Dexter's Final Cut (43 page)

I started to say that of course I would, but then she raised her head
and her lips covered mine and it didn’t seem all that important to say anything. And far too quickly, Jackie pushed herself away from me. “Go,” she said. “Before I drag you into the other room.” She leaned in and pecked at my cheek, and then strode in and lifted the laptop out of the big box of Kathy’s stuff, and began to plug it in beside the bed. “Shit,” I heard her murmur. “I hate this.…”

I wasn’t too happy with things at the moment, either, but I headed out the door. And as I was almost out of earshot I heard the trailer door slam open, and Jackie’s voice yell, “Robert!” and then, softer, “Son of a
bitch
 …” She had clearly decided that she would rather run lines with Robert than sort through Kathy’s stuff. It was a tough program either way, but I had some hard time ahead of me, too.

I headed for the perimeter.

I had left my car in the parking lot at work, since I’d been riding with Jackie in the Town Car. But I found a cop who was headed that way and hitched a ride. He had an AM radio playing a conservative talk show. The host was making some very interesting statements about the president. I don’t usually pay much attention to politics, but from what the man said, I had to believe that sometime in the recent past the laws regarding sedition must have changed.

The cop who was driving, however, was nodding his head and muttering agreement, so I just rode along, grateful that I didn’t have to make conversation, and in a mere twelve minutes I was getting into my car and headed for home.

A
T THIS TIME OF DAY
,
A MIDWEEK AFTERNOON
,
IT WAS AN EASY
drive to my quiet South Miami neighborhood. The traffic was light, and I went quickly up onto I-95 and then straight down Dixie Highway with no problem, and in only about twenty minutes I pulled up in front of my house—my ex-house—and parked my car. I sat for a moment, looking at the place. It had been my home for several years, and it was still home to several things I cared about. My special private rosewood box, for instance: the carefully concealed reliquary for my ever-growing collection of memento mori. Each and every one of my Playmates was there, represented by a single drop of dried blood on a small glass slide. Not Patrick, of course, and that was too bad, but he had been rather a rush job. But all those other fond memories, fifty-seven of them, still lived here in my box. Would it come with me? It had to, of course—leaving it here was unthinkable, and so was getting rid of it. But could my beautiful and unique collection make the transition to life in the fast lane? Could I find a new and safe place for it in my new and unknown life?

That box and its slides were important to me—but under the circumstances it was a truly stupid thing to worry about. I had to find
Astor, wherever she was, and if she had been snatched by some predator, as I suspected, then there would soon be a new slide in the box.

The front door of the house banged open and Rita came chuffing out to my car as I got out. “Oh, Dexter, thank God you’re here; let’s go, quick!” she said, reaching for the handle of the passenger door.

“Go where?” I said.

Rita jerked her hand back from my car as if it had burned her. “Oh!” she said, “I don’t have— I don’t know, it just seems— I mean, I thought if we could— Oh, no …” she said, and she came around the car and clamped onto me, putting her head down onto my chest and snuffling, right where Jackie had so recently pressed her face.

I pried Rita away from me and gave her a gentle shake. “Rita,” I said. “Is there someplace to go? Have you heard from Astor?”

“No, of course not, no, but, Dexter,” she said, “what do we do?”

“First,” I said, “we calm down.” I didn’t think Rita would accept this suggestion with any enthusiasm, and she didn’t. She sniffled again, and moaned, hopping up and down, for all the world like a child who has to go to the bathroom. “All right,” I said, taking her elbow. “Let’s go inside.” And over her incoherent protests I led her into the house and sat her down on the couch.

“Now then,” I said. “When is the last time you heard from her?”

“Oh, God, Dexter, you sound just like a— I mean, it’s
Astor
, for God’s sake, and you’re just—”

“Yes, I am,” I interrupted. “We won’t find her by being hysterical.”

“Oh,” she said, “I suppose you’re right, but …”

“When,” I said very deliberately. “When did you hear from her?”

“I didn’t,” Rita said. “Just … like I said, this morning I dropped her at school? In the same place as always, and then they called to say …”

“All right,” I said. “But you left her in front of her school.”

