Текст книги "The 9th Girl"

Автор книги: Tami Hoag

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

18

“Mom, can Alex come over and play with the Wii?”

Liska’s youngest placed the last of the dinner dishes on the counter above the dishwasher and looked up at her with bright, hopeful eyes, the hint of mischief playing at the corners of his mouth.

“Are you done with your homework?”

He nodded enthusiastically, smelling the victory. His gaze darted quickly to the clock on the microwave.

“Did you ask Kyle if he wants to play?” Nikki asked.

R.J. rolled his eyes. “He went upstairs to feel sorry for himself.”

“Maybe he’ll come down later,” she said, knowing R.J. could not have cared less. It was her own futile, wishful thinking. Kyle hadn’t said ten words since they’d gotten home.

Marysue had come to the rescue with spaghetti Bolognese and her usual sunny disposition. She and R.J. had chatted about their days, while Nikki had spent the meal twirling her pasta and watching her eldest stare at his plate.

R.J. shrugged. “Whatever.”

Nikki frowned. “You know, your brother is going through a rough time right now. You could be a little nicer to him.”

“He’s a dork,” R.J. said bluntly. “He’s a dork, and he likes being a dork, and that’s why he doesn’t have any friends who aren’t dorks.”

“He’s your brother,” Nikki said sternly. “And I don’t care if he’s a dork. You stick up for your brother. Family sticks together.”

“He’s the one who shuts his door,” R.J. pointed out, snagging a fresh chocolate chip cookie off the plate on the island. He took a bite. “He doesn’t want to hang out with me.”

“Why would he hang out with someone who calls him a dork?” Nikki countered. “And don’t talk with your mouth full.”

He swallowed and glanced at the clock again. “Can Alex come over?”

Nikki sighed. “Yes, Alex can come over if his mom says it’s okay. And he goes home at ten on the dot. It’s a school night.”

Grinning, R.J. backed toward the hallway. His thank-you came a split second before the doorbell rang, and he bolted.

“And that would be Alex,” Nikki said.

She turned with a sigh toward Marysue. “I hope being with my family won’t make you sterile.”

Marysue smiled kindly, seeming much too wise for twenty-six. “I love your boys. You know that. They’re good boys, Nikki. You’ve got a lot on your plate right now, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve had a lot on my plate for fifteen years. That doesn’t seem to be getting any better. And their lives are only getting more complicated too.”

She went to the coffeemaker, popped a pod in, and hit the button to start the thing hissing and spitting into the lopsided Christmas mug R.J. had made for her—with Marysue’s help—at a local pottery store. She would pour a generous shot of Irish cream liqueur into the coffee and have it with one of the cookies Marysue had made that afternoon.

There was a painful truth: Marysue was a better mother, and she had yet to give birth to anyone.

“I feel like suddenly I don’t know anything about Kyle’s life,” Nikki admitted, and with the admission she recognized a small knot of cold fear in her chest. How had this happened? How could she not know her own child?

“He was my little boy, climbing trees and scraping his knees and building a cardboard dinosaur for the science fair,” she said. “Suddenly, he’s a teenager, and everything about his life is a secret. He had a girlfriend over the summer. I didn’t have any idea! Now he’s getting picked on at school. He’s getting into fights. And I just realized I don’t even know who his friends are anymore, let alone his enemies.”

She poured the Baileys into her coffee and climbed onto a stool at the island. Marysue slid the plate of cookies toward her and took the other seat.

“How did this happen?” Nikki asked. “Have I just not been paying attention? He’s always been such an easy kid, self-sufficient, never in trouble. Did I really just forget about him? I don’t get it.

“I grew up thinking how great it would be when I had my own family,” she said, catching a glimpse of her younger self in her mind’s eye—innocent and full of romantic notions of love and of having a life untainted by her parents’ mistakes and disappointments.

“All the wonderful things we’d do together,” she went on. “All the time I’d spend with my kids—hours and hours of playing games and reading stories and going places and watching the wonder in their little faces as they learned the new things that I’d teach them.”

She saw it all play through her head like a silly dream sequence in some stupid, sappy movie. How incredibly naïve.

