Accomplice
Authors: Eireann Corrigan
EIREANN CORRIGAN
SCHOLASTIC PRESS • NEW YORK
for Nina Stotler—my co-conspirator and collaborator, my partner-in-crime
The picture they usually use is one from the Activities spread of the yearbook. Chloe’s got denim overalls buckled over a white T-shirt and her hair’s wound into these two loose braids. Like an even blonder version of the girl on the hot cocoa box. She’s gleaming. Beaming. And then, of course, there’s the sheep.
It’s a picture we took at 4-H, so Chloe has a lamb cradled under one arm. The networks loved that—Chloe and her little lamb. In the original snapshot, Chloe’s other arm is linked through mine and we’re leaning toward each other. But when the story first hit the papers, someone picked out that photo and cut me out of it, so it looks like Chloe has her head tipped toward nothing. The way dumber girls do, like something’s just so hilarious they can’t even hold their heads up right. Laughing Chloe and her lamb. Lost little Chloe.
It’s not like I took it personally. It was exactly the kind of picture that we figured the networks would use.
It was all part of our plan.
In the few days after Chloe disappeared, I paid more attention to my own face than I ever had before. I had to look confused and stunned and afraid. And the more I had to arrange my face to look that way, the more I felt that way. After the first little while, I realized it helped to picture what Chloe would look like, feeling those things. She and I probably knew the details of each other’s faces better than we knew our own.
So I bit my lip a lot. I took noticeably deep breaths. Shook my head as if I was trying to clear my thoughts. The hardest face to put on was the puzzled one. Like when Chloe’s dad rapped on our screen door, asking if she was upstairs with me. And when my mom grilled me on whether or not Chloe talked to any strangers online. Or later, when we all had to sit down with the police officer. I chewed on the inside of my cheek the way Chloe did when she was trying to remember something. I said, with what I hoped was a helpless look in my eyes, “I’m sorry—I just don’t remember Chloe saying anything about going for a ride after school.” And then I cried for
real, mostly because I was so scared, and that way I could cover my face with my hands and not have to look the cop in the eyes.
I had sort of figured my mom would keep me home from school. I mean, that seemed like the reasonable thing, especially since we’d been up almost the whole weekend, either with the Caffreys or making sandwiches for the mobs of people gathered with flashlights on our property. But that Monday morning, she called up to my room like it was any other day. At first, it felt like any other day. I almost forgot what we’d done, that my mom wouldn’t be honking the horn on the way down the hill until Chloe came running out of the barn. Chloe wasn’t going to comb her hair in the car.
Realizing it made me gasp. It felt like when you eat too much ice cream and your head hurts, except it felt like that in my chest. I went downstairs clutching my stomach, like I was faking a stomachache. My parents were already in Phase United Front, though. Mom used her gentle voice, but she said, “Your dad and I have discussed this and we think this is the best plan.”
“Plan? How is it a plan?” In my head, I was thinking,
You don’t even know what a plan is. Because we have a plan. We have a much better, more detailed plan.
“Finn, honey, this isn’t a debate. Your father and I have considered this very carefully. You need to be around your friends right now. And we don’t know how
long this is going to go on…” My mom trailed off and looked stricken. And then I made myself look stricken to cover for the fact that I knew exactly how long it would go on, and honestly I wouldn’t have minded an elevenday vacation from school.
“Well, what if she comes home and I’m not here?” I said. Because that’s what a normal kid would wonder, right? That’s what you’d ask if your best friend had just vanished.
“Then we’ll come straight away and pick you up. Really, honey, your dad’s going to stay right by. I’ll be at the Caffreys’ most of the morning, and then I’m putting in a few hours at Dr. Winter’s house.”
Then, when I started to slink back up the steps, my mom said something weird. She said, “Finn, honey, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
I
was
afraid. I was scared to look people in the eye at school. Every time the school secretary came over the intercom, I expected she’d call me down to the front office. They’d tell me that they’d found Chloe. The same cop who had coaxed me to try to remember whether anyone had been looking at Chloe strangely lately would show up, ready to cuff my wrists behind my back and duck my head into the squad car.
That first day back, everybody straightened up when the intercom interrupted class. Even Señora Dutta put her hand to her chest when the secretary called down to
remind her about attendance. She clutched at the collar of her shirt as if she was trying to slow her heart down or something. Chloe—or the lack of Chloe—had us all on edge. They brought in a counselor that day. The principal was really proud of that move—in the months afterward, he brought it up a lot like it was some radically kind move on his part and not a completely reasonable choice. It was just this young guy who looked like Harry Potter, who they probably sent over from some college or something. The only person more tentative than a student teacher has to be a student guidance counselor. They sent me down to talk to him. Of course they sent me down.