“Yes,” she said. “And then I— I mean, Cody was being so grouchy, and Lily Anne needed a change, so I just … I drove away.”

It took only a moment’s thought for me to realize what that meant. In a strange way, it was disappointing. I had raised my Other Self up on point, ready to seek and destroy whatever nervy pervert had grabbed Astor, and as always, I felt a little diminished when I had to
let all that icy glee drain away. “She wasn’t snatched,” I said. “She left on her own.”

“What!?” Rita said, sounding horrified. “Dexter, but that’s stupid! She would never—”

“She did,” I said firmly. “There’s a cop there at the school in the morning, and hundreds of parents, and bus drivers and teachers—all watching very carefully. Nobody could grab her there without being seen. So they didn’t. She walked away.”

Rita stared at me with big round eyes and a mouth stretched open in almost the same shape. “But … why?” she said. “Where would she go?”

“Almost anywhere,” I said. “Walk up to Metrorail—it’s not far—and then … did she have any money?”

“Her allowance,” Rita said. “And …” She bit her lip. “I think she took some money from my purse. Forty dollars.”

“Well, we can rule out Singapore,” I said. Forty dollars and Astor’s allowance—maybe another ten or twenty dollars, if she’d saved up—would not get her far. “Has she said anything? Like a new friend, or somebody online? Any hint at all?”

“Oh, no,” Rita said. “I would never let her— You know what she’s like. She doesn’t make friends very easily, and— She didn’t say anything.”

“Okay,” I said, and I stood up. “I’m going to look in her room.”

“What?” Rita said. “Dexter, she’s not there; I’m sure I would have—Oh! You mean look for something.…”

“Yes,” I said, and I stepped around her and down the hall to the room Astor shared with her brother. It was a small room, too small for two growing kids of different genders, which was one of the main reasons we had bought the new and larger house, where they would each have their own room. One side of the room was taken up by the bunk bed—Cody on top—and the other side was carefully divided between His space and Hers.

The room was cluttered with all the junk you would expect a couple of ordinary kids to collect—but there were differences, because these, after all, were not ordinary kids. Their Bio Dad’s violence, and probably his DNA, had set their feet on the Dark Path, and they would never ever walk in the happy-face light of Normal.

And so a few odd touches stood out to the eye of any trained observer, especially if he was also a Monster like me. For example, Cody had a number of action figures—he got very cranky if you called them dolls—as any boy his age might. But every one of them had been neatly and lovingly beheaded. The tiny plastic heads were lined up in a careful row on the top tier of his toy shelf, aligned exactly, perfectly, not a single one out of place.

The entire Cody side of the little room, in fact, was alarmingly neat. His shoes were lined up, toes together, his books stacked with the spines aligned, and even his dirty clothes lay neatly in a blue plastic laundry basket, looking like they had been folded first. Preteen boys are never that neat, but since I had been the same way myself, I didn’t worry. Something in a Monster just likes things tidy. Since Cody shared my other, Darker tastes, I just assumed that his Neatness was simply part of the package.

Astor’s half, on the other hand, was as chaotic as a very small space could be. She had a small desk with a hutch on it, and a chair pulled halfway out. Clothing, both clean and dirty, was piled on the chair and on top of the hutch, everything from shorts and jeans and dresses to oddly colored socks and underpants with bright patterns on them. It was a mess, even more than usual, as if she had taken every stitch of clothing she owned and sorted through it, throwing it all around as she did.

If she had, in fact, sorted through it as she prepared to leave, the things she chose to take away might be significant. I was no expert on Astor’s wardrobe, but I could recognize some of the most important pieces, since I had listened to her screech about them when they were not laundered yet, or too stupid to wear, or the wrong color for Friday. I picked through the mound of shirts and skirts and sweaters and hoodies, not sure what I was really hoping to find—and finding it anyway.

There had been some kind of fall dance at school a few weeks earlier, and to my surprise, Astor had insisted on attending. Even more, she had gone into a weeklong towering tizzy about having nothing to wear, which struck me as even odder, considering that the floor of her closet was heaped with enough clothing to start a boutique.

