Of Scars and Stardust Page 9

  I needed to know the truth about what had happened to Ella.

  If I wanted to find her, I was going to have to do it alone.

  I told them I was tired and kissed them good night. And then I went to my room to start planning.

  thirteen

  Where do you begin looking for a girl made of scars and stardust?

  This was the question I asked myself as I wrapped a scarf from the hall closet around my neck the next morning.

  When I opened the door, it looked like all of the clouds that looped over Ohio had been body-slammed into the earth, where they’d shattered like glass. Everything was coated in a fine layer of filmy white, and tufts of fog wafted between the broken cornstalks.

  I stepped out in the new layer of snow and immediately walked to the back of the house. Since the damage caused by the fire had bled into the bowels of the interior, I knew it had been more than just a surface stain. But exactly how much damage was done, and how much my parents had covered up, I didn’t know. I needed to know.

  I ran my hand over the aluminum siding. Still the color of an overripe tomato, like it had always been. But when I reached the corner of the house that contained the kitchen, the paint felt gritty. Fresh.

  I pressed both hands over the area, trying to gauge how much of the house had been eaten away by the fire. I stretched my arms over my head. The new paint kept going, higher than my fingertips could reach. My mouth suddenly felt like it had been stuffed with cotton balls. What had they been doing that day, the day Amble decided to light up the police chief’s house? Had Ella been right here, in the kitchen, knitting periwinkle birds and eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches when she smelled smoke?

  My fingers finally found the edge of the new paint, wrapped around the other side of the house. They also found the whisper of a word there, a dash of spray paint that had wiggled its way through the fresh paint like a memory that refused to stay quiet.

  I touched the edge of the letter. It could be any letter with a curve, really. There wasn’t enough of the paint showing to tell.

  That inch of spray paint gnawed at me. There was a secret hidden under there, one that mattered to me even though I didn’t exactly know why. I glanced around the side of the house. Dad’s old, beat-up shed still loomed over the edge of the cornfield. I smiled to myself; Mom had been nagging Dad to chop that thing down and use it as firewood for years. But Dad insisted it stay, said he couldn’t bear to demolish his tiny space shoved full of rusted rifles and car parts and dented buckets of oil and paint.

  Paint.

  The thought bloomed in my mind and I rushed toward the shed, kicking up snow behind me. If there was paint in the shed, there was probably some kind of paint thinner or tool I could use to chip away the secret on the siding. I tugged at the door, and but it didn’t budge. It was only then I noticed a small padlock looped between the handles.

  I scrunched my nose. Dad never used to lock the shed.

  I glanced back at the house. Uncovering this particular secret would have to wait.

  The wind lashed at my face, warning me to get moving before it dumped another layer of snow over the dirt roads and trapped me inside the house. I had no idea where to begin, so I started walking toward town, mostly because I had nowhere else to go.

  One of the perks of living in New York City is that you don’t need a driver’s license. One of the perks of living in a place like Amble is that you do need one, so you can take yourself places you told your parents you wouldn’t go.

  Now I was taking myself as far as the two-mile walk into town, which is exactly where I told Mom and Dad I was going.

  I was totally going to need a license if I intended to do some investigating.

  I let myself brush through the stalks with gloved fingers as I trekked down the dirt path leading to Grandon Road. I thought I would panic when the Explorer turned down the path and sliced between the fields on either side. But I didn’t.

  Because dead corn was just dead corn in the daylight.

  It was night that you had to watch out for.

  I turned onto Grandon, my fingers still breaking off the brittle leaves. They floated behind me like lost balloons bobbing in the wind.

  I imagined a gray wolf with wiry fur staring at me from between the stalks. This time, though, I didn’t feel afraid. I wanted them to come; I needed them. If they had Ella, I needed them here so I could make them give her back.

  No wolves came, and my heart sank.

  I squinted through the stalks, waiting. Nothing. I’d come all the way from New York to find them after they’d hunted me there, and now there wasn’t a single wolf waiting in Amble.

  They weren’t going to make this easy.

  Just about when I thought my fingers were going to fall off and rattle around inside my gloves like marbles in a bag, the sign for Main Street poked through the white-washed sky. I sighed in relief and jogged the rest of the way there, even in my good boots.

  The street was mostly empty, just a long strip of cracked pavement and sagging Christmas wreaths. Just like with a lot of things here, I’d always thought it was bigger.

  I passed a cluster of shops that hadn’t been here before: a diner with red plastic booths and a neon sign that blinked World’s Best Cherry Pie ; the stationery shop that had opened just before I left, the one where Grant had bought my yellow-eyed wolf diary; a bead shop with a purple awning.

  I pressed my nose against the glass and looked inside the bead shop. Rows and rows of delicate silvers and brilliant oranges lined the walls on one side, and blue and greens and reds lined the other. Ella used to love this place. This was probably where I needed to start, somewhere filled with color and shiny things that would catch her eye like a kitten chasing sparkly wrapping paper.

