Текст книги "Shelter"

Автор книги: Harlan Coben

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

chapter 16

UNCLE MYRON WASN’T HOME.

That was fine with me. I looked at my hands. They were still shaking. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t tell him—what would I say? See, I sneaked into this go-go bar with a fake ID, and then, well, the bouncer and some guy named Buddy Ray assaulted me. . . . Right, sure. Who’d buy that? I didn’t have a mark on me. Buddy Ray and the big bouncer would probably both swear that they threw me out when they realized that my ID was fake.

No, that wasn’t the answer.

Candy’s words kept echoing in my head. There’s nothing you can do for Ashley. She’s gone, just like the others.

I had no idea what she meant by that. Or by the fact that Antoine LeMaire “got her months ago. The White Death.” Ashley had been in school. She had smiled and laughed and been so wonderfully shy and—and hadn’t Candy said that Ashley was her only friend?

What was going on?

One thing was clear. Ashley had secrets. Candy did indeed know her. Worse—a lot worse—so did Buddy Ray.

So now what?

I didn’t know. What had I really learned here? Not much. The answer, it seemed, still came down to Antoine LeMaire. I had to find him. But that raised a few questions. Most obvious: How? I didn’t think it best to go back to the Plan B. Maybe I could hang around and run some kind of surveillance, but really, was that going to work? And that led to my second question: When I find Antoine—the White Death?—then what do I do?

I started boiling water for pasta, my mind still trying to take it all in. Something played at the edges—something I couldn’t quite see yet. But it was there. I sat by myself at the kitchen table. My stomach still hurt from that punch. It would be sore tomorrow.

That niggling in the back of my brain picked up steam. I got the laptop and booted it up. I wanted to take another look at my buddy Antoine LeMaire at Ashley’s locker. I watched the tape. Antoine opens the locker, looks inside, sees it’s empty, gets upset. I watched the tape again. Then I realized what was bothering me.

The locker was already empty.

Antoine had hoped to find something inside the locker—but whatever it was, it was already gone. That probably meant that Ashley herself had cleared it out. I wondered when. And more than that, I wondered if I could see that moment, if I could see exactly when she had last been in the school. If she had cleared out her locker, it goes to figure that she’d planned to run—that she hadn’t met up with foul play or the White Death or whatever other horrible thing could happen to a girl who had some connection to the Plan B Go-Go Lounge.

It stood to reason that Ashley had emptied out the locker and was on the run.

Or did it?

I called Spoon. He picked up on the first ring. I expected him to open up with one of his crazy non sequiturs. But he surprised me.

“Did you find Antoine?” Spoon asked.

“What?”

“You must think Ema and I are morons. A basketball game? Please.”

I had to smile at that. “I didn’t find him.”

“So what happened?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. In the meantime I have a favor.” I told him what I wanted—my theory on Ashley’s last visit to the locker being important.

“Hmm,” Spoon said, “we don’t know when Ashley was last at the locker.”

“No.”

“And it could have been during the school day.”

“Could have been.”

He considered that. “I guess we could hit speed reverse and see if we can come up with something. Assuming I can get into the security files again.”

“Do you mind?”

“I’m all about the danger.”

Spoon hung up. Three minutes later, Ema called me. “Have you eaten yet?” she asked me.

“I’m boiling water now.”

“Do you know Baumgart’s?”

I did. It was Uncle Myron’s favorite restaurant. “I do.”

“Meet me there.”

There was something funny in her voice, something I hadn’t heard before. “I didn’t find Antoine.”

“Spoon told me. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

“What’s up?”

“I did some research on that tombstone.”

“And?”

“And something is really wrong here, Mickey.”

Half a century ago, Baumgart’s was a Jewish deli and old-fashioned soda fountain—the kind of place where Dad might order a pastrami on rye while the kids sat at the Formica counter and twirled on stools while waiting for a root beer float. Sometime in the 1980s, a gourmet Chinese chef bought the place. Rather than alienate his base, he simply added to it. He kept all the Jewish deli and soda fountain touches and then added nouvelle Chinese to the menu. It made for an intriguing hybrid. Since then, three more Baumgart’s had opened up in various New Jersey locales.

Ema sat in a corner booth nursing a chocolate milk shake. I sat with her and ordered one too. The waitress asked whether we wanted something to eat. We both nodded. Ema ordered the peanut noodles, Myron’s favorite, and something called sizzle duck crepe. I went with Kung Pao chicken.

“So,” she said, “what happened when you went after Antoine LeMaire?”

“Why don’t you go first?”

She played with the straw in her milk shake. “I still need time to wrap my head around this.” Ema took a sip and leaned back. “By the way, do me a favor: if you want to play overprotective daddy with me, just say so.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Don’t lie.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Good,” Ema said. “So what happened with Antoine?”

