Wanted! (6 page)

A yellow sign warned oncoming cars to be careful of children crossing the street. Alice crossed in the crosswalk, to establish how law-abiding she was. How filthy the back of her dress must be. The dress was cream with scattered tiny red and black flowers, a vaguely Persian pattern. She felt extremely visible.

Around the corner was an elementary school, named for a person, probably a local heroine. Margaret P. Trask School, it said.

Alice’s school had a day off. A professional day, during which teachers were supposed to be learning a ton of useful stuff and you got to stay home, learning how to use nail polish. But this school must be in another district, because it was open. Playing fields stretched on three sides of the school, and kids were struggling with various forms of baseball and T-ball. School must be almost over; empty yellow buses had begun to line up.

Alice was not wearing a watch. Was it two in the afternoon? Three? When had Dad phoned? Eleven? It seemed to Alice that she had a commitment this afternoon. What was it?

This did not seem the time to worry about whether she had a dentist appointment or had promised to call Kelsey.

If Alice had ever needed a best friend, it was now. But Mom would have phoned Kelsey to see if Alice had gone there. The police would be asking Kelsey to guess where Alice was.

What guess would Kelsey make? Would Kelsey tell the police anything? Would she believe for a single instant that Alice—who had spent the night with Kelsey a million times, and shared pizza, and rented movies, and popped popcorn, and most of all discussed boys, boys, and still more boys—was a killer? Whose side would Kelsey be on?

My own mother is not on my side, thought Alice.

A class bolted out a side door of Margaret P. Trask, scattering over the grass. Their teacher clapped her hands. Her students were like little magnet filings, coming back to her. “Hi, how are you?” Alice said to the teacher. Alice smiled at the class, and went in where they had come out. It felt very schoolish in here, with light tan tiles, and art papers on the walls, and the sounds of chatter and chalk coming out the doors.

She was walking toward the front of the building, toward the principal’s office, where phones would be, when she remembered that in elementary school, you had to ask to use a phone. Phones were behind the secretary’s desk. Or in the nurse’s room. They were not lined up, mall-style, in the hallways. How could she use a phone here, considering the conversation she expected to have?

She walked past two closed doors, two open classroom doors, and came to a Girls’ Room.

Inside, the toilets were tiny, and the sinks very low.

She stepped in a stall and changed into her new jeans and T-shirt. She had no way to cut the tags and had to rip them off. It tore a hole in the shirt. Alice had plenty of T-shirts with holes, but this hole seemed too much and once again she had to battle tears. She took off her sandals and yanked on the new sneakers. They, too, had to be torn to separate them. She made a ponytail of her long hair, threaded it through the hole in the back of the baseball cap, and tugged the visor low on her forehead.

Her face puckered like a lemon, and then, horribly, her stomach, too. Alice whirled, bent, and threw up very neatly into the tiny toilet. She stayed clutching the white porcelain sides while her stomach and her face settled back into position, and then it was over.

You can fool your mind, she thought, but not your gut.

The awful quick animal panting returned for a minute and then Alice forced herself to the sink, washed her face and mouth and teeth with her hands, shoved her old clothes back into the shopping bag, slung her purse over her shoulder, and headed out the way she had come.

One class had left book bags outside their door.

There were movie character book bags: Pocahontas and 101 Dalmatians. There were teddy bear book bags and L.L. Bean book bags, tiny second-grade-sized book bags, and huge Dad-goes-camping backpacks.

Alice did not even pause. She picked up a Dad-goes-camping, slung the backpack over her shoulders, and headed on out. There. She had committed her first crime.

It horrified her. She had to escape this place, this innocent stretch of hall, where she had become a thief. Alice dropped the shopping bag and fanny purse in among some poor kid’s chapter book, forgotten permission slip, and the remains of a snack.

She ran.

The running felt wonderful. Alice always felt thin and athletic in jeans, as if she had longer legs and a better personality. She loved any sport with a run. In softball, she was always sorry the bases weren’t farther apart.

