The Night My Sister Went Missing (7 page)

"For now all I can tell you is that the only blotches on it were seaweed. It had picked up some chunks under the pier. Your
Naval Academy
lettering looked pretty damn scary, like haunted-house lettering. But it was not bloody, dude."

I thought of how appropriate that was, considering my sudden qualms about the place. The thought dissolved quickly as I watched the still masts of the fifty or more sailboats docked at the club. Not a single one moved. I couldn't decide whether to ask questions or leave things be. God knows I didn't need to end up in a shoving match with Stern. He ended the silence.

"Stacy's nuts, man, buying a gun."

So much for my self-control. "So what were
you
doing passing it around, numb nuts!"

He stepped back as I stepped up to him. "Easy, Kurt. I did
not
accidentally pull the trigger, if you've got that idea in your head."

"So who did?" I exploded again.

Drew gripped my arm, blathering that she obviously wasn't at the club and we ought to leave. I'm sure he sensed what could come down, though I shook him off.

"Who brought the damn thing to the pier?" I asked.

"I did!" Stern blasted, but then lowered both his voice and his head. "But that doesn't mean I wanted to see it go off! I was over at Stacy's house earlier tonight, making small talk with the grandparents. Stacy's so rude to them these days, it's messed up. If I didn't stick my head in the door and sweet-talk them sometimes, I think they'd die of verbal abuse. It just ... happened. We were fooling around with it ... you know how these things are! She shouldn't have bought it in the first place."

His explanations irritated the hell out of me. He lived about six doors down from the DeWinters, but somehow I didn't quite picture him as having the best interests of old people in his heart. I just glared.

"I wasn't looking when it went off, man!" He held his arms out. "I had just walked away from Alisa after Stacy left us. I was gonna leave, being that I can only take so many
hours of her right now. I was taking a leak in the ticket booth first and just wasn't looking."

Barnes shook his head. "I didn't see it either, Kurt. Sorry."

I just looked back at Stern. The skin on his face was jumping all over the place.

"You look guilty," I muttered.

"I ...
feel
guilty!" Mark stammered. "Casey was ... my girlfriend!"

"What do you mean
was
?"

I shoved him hard, and suddenly Todd and Drew were in between us, in the echoes of "Take it easy..." and "Not the time or place, man..." It was just the type of slip of the tongue you'd see cops jump on during episodes of
CSI.
If somebody describes a missing girlfriend in the past tense—he tried to kill her.

Stern mewled, "I didn't mean it like that! I mean, she'll probably not want to go out with me anymore after I was passing that gun around and she took a hit! That's all!"

I watched him squirm until I couldn't stand it. "We just found out that Stacy's pregnant."

He nodded hard, like this was something he knew, though the words didn't follow quickly. "Right! So ... why would I shoot Casey? How does A relate to B?"

I couldn't quite answer that, but I wasn't ready to leave it alone, either. "Stacy was in the ticket booth with you and ... put you up to it..."I stammered one thought.

"Stacy drives a brand-new Audi, lives in a big-ass house with its own pool and tennis court! She would not be caught dead in our smelly ol' ticket booth," he said. "She'd explode first"

"You were the last known person to have the gun," I argued.

"I was not! One of Casey's friends had it, and the last I saw of it, the thing was being passed down the line. The moon went under when I had to take a leak. I have no idea where it is!"

I kept watching him as he went on adamantly, "Besides. I might feel sorry for the old people she lives with, but I don't feel sorry for Stacy. Her mood swings could draw in the tide. Breaking up with her was the best thing I've ever done! If you think Stacy had it in for your sister, why throw me into the equation? Why don't you find Stacy and see if
she
pulled the trigger?"

I didn't feel like looking for Stacy as well as my sister. I didn't feel like asking him what he was doing at Stacy's if he was going out with my sister. I was sure I'd get a runaround answer, so there was no point. "You don't sound very upset about being a father," I pointed out.

Even in light of the dull moon, I could not miss the rise in his eyebrows. "Uh ... the kid is not mine"

Typical.

"Don't laugh, man! I'm telling you the truth!" He inched closer to me. "There is no way that kid could be mine!"