I told her about my visit to the Plan B Go-Go Lounge. The waitress came and brought our food, but neither one of us noticed. When I finished, Ema said, “I won’t even bother with the ‘whoa.’ This is beyond whoa. It’s like whoa on steroids. It’s like whoa raised to the tenth power.”

The smell of Kung Pao chicken rose up from the plate and suddenly I realized that I was starving. I grabbed my fork and started digging in.

“So,” Ema said, “you think, what, your prim and proper Ashley danced in a go-go bar?”

I shrugged mid-bite. “So what did you learn about that tombstone?”

Her face lost a little color. “It’s about Bat Lady.”

I waited. She hesitated.

“Ema?”

“Yes?”

“When Chief Taylor was dragging me away, I saw Bat Lady in the window. She was trying to tell me something.”

Ema’s eyes narrowed.

“I can’t swear to it,” I said, “but I think she was telling me to save Ashley. I know that makes no sense. But whatever it is, whatever you’ve learned, I need to hear it.”

She nodded. “We already know about that Jefferies quote, right?”

“Right.”

“So I searched the other stuff. That line about a childhood lost for children.”

“And?”

“I found nothing on that exact quote, but I did find this website on . . .” She stopped, shook her head as if she couldn’t believe that she was about to go on. “On the Holocaust.”

I stopped with my fork half in the air. “As in Nazis and World War Two?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was a reference to some of the Jewish children who joined the underground resistance in Poland. See, some of the kids who escaped the death camps lived in the forest. They fought the Nazis in secret. Kids. They would also smuggle goods into the Lodz ghetto, for example. Sometimes, when they could, they even rescued kids heading toward Auschwitz, the Nazis’ biggest and most notorious concentration camp.”

I just sat there and waited. Ema picked up her milk shake and took a deep long sip. “I still don’t understand,” I said. “What does this have to do with the tombstone in Bat Lady’s garden?”

“You’ve heard of Anne Frank, right?”

I had, of course. I had not only read The Diary of Anne Frank, but when I was twelve, my parents took me to the house in Amsterdam where she hid from the Nazis. The two parts I remember best: One, the moveable bookcase that hid the stairs up to the secret attic where the Frank family stayed. Two, the Anne Frank quote you see as you leave this somber memorial: “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.”

“Of course, I’ve heard of her,” I said.

“There was another girl. A thirteen-year-old Polish girl named Lizzy Sobek who escaped from Auschwitz and worked for the resistance.”

The name rang a bell. “I remember reading something about her.”

“Me too. We talked a little about her in eighth-grade history. Lizzy Sobek’s family was slaughtered in Auschwitz, but somehow she escaped. She is credited with saving hundreds of lives. In one documented case, Lizzy ran a February raid that slowed down a cargo train loaded with Jews heading for the death camps. More than fifty people escaped into the snowy woods—almost all under the age of fifteen. And some of those she saved claim”—Ema stopped, took a deep breath—“that when they escaped, they saw butterflies.”

I swallowed. “Butterflies?”

She nodded. “In February. In Poland. Butterflies. Hundreds of them leading them to safety.”

I just sat there.

“Lizzy Sobek became known as the Butterfly.”

I may have been shaking my head, but I can’t swear to it. I knew that we were both thinking the same thing. Butterfly—like on those T-shirts in the old photograph, at my father’s gravesite, on the tombstone in Bat Lady’s backyard. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Lizzy Sobek,” I said—and suddenly my blood went cold again. “Lizzy could be short for Elizabeth.”

“It was,” Ema said.

Elizabeth Sobek. E.S. The initials on that tombstone. Another coincidence? I asked the obvious question: “What became of Lizzy Sobek?”

“That’s the thing,” Ema said. “No one really knows. The vast majority of scholars believe that she was captured during a raid to free a group of children starving to death near Lodz. They believe that she and other resistance fighters were shot and buried in a mass grave, probably in 1944. But there has never been any proof.”

“A childhood lost for children,” I said. “That phrase makes more sense now.”

Ema nodded. “There’s more.”

I waited. The restaurant was bustling. People coming and going, enjoying their food, laughing or texting or whatever it is people do at restaurants. But for us, they were gone now. The room was just this booth—just Ema and me and the ghost of some brave, long-dead girl named Lizzy Sobek.

“I did all kinds of searches on those numbers—the ones on the bottom of the tombstone and on that license plate,” Ema said. “The A30432. But I came up with nothing.”

I sat very still. If she had ended up with nothing, there wouldn’t be tears in her eyes.

“So I read more about Lizzy Sobek,” Ema said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a piece of paper. “I found one of those Q and A sites on her life.” She unfolded the paper and slid it across the table.

I took it from her. Ema looked off. I turned my attention to the paper:

Question 8: What was Lizzy Sobek’s concentration camp tattoo ID number?

