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  “On my way,” Paulie says.

  “What, no IHOP?” his father says as Paulie pulls into the parking lot at Two-7, a local sports bar with a varied menu. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Getting you some culture,” Paulie says.

  They sit in the family section and order. The waiter brings a Coke and a microbrew, gives them time to go over the menu.

  “So what’s going on?”

  He shows his father Mary’s text and translates it.

  “Wow.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You call her parents.”

  “I did. No answer.”

  His dad stares at the message. “I wouldn’t know where to go with this,” he says. “No answer. You think maybe her parents are forcing her into rehab?”

  “I don’t think so. But she disappeared before. Isn’t it all strange enough to—”

  “Tell you what, let’s run by their place and look for lights. If her parents are home and Mary’s not, they can decide what to do. Victor Wells has enough mojo to get the cops looking again.”

  They wolf down their meals while Paulie tells his dad everything he knows and most of what he’s afraid of, then take the long way back to the hotel, past the darkened Wells mansion. “Nobody home,” Paulie’s dad says. “Do they have a vacation home? Can’t believe a guy with his kind of dough wouldn’t. I wish the text had said more, ‘kidnapped by my parents’ or something.”

  Paulie drives back to the hotel parking lot, a sinking feeling engulfing him. “Dad, Mary flips around a lot, like from pretty sane to really crazy, but she wouldn’t send a message like that unless something was really wrong.”

  “You say you don’t think it’s rehab but anyone who gets on oxys once can get sucked back in,” his father says. “You said yourself this girl is a completely different kid than you’ve known. Let’s not overreact. I’m willing to bet this clears itself up by tomorrow. Statistically the worst-case scenario doesn’t usually play out, you know that. I’m betting you hear from her again soon and all this will make sense. But you call me if you think I can help.”

  Paulie brakes in front of his dad’s room. “Thanks, Dad.” He leans over and gives him a quick, uncomfortable hug. “By the way, what’s the latest on your imminent return?”

  “Not so imminent,” his dad says. “I think maybe you were right: your mom’s had enough. I’m moving out of here in a week and getting into something semi-permanent.”

  Paulie watches him get out of the car, rolls down the window as he closes the door. “Whatever happens,” he says, “you’re still my dad. I just want you guys to stop killing each other.”

  Roger Baum grimaces. “And you,” he says. “Listen, you let the so-called adults handle this. Your mother promised she’d quit running her grief past you and I’ll make sure none of it lands on you from my end, okay? You just get your ass out of school and on to the next thing. Mary will turn up.”

  Paulie nods.

  “And one more thing. Whatever happened with Hannah, happened. It doesn’t mean you’re like me, okay? I love your mom, and she loves me, but we never should have gotten married. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have known my weaknesses would take us down. You don’t have those weaknesses. I sometimes wonder if you’re really my kid.”

  Paulie nods again. “Thanks, Dad. Love you.”

  “Back atcha. And by the way, you’re the reason whatever our marriage has turned into was worth it.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Logs stands in his doorway in his sweats at 10 PM staring at the text on Paulie’s iPhone.

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you showed this to anyone else?”

  “My dad. His thinks it’s family related, that the cops wouldn’t do anything without the parents reporting it.”

  “Mary has never had a flair for the dramatic, that I know of,” Logs says, reading the text again. “No offense to your dad, but I’d rather err on the side of caution. We need someone else’s eyes on this. First thing in the morning I’ll get Wells’s cell number from the front office and see if I can locate him. If Mary’s with him, that’s cool, but this doesn’t feel right.”

  “I know. What scares me is, remember how Hannah said Mary was on something that night on the road? Mary told me it was oxys.”

  Logs grimaces. “That’s a pretty addictive drug.”

  “She said she only used it once.”

  “There are drugs that would make a liar out of you and oxycodone is one of them,” Logs says, “but let’s not jump to conclusions. What we have is a text from Mary Wells and the word ‘danger.’”

  “You think she’s mixed up with drug guys?” Paulie says.