The slamming of her feet felt useful, as if she were accomplishing something. She liked the speed at which she put distance between herself and Margaret P. Trask. Running was good because it replaced thought, and Alice had not been doing well on the thought front.

Alice ran about a mile, and then got hit by exhaustion as if by a train. All at once she could not even lift her feet, and her shoulders trembled under the weight of the backpack, whose wide padded ribs kept falling off. Her throat burned where she had thrown up.

The tears spilled again.

Stealing a little kid’s book bag. It was disgusting. It was the most low-life thing Alice had ever done. She would have preferred to get caught stealing the Windstar.

How could she make up for it? How could she ever explain what made her decide to do it?

It was nothing, it was minor, anybody in her position would do it, she told herself.

But nobody had ever been in her position before, had they? Did this happen to other high school sophomores?

Alice walked facing traffic, but not really, because she was keeping her chin down and her eyes on the pavement. She reminded herself that she looked exactly like a million teenagers; nobody could tell she was Alice, nobody would stop and ask.

Please don’t hit me, she said silently to the cars she was not looking at.

But somebody had hit her father. Hit in the television series manner:
killed. I killed him good.
How could that have happened to her father?

Dad hadn’t been at Austin & Scote very long. He changed jobs a lot. He was so good at what he did that he kept getting offers he couldn’t refuse.

Alice could vaguely picture Mr. Austin and Mr. Scote. Middle-aged, going gray, and going bald. She remembered then—cars, of course: a stunning silver Jaguar and a black Mercedes that looked like part of a presidential cavalcade.

Would Mr. Austin or Mr. Scote recognize Alice? Did Daddy keep a photograph of Alice on his desk? But it didn’t matter, because Austin & Scote was not a place where Alice could slip in unnoticed and riffle through the papers on her father’s desk, or open up his computer files to see who his enemies were.

The company was high-security: You had to have a photo ID to get into the building, and Austin & Scote had their own elevator, run by a uniformed person, not buttons. If you didn’t have a pass, you didn’t go up.

Alice could not get into Dad’s office to find out anything, and in any case, she had not the slightest idea what to look for, nor how to look.

Dad enjoyed his work, but that did not mean his co-workers were honest. These men and women had access to corporate plans, strategies, patents, formulae, sales figures, mailing lists. Suppose there was more money in selling these secrets than in protecting them?

Suppose that
Dad
had a secret to sell and—

No.

Alice refused to think even for a moment that Dad was the one doing something wrong.

She had to get to a computer and read what was on the disk that mattered so much.

She plodded on. The buildings ceased to be houses and became doctors’ offices. Accountants and lawyers. And then, blessedly, a main street. It had the look of a small town. All in a row were a hardware store, drugstore, flower shop, boutique. A traffic sign said ROUTE 145. Alice knew the other end of this road well; her high school was on 145. So she had been correct about the diagonal; she was circling the city through its suburbs.

Alice could not take another step. She sat on a bench. It was pretty here, with a row of flagpoles, each pole with a small circle of red, white, and blue flowers. Alice’s mother knew flowers and could have named them.

The tears came back when she thought of her mother.

When Alice was little, she had thought of her mother as a goddess: a beautiful, sparkling woman of perfection and strength. It had been so awful, so painful, when her mother turned out to be somebody Alice didn’t always like. Okay, other girls moaned and groaned about their mothers, but Alice figured hers would be different; her mother would stay flawless.

No.

Not only did Mom have flaws, but she had left Dad, and for Alice this was a gap in Mom’s character that Alice could not forget.

Alice busied herself sorting out the contents of her backpack, tossing the dead snack into a trash container, and taking the price tag off the nerd glasses.

Way down the block, from behind a brick building in whose front yard a fruit tree blossomed, came a police car.

Alice put the glasses on. The corrective lenses made objects shimmer and curve, like heat spots on the road. The police car drove toward her; she could feel the cop’s presence, his uniform, his loud voice, his gun, his handcuffs—

But it drove by.

Through the distorting lenses, Alice could not tell whether the officer was a man or a woman. It was simply a person not looking left or right.