“The reality is I spend most of my time trying to earn a living to keep a roof over their heads, to keep clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet,” she said, the weight of that reality pressing down on her shoulders. “I feel lucky when we get to grab a meal together. Our conversations are five minutes here and ten minutes there, usually in the car on the way to some activity I won’t get to see all the way through because I’ll get a callout to a crime scene. We live our lives like hamsters running in wheels.”

She took a sip of her coffee and stared at the mug R.J. had made, her heart aching with love as she took in all the lumps and bumps and imperfections, the childish printing: TO MOM R.J.

“Sometimes I think, what if I had a different profession?” she said. “What if I had some normal kind of a job? But would it be any different? Is it really any different for anyone—for any single mom?

“So . . . what? I should find the perfect husband, right?” she said. “And when am I supposed to do that? Where am I supposed to find him? A fender bender in a parking lot? He bumps his cart into mine at the supermarket? That never happens. My life is not a Lifetime movie or a Harlequin romance. Statistically, I probably have a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting remarried. I don’t even want to get remarried.

“And what are the odds the boys would like anyone I brought home, anyway?” she asked. “Pretty much zip. They’re loyal to their father—even Kyle, who thinks he hates his dad, doesn’t really hate him. He’s disappointed by him. That’s not hate. Once you cross the line to hate, disappointment is irrelevant; it’s a given. If you hate someone, you’re only too happy to have them disappoint you. It just proves your point.

“He wouldn’t bond with another man at this late date, anyway,” she went on. “He’s fifteen. He’s already looking at the light at the end of the tunnel. Three more years and he’s off to college and leading his own life. And that’s it. I had my shot, and it was over in the blink of an eye.”

She sighed, exhausted, and looked at Marysue—young and fresh-faced with her big brown eyes and her rosebud mouth. Just looking at her made Nikki feel old. She forced a wry smile.

“So you’ve got that to look forward to, Marysue,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I think you drink too much caffeine,” Marysue said without hesitation.

Their laughter broke the tension, at least for a moment.

“Well, you’ve probably got that right,” Nikki said. She took another long drink of her coffee anyway, savoring the smoky sweetness of the liqueur laced through it. “Thanks for letting me dump all that on you.”

“It’s okay,” Marysue said with a soft smile.

“I’ve got a victim,” Nikki said quietly. “A girl around Kyle’s age. We don’t know who she is. We haven’t found her family. No one has come looking for her. And I want to be outraged by that. I want to say, how can someone be missing a daughter and not even know she’s gone? Then I look at my own son. I have him right here with me, and I don’t even know who he is.”

A sense of deep, quiet desperation closed around her and squeezed. The air hissed out of her lungs, and she put her face in her hands and pressed her fingers against her closed eyes in an effort to keep the tears at bay.

Marysue Zaytoun put an arm around her shoulders.

•   •   •

KYLE HAD ESCAPED to his room at the first opportunity after supper. His mom had been relentless in trying to dig details out of him about his problems at school and his problems with Aaron Fogelman. That was one of the things that sucked about having a mom who was a police detective. She interrogated people for a living. But he was used to it. He had grown up learning how not to give anything away. Like a counterpuncher in a fight or a jiu-jitsu player rolling with a skillful opponent, his best offense was his defense.

His greatest fear was that his mother would pull the ultra-trump card and call Aaron Fogelman’s parents in an attempt to get to the bottom of things. He couldn’t think of anything worse or more embarrassing. He would rather have taken a beating by Fogelman and his goon friends every day for a month. Of course, that was exactly what would happen if his mother called Fogelman’s mother.

He could only imagine the things his enemies would say about him then, the names they would call him, the rumors they would spread.

He dug his phone out of the pocket of his hoodie and brought up his secret Twitter account.

He had a Facebook page and a Twitter account that were readily accessible on the computer in the family room. But they were basically dummy accounts. His “friends” were the pages of mixed martial arts fighters he followed and bands he liked, not kids from school.

There was no such thing as absolute privacy in this house. The rule was that he and R.J. had to share time on the computer, and Mom had access to anything and everything on it. She policed their pages regularly. R.J. was constantly getting in trouble for friending people he didn’t know and liking pages Mom disapproved of. She never said anything about Kyle’s stuff.

He had set up separate accounts on his phone using an alias. Nobody on Twitter knew @PSIArtGeek was really him. There were a million art geeks at PSI. They all followed one another automatically. The profile photo he used was the PSI mascot, an angry-looking comic owl. The stuff he tweeted was generic—mostly re-tweets of stupid memes and cartoons and art. He used the account mainly to lurk, to see what other kids were talking about. The tweets he followed were full of vicious shit from the likes of Aaron Fogelman and Christina Warner and their minions.

