Sammy Keyes and the Kiss Goodbye (2 page)

So it came as no surprise to Holly that after just one short sentence Sergeant Borsch had already interrupted her, but Meg was not so accustomed to the lawman’s brusque ways. “The girls had been studying for exams,” she began.

“At the Pup Parlor?” Sergeant Borsch interjected, again interrupting after a single sentence.

“At our apartment above the business,” Meg said. “It was after nine and dark outside. I was heading off to take
a shower before bed and told Sammy she should get home before her grandmother began to worry.”

“But her grandmother no longer lives in the Highrise!”

Sergeant Borsch’s confusion was understandable. Not so long ago Sammy had lived illegally with her grandmother on the fifth floor of Santa Martina’s only government-subsidized housing for seniors—the Senior Highrise (clearly named in a moment of unrivaled creative genius).

And although the secret of Sammy’s residence had never been openly discussed, the Borschman had figured it out and immediately wished he hadn’t. How could he let this girl continue to sneak up and down the fire escape and sleep on her grandmother’s couch when doing so was against the law?

It was the first time in his career that Officer Borsch had consciously looked the other way, convincing himself that there were bigger wrongs in this world than a kid sleeping on an old lady’s couch.

Still, no one was more relieved than Gil Borsch when Sammy’s grandmother married the straight-shooting Hudson Graham, and the lawbreakers and their cat took up legal residence with the septuagenarian on Cypress Street.

But that move had occurred months earlier, which is why (despite his abrasive demeanor and propensity for interruption) it was legitimate for an investigating officer to ask, “What was Sammy doing at the Highrise?”

And ask it he did.

Holly’s head quivered side to side. “She said something about the Nightie-Napper.”

The creases in Sergeant Borsch’s face deepened.
Especially the ones above and between his eyebrows. Entire rivers could have coursed through them without hazarding overflow. “The Nightie-Napper?”

Holly nodded. “It bugged her that she never figured out who the Nightie-Napper was.”

“So this … this
Nightie-Napper
did this to her?”

“No!” Holly’s head quivering resumed. “At least I don’t think so!”

Again, it was Meg who came to the rescue. “Holly, sweetheart,” she said with a soothing voice, “we don’t understand what you’re talking about. Explain what a nightie-napper is.”

“The Nightie-Napper has been stealing stuff out of the dryers in the basement at the Highrise. They’ve been doing it for a long time.”

“Stuff?” Meg prompted. “Like … nightgowns?”

Holly shrugged. “And muumuus.”

“Muumuus,” Sergeant Borsch moaned. “What has this—”

Since Meg was a woman of both internal and external substance, it took a simple
STOP
hand signal for her to shut him down. Then she continued coaxing information from her obviously traumatized daughter. “Is the Nightie-Napper someone you think might try to kill a fourteen-year-old girl?”

Holly’s eyes pinched closed. “The Nightie-Napper doesn’t have anything to do with this!”

Sergeant Borsch’s hands flew skyward. “Then why are you—”

STOP
went Meg’s hand again. And like a Rottweiler warning off an intruder, she locked eyes with him and bared her teeth ever so slightly as she growled, “She’ll get to it.”

And after a little head bobbing and recollecting and sorting and thinking, Holly did indeed get to it. “Sammy talked about the Nightie-Napper. She also wondered if her gum was still in the fire-escape doorjamb. She was trying to picture what the new neighbor was like. Her name’s Violet, and Sammy thought that was strange.”

“Why strange?” Meg asked, but then with a laugh she got it. “Oh! First Daisy, then Rose, now Violet!”

“Exactly.” Holly took a deep breath, then continued. “It seemed like she missed the place. I told her she should take me there someday, because I’d never been inside, and after all the stories she’d told, I really wanted to sneak up the fire escape and peek down the hallway and hide out in the basement and maybe catch the Nightie-Napper red-handed.”

Now, an ordinary parent might have filed this particular conversation away in her mental To Be Discussed folder, but Meg was no ordinary parent. She had taken the runaway Holly in, saving her from a life of homelessness, and no sleuthing adventure through a seniors building would (or could) come close to the dangers Holly had already faced.

Besides, this wasn’t about going places you shouldn’t.