It didn’t feel kind, being sent down to the makeshift mental ward. I felt sent away, probably because I felt like I should be sent away. And when I got to the library-slash-counseling-center, there were a bunch of PTA moms setting out a spread of cookies and donuts. We’re never allowed to eat in the library, but I guess when a member of the homecoming court goes missing, it counts as a special occasion.
“Oh, Finley.” Kara Mae Clairemont’s mom is one of the only people in the world who has ever called me Finley. The other is my grandmother, which is just weird. Finley was my mom’s maiden name. So essentially, my grandma insists on calling me by her own last name. And honestly? Kara Mae Clairemont’s mom went to high
school with mine, so it’s odd that she insists on using it, too.
Mrs. Clairemont draped her arms around me and squeezed me like a grandmother would. She kept her hand on my shoulders and steered me into the doorway of the conference room. “Doctor?” The guy she was calling Doctor looked like he was maybe twenty years old.
But Mrs. Clairemont didn’t seem to notice that the doctor didn’t appear old enough to rent a car on his own. “Doctor—this is Finley Jacobs. She was Chloe’s best friend. She
is
Chloe’s best friend.” Her hand rubbed circles into my back. “It’s so important to support each other during a time like this. To trust each other with our feelings.” I wanted to tell Mrs. Clairemont that her daughter once spread a rumor that Chloe’s brother, Cam, had fetal alcohol syndrome, but I just nodded and let her close the door after her.
The kid sitting across from me looked like he had a paper route. “I’m not actually a doctor.” Shocking. “I never know what to say when people call me that.” In AP Psych we’d call this
building rapport
. I tried to look like the young undoctor’s canned conversation was putting me at ease. I didn’t want rapport. Chloe and I had covered this. We had figured it would be Mrs. Holmes, the same old guidance counselor we had always refused to confide in. But still, I reminded myself of the plan: Get in. Act appropriately shocked, sad. Shut down. Get out. I
almost felt sorry for the undoctor. Here he was, trying to get his grief counseling merit badge, and I was too busy getting my black belt in fake kidnappings to care.
“So your name is Finley?” He wrote it at the top of a yellow legal pad and underlined it.
“Finn.”
“Oh, Finn. Like Huck?”
I hate when people say that. Hated it when I was a little kid. Hated it sophomore year when we read the book in class. Sure, just like a ten-year-old boy. Thanks.
“No, it’s just Finn.” That’s all I’d give him. Let him think I was illiterate.
“Well, you can call me Ace.”
“What?”
“I mean, if you’re more comfortable with that.”
“I’m not comfortable with that.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a drug dealer name.”
“Oh? You know many drug dealers?”
“This is Colt River.”
“Yes?”
“We don’t have drug dealers in Colt River.”
“Did Chloe know any drug dealers?”
“Are you a cop?”
“No.” But even as he said it, Dr. Ace wrote something down below my name on his yellow legal pad. My palms were wet again. I could probably leave handprints on the
table. I tugged my sleeves down and kept my hands in my lap. This was exactly the kind of conversation Chloe and I said I shouldn’t get myself trapped into.
Maybe Dr. Ace saw my face tense up, because he exhaled and pushed the chair away from the conference table. I heard the wheels squeak. He said, “I’m sorry. I’m nervous.” He splayed out his fingers like,
Hey—what can you do?
And smiled. He had a nice smile.
I don’t really fall for that kind of thing. “You’re nervous because you’re just starting out?”
“I’m a student.”
“I figured,” I told him. “I didn’t want to insult you.”
“I wouldn’t have been insulted. We’re all students. We’re all learning.”
That made me laugh. A little. “That’s the kind of thing Chloe would say.” And it was. She would’ve probably ended up Googling Dr. Ace or trying to bump into him after school. She would’ve even liked that his name was Ace.
“So you guys are good friends.”
“Yes.”
“Grew up together?”
“Almost.”
It was fourth grade. My mother made me carry over the welcome-to-the-neighborhood pie while it was still warm. The Caffreys didn’t even have a real house yet. They lived out of a trailer while a bunch of men in
coveralls and work boots turned our old barn into a house. My parents had sold off all the cows the month before the new family moved in. So that summer, our fence moved about twenty acres closer to our house. And then the Caffreys moved in and installed solar panels above the old hayloft. They built a pen for llamas, talked about raising ostrich for meat.