Beneath all the unintelligent commentary about pop culture and what everyone had for dinner, the Twitterverse was a turbulent sea of vicious accusation, unsubstantiated rumor, and outright lies. The false facelessness of it gave people the freedom to strike out in ways they might never have dared in person. Even the meek became assassins on Twitter, drunk on the counterfeit confidence of imagined anonymity.

Fogelman and his toadies were all over it tonight with their usual unimaginative cracks about Kyle being a queer, being a faggot, deserving a beat-down, and promising to give him one. Christina Warner was in the mix too, supporting her lackey’s take on what had gone down in the hall, while at the same time riding Brittany about being seen with him.

@XtinaW: Watch out @lilBritt people will think ur in luv w/psycho stalker boy! Don’t wanna b Mrs Loser

Kyle didn’t care what Christina thought about him. It was the tweet that followed hers that hurt.

@lilBritt: Not me!!! hate u stalker boy. get a boyfriend loser! LOL!

He didn’t want to believe she hated him. He didn’t believe it. She was better than that. At least, she had been BC—before Christina.

Brittany’s family had moved to Minneapolis in the spring, just as school was ending. The Brittany Kyle had met in his English class had been sweet and a little shy. He had signed up for a summer writer’s workshop—even though he sucked at writing—just to get to know her better.

They had become friends with the possibility of, the hint of, something more. At least he had thought so. They had hung out together after the workshop classes, sitting around Lake Calhoun talking about stuff—him and Britt and Gray and a couple of kids who went to other schools. They talked about poetry and art and self-expression and accepting people for who they were.

Kyle didn’t really know Gray. He suspected nobody really knew her. She was intense, deep, wrapped up in internal drama. Acceptance was her thing. Why couldn’t people just accept other people? Why was it everyone thought they had to change to be more like someone else? Why were people so threatened by someone who wanted to live their own life in their own way?

The tattoo had been Gray’s idea, but they had all done it—Brittany too.

But then school had started again, and Brittany found herself drawn into Christina Warner’s orbit.

Kyle saw Christina as an evil queen in a fairy tale and Brittany as the pure, innocent heroine being dragged away by the powerful undertow of Christina’s dark spell. And as Christina pulled her in deeper, Brittany let go of who she had been over the summer.

Kyle wanted her to break free. He supposed that cast him in the role of hero by default. He didn’t really see himself that way. He was no Ultor. He wished he were. He wished he had Ultor’s strength and the powerful energy currents Ultor could send from his hands to battle his enemies. But Ultor was fantasy, and high school was the real world. And maybe the truth was that the real Brittany was the one who called him a loser and told him to get a boyfriend, and the Brittany who got the Chinese symbol of acceptance inked on her body was the fake.

If he was writing that into the story line of his comic book, he would make it so the tattoo burned every time Brittany did something that went against the philosophy behind it.

Agitated by the thought, Kyle went to his small desk and opened his sketchbook, frowning at the ruined drawing of his superhero. All the painstaking time and effort he had put into the three views of Ultor, the deliberate care he had taken to express different levels of strength simply with the lines and shading, all ruined by a pack of juvenile morons who thought degrading other people somehow built them up.

He stared at the drawing, trying to detach from it emotionally, trying to see it as something other than an attack on him. What would his personal hero do in his place? It was hard to imagine the UFC champion fighter Georges St-Pierre being in this situation, but Kyle knew GSP had faced his own bullies as a kid.

He would have tried to find a way to turn the situation against his enemies, Kyle decided. On his website St-Pierre gave the standard advice adults gave to kids, telling them to turn to an adult for help. But Kyle figured the adult GSP would have done what he did when he was fighting in the octagon. He would have found a way to take his enemy’s power and defeat him with it.

That was exactly what he would have done.

Kyle sat down and dug an eraser out of a drawer as the idea took hold of him. He rubbed away, erasing not the ridiculous giant penises that had been added by Fogelman’s idiot buddies but the carefully rendered profiles of Ultor’s face. He beheaded his superhero, then went to work with a pencil, a kind of giddy joy rising in his chest as he worked.

