Found

CHAPTER 7

I should have felt elated. My big enemy was apparently off the team. But I didn’t. I felt confused and a little lost. Then again, that seemed to be my permanent status lately. I was at my best when I didn’t have to think too much-either when I was on the court or when I had a specific task.

So what was my next task?

Help Ema find her missing boyfriend, I guess.

I walked up the long driveway and crossed the expansive front grounds. I’d barely put my fingertip on the doorbell in front of Ema’s enormous mansion when the door swung slowly open.

“Master Mickey. Welcome.”

It was Niles, the family butler, speaking with an accent so pronounced, it had to be fake. He wore a tuxedo or tails or something like that. His posture was ramrod straight. He arched one eyebrow.

Ema ran to the door. “Cut that out, Niles.”

“Sorry, madam.”

Ema rolled her eyes. “He’s been watching a lot of British television.”

“Oh,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I got it.

It was funny watching the two of them standing there. Both wore black, but that was where the similarities ended. Niles wore formal wear. Ema was in full goth mode-black clothes, jet-black hair, black lipstick, white makeup. She had silver studs going all the way up her ears, a pierced eyebrow, and one skull ring on each hand.

As we headed down the stairs, I couldn’t help but stare at the movie posters. They all featured films starring the gorgeous Angelica Wyatt. Some were headshots. Some were full body. Sometimes she was alone. Sometimes she was with some guy. On the bottom step, there was one for that romantic comedy she did with Matt Damon last year.

Only a handful of people knew that Angelica Wyatt-yes, the Angelica Wyatt-was Ema’s mom.

“So tell me what happened in California,” Ema said.

We sat on oversize beanbag chairs. I told her everything. When I was done, Ema said, “Maybe it was your father’s wish.”

“What? Being cremated?”

“Right, a lot of people choose that,” Ema said. “It’s a possibility, right?”

I thought about it. We had traveled all over the world. Most foreign cultures-most cultures my father admired-preferred cremation to burial. I remembered that my father once bemoaned the “waste” of good land, land that could have been used to grow crops, because it was being used as a graveyard.

Could he have told Mom he wanted to be cremated?

I thought some more. Then I said, “No.”

“You’re sure?”

“If Dad had wanted to be cremated, he wouldn’t then want to be buried too. He’d choose one or the other.”

Ema nodded. “But it was your mother’s signature on the form?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“So I need to ask her about it. The problem is, she’s not allowed visitors in rehab right now. She’s going through withdrawal.”

“How much longer?”

“I don’t know.” I looked at Ema. Yes, she was interested, but I knew what she was doing. For some reason, she was asking all these questions to stall. “So tell me about your missing boyfriend.”

“Before I do,” Ema said, “I wanted to show you something.”

“Okay.”

She started pulling up her shirt.

“Uh,” I said, because I’m good with words.

“Relax, perv. I want to show you a tattoo.”

“Uh,” I said again.

“You’ll see why.”

Ema was loaded up with tattoos. This helped cultivate her bad-girl image. She wore them almost like a fence, warning people to stay back. Yes, I know a lot of people have tattoos, but Ema was only a high school freshman. Many of the kids were intimidated that a girl so young could have so many. How did she get her parents’ permission?

I had wondered that myself.

But more recently I learned the simple truth: The tattoos were temporary. She had a friend named Agent at a tattoo parlor called Tattoos While U Wait. Agent liked to try out designs before putting them on someone in a permanent way. He used Ema’s skin as a practice canvas.

Ema turned her back to me. “Look.”

There, in the center of her back, was a familiar image to Ema, Spoon, Rachel, and me.

A butterfly. More specifically, the Tisiphone Abeona butterfly.

That image haunted us. I had seen it on a grave behind Bat Lady’s house. I had seen it on Rachel’s hospital room door. I had seen it in an old picture of hippies from the sixties. I had even seen the image of that butterfly in an old photograph of the famous Lizzy Sobek, the young girl who led children to safety during the Holocaust. I saw it atop my father’s “maybe” grave, on the back of a photograph in Bat Lady’s basement, even in a tattoo parlor.

“You told me about that,” I said.

“I know. But I went back to have it redone. You know. Have Agent make it bright or change it. The tattoos usually wear off after a few weeks.”

I felt a small chill ripple across my back. “But?”

“But he couldn’t.”