It remains unknown. Most people mistakenly believe that every person in a Nazi concentration camp was tattooed, but in truth, the Auschwitz concentration camp complex (including Auschwitz 1, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Monowitz) was the only location in which prisoners were systematically tattooed during the Holocaust. On September 12, 1942, Lizzy, along with her father, Samuel, her mother, Esther, and her brother, Emmanuel, boarded a transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The transport arrived in Auschwitz on September 13, 1942, with 1,121 Jews on board. Men and women were separated. The women selected from this transport, including Lizzy and Esther, were marked with tattoos between the numbers A-30380 and A-30615. Records indicating their exact numbers have not been preserved, so to this day, the number Lizzy Sobek bore on her forearm remains a mystery.

I looked up at Ema and now I had tears in my eyes too. “Have we solved this particular mystery?”

“We may have.”

“Which leads to another.”

Ema nodded. “How would Bat Lady know the exact same number?”

“And why would she have a tombstone for her in her backyard?”

“Unless . . .”

Ema stopped. We both knew what she was thinking, but I don’t think either of us was ready to say it out loud. Maybe we had solved a mystery deeper than a tattoo number. Maybe, after all these years, we had solved the mystery of what really happened to Lizzy Sobek.

chapter 17

THE NEXT MORNING, I called my mother at the Coddington Institute. The operator said, “Please hold.”

There were two rings and then the phone was picked up. “Mickey?”

It wasn’t my mother. It was the rehab’s director, Christine Shippee. “I want to talk to my mother.”

“And I want to take a shower with Brad Pitt,” she said. “Sorry, I told you, no contact.”

“You can’t just cut her off from me.”

“Uh, yeah, Mickey, I can. Speaking of which, we need to talk. Do you know what an enabler is?”

Again with that question. “I didn’t give her the drugs.”

“No, but you’re being a candy ass about this. You need to be tougher on her.”

“You don’t know what she’s been through.”

“Sure I do,” she said as though stifling a yawn. “Her husband died. Her only son is growing up. She has no prospects. She is scared and lonely and depressed. What, you think your mother’s the only one in here with a sob story?”

“Your sympathy,” I said, “is overwhelming. No wonder the patients love you.”

“I was one of them, Mickey. A manipulative addict. I know how it works. Come by next week and we’ll talk more. In the meantime, get to school.”

She hung up.

At school, most of the morning was taken up with an assembly program. I don’t really remember much of what was being said. Two local politicians tried to “relate” to us, which made for serious condescension and boredom. I spent the time glancing around the room and locking eyes with Rachel.

When lunchtime came, I sat at what was fast becoming our usual table with Ema. Spoon was nowhere to be found. Ema and I tried, for once, to talk about the new movie releases or what music we liked or what TV shows were our favorites—but we kept steering back to the Holocaust and a heroic girl named Lizzy Sobek.

At one point I looked across the room and spotted Troy and Buck. Not surprisingly they smirked at me. Troy had a cocky I-know-something-you-don’t-know look on his face and then he started flapping his arms like wings and making an eek-eek noise.

“A bat,” Ema finally said.

“As in Bat Lady.”

“Man, he’s clever.”

I guessed that his father had told him about my arrest near Bat Lady’s house and this was his subtle way of communicating this to us. I responded by pantomiming a yawn. Troy glared when I did that, and then he used his finger to cut across his neck, the international dumbwad sign for, yup, “You’re a dead man.”

Not worth it. I turned away.

“Do you know where Spoon is?” I asked Ema.

I had caught her mid-chew, so she gestured behind her. Spoon was hurrying over to the table—sprinting really—with an open laptop in his arms. Ms. Owens blocked his path and said, “Walk, don’t run.”

Spoon nodded and apologized. When he reached us, he was wide-eyed and out of breath. “Shocking,” Spoon said.

“What?”

Spoon put the laptop on the table. “Oh boy, you are so going to want to see this.”

“What is it?” I asked.

He frowned. “Didn’t you ask me to check the surveillance video of Ashley’s locker?”

“Right.”

“Well, I’ve been going through it since last night. You are not going to believe what I found.”

The bell rang. Everyone started for the door, except for the three of us. Spoon sat down in front of the laptop. I pushed my chair over so I was on his immediate right. Ema did likewise so she was on his left.

“Okay,” he started, “so I was doing what you asked—checking the video, right? I started with that hooligan breaking into the locker, and then I traveled back from there until I found the last time that Ashley’s locker was open.”

He stopped, pushed up his glasses.

“And?” I said.

“Watch.”

Spoon was about to hit the computer key when Ms. Owens cleared her throat in dramatic fashion.

“The bell rang,” she said in a clipped voice.

“We’ll be just a minute,” I said.

Ms. Owens didn’t like that response. “We don’t operate on your time, Mr. Bolitar. The bell has sounded. That means you leave the room. You aren’t special.”