In contrast to the realistic, anatomically perfect bodies of the three Ultors, the new faces he drew were comic caricatures, oversize heads with exaggerated features. Kyle started chuckling as the faces came to life—as he took the power away from his enemies and turned it into something else.

When he was finished, he was no longer looking at three images of Ultor. He was looking at two of Aaron Fogelman’s stooges—Thing One and Thing Two—and Fogelman, grinning like an idiot. The lead idiot at the head of the idiot threesome sex train.

Kyle admired his masterpiece, grinning, then laughing, feeling light and happy for the first time in days.

This was sweet. This was awesome. This was going to make Aaron Fogelman flip his shit.

He grabbed his phone and snapped a picture of the drawing. And before he could really think about what he was doing and what the fallout would be, he posted it to Twitter via @PSIArtGeek

The shit was about to hit the fan.

19

Brittany sat on her bed in her pretty yellow bedroom, her iPad on her lap, her iPod playing on the nightstand, feeling like a fraud and a bitch and someone who didn’t belong in a pretty princess bedroom.

When her family had moved to Minneapolis from Duluth, her mother had thought the transition would be easier if they didn’t change everything about their lives at the same time. Brittany had agreed. She didn’t like change. She hadn’t wanted to move and leave her friends. It did make her feel better to at least have all her familiar things surrounding her in her bedroom.

They had painted the walls the exact same shade of yellow as her old bedroom. She had her same ornate white iron bed with the quilts her grandmother had made. The same white wicker-framed mirror hung over the white painted dresser with the collection of old perfume bottles on top.

It was the frilly room of a sweet little girl. Brittany felt like she didn’t deserve to be there tonight.

Tonight she wanted to rewind the calendar to before the move to Minneapolis. She wanted to go back to Duluth and the kids she had known her whole life. Here she felt like she was swimming with the sharks in deep water.

She didn’t really think she was smart enough or talented enough to be in PSI. She was a good student, but she had to work at it. She liked to write short stories and poetry and songs, but it didn’t come easily to her, and she never thought what she wrote was very good. Socially, she felt like a hick among the city kids. Even though Duluth wasn’t exactly a small town, it was a world away from Minneapolis.

Brittany didn’t like being an outsider. She wanted to fit in. She wanted to blend in. To be yourself, to go your own way, to express yourself like Gray did, sounded exciting and admirable, but Brittany wasn’t brave enough to stand out. She didn’t want to be a rebel. She wanted to be accepted. She wanted to be popular. There was nothing wrong with that.

Gray acted like wanting people to like you was a sign of weakness, but Brittany didn’t see it that way at all—and she didn’t believe Gray really saw it that way either. Gray wanted to be accepted too. Her poetry was all about feeling like an outsider but wanting to belong. It had been Gray’s idea to get the acceptance tattoo.

To want to be a part of the group was a natural thing, Brittany thought. It felt good to belong with other people. It felt . . . safe. She had always been one of the popular kids—not the leader, not the trendsetter, just . . . a belonger, she thought, knowing that wasn’t a real word. It should have been. It expressed what she meant exactly. She just wanted to belong.

That was ironic, she supposed. She wanted to be accepted. She had gotten the tattoo along with Gray and Kyle. She had gotten the tattoo that stood for acceptance so she would be accepted by kids who wanted to stand apart. Now she wanted to be accepted by a group of kids who singled out other kids to be ostracized.

She lived in fear of Christina seeing her tattoo, and she was glad every day that she had put the tattoo on her hip, where she could easily cover it up. She wished she hadn’t gotten it at all. In the first place, getting it had hurt really badly. Then she’d been terrified trying to hide it from her mom. More important, she felt like such a phony and fake wearing a symbol of acceptance. Sometimes she imagined the inked marks burning every time she said something or did something that went against the philosophy behind the tattoo.

She felt that way now after tweeting what she had about Kyle. She felt wrong and bad, and a little sick in her stomach. She didn’t like saying mean things. She felt bad for calling him a loser, and she knew he wasn’t gay—not that it should have mattered to anyone if he was.

Acceptance. She wanted to scratch at the tattoo. She had pledged acceptance of people’s choices, including sexual preference. She knew gay kids. Gray claimed to be bisexual, which kind of made Brittany uncomfortable because it seemed so . . . darkly . . . brave? Fearless? Creepy? She wasn’t sure what word was the right word.