Alice had to wait until her heart had stopped jumping around before she could move, and then she had to move, because sitting still was too scary.

Definitely a case, thought Alice, of Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. I’m that chicken. Short on reasons to do anything.

Gathered outside a secondhand boutique with plaid shirts, prom gowns, beaded bags, and camo pants all in the same window, was a group of girls older than Alice. She thought they were about eighteen. They were loud and very full of themselves. Alice drifted near, keeping their bodies between herself and the traffic on 145.

“So do you like your new roommate any better?” said one girl.

“I hate her guts; she’s a jerk,” said a girl wearing a State University sweatshirt.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I dunno. What am I supposed to do about it? I told the dorm supervisor and she shrugs, she says ‘Sometimes people have to try harder.’ ” The speaker was disgusted with the concept of trying harder.

Down the street, driving slowly, came a car Alice knew. Oh, yes! she thought, overjoyed. Mom stayed by the phone, weeping, praying I’d call again, and she sent Richard Rellen out to find me.

For that dark green Volvo wagon, square, solid, and practical, belonged to the man her mother planned to marry.

Alice was trembling with relief. Mom cared. Of course Mom cared; how could Alice have thought for a moment that she did not care? Of course Mom had stayed by the phone, and would be sobbing even harder now, aching and yearning for Alice to call, so Mom could take back what she had said, could explain and apologize.

Alice lifted her arm to wave. She opened her mouth to call, thinking
friend
, thinking
ally
, and thought: Wait.
Over
joyed.

Was she feeling too much joy?

Alice stepped back, trying to be a college girl among college girls.

Her parents had argued over Rick darling. Dad and Mom had said terrible things to each other about Mom’s dating. Alice had fled the room and let them have their arguments without her. She hated raised voices, but especially her own mother and father at war.

Through the glimmery focus of her new glasses, she saw Rick Rellen glance at the group of girls. Alice’s hair was up beneath her baseball cap, and Alice never put her hair up, because she believed her left ear stuck out, and it was unbearable to let the world see her ear. Now, in nerd glasses, pathetic T-shirt, cap, and protruding ear, Alice wondered if Mr. Rellen would recognize her.

In Dad’s honor, Alice had avoided him as much as possible.

She did not know whether she actually disliked Mr. Rellen, or if she was working on it for Dad’s sake, or if this was her personal contribution to strife: her way to make her mother pay.

Whatever he was, he was not a parent. Alice was ready to talk to her mother. She was not ready to talk to the future second husband of that mother.

It startled Alice to be so sure of that. It was the first thing all this long hard day that she was sure of: She was not going to confide in Rick Rellen.

“Oh, I know the woman you mean,” chimed in a third girl. “She used to be in charge at Flemming Dorm. You’re right, Bethany, she never does anything to help you. She says you have to learn to take things in stride.”

The girls made noises of disgust and headed for a big, heavy-duty, take-the-class-with-you-to-Disney-World Econo-line van. Swivel seats, privacy glass, the works. The girls piled in. Bethany was the driver.

Alice took off her glasses, hoping she looked eighteen and not twelve. “Hey, listen, I hate to bother you,” she said, “but can you give me a lift back to the campus? I think my boyfriend has abandoned me here.”

It was a sisterhood moment. They had things to do, and they did not want to be bothered, but still, they could not drive away from a woman whose boyfriend had proved unreliable. “Well, okay,” said Bethany sullenly.

Alice climbed in, said “Thank you,” and sat in back, where she would not bother them. The shock of being pursued had left every joint weak, every muscle trembling. The backseat would be a very short vacation from running.

The State University campus was also on 145, maybe ten miles from Mom’s, maybe half that from Dad’s or Westtown Mall. So Alice had covered a lot of territory in order to get nowhere.

Ten miles took enough time, however, to ask herself what she was doing, and why.

The van moved slowly out into the traffic.

The Volvo idled beside parallel-parked cars. Rick Rellen’s left elbow stuck out the driver’s window. Cradled in his hand was a car phone.