Was she kidding me?

I tried an old standard: “It’s schoolwork.”

“I don’t care if it is a cure for cancer,” Ms. Owens said—and on that, I believed her. She slammed the laptop closed, making Spoon gasp out loud. “You had all lunch period to discuss this matter. Move along now or you’ll all be in detention.”

“You assaulted my laptop,” Spoon said.

“Excuse me?”

“You assaulted my battery or whatever they call it.”

“Are you challenging my authority, young man?”

Spoon opened his mouth to say more, so I kicked him just hard enough to get him to close it again. I stood, pulling Spoon along with me. The three of us left the cafeteria. In the corridor we quickly discussed what classes we had next. I had English. Spoon had study hall. Ema had “PE, which I’m going to cut anyway.”

Spoon rushed us over to a janitor’s closet on the lower level. We huddled around the laptop again. Spoon hit the start key and said, “Watch.”

And there it was.

Ashley’s locker. Spoon had it cued up right where it needed to be—right as the locker was being unlocked. We all watched in silence while the locker was cleaned out, all the possessions dumped into a backpack.

My jaw dropped open.

“I knew it!” Ema said. “I warned you, didn’t I?”

It wasn’t Ashley clearing out the locker. It wasn’t Antoine or Buddy Ray or his big bouncer Derrick. The person who opened up the locker with the combination and cleaned it out was none other than Rachel Caldwell.

First, there was confusion, but that almost immediately gave way to anger.

I was furious. I was beyond furious. I not only felt betrayed, but I felt like the dumbest sort of sap. We get mad at those who hurt or deceive us—we get even madder when they make us feel like fools.

Right now I felt like a great big sucker.

Rachel Caldwell had batted her big blue eyes at me, and I fell for it.

Grab your thesaurus, boys and girls. Sap. Loser. Sucker. Fool. Me!

I played back Rachel’s every smile, every coy look, every little laugh.

Phony. All so phony. How had I fallen for her act?

Ema could not have looked more pleased. “I told you that we couldn’t trust her.”

I said nothing.

Spoon pushed his glasses up. “Whatever you saw on this video doesn’t change the main fact.”

“What fact is that?” Ema asked.

“That Rachel Caldwell is a first-class, teeth-melting, jawdropping, knee-knocking hottie.”

Ema rolled her eyes.

The late bell rang. It was time to move. We broke up, Spoon and I going to our respective classes, Ema going . . . wherever it was she was going. I had Mr. Lampf for English. I sat in the back and opened up my notebook, but I can’t tell you anything else about the class. I was still consumed by fury. Finally, after some time had passed, I allowed the obvious, more important question to break through my cloud of anger: What could Rachel Caldwell possibly have to do with all this?

I trotted out about a million different scenarios, but none of them made any sense. Logic wasn’t working for me, so I let the rage back in. The rage was good right now. The rage reminded me that Rachel Caldwell was in this very building at this very moment. The rage reminded me that I could confront her and then I would find it all out.

When the bell rang, I hurried toward the door. I knew that Rachel had math with Mrs. Cannon right now. I knew that because, well, I just did. Mrs. Cannon’s class was only halfway down this same corridor. I often caught glimpses of her in the hallway between this class and the next. Sue me, I looked, okay?

I headed into the corridor and turned right.

There she was. Rachel was turning away from me, her hair seeming to move in perfect slow motion, like in a shampoo ad. I rushed after her, swimming through the throngs of fellow students. She was about to turn the corner when I reached her. I put my hand on her shoulder, maybe a little too roughly. She turned, startled, but when she saw it was me, her face broke into a gorgeous, gut-punching smile.

“Hey, Mickey!” she said as if she couldn’t be happier to see me.

Someone should give this girl an Oscar.

“Where’s Ashley?”

The smile fell off Rachel’s face like an anvil. She tried to get it back, but now it only stayed on in flickers. “What do you mean?”

“You opened her locker, and you took everything out of it. Why?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Boy, how did I not see through her before? She wasn’t even a convincing liar.

“I saw you,” I said.

“That’s impossible.”

“On the surveillance camera. I saw you open Ashley’s locker and clear it out.”

Her eyes shot to the right, then to the left. “I have to go to class.”

Rachel started away from me. Working more on instinct than reason, I reached out and grabbed her arm, holding her in place.

“Why did you lie to me?”

“Let go of me.”

“Where’s Ashley?”

“Mickey, you’re hurting me!”

I let go then. She pulled her arm back and rubbed where I’d grabbed near the elbow. People walked past us, whispering.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her.

“I have to get to class.”

She started to walk away.

“I’m not going to let this go, Rachel.”

She stopped and looked at me again. “I can explain.”

“I’m listening.”

“Meet me after school. Alone. No Ema or Spoon. I’ll tell you everything.”

And then she was off again.