She knew she was the kind of person who was afraid to leave the straightest, most well-lit road of life. It had taken courage for her to befriend a girl like Gray. She didn’t think Gray fully appreciated that. Not that it mattered now. They would probably never be friends again after what had happened at the Rock & Bowl.

And the emotional merry-go-round came back to guilt while Beyoncé sang in the background.

The group of kids she hung out with now used the word gay as the worst kind of insult, and Brittany pretended to go along with them. The girl with the acceptance tattoo. And what had she just tweeted about Kyle? Get a boyfriend.

Christina had told her talking trash about Kyle was the best way to get rid of him. If he wouldn’t leave her alone, then she had to send a message. He wasn’t the kind of guy she needed to be hanging out with—according to Christina. He was weird. He didn’t try to get along with anyone—except other outcasts. He spent all his time reading comic books and drawing his stupid superheroes.

And if he really liked her, Brittany reasoned, he wouldn’t have put her in the position he had that afternoon. He would have left her alone like she asked him to. He was all Mr. Antibully, but what was he doing to her by hanging around when she asked him not to and pressuring her about the people she wanted to be friends with? He was a bully too, in his own way.

It was his own fault Aaron and Christina and practically everyone else didn’t like him, she thought angrily. It wasn’t her fault everyone got on Twitter and Facebook and talked shit about him. He practically invited them to. But even as she thought that, another wave of guilt swept through her. She could see the accusation and disappointment and betrayal on his face as he had glared at her in the hall today.

Nice friends you’ve got, Britt. I can see why you’d rather hang with them.

She felt like she had betrayed him, and then she felt angry with him for making her feel that way.

On the nightstand beside her, her phone made the little ding! that announced a new text message.

Xtina: R U OK?

Brittany ignored it. She didn’t want to interact with anyone—especially not Christina. No more than she wanted to interact with Kyle. She felt like the two of them were fighting over her like she was a rag doll, one pulling her this way, one the other.

Kyle made out like Christina was an evil witch, which wasn’t true. Christina could be a diva, but she could also be kind and generous, and she was fiercely protective of her friends. She had taken it upon herself to help Brittany survive the first brutal weeks of chemistry and helped her get on the yearbook committee. Christina saw Kyle and Gray as the bad influences. They were the ones trying to separate her from her friends and cut her off from things she wanted to do.

Gray and Christina’s relationship was complicated by the fact that Christina’s father was dating Gray’s mom. Gray felt threatened by the relationship. She felt like Christina was the daughter her mother would have liked. She resented Christina, resented the way she looked and the way she dressed. She resented Christina’s popularity.

Brittany found herself caught in the middle between them—and a little bit used by both of them.

Tired of thinking about it, Brittany looked down at her iPad and tried to distract herself, browsing through the pages and apps she checked every night. She didn’t want to think anymore about Kyle Hatcher or Gray or Christina or anything. She touched the icon for an online magazine called TeenCities. She had used this magazine as her guide since moving to the Twin Cities. It was full of fun articles about things to do and places kids her age could go all over the metro area. There were always great articles about fashion and celebrities and the local music scene.

Those were the pages that interested Brittany, especially after the kind of day she’d had. She didn’t have any interest in the more serious news articles. She didn’t want to read about bulimia or cutting or dire warnings about the latest street drugs. She certainly had no interest in reading a column about cyberbullies.

She sometimes read Sonya Porter’s blog about current issues. She thought the writer had a great hip style that was easy and conversational with a wry sense of humor. Her pieces read as if the writing had been effortless—a quality Brittany longed for in her own writing. And Sonya Porter’s profile picture fit perfectly with that image—hip and cool, the perfect chic blend of sophistication and youth.

Brittany wished she could have been half as cool as Sonya Porter. Fat chance of that. She wasn’t even brave enough to get her belly button pierced. She would never be bold enough to be as cool as Sonya Porter.

She touched the screen to go to Porter’s blog, hoping for one of her lighter pieces. But the piece couldn’t have been any heavier or more depressing. The article was about young women being murdered in horrible ways, their bodies dumped along roadways.

That was the last thing Brittany wanted to look at tonight. She was depressed enough already. She didn’t want to know some girl her own age had been found dead on New Year’s Eve.