  “Let me get dressed and we’ll run down and do an FYI with the city cops, just to get it on the record.”

  “Cops just going to think we’re, like, alarmists?”

  “Probably, but what’s to lose? More than likely the Wellses will come home and what we don’t know now, we’ll know then. I just hope Mary is with them.”

  .14

  “Officer Rankin.”

  John Rankin stares at an unfamiliar face. “Do I know you?”

  “Bruce Logsdon. I teach at the high school. We met at ‘Dragnet in the Park.’”

  “Ah, yes sir. What can I do for you?”

  “The guy at the desk said you were the person to talk to about things ‘Wells related.’”

  “True,” Rankin says. “Why, did something come up? I’m technically off duty. Strictly day shift. I was logging some overtime; catching up on paperwork.”

  “I know the feeling,” Logs says. “This won’t take long, and it’ll probably seem frivolous, but my friend Mr. Baum here got a disturbing text message from the Wells girl, on the heels of her being absent again.”

  Rankin perks up. “Really?”

  Logs nods at Paulie. “Show him.”

  Rankin takes his time reading the message. Paulie translates.

  “I understand this doesn’t rise to the level that would bring action by you guys,” Logs says, “but it seemed like a good idea to get it on the record in case it turns into something.”

  “Good idea,” Rankin says. “Do me a favor and forward it to my cell and I’ll write it down when I get a chance.” He gives Paulie his number. “You were smart to bring it.”

  They’re walking back toward the car when Officer Rankin hollers, “Wait.”

  They turn in unison.

  “It’s probably a good idea to keep the text to yourself,” Rankin says. “I mean, don’t even tell your friends for now, Paulie. I doubt there’s been foul play—there seems to be a lot of parent-child conflict in that house—but on the off chance that this turns into evidence, the fewer people know about it the better.” He smiles. “One of those ‘pieces of information not generally known.’ You good with that?”

  “It makes sense,” Logs says. He turns to Paulie. “You keep this between us?”

  “Sure,” Paulie says. “No sweat.”

  “We’ve done what we can do,” Logs says to Paulie as they get back into his car in front of the police station.

  “Man,” Paulie says, “Mary’s dad has his own private police officer. Everything ‘Wells related’?”

  “Small town, big money I guess,” Logs says.

  Frank’s Diner is a block ahead. “You wanna grab something real quick?” Logs asks.

  They pull into the nearly empty parking lot and sit a moment.

  “My crazy brain is telling me one thing,” Paulie says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Arney Stack is in this somehow.”

  Logs motions for them to go inside. “How so?”

  They walk in and sit at the deserted counter. A young man, probably college age, runs a wet rag over it. Dim light reveals an empty room. Both order shakes; chocolate for Paulie, vanilla for Logs.

  “Three different times lately he’s given me bullshit, like exactly opposite of what’s true when there was no reason for it. Like he was lying just
to see if he could. When I caught him he gave me more bullshit.”

  Paulie tells Logs about his conversation with Justin earlier in the day, then about how he’d asked Arney to take Mary home the night of his big screwup—no pun intended—and how Arney lied about going to meet the Thumpers. “Either he was going someplace he didn’t want me to know about or he was, like, setting me up with Mary for some stupid reason, and that seriously doesn’t make sense. He’d said he was spending time with her, but then he gives me some crap excuse why he can’t take her home.”

  Logs frowns.

  “I know Mary isn’t telling me everything,” Paulie says. “I’ve tried to call her on it, but she just plays dumb. She’s like this hurt little kid one minute and then like a . . . I don’t know, a fucking vampire. And I ain’t talking Twilight. I don’t know. It’s crazy; there’s no reason for anything.”

  “Or one you don’t see.”

  “Yeah, that. And fucking Stack has his hand in everything. He tells me it was Hannah’s idea to start hanging out with him. I can’t prove it, but no fucking way. That’s not Hannah. She might rub my face in it, letting me see her with him if he went to her, but no way she sets it up.”