I felt Drew watching him beside me, felt Drew almost
smiling, same as I almost smiled. There's some sense of weird power in getting a polecat like Stern to say in front of three guys that he hadn't worked any magic on a girl. I didn't know if I believed him—I just wanted to watch him squirm.

"So how do you
know
it's not yours?"

"Look. We all know how her mother is. Stacy's been taking lessons, obviously."

"So Stacy cheated on you," I singsonged. "With who?"

"Hey, the boyfriend is always the last to know! But if I had ever
done it
with her, I would surely know
that,
wouldn't I?"

Ahhh, gratification. A snort slid out of Drew's nostrils. But Stern's injured prowess must have been slightly less important than saving his neck, because he went on.

"And no, we didn't 'almost' do it. Stacy always told me she was terrified of a pregnancy, good Catholic that she claimed to be. If she's so devout, couldn't the church clean up her wicked mouth? She's just afraid of being known as a side dish like her old lady, that's what. If she's really knocked up, it's somebody else's. Believe me," he stammered, "I tried. I wanted to. She kept saying no."

I wondered why I hadn't put my foot down with Casey and said, "Anybody but him, you moron." Even if Stern didn't pull the trigger, he had been trying this mutt routine on my little sister and had been a big part of the gun flying around. If it wasn't for him, probably none of this would have happened.

"So ... she was saying no to you, but yes to somebody else." I just couldn't help grinding him down to size.

He just kept shaking his head and wouldn't look at me. "It's probably some guy from another island. She's probably hot to trot just like her mom. She's probably got some Joe down in Ship Bottom or Sea Isle. Maybe a bunch of Joes. She's seventeen-going-on-twenty-five, with a new Audi and a fake ID that looks so pristine, she could get into any fancy club she wanted to. And you know, for about the last month that we went out, I didn't know where she was half the nights."

The comment was interesting enough that I wanted to hear what he meant.

"I used to call her on her cell phone. She would tell me she was in the supermarket getting stuff for her mom, but I could hear all these voices in the background, and music, like a party. Guys' voices and stuff."

Drew and I said nothing. Stern continued, "And one time she told me she was at home, and clearly, I could hear her brothers yelling at each other in the background. They don't even speak to Stacy's mom or her grandparents anymore, let alone go in that house. I knew she was lying to me, so I made up some excuse, said, 'I'll call you right back on the house phone.' She was like, 'No! Don't call on the house phone!' She knew she wasn't at her mom's. So I don't know why she's such a big liar, but she is. There you have it."

I didn't know what we had. Being that Stacy's father was staying at the Ocean View—and being that her fa
ther was a general embarrassment to her mom's family—maybe she was embarrassed to say that she got a twitch one night to go see her father and brothers. It made sense in a way.

My mind was bobbing all over the place, so Drew asked the important question. "Why did Stacy buy that gun?"

"Got me." Stern spread his arms again. "She got it the last week before I broke up with her. She showed it to me and said, 'Look at this little thing! Isn't it cute?' It was wrapped in a handkerchief, and when she unfolded the handkerchief, my eyeballs almost flew out of my head. I held it. I couldn't help it. But I didn't ask anything, like where she got it, or how, or how come."

"Why not?" Drew asked in irritation.

Stern squirmed again. "I guess because ... I knew I wouldn't get a straight answer. When did you ever get a straight answer out of Stacy?"

I felt that for once Stern had nailed down a truth. Maybe that was why Stacy could make you so jumpy. She could laugh and joke and threaten and entertain thoroughly in a crowd. But she never
talked
about anything. She never said how she
felt
about anything. That's when a friend really becomes a friend—when they talk to you about something important to either you or them. Stacy acted like she didn't have problems, or when she did, they surely were not worth discussing. It was all chatter with her—sometimes fun, sometimes mean and hard to take, but rarely serious.

"I mean ... I was the boyfriend. I was closer to her than
anybody, save Alisa.
Maybe.
If there's anything in there"—he knocked on his head—"besides icicles and nails, I never saw it."

But he was overstating his case.

"There's something else 'in there.'" I burst past them and walked down to the end of the dock, staring into the condo lights on the far side of the cove, watching the masts of the boats docked there, despite the fact they all belonged to summer people we didn't know.

