Alpha Alpha Gamma
Alpha Alpha Gamma
By Nancy Springer
Copyright 2012 by Nancy Springer
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, Cicada, Sept/Oct 2008.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Also by Nancy Springer and Untreed Reads Publishing
#20
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The Boy Who Plaited Manes
Dreamfisher
The Scent of an Angel
Alpha Alpha Gamma
By Nancy Springer
I can’t handle this.
But Kerri Ellen did not say the words aloud. Jammed into a MINI Cooper with four other community college kids, she wouldn’t let them know how shaky she felt as they pulled into the church parking lot where the search-and-rescue command center was set up. To her friends it was all new, the muddle of cop cars and ambulances and TV vans and tables and tents, the swarms of state troopers and sheriffs and borough officials and firefighters and volunteers, the blare of megaphones and the yammering of a helicopter overhead. But to Kerri Ellen it was entirely too familiar, even though this was not a ragged stretch of highway amid used car lots, storage lockers, furniture outlets and fast food eateries—such as the Burger King her sister had been walking to.
This was a rich neighborhood. Here, Kerri Ellen looked around at McMansions bigger than barns, each with its own vast Chem-Green lawn beneath forested hills. Kinda different than the trailer park where she lived, out along Route 109.
Yet here were the search dogs in their orange capelets, and the feeling here was just the same as—then.
“Deja fu,” she murmured.
“I beg your pardon” asked a skinny boy with fat glasses, an archetypical nerd, squashed against her in the MINI Cooper back seat.
“Nothing.”
I’ve been kicked in the head like this before. It’s been two years. Get over it.
The girl who was driving parked in the only available space, on the grass, and killed the motor. “Geez, I didn’t think there’d be so many people here.”
“I thought they would have
found
her by now,” said another sorority girl. “She’s, what, three years old? How far can she have gone?”
“Unless somebody abducted her,” said the nerd.
Don’t! Don’t even think that word
. It was way less painful to think what the cops had suggested at first, that Kimmi Sue was a runaway, even though anybody with the brain of a garden slug knew Kimmi would never run away, especially not when she was walking to work in her Burger King uniform. No, it didn’t matter what anybody said, they all knew Kimmi Sue, like so many others, had been snatched—but Kerri tried to tell herself it had happened differently, that her sister had been “kidnapped.” Kidnappers kept people alive. Didn’t they?
“But say she just wandered out of the house,” gabbed the driver as she got out of the MINI Cooper.
With difficulty Kerri Ellen shifted her thoughts back to the latest lost girl, not a teen but a toddler.
“Say she was out in the woods last night. It got down almost to freezing. They think if they don’t find her today, she might not—”
“So let’s get moving,” Kerri Ellen heard her own voice as if startled by a stranger.
Once out of the car, they strode a serpentine between parked pickup trucks, incoming traffic and the women directing it. Kerri stared numbly at dog handlers arriving with bloodhounds, church ladies bringing bags of hamburger buns and crock-pots of barbecue, people carrying boxes of freshly printed flyers, Red Cross workers handing out coffee. Scanning the crowd, she realized she was looking for Kimmi, the way she always did wherever she went, like she might someday glimpse her sister at a shopping mall or a Renaissance fair.
Stop it.
Redirected, her attention caught on a young man in a college basketball jacket, a gawky young man jutting like a tall dead pine over the flood-water rush of activity.
“Burke!” called one of the three sorority girls. “Have they found anything?”
He focused stunned eyes on the approaching group as if he didn’t recognize them, even though he went to their post-game parties, and he knew other commuters like Kerri from hanging out on campus between classes. She saw Burke’s throat shudder as he swallowed. It was his little sister, Bethany, who was lost.
“Anything?” the girl asked again.
He shook his head. His wooden gaze drifted down a stream of consciousness none of them could see. Except Kerri. She knew how he felt—
Stop thinking.
She turned away from him.
VOLUNTEERS SIGN IN HERE said a hand-lettered poster over a table manned by two middle-aged guys in brown uniforms. The one who took their names gave instructions rapid-fire. “Down that path.” He pointed to a hiking trail leading into the woods. “When you get to where the ribbons stop, that’s where you search. Three teams of two—no, wait, there are five of you.”
“I’ll go,” said an unexpected voice. Kerri Ellen turned to find Burke by her side. “We’re not doing any good here.”
The officer only glanced at him, curt. “Three teams of two. Spread out about six feet apart and post these.” He handed the girl in front three ribbons. “Go due east.” He handed her three compasses. “You should be almost shoulder to shoulder. Look all around, up, down, sideways, not just in front. If you find anything at all, a cigarette butt, a tire mark, a footprint, don’t touch it. Shove one of these into the ground nearby.” He gave her a few stakes of raw wood with orange plastic stapled to the top. “Then go on. When you get to the highway, turn around and come back, due west. Keep looking in case you missed something the first time. When you get back where you started, leave the ribbons, and report here to me. Be safe and stay with your buddies. We don’t need another missing person right now. Any questions?” He scanned their faces, but jolted to a halt when he saw Kerri Ellen, and his voice changed completely. “Aren’t you the Spangler girl?”
Kerri Ellen hadn’t expected this. She managed only to nod.