Downstairs the doorbell rang. Brittany paid no attention. Her mother was having her book group in tonight. The bell had rung half a dozen times already. The voices of the women rose and fell like a distant wave of conversation and laughter.

She scrolled through the virtual pages of her magazine, unable to find anything that held her attention for more than a few lines. Her mind kept going back to Kyle and the things she had said about him, and the way she knew that would hurt him when he read it. And of course he would read it. He lurked on Twitter and Facebook all the time, reading all the nasty, mean things kids wrote about other kids so he could feel morally superior.

When the knock came on her bedroom door, she jumped, startled.

“Britt?” her mother asked. “Can I come in?”

Brittany set her iPad aside and went to the door, expecting her mother to ask her to turn her music down. But when she opened the door her mother was not alone. Two men in suits and heavy coats stood behind her.

“Honey, these men are police detectives,” her mom said, looking worried. “They’re looking for Gray.”

“Gray?” Brittany looked from one man to the other. Police? One was older; one was bigger. They both scared her with their serious expressions. “Why? Is she in trouble?”

The older cop showed her his ID and badge. He was lean and hard-looking, with a lot of gray shot through his thick hair. His eyes seemed to burn right into her.

“Brittany, I’m Sergeant Kovac. This is Sergeant Knutson. Penny Gray’s mom told us she was staying with you,” he said.

“She was here for a couple of days,” she said. “Then she left.”

“Where did she go?”

Brittany shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought she went home.”

Police. In her bedroom. Asking about Gray. A chill ran down her back.

“When did you last see her?”

“Um, the night before New Year’s Eve.”

“Have you heard from her in the last day or so?” the cop Kovac asked.

Her heart beat faster. The way he stared at her made her feel like she was some kind of criminal. It was unnerving. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was still afraid. Her palms were sweating.

“No,” she said.

“Do you have any idea where she might be?”

“No.”

“She didn’t tell you where she was going?”

“No.”

He looked at his partner and gave a sharp sigh.

“Britt,” her mother said, “if you know where Gray is, you have to tell these men.”

“I don’t know where she is!” Brittany snapped. “We went to a party and she got mad and left; that’s all. I don’t know where she went. I thought she went home.”

“Where was the party?” Kovac asked.

Brittany bit her lip and tried not to look at her mom. She was going to be in such trouble.

“Brittany . . . ,” her mother said in that tone of voice that warned of worse to come.

“This is important, Brittany,” Kovac said. “I can’t speak for your mom, but personally, I’d cut you some slack on the party if you had something to share about your friend Gray. She’s missing. She could be in some serious trouble. We need to locate her.”

This is so weird. This can’t be happening, she thought. Police in her bedroom asking about Gray. Gray missing? Gray wasn’t missing. She was just being Gray.

“Brittany Anne Lawler,” her mom said, enunciating every syllable.

“We went to the Rock & Bowl,” Brittany confessed.

Her mom gasped. “Brittany! You told me you were going to Christina’s house!”

“We were! But then everybody went to the Rock & Bowl first—”

“You know I don’t like you going to that place!”

Brittany rolled her eyes and huffed a sigh. “Mom. Everybody goes there!”

“It’s in a terrible neighborhood!”

“No, it isn’t! It’s practically right by the Mall of America.”

“The mall has to have its own police force for a reason,” her mother said.

“How did she leave?” Kovac asked.

Brittany looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“How did Gray leave? Did she call a cab? Did she take a bus? Did she leave with someone?”

“She has a car,” Brittany said. “She just left.”

Her mother looked as though she wanted to strangle her. Her eyes were practically bulging from her head. “You told me Aaron’s father was picking you up.”

She glanced at the cops, embarrassment and anger turning her cheeks red. “My husband and I were at a dinner party,” she said, almost like an apology, like the detectives would think she was a bad mom because her daughter had gone to the stupid Rock & Bowl.

She turned back to Brittany. “And you know I don’t want you riding in a car with her. She just got her license!”

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Brittany argued. “She had to pass a test to get it. She’s just as good a driver as anyone else.”

“Oh my God,” her mother muttered, looking up at the ceiling.

“What time was it when you last saw Miss Gray?” the big cop asked.

Brittany shrugged. “I don’t know. Nine thirty? Ten, maybe. Maybe ten thirty. I don’t remember.”

“Brittany . . . ,” her mother said.