Jex Malone Read online

  “Of course,” I respond. “The good old saliva test. Do it all the time.

  “Nat, aren’t you hot?” I ask. Maybe I can distract her from the case file and, while she’s not looking, try to hit the screen sleep button. I’m too slow because she notices and continues to click away.

  “I’m perfect,” she insists. “But thanks for asking.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the screen as she searches through the digital file looking for little tidbits of heaven knows what.

  “Enough of this cop stuff. I propose we move on to something more important—hair,” Deva suggests. “Jex, is that your real hair color? It’s fabulous—so natural. Natural redheads are very rare.”

  “Very rare,” I say unenthusiastically and swiftly lean over to grab the mouse and click the screen sleep button in the upper right hand corner of the screen before Nat realizes what I am doing and can stop me. I catch her starting to say “Hey!” in response before Deva makes another announcement.

  “Well I propose in honor of our new friend Jex spending the summer in our neighborhood that we think of something fabulous to do. Who is up for an at-home pedicure party?”

  Both Cissy and I shoot our hands up in the air to volunteer as tributes.

  Chapter 4

  Famous Girl Detective Quote:

  “You’re a woman; you’ve got female intuition, and you’re a detective—what could be better?”

  —Jill Munroe, Charlie’s Angels

  So this is apparently how it works: Deva gets an idea that we should all have pedicures, calls the housekeeper and tells her said idea, and then the housekeeper drives over in a very large Mercedes sedan and delivers to Deva a very large case that has two dozen very expensive Chanel colors of nail polish and all the manicure and pedicure tools anyone could need.

  I end up with just a manicure since I wasn’t sure if my feet were in any condition to be revealed to brand new friends. Make that, I absolutely knew that my feet were in no condition to be revealed to brand new friends. I refuse to take off my sneakers.

  “You’re just like Nat with that hoodie; she doesn’t want to show her boobies, you don’t want to show your toes—repressed much?” Deva huffs.

  Pretty soon my dad is probably going to be home—so I have to figure out how I am going to get these girls out of here before I face a litany of questions about letting strangers into the house. But maybe not, since he has seen them around the neighborhood all these years, although—surprise, surprise—he’s never mentioned them once.

  First thought: Maybe I can just ask them to leave. But then I’d be alone, and the afternoon is sort of flying by. Plus, Nat and Cissy like junk food just as much as I do, which falls into the definite plus column since I live with the world’s most committed nondairy, nonsugar, nonanything-vegan most of the year. Deva, I presume, doesn’t like junk food because it starts with the word junk.

  “Can I use your dad’s computer again to look something up?” Nat asks, abruptly changing the topic.

  Soon, her hands are flying across the keyboard, and the next thing I know she’s in the case management system again. “Uh, I don’t think you should stay on the computer much longer,” I caution.

  Nat keeps her eyes trained on the screen. “Oh, don’t worry—I was just looking,” she brushes me off. “There was something there that caught my eye earlier. Just want to make sure I saw it right.”

  “Umm, guys, look at this. Now this is cool,” Cissy whispers, pointing at the screen where a series of photos have magically popped up.

  Some of them are old pictures that look like drivers’ license mug shots showing all kinds of people: girls with long straight hair; black women with wild Afros; guys with a distant gaze in their eyes. Sprinkled in are some line drawings of what people might have looked like. Under each photo was a tag: last name first, first name last.

  “Who are those people?” Cissy whispers.

  “Uh, I don’t know—guys, we better close that screen down,” I caution.

  “Oh I know what this is—they’re crime victims,” Nat answers authoritatively and with wild joy in her voice at the same time. “I’ve seen these pictures before on the Cold Case website the police department keeps on its home page.”

  Nat’s hand is flashing across the mouse and clicking on the picture of a woman who looks to be in her early twenties with a ring through her nose and wild, unkempt hair.