This was about Sammy.

So Meg simply waited for Holly to continue, needing
to employ only one
STOP
signal to quell Sergeant Borsch’s questions before Holly’s focus returned.

“After she left, I watched her through the window. She rode her skateboard up to Main Street and crossed Broadway. Only when she got to the other side, she didn’t cross again and go toward Hudson’s the way she always does. She just stood looking over at the Highrise for a little while. Then she rode down Main and disappeared into the bushes like she used to when she lived at the Highrise.”

Meg asked her daughter a question that Gil Borsch would never in a million years have thought to ask: “Did that upset you?”

Holly’s head bobbed. “Yes! I’d
just
talked to her about wanting to go there with her—why couldn’t she wait for sometime when I could go, too?”

“So you watched to see if she really was going up the fire escape?”

“Yes! And she did! And at first I was really mad!”

“But then?”

“But then I saw someone start up the stairs after her.”

“And …?”

“And … and they were moving fast. Like they were chasing her. I called her cell phone to warn her, but her phone started ringing in our kitchen! So I opened the window and yelled for her to watch out, but that was hopeless because of the traffic. And then there was a big struggle and I saw Sammy fall off the fire escape.” Holly’s eyes welled with tears. “It was the third floor, Mom. Nobody can survive that.”

“There were bushes,” Meg assured her.

Even in that moment Holly recognized the irony of Meg’s statement. Bushes had been a big part of Sammy’s duck-and-cover routine. Bushes had concealed her from foes and cops alike. Bushes had been her primary spy spot, and once again, she had landed in them.

Only this wasn’t funny.

Not funny at all.

But pondering the irony of bushes provided a silence and, consequently, a long-awaited entry into the conversation for Sergeant Borsch. “How would you describe this person who followed Sammy up the stairs?” he asked. “Tall? Short? Thin? Hefty?”

Holly thought a moment, then shook her head. “Kind of medium.”

If there’s one answer Sergeant Borsch has been known to ridicule, it’s “kind of medium.” But this time it didn’t seem to even register on his finely calibrated annoyance meter, and he just went on. “Man? Woman?”

Holly hesitated. “I figured it was a man, but … but … I guess it
could
have been a woman.”

“Hair? Clothing?”

“It was dark! I don’t know!”

“Where did the assailant go? Up? Down?”

“I don’t know! I saw Sammy fall and I screamed and called 911!”

“How’d you know it was Sammy falling and not the other person?”

“Her backpack! She was wearing her backpack!”

The three of them sat there, Holly in tears, Meg trying to comfort her, and Sergeant Borsch numbed to the core.

He had nothing.

Nothing to work with.

Not a single clue.

News travels fast in the digital age, and not long after Holly smacked Sergeant Borsch with the one-two punch of Don’t Know and Not Sure, teenagers started coming through the emergency-room door.

The first one on the scene was Heather Acosta.

“Where is she?” she panted, looking around wildly as if Sammy were her best friend, instead of the girl she’d tortured and
wished
dead for well over a year.

Holly groaned at the sight of her. She was not (and would likely never be) convinced that Heather was sincere in her newfound enthusiasm for Sammy. And despite Sammy’s willingness to let bygones be bygones, Holly was not one to forget Heather Acosta’s long history of deceit and revenge (not to mention brazen backstabbing). It was hard for her to believe that three “shell-shocking” days in Las Vegas had really changed Heather.

But there Heather was, gasping and gushing concern, her red hair flashing like a squad-car light as she spun around, searching for Sammy. “She’s not …,” she said,
her voice trailing off as she cast her wide eyes on Holly, Meg, and Sergeant Borsch.

And since Holly, Meg, and Sergeant Borsch each held similar suspicions about Heather, none of them jumped up with assurances that Sammy would be all right. They simply stared.

What this lack of assurance triggered in Heather was a crumpling at the knees and a scream so fierce and pathetic and
loud
that emergency-room personnel began appearing to see if anyone was being stabbed in the waiting room (something that was, unfortunately, not unheard of at Santa Martina’s Community Hospital).

“Stop it!” Holly shouted at Heather. “We don’t know anything yet!”