The cop took a deep breath. “Young lady, I’m sorry about your sister,” he said softly. “I want you to know that we law officers haven’t forgotten about her. Not a day goes by that we don’t follow up or try to think of a new angle, a way to find her.”
Something bleak and true in his gray gaze enabled Kerri to say, “Every night we light a candle for her. In a lantern outside the door. Like, to bring her home.”
The policeman just nodded. “Whatever it takes to keep going, huh? You’re brave to be here today.”
Kerri Ellen couldn’t acknowledge.
“Well, good luck.”
Dismissed, walking back the graveled hiking trail, Kerri studied the blue ribbons tied to tree trunks and felt her friends eyeing her. Out-of-towners, they didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to explain. No one said anything until they reached the end of the ribbons, and then they spoke only to pair off. Kerri found herself teamed, just her luck, with Burke.
He stood there. Lost in an abyss of self, trying to peer out at a world that made no sense; she knew. She tied their blue ribbon around a shagbark hickory. They headed into the woods.
“Ow. Briars,” complained one of the girls as they picked their way through the thorny edge.
Suddenly Burke broke his silence to call, “Bethany!”
Kerri Ellen stiffened.
Only echoes answered from between the trunks of tall pines. The gray-green twilight beneath the trees felt familiar. This place reminded Kerri of the woods near Grandpa’s hunting cabin, two little girls calling and giggling and playing hidey-hole. Forests were full of good places to hide, always. Blinking around her at boulders, deadfalls, dying saplings draped in kudzu vine, Kerri felt as if—
Kimmi?
Right here, somewhere—
STOP it
, she scolded herself. Stop. Feeling. Don’t. Think. Instead, she started scanning. Up, down, sideward. Between trees, behind rocks, under fallen trunks.
“Bethany!” Burke called.
Kerri bit her lip.
The skinny boy with fat glasses asked, “Burke, weren’t you the last one who saw her?”
“Right.” In a sinking voice, waterlogged. “I was babysitting her.”
“You were watching a movie or something?”
“Right.”
“What was your sister doing?”
Who did this nerd think he was? Heaving a fallen branch out of her way with more than necessary force, Kerri almost told him to shut up—but suddenly Burke started talking as if he wanted to. “Little brat, she was just hanging around. Pestering. I was watching
The Aviator
, like, I rented it, I’d never seen it before, and Bethany was just in and out of the room. I wasn’t paying much attention. Anyway, when the movie was over, I went looking for her to put her to bed. I figured she’d fallen asleep on the sofa or someplace, like she usually did.”
A long silence followed, broken by crashing sounds as they made their slow way through rocks and brush. Kerri saw bloodroot in bloom. She saw fern fiddleheads, turkey-tail bracket fungus, and tiny mushrooms growing Day-Glo orange, like a search dog’s uniform, on a rotting log.
She did not see any sign of a little lost girl.
The skinny guy asked, “Was the house door open or anything?”
“No.” Burke’s voice wobbled. “I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. I’d swear she didn’t go out of the house. I mean, she never did before.”
“But you looked—“
“Everywhere. Under beds, in closets, in the attic, the swimming pool, all the shower stalls, the Jacuzzi, the toy chest, both the freezers and refrigerators…my parents came home and looked. Then the cops looked.”
One of the girls asked, “Are your parents pissed at you?”
“I—I really don’t know. They’re too freaked to even talk to me.”
“Ow. I’m sorry.”
The other boy said, “There’s something white—no, it’s just flowers. Damn.”
Burke called to the wilderness, “Bethany! Bethie?”
* * *
Back at the VOLUNTEERS desk, they turned in the wood stakes as well as the compasses. They had not found a thing.
They uttered platitudes to Burke: “Well, um, good luck.”
“Yeah, hang in there.”
“Things have got to get better.”
He barely nodded, all alone in a sea of people. Kerri Ellen wished she could think of something to say to him, to tell him she understood how he felt—which she did, probably better than anybody else there. But forget it; even more, she just wanted to get the heck
away
. Good; the girl who drove the MINI Cooper was ready to head out, car keys in hand.
“Um, thanks for trying, guys.” Burke’s voice had gone wooden again.
The skinny boy asked suddenly, “Burke, would you show us where Bethany was, you know, the last time you saw her?”
Oh, no
. What was it with the nerd? He had some kind of detective complex?
“Um, sure.” Burke seemed surprised, but more alive. “Why not? Come on.” He led the way.
Sighing, trailing behind, Kerri looked around with the scorn of the have-nots toward the haves: how could four people possibly require so much space? Burke’s barn-sized house echoed cavernous. Of course, there was nobody home; Burke’s parents were busy with the command center, the posters, the radio and TV reporters—Kerri Ellen knew how it was. But even on an ordinary day this place would have felt like an under-booked hotel. Burke took them through a living room the size of a gymnasium and past a formal dining room, a decorative downstairs bathroom and a white, gleaming kitchen, then along a wide corridor—above her head, on a sort of indoor balcony, Kerri Ellen glimpsed a crawl-in plastic play house with a doll perched on its pink roof. Hastily she looked away, following Burke down curving stairs to a family room. Way in the back of the house, as far as possible from its gracious spaces, this was a windowless den apparently meant for turning up the volume. Vast plasma screen TV. Stereo, CD, DVD, racks of discs to choose from. Five speakers positioned around the room. Lush velvety cream-colored carpeting and oversized cushy sofas.