Val and Brian were standing now, too. When had they stood up? Everything was blurring. They each had a hand on one of Zoe’s arms, and they were steering her toward the door. She didn’t want to cooperate. She stiffened her body, like Jonah when he refused to get dressed. Finally, Val whispered, “I love you, but stop it or you really are gonna get arrested. I’m saying this as your lawyer.”
Baldino seemed to notice Val for the first time now. He did the least subtle triple take Zoe had ever seen.
Val gave him a wide smile—god, she loved Val, she was a born blurter, too—and said, “I could show you how to get this look, if you want.”
Baldino snorted.
“Get your little friend out of here,” he told her.
Zoe let her body go slack.
There were tourists at the door, openly gawking at her. Brian cut a path through them.
“It’s all good,” he told Zoe gently.
The door swung open. She felt cold air on her face. She heard car tires hissing on the wet street. Already, she’d forgotten everything she had said to Chief Baldino. She knew she’d been loud, but had she been clear? Had she been heard? Had she told him what she’d promised Jonah?
She turned back to the chief. Brian’s head sagged. He just wanted this to be over. And it was. Almost.
“If you guys don’t go get my dad, I’m gonna go get him myself,” she told Baldino. “And then you may have two bodies to fish out of that cave, not just one.”
Val took Zoe’s car keys and escorted her to the passenger side. Zoe was still in such a cloud that Val had to help her with her seat belt.
Brian leaned in through the window.
“Let’s all just breathe for a second,” he said.
He rested against the Struggle Buggy, hands stuffed in his pockets, head tilted up at the sky.
Zoe waited for the tension of the last ten minutes to dissipate, for the wind to sweep in and break it up and turn it into rain, or something. She regained her equilibrium slowly. Everything started to come back into focus.
Brian patted the roof of the car twice in an okay-let’s-do-this sort of way. He crouched down beside Zoe’s window again.
“First, the good news,” he said.
He waved a small bag of candy—sour gummy worms, it looked like—and offered it to the girls.
“I confiscated these from my daughter this morning,” he said. When they smiled, he added, “It was a routine stop-and-frisk.”
Zoe and Val each took a handful of worms—Brian winced when he saw how many they were about to ingest—and dropped them one after the other into their mouths. The girls squirmed as the bitterness corroded their tongues.
“Thith ith horrible,” said Val.
“Weally horrible,” said Zoe.
When they’d calmed down, Brian did another one-two pat on the roof of the car.
“Can we talk for a second?” he said.
“Yeth,” said Zoe.
“Abtholutely,” said Val.
Brian cast his eyes back at the station to make sure no one on the force was milling around.
“I know the chief doesn’t seem like the world’s awesomest guy,” he said. “And I’m not going lie to you, Zoe—he is not the world’s awesomest guy. Between us, his wife is leaving him and he’s pretty torn up about it. Anyway, the point is…”
He paused, frowning.
“The point is, he’s not saying no about your dad because he’s some colossal jerk,” he continued. “He wanted to recover the body, believe me. There’s some good cave-rescue units out there. He was in touch with them.”
Brian paused again, looking tortured.
“But he was told to let it go,” he said. “Well, not told, really. I shouldn’t put it that way. He was asked to let it go.”
Zoe and Val replied simultaneously:
“By who?”
“It’s not my place to say,” said Brian. He dropped his head, like a dog that knew it had done something wrong. “I’m sorry.”
Zoe needed an answer. She made Brian look at her. Her eyes, she knew, were teary and bloodshot. Good. Let him see the kind of pain she was in.
“By who?” she said again.
Brian groaned. He swept a hand through his hair, which settled back down into an even messier formation.
“I just know I’m going to regret telling you this,” he said.
He thumped the car a final time, by way of good-bye.
“Your mother.”
Zoe slipped down in the passenger seat, her mood darkening by the second. There was a bank of black clouds approaching. It looked like the underside of a massive spaceship.
“You should call your mom,” Val said quietly.
“Yeah,” said Zoe. “But can we just sit here a second?”
“Whatever you need,” said Val. “I’ll sit here forever if you want. I’ll sit here until they tow the car to the junkyard. I’ll go in the trash compactor with you, if I have to.”
“Thank you,” said Zoe.
“I mean, I’d prefer not to go in the trash compactor,” said Val.
Zoe laughed despite herself.
“You want to hear something weird?” she said.
“Of course,” said Val. “Have we met?”
“When the cops came to ask us about Stan,” said Zoe, “I made some comment about how they were idiots and how they’d never gotten my dad’s body out of the cave. And my mom gave me this look, like, Nothing good will come from stirring all that up! Now I know why—because she told them to leave him there. Because she was glad he was gone.”