They don’t notice the sound of Claude’s Docs on the floor. “Fuck off,” she hisses. They stare at her in openmouthed amazement for a moment. Then they fuck off. Their laughter erupts behind her, but she doesn’t care about them. One long finger touches a cream envelope with Emma’s name written neatly in blue pen. For a moment Claude lingers at the envelope’s flap—then she turns her attention to the locker itself.
The inside of the locker would be neat, except for the notes that have been shoved through the slats. More you were the greatests from people who’ve only known Emma as “that girl.” People are scrambling for even the smallest excuses to say they knew her. A couple of notebooks lean against one side of the locker.
Claude’s eyes narrow at the sight of the notebooks, but they’re not what she’s looking for. She pulls a nail file out of her pocket. Sliding it into a crack at the bottom of the locker, she jiggles the nail file, then again. The bottom pops up with a soft sound. Reaching in, her hands curl around something. She pulls out a battered iPhone. One eyebrow arches. She drops the phone into her bag and reaches back into the secret compartment. She rummages until she hears a crinkle. Her expression twists in satisfaction.
Claude pulls out a bag of tiny white pills. It goes into the messenger bag, too. Then she slides the false bottom back into place with a click.
A muffled “thanks” from the conversation around the corner makes her leap back. She spins on her heel, takes a few trotting steps, and when she’s out of sight, she stops and straightens her clothes.
Claude doesn’t go to class. She goes straight to her car.
The Vanderly home is a little two-story box tucked on the “wrong side” of the mountain, the side that was developed during the mining days. The Vanderly women have lived there since time immemorial, which means the cabin is half Grandma’s attic, half hectic-lawyer single mom. A cuckoo clock sits on the wall next to pictures of the Vanderly family from four generations back. Ms. Vanderly’s law diploma is crammed among them. A high shelf running around the living room wall holds a ceramic angel collection that props up vinyl records Claude and her mom rescued from flea markets and estate sales.
Claude and Mom sit at a rickety wooden table covered in bills, newspaper pages, and junk mail, eating Red Runner takeout. Mom’s eyes sag from fatigue. A pile of notebooks—math, history, psychology—sits in in front of the third chair, as though obscuring it from view.
“Lily Fransen’s case got dismissed,” Mom says.
Claude drops her burger in disgust. “What the fuck.”
“Statute of limitations was past.”
“Yeah, because she was younger than me when it happened.” Claude rubs at her eye, then looks down at her uneaten food.
Mom puts a hand on her arm. “I thought life would be easier for you than it was for me. That the world would change faster. But all we have now is smear campaigns and interviews and . . . dead girls.” She raises an eyebrow, but Claude doesn’t look up. “Want to tell me what happened?”
Claude shrugs. “They asked me where I was last night. They asked me if I knew her, they asked me what I did between yesterday and today. Then they pulled me back in around lunch and asked everything all over again.”
“What did you tell them?”
Claude sighs. Her burger bun sags with too much ketchup, and a pickle falls out as she lifts it again. “I don’t need the third degree from you, too.”
A line appears between Mom’s eyes, but a moment later it’s smoothed out, and she’s all sympathy. “I don’t want them targeting you.” They both know how easy it would be. The school slut could have gotten into a fight with Emma over a boy. The school vandal could have taken a prank too far. The school delinquent could have been one step from psychotic the whole time. Claude happens to be all three of those.
Claude nods grudgingly and takes another bite of the burger, washing it down with orange juice. “I told them the truth.”
“The whole truth?”
Claude puts the burger down and looks her mother right in the eye.
They wait. The silence turns cold and brittle.
The door rattles as someone hammers on the other side. Mom’s face flushes. She glances at Claude; Claude shakes her head. It’s eight in the evening and they’re not accustomed to uninvited guests.
The Vanderly household abhors guns, but as Mom slides toward the door on the balls of her feet, she grabs a baseball bat from where it rests against the balding couch.
The pounding comes again. “Open up! Police!”
Mom’s apprehension coalesces into cold anger. She unlocks the door. “There’s no need to break down my door. What can I help you with, sirs?”
The cop all but punches her in the face with the paper, brandished like a talisman. But he drops it when he sees Ms. Vanderly’s sharp cheeks and wide brown eyes, the curly mane of hair. He tries not to stare at the triangle of skin exposed by the unbuttoned collar of her dress shirt. His face softens a bit. Men have a tendency to go gooey around her. “Sorry, ma’am. But we have a warrant to search the premises.”
“What?” But Mom has no choice. She steps aside and allows a team of three to shove past her. The last cop has a German shepherd on a leash. “How did you get that? You can’t come in here and implicate my daughter, just because you don’t have any real evidence—”
No one’s listening, least of all Claude. The moment she sees the German shepherd, she springs from the table and leaps for the living room, where her bag is tucked against the couch. The nearest cop scoops it up, putting out a hand to keep Claude at bay. He turns the bag over and dumps its contents on the floor.
“If you’re going to riffle through our lives, the least you can do is treat my child’s belongings with re . . . spect. . . .” Mom’s voice peters out as the cop leans down and pulls a plastic bag from the mess. The German shepherd barks.
The pills are white, small, round. Not terribly interesting. The cop hands them off and leans down again, pulling a phone from the chaos of notes and pens and open candy wrappers. “This yours?”
He looks past her to where two phones sit on the table.
With a gloved hand he activates the lock screen. The photo is of a girl, smiling. A girl with ice-blond hair cut close to her chin. A girl who’s gone with the current.
The world rushes through Claude, dragging her down, stealing her breath. She hears the cop muttering the usual “You have the right to remain silent . . .” but his voice is lost in the river of noise—the bark of the dog, the shouts of the cops, the click of the handcuffs as they slide around her wrist.
And standing in the middle, silent, the rock around which the noise froths—Ms. Vanderly, staring. Shocked into a rare loss of words.
It doesn’t last. She swallows, and her voice comes back, louder than the rest, cutting through the cacophony. “Don’t say anything, Claude. Anything. We’re getting a lawyer. Do you understand? Don’t say anything.”
And then Claude’s mother is lost, left behind, as the current sweeps downstream.
THE LORNE EXAMINER ONLINE
Thursday, December 6, 2018, 7:00 P.M.
Missing Persons Case Officially Declared Murder