Last Seen Leaving (9 page)

Reiko stabbed a finger at my chest. “You were never around for January when she needed you.
Never
. You made her go to parties full of strangers all by herself because
you
didn't want to hang out with anyone from Dumas; she was the only person at that dance without a date, and she was so miserable she could barely smile in the pictures—”

“
What dance?
” I was shouting now, my voice rebounding loudly off the tiled corridor, and Reiko flinched.

“The charity dance,” she repeated stiffly, and seeing that I needed more than that, she rolled her eyes. “The dance the Dumas Philanthropic Society puts on every year?” I was still looking at her blankly, so she huffily explained, “You buy tickets to attend, and all the proceeds go to a worthy cause, and everybody gets all dressed up, and it is literally
the
biggest social event of every single fall semester, and
your girlfriend
had to go
by herself
because you ‘don't do dances'!”

She delivered the last bit with a remarkable amount of mocking sarcasm, and I assumed it to be a direct citation. It took me a moment to answer her, though, because the words conjured up no memories whatsoever. No conversation January and I had ever had came back to me at that prompt. Mystified, I put up my hands. “I may not be crazy about dances, but I would've gone if January had asked me. This is the first I'm even hearing about it.”

“She said she
did
ask you, and you told her you weren't interested.”

“She never invited me to anything at Dumas,” I insisted. I don't know why, but all of a sudden it was really important to me that I repair my image in the eyes of this girl. “She told me that
she
didn't even want to go to those things, that her stepdad forced her, so why would she make me go with her? I mean, when even
was
this ‘big dance'?”

Reiko was staring at me with naked suspicion, but she grudgingly answered the question. “Three weeks ago, Saturday.”

“The day you picked up January's final paycheck together.” I lifted a brow.

The girl shrugged uncomfortably. “Yeah. She wanted someone to go with her. I told her it was a bad idea to quit her job, but she wouldn't listen to me.”

“Why did she quit?”

“I don't know. Maybe because of you,” she shot back, her expression once more frigid and hard as an iceberg.

“Boy, I sure can't wait to hear where you're going with this.”

“Well, you made her quit the play, so who knows what else you made her—”

“What do you mean she quit the play?” My head was starting to spin. It was like we were speaking two different languages that only sounded sort of similar. “She's been going to these rehearsals every day after school since almost the beginning of the year!”

Reiko cocked her head and stared at me like I was the crazy one. “No, she quit after the dance. She said you were giving her all this crap about how she was always busy with school stuff, and how she wasn't spending enough time with you! Once again, your great, big whiny needs came before—”

“I didn't say jackshit to her about the play, or about any of her other time commitments,” I exclaimed heatedly, “and if she quit, she never told me anything about it! Two weeks ago, she was still blowing me off for rehearsals!”

Reiko was adamant. “No. No! She quit
for you
. We had plans for the Saturday before last, and January blew
me
off because
you
needed her to come watch you pop a wheelie on your skateboard or some dumbass thing like that.”

“I've barely seen January since September, and ten days ago, she dumped me! So we didn't do
anything
together that Saturday,” I declared firmly, deciding not to correct Reiko's egregious misunderstanding of what one does on a skateboard.

“She broke up with you?” The girl made a face. My announcement had disrupted the momentum of our argument, and for a long moment we just eyed each other in wary silence. Finally, Reiko ended the standoff with a noise somewhere between a sigh and a snort, her anger seeming to subside into irritable pensiveness. “Wow. So maybe she was planning it all along.”

“Planning what?” I asked, bewildered, and Reiko huffed like I was an idiot.

“To run away!” She thrust both hands into the air, as if to say
Ta-da!
“January quit her job, she dropped out of the drama club, she broke up with your sorry ass … I mean, it kinda sounds like she was cutting all her ties, doesn't it?”