  The shakes are placed in front of them. “Thanks, man,” Paulie says to the kid behind the counter. “I could drink five of these a day,” he says to Logs.

  Logs lays his straw on the counter and drinks directly from the glass. “Keep going.”

  “Okay. Back when Mary first ‘went missing,’ Arney tells us he knows Mary better than anyone, that she’ll be back and okay, wouldn’t screw up her scholarship. When I asked her if she has any kind of relationship with him, she says, ‘Yeah, I hate his guts.’ Doesn’t go into it, like every other goddamn thing. He tells us Mary’s old man is a cool guy if you just get to know him—not scared of him at all. Turns out Mr. Wells knows him as some community service partner for Mary. Period. I mean, why’s Arney even bringing her up? Who gives a shit if he knows her better than the rest of us? He had to be wondering the same things we were wondering when she showed up missing.” He takes a sip of his shake. “I guess you can’t show up missing, but you know what I mean.”

  “I do.”

  “Then,” says Paulie, “according to Justin and Tak, he and Hannah show up on the other side of Diamond Lake, where Justin and some of his crew were smok—studying, and goes into this rant about girls with no core. Even takes a shot at Hannah. Gets so nasty, Hannah won’t ride home with him. One of his ‘no core’ girls was Mary. Another one was Kylie.”

  “No core?” Logs says.

  “Yeah, like they need somebody else to tell them who they are.”

  Logs sits a moment, considering. “What else?”

  “I sure don’t buy his plea for world peace in P-8. Gives us all that crap about his legacy as ASB prez. ‘We gotta take care of each other.’ Then he talks this shit about Mary and Kylie. Then there’s his big business deal.”

  “I guess I don’t know about that.”

  “Supposedly his old man gave him a bundle to invest. Hooked him up with some business guys downtown and bankrolled him big enough to make it worth their while. Arney says his dad wants him to know how to handle real money.”

  “You think that’s related?”

  “I don’t know that any of this is related,” Paulie says as they head back to the car. “I just know I have the same gut feeling about all of it. Shit, it’s probably just the feeling I have about Arney since he started hanging out with Hannah.”

  Logs watches Paulie struggle with it. If all this is related, there are some really loose strings.

  “Anyway,” Paulie says, “stuff either makes sense or it doesn’t, and since the night I cheated on Hannah, a hell of a lot more doesn’t than does. I know I’m obsessed, so it’s all running together, but . . . wanna hear something really crazy?”

  Logs laughs. “Don’t stop now.”

  “I was looking back on the night I messed up, when Mary asked me to dance.”

  “And . . .”

  “I swear, there was this look on Arney’s face when she asked me. It was like he sicced her on me. Then the day you and I saw her up at the lake; that day she came back, she said there were things she couldn’t tell me. ‘Awful things,’ she said. I thought she was talking about her dad, but now I’m not so sure. Arney . . .”

  “You think Arney is actually involved in Mary’s disappearance.”

  “Couldn’t be, right?” Paulie says. “He’s a fucking kid, like me.”

  “I think you’re probably pissed at him, Paulie, but some of this stuff is easy to check out,” Logs says. “Tomorrow I’ll see if I can track Mr. Wells down and find out if he knows where Mary is. We’ll go from there. Until then, there’s nothing to do if you don’t get more messages from Mary, so why don’t you go home and try to get some sleep.”

  “Because I have to go home and get at least one paragraph down on my senior thesis, or I’m going to be stuck in this hellhole without you.”

  Logs puts his hand on Paulie’s head. “Go forth and write as if your life depended on it, grasshopper, because it does. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”

  Draft V

  What do you do when you know your brain isn’t developed enough to do the right thing? Brain scientists tell us the adolescent brain isn’t quite “cooked” yet. The evolution of the individual follows the pattern of the evolution of the species. The emotional brain—the instinctive brain—has been fully evolved in those species in line to turn into humans for millions of years. The rational brain—evident only in humans—has been evolved for, in relative terms, a blink of an eye. (Medina; Brain Rules). The development of the individual brain follows that same pattern. The emotional aspect is fully formed at an early age, but the rational aspect doesn’t become fully developed until the early to mid-twenties (Medina; Brain Rules). Which accounts for why teenagers often do what seems like some spectacularly stupid shit.