"What, you're gonna defend her
now?
" Stern laughed uneasily into my back as they shuffled up beside me. I almost turned and slugged him. I didn't remember seeing Stacy with that gun at all on the pier, but I'd seen him with it plenty. I wanted to kick her for buying the stupid thing, but kill him for passing it around with so much mouth.

"Remember when Casey broke her neck and had to start high school in a halo?" I asked instead.

Nobody answered, which smacked of "If you can't say something nice about a guy's sister, don't say anything."

"I thought even my mom would go hoarse lecturing her on being vain and insecure, and how she ought to count her blessings she wasn't starting high school in a wheelchair instead. None of it did much good. Casey was so impossible that I would leave the living room as soon as she came in. Her girlfriends quit calling. Stacy wasn't too friendly with her at that point, because Casey hadn't gone to high school yet. But she was there, like, so many nights. And the morn
ing before school started, she fixed up Casey's hair somehow and fixed her up with makeup..."

Everyone stayed quiet. I had never bothered thanking Stacy. Some things are just between girls. But coming for Casey on the first day of school must have had all the appeal of crawling through a briar patch. I heard a laugh and realized it was mine. "I mean ... most of the time, Stacy was doing her Stacy routine. You know—'Casey, shut the fuck up before I shove this mascara tube up your nostril...,' 'Listening to you whine is as fun as drinking dish soap—get over yourself before I puke on your shoe ...' La-la-la."

"See? She's a troll!" Stern said, and I wondered if he brought a new depth to the meaning of
idiot.

Drew mumbled down at our feet, "Proverbs twenty-six four," which is this very cool saying that we both like: "Don't answer a fool in his folly, lest you become like him."

I let Stern rant on a little. "You want some motive, Carmody? Maybe I've got some. I'm not saying for sure, but tonight when I was at her house? Stacy asked me to go back with her."

I turned as slowly as possible, considering this was news to me.

Mark shrugged. "I said no ... I was with Casey now."

"Did she get mad?" Drew asked.

"Yeah. I mean ... no. I mean, she's, like, the mystery bitch. Hard to read. She started laughing in that evil way of hers, and right in the middle of it, she started crying. So she
was, like, laughing and crying. And then she says to me, 'Forget I ever asked that. I don't know what comes over me sometimes...,' as if she suddenly 'remembered' she was too good for me. She was
always
acting too good. Even when we went out. It got on my nerves totally. I stuck around, thinking I would finally get a piece, but I didn't even get that"

"All right, let's just go." Drew jerked on my arm before giving me time to contemplate a new definition for the term "fucking pig." Stern didn't seem to realize I'd apply his little philosophies to my own sister. "Let's leave conversations like this to the cops! They'll analyze the sweatshirt for evidence. They'll order a paternity test!"

Drew kind of spit all that over his shoulder as he pulled me along, and I heard Stern say, "Go ahead! They can order anything they want...,"then I was glad to be out of earshot of his donkey voice.

"Let's go to the beach," I muttered to Drew.

"As soon as a cop sees you, they'll have someone drive you right back down to the station. In fact, they're going to notice you're missing any second and send a car out to—" Drew stopped dead at the same time I did, seeing someone in a hooded white sweatshirt, sitting on the front steps of the yacht club. The place was closed and dark, but the white sweatshirt almost glowed. I forgot for a moment that they had found my sweatshirt, and I tore over going, "Casey?"

I was within five feet when I heard "Not Casey," coming from the girl. Her hood was up. She pulled on her earlobe and said, "Sounds like..."

Charades. Casey sounds like ... I remembered, disappointed and annoyed, that Stacy had been wearing a white hooded sweatshirt tonight, also.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

After a moment she stood up, not pulling the hood down. "Same thing you are."

Her face caught the glow of the moonlight. If anyone found Stacy Kearney beautiful, it was probably due to the fact that she was tall and thin and had nice blond streaks in her hair. There was nothing much to notice about her face. She had a thin line of a mouth that widened into a smile for her ornery moments, but her eyes never laughed. You'd be hard-pressed to say what color they were. But now there was some strange softness behind their hardness.