When she put it that way, that kind of
was
what it sounded like … but I wasn't sure it constituted proof beyond reasonable doubt. “Why, though? I get that she was unhappy, I even get that I wasn't always a great boyfriend, but January was a fighter, not a quitter. Something must have happened to make her do all this stuff—bail on her friends and her job and the play, and then lie about it all. What?”

Reiko's mouth twisted up in a frown, and her eyes wouldn't quite meet mine. A few seconds too late to sound convincing, she muttered, “I don't know.”

I tensed. “Reiko? What happened?”

“There's nothing I can tell you,” she returned evasively.

“What does that mean?” I demanded. “If you know something that might help the police figure out what happened to her, you have to say something.”

“I
can't
—there are
rules
!” she shouted, and then clamped her lips together as if she'd just said something she shouldn't have.

“What are you talking about? What rules?”

Reiko dragged her hands through her hair, turned to leave, and then swung back around. “Look, January was surrounded by people who always let her down, and I won't turn into one of them. Anything I know, she told me in absolute confidence, and I will not betray that. If she doesn't want to be found, I'm sure as hell not going to drop a dime on her—and I'm also not about to blab her secrets to people she didn't trust with them!”

Turning her back on me once again, Reiko yanked open the backstage door and disappeared into the darkness of the stage-right wing. The door slammed shut behind her, and when the ripples of the echo had died away, I was left with one frightening question to which I would get no answer:
But what if January hadn't run away after all?

 

EIGHT

IT WASN'T AN
easy night. Reiko seemed to have been convinced that my ex-girlfriend was a runaway, but the point she'd made about January having cut all her ties wasn't particularly comforting. That kind of tidying up of loose ends was the sort of thing people did when they were preparing to shuffle off the old mortal coil—and hadn't that been the very first conclusion the detectives had implied when they'd come to my house? I still wanted to believe January had run away, but I didn't know what to think anymore. Things I'd thought I'd known about my girlfriend were suddenly coming into question, and it was making me insecure.

I didn't know how to process what I'd learned over the past few days, and the worst part was that I couldn't even confront January for an explanation. Why had she said I was never there for her, when the truth was that
she
had been the one pulling away from me?
I'm also not about to blab her secrets to people she didn't trust with them!
What did January feel she couldn't trust me with? Aside from the one significant issue in our relationship, what had I ever done to make her feel that she couldn't count on me?

She was one of the most important people in my life and had been since the start of freshman year; even if I'd bungled things by hoping I could make a romance work between us—and by panicking when I started to realize I couldn't—I still loved her in a very real way. I still wanted to be someone she could count on. Why hadn't she? And what else didn't I know about her?

On Tuesday morning, with January gone for almost a week, my mom called the school office and told them I would be out that day. A volunteer search party had been organized to comb the fields and wilderness that abounded in Superior Charter Township, and I had argued with my parents until they agreed to let me take part. A couple of church groups had spent the weekend tramping through the woods surrounding Dumas, the police had covertly dragged sections of the Huron River—the waterway that coiled through the center of town—and university students had canvased the Arb, a 123-acre arboretum near the center of campus. Not a trace of my ex-girlfriend had been found.

I had a lot of unresolved feelings about January—guilt, of course, and now a growing amount of confusion and anger as I learned of the way she had portrayed me to people who had nothing else to believe but her word—but the truth was that I missed her. I missed the nights we spent sharing popcorn and ice cream while watching old movies; I missed the IMs we sent back and forth nonstop during our conveniently simultaneous computer labs; and I missed the way she always had the perfect quip on the end of her tongue, an ability to skewer a moment so accurately that you couldn't believe it hadn't been scripted. I missed my best friend.

Even if January did return out of the blue, I knew we couldn't go back to the way things once were—but I couldn't just let things end the way they had, either. At the very least, I needed her to know that I was sorry about that stupid fight, about any hurt I'd caused her because I wasn't able to be honest with myself about what I really wanted.
Then
we could get into the issue of
her
dishonesty.