  I started to open the door when, as if on cue, the door of the diner across the street opened with a jingle and a flood of warm, sugary cherries blasted me in the face. It smelled exactly like Ella’s Cherry Blast body spray. My stomach hitched with hunger and nausea at the same time. I hadn’t eaten since those two bites of lasagna last night, and I was starving. But even so, I would not eat the World’s Best Cherry Pie.

  I shut the door before the shop owner could greet me and ran across the empty road without looking twice. So, so much easier than crossing 45th in Manhattan.

  The cherry smell smacked me across the face again when I opened the door, and my stomach churned.

  The diner was mostly empty, except for a guy about my age with cropped dark hair sitting at the bar area. I wanted to sit anywhere else but next to him, even in the booth next to the bathroom. Not because I had an aversion to guys or anything, but because I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk to anyone in Amble just yet.

  “Right here, hon,” said a waitress with ratty hair, cocking her head at the counter. “We’re only seating at the bar for lunch today.”

  I pulled myself onto the stool and reached for a menu. The cover felt slippery. It was like trying to hold on to a soapy glass. I scrunched up my nose as I flipped through the pages.

  “What’re you having today?” the waitress asked. Her ratty hair was the chemical color of strawberry soda.

  “Um,” I said, flipping through the menu.

  “Our pie’s on special. Best in the state.” She tapped her nails against the counter.

  Just thinking of the cherry pie made me shudder. “I’ll just have a cheese omelette.” The creases in the menu crinkled when I snapped it shut. “Thanks.”

  “Sure thing,” she said, heading to the back counter to grab a still-gurgling pot of coffee. She filled the empty mug next to me, the one that belonged to the guy squinting into his newspaper. “There you go, Grant. Refill’s on the house.” She winked, but he just mumbled “Thanks, Kate” from between the lines of the local news section.

  My eyes flicked down to the table and the tingly feeling
of a fierce blush blossomed in my cheeks.

  Grant.

  No. There were other Grants in Amble. There was Grant Carpenter, who was in Ella’s grade. He had hair the color of straw and a one eye that twitched when you talked to him.

  And that was it.

  I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. It could definitely be the Grant. It probably was. He looked the same as I remembered him, for the most part, except for the way he moved. I watched as he licked his lips before pressing them to the rim of his coffee mug, and how he swallowed it down, black, without even flinching. He tilted his head as his eyes scanned something in the paper, and he tapped the tip of his pencil in the middle of the headlines, like the rhythm would make him think better. And then he turned in my direction, just enough, and I saw them: the freckles patterned across his nose like a mini Big Dipper.

  Without looking at me, he opened up his paper so that it sprawled onto my section of the counter, yawned, and said, “It’s impolite to stare, you know?”

  I froze like a rabbit caught in a snare, my eyes wide and shoulders rigid. I stared at the counter in front of me.

  I’d thought he would say something like Claire? Claire Graham? Is that you? Oh my God, you look so great! Hey, I’m really sorry about not going to your birthday party that one year, I was a jerk. But instead he flipped up the edges of the paper so that the crossword puzzles splattered between us.

  He must not recognize me, that must be it. Because if he did, I knew he’d put down the paper and hug me and maybe buy me coffee.

  “Here you go.” The waitress had appeared in front of me and slapped a jiggly cheese omelette down. “Need anything else?”

  I shook my head and she drifted away, humming “Frosty the Snowman” even though Christmas was over.

  I twisted the egg around my fork. He didn’t know it was me. But did that mean I should tell him?

  All of a sudden, he flashed in my mind the last day I saw him. He was outlined by the picture window, his face and neck pink and his hair tousled from the wind and corn leaves. He looked so much younger in my head, more like himself.

  I set down the fork with a clink. “Do you know who I am?” I asked, almost whispering.

  He put down the paper and rubbed his nose, making his star-freckles fold in on themselves. “I know who you are, Claire.”

  A shiver dripped down my spine, and even though the diner was packed with stuffy, stale air, I suddenly felt cold. “Oh,” I said, but it came out more like a squeak. I cleared my throat. “Oh. I, um, I didn’t know.” I shoved eggs into my mouth, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do with it. Obviously using it for speaking was a terrible idea.

  I could feel his eyes on me while I shoveled more food in my mouth. He folded his hands over his paper. “I heard you were coming back into town for a little while. I knew it was you as soon as you walked in.”

  I swallowed and looked him—really looked at him—because I could now. His eyes were still that melty green color, like the first pale shoots poking through the snow in spring. And there was the Big Dipper, and the way his mouth always looked like it turned up even when he didn’t mean to smile. But there were tiny fracture lines under his eyes now, and he looked like he was heavier somehow even though he hadn’t gained any weight. Kind of like some invisible sadness pressed him into the earth while the rest of the world floated around him.

  I wondered if I looked like that, too.

  He sucked down the last dregs of his coffee and said, “So what are you doing back in Amble, city girl?”

  “Just visiting,” I said. “You know, it’s been a while.”