But Rita had played along with Astor’s enthusiasm, telling me
only that a girl’s first dance was very special, almost like first Communion, and of
course
she had to have a new dress, and of course it had to be Just Right. And so they had spent an entire weekend flitting across Miami from mall to mall until they found the perfect dress. It was a silver sheath that sparkled and gleamed and radiated blue highlights as it moved, and Astor had been more pleased with that dress than I had ever seen her. And it must have been effective, because she came home from the dance radiating a smug contempt for boys.

But the dress didn’t seem to be here at the moment. I poked through the heap of clothes without finding a flicker of silver. I stepped over to the closet and peered in, moving things around until I was sure it was not there, either.

Wherever Astor had gone, she had taken her Very Special Dress.

I moved back beside her desk and thought about this. She would not have taken that dress if she planned to hitchhike through South America, climb Mount Rainier, or work her way to Australia on a tramp steamer. She would not risk getting it dirty. So where
had
she gone?

I looked around. On the far side of the rag heap, there were dozens of photos taped to the wall, jammed crazily together and even overlapping one another. I stepped over and looked at the most recent layer, hoping to see something, anything that might suggest where she was. Most of the pictures on the wall were of Astor, many of them she had clearly taken herself, by holding the camera out in front of her own face, or shooting into a mirror. There were three pictures taped on top of all the others, in the center of the wall. But they showed nothing except Astor clowning with Robert, obviously taken on the day she and her siblings had surprised me at Wardrobe. In one of them Astor had pale makeup covering her face and fake blood dripping from her mouth; she was attacking Robert as he cringed away in mock fear.

The next one showed Astor in grotesquely overdone glamour makeup, pouting at her reflection in the large, light-framed mirror of a professional makeup room; Portrait of the Actress as a Young Vamp.

In the last picture Astor, still in the awful makeup, stood in front of Robert with huge eyes and a face full of dramatic yearning straight
from
Gone with the Wind
, while Robert looked away with an expression of noble longing on his face.

A fourth picture, set off to the side, was a standard publicity shot of Robert. In black marker, somebody, presumably Robert, had written, “To the Beautiful Astor with my very best,” and then an illegible flourish that was probably his signature.

There was nothing else, just these silly pictures, and nothing to them but a young girl’s infatuation with the idea of being an actress, and having a chance to really do it with Real Makeup and a Real Star. There was nothing else there on the wall that I hadn’t seen before: no tourist brochures for Rio, no scribbled flight numbers, nothing. I poked around for another minute anyway, looking in the closet, under the bed, and even under the mattress, but I found no hint of where she might have gone, or why.

I sat on the edge of the lower bunk and pondered. I was now sure that Astor had run away—probably just
walked
away, most likely—and had not been grabbed by some drooling dolt with arrested development. Of course, that would not last. A young girl on the street alone does not stay alone for long; that is a simple law of nature. She would have company very quickly—they would find her. She would almost certainly not like her new friends, or the things they made her do, but she would not be alone. Someone with an eye out for somebody just like her would find her, and lead her away, and then Astor would disappear forever into a world of painful surprises.

In the meantime, however, there was a brief window of opportunity for me to get to her before somebody else did. And it should be easy, because I knew her very well, knew her in ways that even her mother did not, and also because I am very, very clever and I almost always figure out these little puzzles.

So where would she go? And just as important, why would she go
now
? She had grumbled about hating her family and wanting to run away, but all kids did that, and I’d never taken her seriously. Astor was too bright to throw herself out the door and into random chance, or to think she could instantly find a place where her True Greatness and Beauty were recognized and rewarded. And she had taken along her Special Dress. So if she went, it would be to someplace specific, and someplace she was sure would be better.

But what could be better than having three square meals, plus snacks, and new shoes now and then? And all this with a family who actually liked her for some reason, paid all her bills, put up with her unpleasant and furious snits—and more, a semifather who knew and understood what she was really like in the dark and damaged interior of her twisted self?