  “Let’s see here. Rhonda Cruz. Homicide victim. Dec. 4, 2003. Found dead in her apartment. Upper-body trauma,” Nat reads aloud as she skims the words on the screen.

  “Oh lovely,” Deva yawns. “Fashion victim, too. Look at that polyester top she’s wearing.”

  Nat quickly clicks on the back button and the field of victim photos flashes on the screen again. I decide to try again and semi-plead with her to close out the program, but I have to admit that this is kind of interesting.

  Nat clicks and scans the next victim profile. “Hit-and-run victim.”

  “Next,” Deva barks.

  Click. “Bar brawl.”

  “Next.”

  “Wait a second, now we’re talking,” Nat interrupts in a low, slow voice that catches everyone’s attention.

  “Looky here … it’s Patty Matthews,” she says slowly, as if she’s savoring every single syllable in those few words.

  There’s an audible gasp in the room and the girls are now staring intently at the screen with big, wide eyes.

  Patty Matthews.

  They scoot their chairs closer to the computer.

  “Oh, Patty Matthews,” Cissy says in a soft whisper. “Poor, poor Patty Matthews.”

  Suddenly, my memory coughs up what I’m searching for—that thing that was buried a long time ago because it was just too hard to think about too much.

  Patty Matthews. No ordinary crime victim. Patty Matthews was the reason my parents broke up.

  My eyes meet her long-gone baby blues.

  Patty Matthews, I’m sorry … but rot in hell.

  Chapter 5

  Famous Girl Detective Quote:

  “We blame all kinds of people for creating monsters. Why not ourselves?”

  —Olivia Benson, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

  One night in New Jersey when I was in seventh grade, my mom caught me Googling Patty Matthews’s name and yelled at me to stop it or I’d be grounded. My mom never grounds me, so I knew this was serious. I was thirteen and couldn’t tell her that I was just curious to see if anything had ever happened in the case because it was such a big deal for my dad. In fact, it was the only deal for him back in those days.

  “Stop it, Jessica,” Mom scolded me. “That girl isn’t missing. She’s dead. Let her rest in peace.”

  My mom would so kill me if she knew what I was doing now. Dad would kill me, too, come to think about it. It’s like ripping a scab off a very deep and old wound that would never heal.

  Okay, okay, okay … Think!

  So I really have to get these girls away from the computer and distract them from this Patty Matthews trip down memory lane. Think!

  Patty Matthews. You’d think she was a member of our family who went missing, but she wasn’t. She was just some teenage girl who lived right around here—around the corner come to think about it—and vanished into thin air one day. My dad worked on the missing persons squad in those days and it was his job to find her.

  And he failed.

  Her.

  Us.

  He failed in every way possible.

  The sad thing about Patty was that no one really knew what happened to her. She was a super smart and super pretty sixteen-year-old, and one day she was just super gone.

  It happened at a bad time in the history of my parents’ rocky relationship. We were living in this house and Dad was working all the time, leaving Mom to do everything on her own with me, and rumor has it I was a handful.

  My mom had given up her teaching career to stay at home because Dad’s schedule was unpredictable at best. She was stuck in
the house with this baby (me), bored out of her skull and feeling like she’d spent all those years in school working on her PhD in archaeology for nothing. She wasn’t the female Indiana Jones—which is how she’d imagined her life to be. Her days were filled with sitting around, changing diapers, and having the songs of a large purple dinosaur ringing in her head.

  Can’t say that I blame her for being a bit restless.

  According to my-mother’s-side-of-family lore, when Patty Matthews vanished, my dad became obsessed with finding her because he was the lead detective on the case. His life was only focused on being a hotshot young detective who would solve the case of the little missing girl from his neighborhood who was so pretty and had such a terrible home life.

  She was the perfect victim: blonde, beautiful, and supposedly a really sweet girl who was some artistic prodigy. Every teacher she ever had talked about her being the perfect kid.

  In spite of everything.