When Chloe first got here in fourth grade, she was just some weirdo city kid. She wore Halloween costume dresses all the time with knee socks and sat alone on the bus. I was the only person who knew who she was, and I only talked to her out of fear and pity.
“It must be tough to be here without her,” Dr. Ace said. I just looked at him. “Something like this must be a hard thing to go through without her.”
I put the look on my face that Chloe got when she was considering something. She looked to the side, like she was trying to read a list written over in the corner. “The whole thing is scary.” That’s what I let myself say. The truth.
“Are you scared?”
“This is Colt River.”
“You’ve said that. But what does that mean to you?”
“Nothing ever really happens in Colt River.”
“Except…”
“Except my best friend’s gone.” I did him the favor of finishing the sentence. And then I added, “That’s pretty
much the only thing that’s ever happened. And she’s missing it.”
Only she wasn’t. Chloe was holed up in my grandmother’s basement, probably watching the local news with headphones on.
“What would you say to Chloe if she were here right now?” Dr. Ace might as well have jolted me with electroshock.
“What?”
“Sometimes it helps to envision the person for whom we’re grieving, to take the opportunity to say what we need to hear ourselves say.” He sounded like one of the cards my mom bought my aunt during her divorce.
“I’m not grieving for Chloe. She’s not dead.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Everyone’s acting like that—like she’s dead.” They were, and I hadn’t counted on that, either. For the first two nights, it was like the whole town was coasting on adrenaline. No one slept, people stomped in and out of our house all hours of the night. You could see traffic winding down our road at two in the morning. I’d never seen actual traffic in Colt River.
By the time I got to school on Monday morning, though, things had calmed down into an eerie hush. Everyone spoke in funeral voices. There were a lot of hugs in homeroom and in the halls beforehand. I think people were starting to imagine the worst that could have
happened to Chloe. Chloe had predicted that would be the hardest part. She had said, “You’re going to want to tell people I’m okay because you’re a good person. You’re going to want to make everyone feel better. But remember most of them will be caught up in the moment. They won’t know they’re doing it, but they’ll be faking it.”
Chloe had said, “You have to remember what will happen if we get caught.” There were things I couldn’t think about because they were so terrible. Like Chloe’s mom. Even Dean West, who’d been in love with Chloe since the seventh grade. I knew he was probably going nuts, and he wasn’t going to be in there talking to Dr. Ace. Dean didn’t talk much in front of anyone.
At the same time, Chloe was right—there were plenty of people who were just playing the part they’d been cast in the new soap opera of Colt River. Like Mrs. Clairemont and her cookies and the girls who had one by one come up to squeeze me at my locker before school. Maddie Dunleavy and Lizbette Markell had set up a table in the hallway and sold B
RING
C
HLOE
H
OME
ribbons for three bucks a pop. I don’t know who chose green, but it looked like half the school had spinach leaves pinned to their chests. Those people sitting in homeroom with swollen eyes and solemn faces—most of them weren’t our friends. They didn’t really know Chloe.
Even Dr. Ace was just playing a part. I felt like telling
him he should write Chloe and me a check. By the time we were through, Colt River would be big news and he’d be able to put this stint on his resume. Instead I asked him, “How long will you be here?”
“Hmmm.” He sounded like it was the first time he’d considered it. He said, “I don’t know.” He meant that it depended on whether or not they found Chloe. And how they found her.
I took the card that Dr. Ace offered after he ran out of questions. It didn’t even have his name on it. It said: R
UTGERS
U
NIVERSITY
S
TUDENT
C
OUNSELING
S
ERVICES
. I snickered a little—all that and we didn’t even get a student social worker from Princeton. He said, “You can come talk whenever you need to.”
I tried to look grateful. And then I said something weird. Something stupid. I said, “When Chloe comes home, I bet she’d like to meet you.” And then I felt my throat close up, like my body was cringing on the inside. I pictured the little Chloe in my head, slamming her head on the old metal desk in a miniature version of my grandmother’s basement. But when Dr. Ace looked up, he blinked, and the only thing that flickered in his eyes was pity. I could see it written across his face—
You poor girl. You think she’s coming home.
If we had planned for Chloe to stay missing for longer, I might have risen to the top of our class. For once, in school we weren’t leaning over each other’s desks
and writing in each other’s notebooks. I didn’t want to look at everyone looking at me anymore, so I kept my eyes on the board. Listened to my teachers rather than the whispering behind me. And most of our teachers spoke more slowly. It was like the whole school was moving through syrup. It’s weird to think that might have helped my college applications just as much as anything else.