  But to say that the rational brain isn’t fully developed in adolescence isn’t to say that it isn’t almost there. The more we know about where that development is headed, the better chance we have of making better, more adultlike decisions.

  (Okay, that’s further than I’ve gotten before. Taking my partially developed brain to bed.)

  Paulie hits the light and lays his head back on his pillow, staring out his bedroom window at a starry, moonless night, imagining being Bruce Logsdon on that day toward the end of 1968 when he first saw a photograph of our blue ball hanging in the void of space, and all that couldn’t be seen from that distance. His mind drifts toward semiconsciousness when suddenly Mary’s face flashes before him. What if she’s out there in some tortuous situation and can’t call for help? What if her last text ever was to his phone? Was she suicidal? “Might not make it back” could mean a lot of things. sory I got u into this. What? What did she get him into? And what is the danger? His imagination is driving him crazy. The one person he’d give anything to talk to has nothing for him but contempt. Truth be told, as angry and hurt and disappointed as he’s been, he’d do anything to make up with her.

  Logs rolls into the school parking lot an hour early and lets himself into the main office, determined to clear up as much of the Mary Wells mystery as he can. He brings up the Wellses’ numbers on the office computer: home and cells for Mom, Dad, and Mary, noticing that Mary’s number does not correspond to the one that popped up on Paulie’s phone last night. He slips a note under Dr. Johannsen’s door: Please call my room ASAP. Logs

  He walks through the breezeway, into the math/science department foyer and toward his room, lost in thought.

  “Hey, Mr. Logs.”

  He looks up to see Hannah Murphy on the carpeted hallway floor next to his door, writing in a notebook and texting.

  “Hannah. You’re early.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Been here awhile, huh?” Logs glances around the empty foyer. “How’d you get in?”

  “Mr. Branson was
just finishing up in your office.”

  “Well, since you’re sitting next to my door, I’m guessing you want to talk with me.”

  “This is why you’re my favorite teacher. You’re so smart.”

  Logs unlocks his door and they go inside. “What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Logs, I think I might have made a big mistake.”

  “Tell me.”

  “With Paulie.”

  Logs’s eyebrows go up involuntarily.

  “You think so, too.”

  “Look, Hannah, I love you both, I do. And I’ll be honest: I used to think there weren’t two kids more perfect for each other. But life ain’t predictable and things happen. We all have to figure out how to negotiate them.”

  “I was being a bitch hanging out with Arney.”

  “Your words, but I know.”

  “I can’t tell you how stupid that was.”

  Logs smiles. “You don’t have to.”

  Hannah takes a deep breath. “Actually that’s not why I’m here—the stuff with me and Paulie, I mean. I can deal with that.”

  Logs waits.

  “It’s Arney.”

  “What about him?”

  “I told him I’d go out to his family cabin last weekend to help get it ready for summer. I thought it would be nice to just get away, and he and I had been getting along okay. Like friends.” She looks at her feet. “And I guess I wanted Paulie to think we went there for a different reason.”

  Logs’s face is expressionless. It’s not his job to judge, but he’s had a trace of ill will toward Hannah for choosing Arney of all people to rub Paulie’s nose in. Not that Paulie didn’t have it coming. . . .

  “I know, I know. Like I said, I was being a bitch. At any rate, Arney seemed cool enough, but he was saying things about Paulie that couldn’t be true.”

  “Such as.”

  “Mr. Logs, something’s seriously wrong with Arney.”

  “Did he get out of line?”

  Hannah laughs. “You think there has to be something wrong with a guy to make a move on me?”

  “I meant . . .”

  “I know. Yeah, he made a move, but I expected that and it wasn’t going to happen. But we had a few beers and he got into this fancy scotch his dad keeps hidden up there, and he said some things . . . he was like, hateful.”