’t add up, Diego. Zed says that Emily had a crush on him, and he tolerated it. She was his boss’s daughter. He loaned her a book. She’s the one who made more out of it than there was.”

  “He says.”

  “I think she would have told me if there was something between her and Zed,” I say. I stop wiping the counter, because I just might grind away the Formica. I turn and lean against it. “She might not have told me about a crush, but she would have told me about a thing.”

  “What about his computer?” Diego asks.

  “He says he doesn’t know how it got wiped,” I explain. “And his dad says Zed doesn’t know enough about computers to do it. Even Rocky has his doubts. He told Shay he can’t believe it. Zed swore to him he doesn’t know anything about Emily’s disappearance.”

  “Are you forgetting that he tried to kidnap you?” Diego asks. He shuts the empty dishwasher.

  “I don’t know that.” I’ve thought about what happened all last night. “He tackled me, and we fell down the hill. He wanted to know what the police had on him. He was scared. Angry, too, sure. Because I was the one who led them to him. I’d be plenty pissed, too, if I was innocent.”

  Diego doesn’t try to argue with me. “So what should we do?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I told Detective Fusilli all this, but he didn’t care. The police think they have their guy. It’s just a matter of getting more evidence.”

  “What does Shay think?”

  “She saw him attacking me, or at least that’s certainly the way it looked. The book is closed for her, too.”

  “Well, until we can figure out who did it, Zed is in trouble,” Diego says.

  “Well, Emily is in worse trouble. But finding her will help Zed.”

  “Exactly.” He drums his fingers on the counter. “What about the oven? You saw that in your vision.”

  “Sort of.”

  “What about Rocky?”

  “Emily’s dad?”

  Diego shrugs. “Nasty custody battle. It happens. Emily could be in another country by now, and Rocky is just cooling his heels, waiting to go.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I bet the police have.”

  I shake my head. “This is all so confusing. I�
�m not a detective. But thanks.”

  “For…”

  “Taking me seriously.”

  “No problem,” Diego says. “Spook-doozy.”

  We hear Shay’s footsteps. She walks into the kitchen, holding up a credit card. “Retail therapy,” she says. “Anyone interested?”

  “Mom,” Diego says, “can I remind you of something? I’m a guy.”

  “Not tempting?”

  “Not tempting.”

  “So what will you do today? It’s Saturday.”

  “Guy things.”

  I watch them together. It’s like I zoom backward, out of their space. There is something easy about the way they are together. Diego is seventeen. He has a relationship with Shay that I’ll never have with my mother. I’ll never have a relationship with Mom at seventeen, or nineteen, or twenty-three. We were just starting to have that thing where you’re friends, when it’s not just me looking up to her, but us looking at each other. I’ll never get there. I’ll never have the pleasure of watching us change. I’ll be locked into Mom and me at fifteen.

  Still grinning at Diego, Shay turns to me. “What do you say? Seattle? New clothes? I know all the cool stores in the U district.”

  What would Shay, Woman of Gauze, know about cool stores?

  “Yes,” Shay intones, noting my look of surprise, “I am a woman of fashion and mystery. Come.”

  The heat wave has broken, and the temperature is in the seventies when we hit the streets of Seattle. It’s T-shirt weather, blue-sky weather, and everyone is out and grooving on it, because Satellites (which is what I call Seattle-ites) see most of the winter days through a frizzly, drizzly curtain of gray rain. Then mold starts growing on their sport mocs, and boom, it’s summer.

  I try to be enthusiastic about shopping, but I’ve got things on my mind. I can tell Shay does, too. We flip through racks of clothes but we can’t get up the necessary self-interest to try anything on.

  “This was a bad idea,” Shay says finally.