  Mom told me that every night on the Nevada TV news for a year, it seemed like there was a story about her disappearance. When she first went missing, the police department organized these big search parties with guys on horseback trotting out into the desert to look for a body. Her whole neighborhood was covered in purple ribbons to show support for the family, and there were the obligatory candlelight vigils with cameras, tears, and teddy bears. Every afternoon for a very long time, my dad had to hold a news briefing at headquarters saying essentially the same thing.

  He couldn’t find her.

  Gone, baby, gone.

  Mom told me once that this was the most humiliating thing ever for him because people were kind of scared and wondered why my dad didn’t arrest some lurking neighborhood monster that stole young girls away in the middle of the darkest nights.

  In a nutshell, the police could never figure out what happened to Patty or who was responsible for her disappearance.

  One of the big things my mom and I never talk about is what happened to Dad when it became clear he wasn’t going to ever solve this case. On many nights, Dad wandered in the front door and barely talked to us, opting instead to walk aimlessly into his den. He would lock himself in there until dawn. I remember lying in my bed and hearing my mom plod down the hall, pound on the door, and yell at him to eat dinner or come to bed.

  “All you do is neglect your own family,” she ranted. “You’re putting someone else’s daughter above your own. Hold your own baby. Get to know her.”

  My dad stayed locked in his room.

  The last memory I have of Nevada is the day we left. The moving truck came and the men picked up the boxes with my toys and clothes and all of Mom’s books. I still remember the sound of that metal truck gate rolling down and the loud clang of the latch finalizing it all.

  The person to blame for all this is staring out from the computer at me.

  Really, Patty Matthews, why did you have to ruin my family?

  Chapter 6

  Famous Girl Detective Quote:

  “I can trust your head to work out a good solution, Judy girl.”

  —Judy Bolton, The Vanishing Shadow

  “Hey, wasn’t your dad the case detective in the Patty Matthews disappearance?” Nat asks, and the other girls go strangely silent.

  There it is.

  It is always there.

  Somewhere. Lurking.

  “That’s the biggest unsolved mystery around and pretty much the only interesting thing that has ever happened in this town,” Nat rambles on, obviously delighted to talk about a real case.

  She can’t possibly know that she’s bloodlessly killing me—word by word, just stabbing me in the heart.

  “They never even found her body. They’re still talking about it at school and kids have these debates at lunch about who offed her,” Nat blabbers, almost choking herself as she tries to get all the information out in one breathless spurt.

  Cissy shivers and begs, “Let’s totally change the subject because you’re upsetting the new girl … and me.”

  “All right, little chickens,” Deva sniffs. “Go on and ruin the only interesting thing we’ve done all day. But you know what—I bet those aren’t the only Patty Matthews files our handsome detective neighbor has in his man cave.”

  “You know, there are probably other files. Duh. Paper files—before they put things on computers. You know, like the days when people used to have to pay cash for everything instead of using a debit card,” Nat answers.

  Obviously, they are not stopping.

  “Look, I know how to not leave an electronic trail better than anyone,” Deva promises. “No one can keep track of good ol’ paper money. How do you think I avoid those spending limits my parents put on me each month? Petty cash, baby. They think we spend a fortune on cereal at our house,” she says.

  I can’t even begin to process Deva’s logic or her Lucky Charms habit when out of the corner of my eye, I notice Nat is already up on her feet, pulling open the bifold doors of the closet to reveal stacks of identical white boxes.

  “Look, case files! Hot dog!” Nat exclaims in reverent tone. “OMG—this is even better than the computer files! I wonder if there are actual evidence bags in here.”

  “Oh wouldn’t that just make your day to get your grubby hands on some dried blood or a severed limb,” Deva snaps.

  I hear a gasp from deep in the closet and wonder if Nat found the actual body, but it’s almost worse. “Matthews. I’ve found Matthews!” Nat shouts, wiggling her backside out of the closet and emerging with a white, lidded box labeled with a black marker: Matthews, Patty. Case No: 01-5774.