But Heather was folded into herself on the floor, so deafened by her own primal wailing that she didn’t hear what Holly was saying.

And then Casey Acosta came blasting in and saw (and heard) his sister wailing on the floor, which immediately set him falling into the same pit of despair as his life with Sammy flashed before his eyes.

The tortured look on his face could have broken the heart of Death himself. If Death was around. Which nobody really knew at that point. (Although in the emergency room the odds were alarmingly high.)

What Casey’s reaction
did
do was kick Holly into gear. “No one’s said she’s dead yet!” Holly shouted, jumping out of her seat. “They’re still working on her!”

This did a nice job of shutting Heather up, but it didn’t happen fast enough for Nurse Cathy Abbey, who came
ramming through the main interior door, shouting, “You need to SHUT UP out here!” Her pants were a tired blue, her shoes a scuffed white, and the geometric designs on her smock were a telling sign of her impersonal approach to patient care.

“Is there any news?” Holly asked.

“When there’s news, we’ll tell ya!” Nurse Abbey snapped, then withdrew through the emergency room’s swinging door of fate.

“So she’s not …?” Heather asked, looking up from her crumpled position on the floor.

“We don’t know!” Holly snapped, and then to her enormous relief, Marissa McKenze rushed in from outside, followed almost immediately by Billy Pratt.

Marissa and Billy were tried-and-true friends. Maybe not with each other, seeing how Marissa had dumped Billy for the smooth-talking Danny Urbanski, breaking Billy’s heart for at least a week. But Billy and Marissa had been through the thick of things with Sammy, and that’s what mattered now.

“What’s
she
doing here?” Marissa seethed after Holly had given all of them a quick recap. Like Holly, Marissa trusted Heather about as far as she could throw a tiger. “And who is she texting?”

“She’s not just texting,” Holly said, craning a little to see better. “She’s posting.”

“What? No! Tell her to stop! We don’t want a bunch of people here!”

But the reality was, neither Holly nor Marissa knew how to tell Heather to stop. The only person who seemed
to be able to reason with Heather was Sammy … and sometimes Casey.

But Casey was fighting back tears as he whispered with Billy, and Marissa didn’t have the heart to interrupt their conversation to ask him to deal with something she could do herself. Even though she couldn’t.

Meg had noted Heather’s flurry of phone activity, too, and saw a different sort of downside. She leaned over and asked Sergeant Borsch, “Does Sammy’s grandmother know what’s happened?” The question was met with the blank look of a man in shock, so she added, “Rita’s the guardian—I’m sure they’ll need her here. And someone really should tell her before the rumor mill does.” Then, since the lawman still seemed too stunned to take action, she offered, “If you have her number, I could call her.”

Gil Borsch did, in fact, have the number, but even through the daze of his despair, he knew this was not the sort of thing he should break to Rita over the phone. So he pulled himself together and stood, saying, “I’ll tell her in person.” Then he gave his cell number to Meg so she could call him if there were any developments and hauled his heavy heart outside.

On the short ride over to Cypress Street, it occurred to Sergeant Borsch that he was the very worst person for this job. Since the facts were sketchy and the outcome uncertain, he didn’t know what to say. The situation was gray on gray, and Gil Borsch worked best when things were black on white.

So he called his wife. However, instead of acknowledging that he really needed to talk to somebody, he convinced
himself he was doing it because she would want to know. After all, Deb was a huge fan of Sammy’s. She’d even asked Sammy to be a bridesmaid in their wedding! Never mind that Sammy had almost
ruined
the wedding with one of her daredevil escapades—that was beside the point. Deb loved her and would want to know.

Plus, he could try this breaking-the-news thing out on her.

Unfortunately, it did not go well.

Not due to Deb’s reaction.

Due to his.

Besides breaking down while breaking the news, Gil Borsch also broke the hands-free law while making the call—something he’d been quick to ticket other drivers for doing.

So after hanging up, he felt both broken up
and
dirty—worse off by far than he’d been before he’d made the call. But as awful as he felt (and as raw and red as his eyes now looked), he was already at the Cypress Street residence, and really, there was no turning back from duty. Especially since Rita and Hudson were both sitting on the porch, presumably waiting for Sammy’s postcurfew return.