  Grant didn’t say anything for a long time. He picked at a nail and cleared his throat a few times, and I remembered that that’s what he used to do when he was thinking. I used to call him “S&S” when we were kids: Slow and Steady. Grant never did anything or said anything without thinking about it at the speed of a tortoise crossing Route 24. I waited, because that’s the understanding Grant and I still had, even after all these miles and all this melancholy.

  Finally he turned to me, his eyes flashing. “Did your dad tell you I’m in the deputy police force program at the station?” he asked. I shook my head. “Yeah. They needed an extra person down at the station after … ” He studied me for a second, and the look on my face must have told him he could finish his sentence. He cleared his throat. “After your dad took over a lot of the paperwork stuff instead of being chief. You know—filing, phone calls, that sort of thing. He still goes out sometimes and writes a speeding ticket. Anyway, I think I want to be an officer, go to school for it.”

  I blinked away the thought of my dad being a glorified secretary. “I thought you wanted to be an architect, build stuff in Chicago?” I asked.

  Grant waved his hand dismissively. “Nah, not anymore. You know, police work is really interesting. You learn a lot about people, sometimes even things they don’t realize about themselves.” He stopped to clear his throat. “Your dad’s teaching me some things about motive. Did you know that every crime or disappearance or whatever has a motive? People don’t just do things because it’s sunny that day or they’re in a bad mood because their credit card got declined or something.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”

  “You, Claire Graham, did not come to Amble to hang out with your parents or because you were bored in New York.” Grant raised his hand and the waitress nodded. “You came to Amble to find your sister.”

  The waitress came over and waited while Grant smoothed out the crumpled dollar bills from his pocket. Something about the way she stood there, hunched over Grant but watching me out of the corner of her eye, made my skin crawl. When she left again, he looked at me and said, “You came because you thought we wouldn’t be able to find her without you.”

  I did what Grant did and waved my hand, but the waitress just stared back at me like I’d asked her for the check in Chinese. Grant mumbled something and then flipped his hand up again, and she nodded and went to the cash register. I must have forgotten how to speak Amble while I was gone.

  “I’ve got this,” Grant said as he pulled another stack of scrunched-up bills from his pocket. He must have noticed me watching him laboriously smooth them out over the edge of the counter, because he added, “My wallet got torn up in the washing machine,” with a tiny smile pressed into the corners of his mouth. It was the first time he smiled since I’d walked into the diner, and it made him seem a little lighter.

  “Thanks,” I said as we started toward the door. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  He shrugged and pulled a knit hat over his head, shadowing his eyes. “Yeah, no problem.”

  “You’re Mike Graham’s daughter, right? Claire?” We both turned around to see the waitress still standing at the counter, clutching Grant’s crumpled bills in her fist.

  I glanced at Grant, but he was staring at something on the sleeve of his jacket. “Yeah, why?” I asked.

  Her eyes narrowed but her lips twisted into a smile, a definite no-teeth smile. It made her whole face scrunch up, like she’d smelled something rotten. “Oh, no reason. Just thought I recognized you from … somewhere.”

  I felt a light touch on my shoulder—Grant’s fingertips guiding me away from the counter. She still watched us as I let Grant move me toward the street. “You two be careful out there, okay?” she called after us.

  The bells jingled as we stepped into the cold. “What was that all about?” I asked, turning toward Grant.

  His hand brushed my elbow before falling limp at his side. He shook his head, staring out at the empty street behind me. “You know how Amble is. Everyone feels like everyone else’s business is theirs.” He started to shift his body toward the opposite direction of where I needed to go. “Don’t worry about it.”

  I wanted to stay with him, to attach to him like a barnacle on the bo
ttom of a crusty old ship and sail with him wherever he went. Because being around Grant was a little like being around Ella; he was still like liquid sunshine that I could drink by the gallon and never get full of. He always made me feel better, even if he pretended he didn’t know me or didn’t want to talk to me. Something about him was magic too. Like Ella.

  Grant shoved his hands in his pocket and said, “Well, I guess I better get going. I’ve gotta get to work.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, it was really great seeing you, after, you know, years.” I started to walk away, back toward the cornfields looming in the snow. Back to the cold.

  “Hey Claire,” he called. I turned around and saw him still standing in front of the diner, shuffling on his feet. “I’ve got two questions for you.”

  I walked back to him, wrapping the scarf tighter around my neck to force out the seeping cold. “Shoot.”

  “First question: if you’re looking for Ella, you’re doing it in the wrong place.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  He lifted a finger and said, “I’ve been reading through a lot of old case files lately, studying, and the answer always seems to be closer than you’d think. You need to look in the place where this whole thing started, where the most bits and pieces of her are. So, my question is, why aren’t you looking in her room, through her stuff, right now?”

  I sucked in my lip and looked up into his eyes, which seemed gray under the shadow of his hat. And then I said something I didn’t realize was true until I said it to Grant: “Because I’m scared to.”

  But he didn’t even flinch when I said that. He just nodded slowly and cleared his throat. I waited, because he’d told me to without words. Then he said, “I know a little bit about searching for someone.”

  “From working at the police station?”