On his way to work, my dad dropped me off at January's new house. A gigantic campaign sign reading
WALKER FOR SENATE
greeted us as we left the road and made our way down a long, curving drive that wended through topiary on its way to the hopeful candidate's five-car garage. My ex-girlfriend's home was a colossal mansion of brick and stone, with four gables, three chimneys, and two enormous second-floor balconies. The elevated porch, complete with a low rail of carved stone, bowed gently to echo the shape of a massive fountain-slash-koi pond in the front courtyard. Harmon and Eugenia Davenport would have eaten their hearts out.

An impressive group of people had already gathered outside, including at least one TV news crew, and as I joined the crowd I looked around for familiar faces. There weren't many. Aside from January's parents and a handful of Jonathan Walker's stuffy political friends, the only adult I recognized was Mrs. Hughes, Tiana's mother. There was only one other volunteer from my own age group and, of course, it was Fucking Kaz. It was freezing out and I had a beanie pulled down over my ears, but Kaz—in a wool peacoat and Burberry scarf—had left his perfectly styled hair open to the elements. Without a trace of bitterness, I silently hoped he got frostbite and lost his ears.

He noticed me almost as soon as I arrived, but instead of turning the other way, he actually waved at me, trying to get my attention like we were old friends or something. I ignored him, pushing ahead to the front of the crowd, and mounted one of the two sets of stone steps that converged on the stagelike porch. January's parents were standing there, attended by Detective Moses and Mr. Walker's campaign manager, Eddie Sward. Detective Moses was scanning the crowd and speaking into a walkie-talkie, while Mr. and Mrs. Walker did a lousy job of pretending to look interested in the words of an older man I didn't recognize.

I'd never exactly hit it off with January's stepfather. It wasn't that we'd argued or anything, more that he'd never seemed to consider me much worth relating to. When I would come over to see January, he would give me a perfunctory handshake, ask me a perfunctory question about my classes, and then excuse himself to take a phone call. I'd never heard him make a joke or laugh out loud—not a genuine laugh, anyway—and I didn't think I'd ever seen him without a necktie, either. His graying hair was combed back from his aristocratic face, and his expression was distant, like he was only vaguely disturbed by the weeklong, unexplained absence of his stepdaughter. He hadn't forgotten to affix a campaign button to the lapel of his trench coat, I noticed, and was clearly aware of the television cameras despite his attempts to appear oblivious.

In contrast, January's mother looked like a wreck. She'd lost some weight when she and Mr. Walker became serious as a couple, jumping quickly on board the latest diet and exercise trends that were being promoted on talk shows for Women of a Certain Age, but she'd lost even more since the last time I'd seen her. Her face was gaunt, her eyes puffy and uncertain, and her long fingers fiddled relentlessly with a strand of pearls at her throat. She wore an off-white pantsuit under an off-white jacket, her off-white hair pulled back in a tight French twist, and she looked startlingly like her own ghost.

“She's just a remarkable girl, so lovely,” the older man was saying to them in a strangely mannered voice, as if he were reciting something he'd committed to memory. He was balding, with a white beard and rimless glasses, and gave off a professorial air. “I told her she was too pretty to be wasting her time behind the scenes—she ought to have been in the spotlight, I told her—but she was reluctant. Her modesty was quite becoming, as a matter of fact.”

“Thank you, that's very kind,” Jonathan Walker murmured with a clenched jaw, shifting slightly to be in better view of the cameras.

“She was quite engaging, January,” the man went on earnestly, “she—”

“Flynn!” Tammy Walker caught sight of me, and her face lit up like a Christmas tree, genuine happiness splitting through a layer of grief, and the contrast was heartbreaking. “Flynn, I can't believe you came!”

“Hi, Mrs. Walker, Mr. Walker,” I mumbled awkwardly as January's mother beckoned me into their uncomfortable little circle. Mr. Walker gave me the perfunctory handshake and a gruff, monosyllabic greeting, but Mrs. Walker dragged me into an intense, angular bear hug, her breath ragged and hot against my neck.