  “The 01 stands for the year she went missing. 2001,” Nat informs us, carefully opening the box.

  “You know, it was your dad who completely screwed up the case,” Deva snaps. “He was the one who was supposed to figure out who killed her and he didn’t or couldn’t. He totally messed it all up.”

  White-hot anger catches in my throat. It’s one thing for me to think these things about my dad and quite another for complete strangers to dis him. I shoot back, “I’m sure it wasn’t my dad who screwed it up. He might not be much of a father, but he’s a great cop.”

  “Calm down,” Nat jumps in, sensing things might get a little ugly. “Jex, do you know anything about Patty Matthews?”

  I shake my head—as in no. Suddenly, I’m unsure about trusting these girls, and there is no way I’m going to let on there’s an oh-so-personal story behind the Patty Matthews disappearance.

  “It happened only three blocks away from here in the middle of the night,” Nat begins, sounding strangely like the guy who narrates the Dateline murder mystery shows.

  Nat is in her glory now. “It was thirteen years ago. No one saw Patty, who was this sixteen-year-old girl, disappear. But her mom woke up the next morning and Patty wasn’t in her room. She was just … gone. Completely AWOL. Vanished into thin air. And there were three people the cops think could have had something to do with it.

  “She had this really nasty boyfriend named Billy who supposedly had a very ugly temper. Football player. Thought he was much better than her and then, as these things usually go, she got to be very pretty and could have done much better than him.”

  “Pig,” Deva spits out.

  “She had this very creepy next-door neighbor, whom we all still hate, named Mr. Foster. A real recluse freak who is out for blood if you step on a pristine blade of his front lawn. Creep-o. Always was. Always will be,” Nat adds. “And then there was her own dad. He was the town’s biggest drunk and a really mean guy. He was mostly unemployed. Hit the bottle. Hard.”

  “Then there was the real twist,” Deva says, proud that she actually knows more about her town than where the mall is located. “A few weeks after Patty disappeared, her dad got real drunk and crashed his car into one of the canals. He died on impact, so case closed.”

  “Since then the police haven’t said a word about the case,” Nat, the voice of authority, continues. “Some people think that they�
�ve just forgotten about it or that the town spent too much money on it and someone messed it up somehow. No judgment about your father.”

  It’s like she hit me with a stun gun. “So, what does this have to do with my dad?” I demand.

  “All of our parents thought he would solve the case because they know him. He’s their neighbor. A good guy. Takes care of business,” Cissy says. “It’s kind of a weird thing because no one has felt entirely safe around here since this happened. At least, that’s what my mom says.”

  Staring hard at each of us, Nat slowly pulls out a thick manila file. I don’t even try to stop her, but sit silently on the hard floor as she reads, waiting for her to report her findings.

  “See, it’s a cold case. No one has made any progress on this case in about a million years. It’s as cold as a Popsicle,” Nat continues.

  “Okay guys, this has gone too far,” I interrupt. “My dad will kill me if he thinks I’m sleuthing around his office.”

  Something in the tone of my voice makes the others sit up and listen. Quietly, they relent, and a sour-faced Nat puts the papers back into the file. She even puts the file back in the box and pushes the lid down. Picking it up, she slides it back into the closet, right where she found it. Then she shuts the door.

  But not really.

  She doesn’t really shut the door that tightly.

  The four of us look at each other because we know it’s not over.

  It’s not even close.

  Suddenly, I have a thought that revolves around insurance. Specifically, I need an insurance policy or a way to make sure that everyone keeps their mouths shut about what we have been doing, because I’m sure that I have crossed about 1,000 invisible lines. I haven’t even been here a whole day and already trouble! For a split second, I wonder if there are actual penalties for getting into secret police files. I certainly don’t want my butt to land in front of another judge.

  Of course, I can just ask these girls to keep it quiet, but I know that’s pointless. These girls are sixteen going on seventeen. They have mouths—big, ginormous, gossipy mouths.