I knew the answer but I asked anyway. “Why?”

“It’s permanent,” Ema said. “Agent said he doesn’t know how that happened. But the butterfly is there. For good.”

I said nothing.

“What’s going on, Mickey?”

“I don’t know.”

We sat there in silence. I finally broke it. “Tell me about your missing boyfriend.”

For a second or two, she didn’t move. She swallowed, blinked a few times, and then stared at the floor. “Boyfriend may be putting it a little too strongly.”

I waited.

“Mickey?”

“What?”

Ema started twisting the skull ring on her right hand. “You have to promise me something.”

Her body language was all wrong. Ema was about confidence. She was big and confident and didn’t care who noticed. She was comfortable in her own skin. Now, all of a sudden, that confidence was gone.

“Okay,” I said.

“You have to promise you won’t make fun of me.”

“Are you serious?”

She just looked at me.

“Okay, okay, I promise. It’s odd, that’s all.”

“What’s odd?” she asked.

“This promise. I thought you didn’t care what people think of you.”

“I don’t,” Ema said. “I care what you think of me.”

A second passed. Then another. Then I said, “Oh,” because I’m really, really good with words. It was, of course, a dumb comment on my part-the stuff about her not caring. Everyone cares what people think. Some just hide it better.

“So tell me,” I said.

“I met a guy in a chat room,” Ema said.

I blinked once. Then I said, “You hang out in chat rooms?”

“You promised.”

“I’m not making fun.”

“You’re judging,” she said. “That’s just as bad.”

“I’m not. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

“It’s not like you think,” Ema said. “See, I’ve been helping my mom with her social networking. She’s clueless. So is her manager and her agent and her personal assistant-whatever. So I set some promotional stuff up for her-Twitter, Facebook, you know the deal. And now I watch it for her.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Anyway, in this chat room, I met this guy.”

I just looked at her.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re judging again.”

“I’m just sitting here,” I said, spreading my hands. “If you see something more on my face, that’s more about you than me.”

“Right, sure.”

“I’m just surprised, okay? What kind of chat room was this anyway?”

“It’s for Angelica Wyatt fans.”

I tried sooo hard to keep my face expressionless.

“There you go again!” she shouted.

“Stop looking at my face and tell me what happened. You’re in an Angelica Wyatt chat room. You start talking to a guy. Am I right so far?”

Ema looked sheepish. “Yeah.”

“Are you using an alias?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why would I? No one knows I’m Angelica Wyatt’s daughter.”

Not even me until I followed her from school last week. In school, Ema was the subject of much speculation. Every school, I’m told, has that one kid who seems to come out of the woods to school every day. No one knows where he or she lives. No one has been to his or her house. Rumors start-as they did about Ema. She lived in a cabin in the woods, some speculated. Her father abused her maybe. He sold drugs. Something.

Ema actually encouraged those rumors to hide the truth: She was the daughter of a world-famous movie star.

“I use my own name in the chat room,” Ema said, “so I can be just another fan.”

“Okay, go on.”

“So anyway, I started chatting with this guy. Then we started e-mailing and texting, that kind of thing.” Her face turned red. “He told me about his life. He told me he used to live in Europe but they had moved to the United States last year. We talked about books and movies and feelings. It… it got pretty intimate.”

My face twisted into a grimace.

“Ew, gross,” Ema snapped. “Not that kind of intimate!”

“I didn’t say-”

“Stop, okay? And never play poker, Mickey. You’d be terrible at it. I mean, we talked. We really talked and opened up. At first, okay, I figured that maybe this guy was a fake, you know? Like I was being played.”

“A prank,” I said. “Catfished.”

“Right. I mean, you know me. I don’t trust easily. But as time went on…” Ema’s eyes lit up. “It was weird, but we both changed. Especially him. He might have started out playing some kind of game, but he became real. I can’t explain it.”

I nodded, trying to move her along. “So you two got close.”

“Yes.”

“You felt like he was starting to open up to you.”

“Yes. A few days ago, he said that he had something really important to tell me. That he had to confess something. I figured, uh-oh, here we go. He’s really an eleven-year-old girl or he’s married and thirty-eight. Something like that.”

“But that wasn’t it?”

Ema shook her head. “No.”

“So what was his big secret?”

“He ended up saying, forget it, it’s no big deal,” Ema said. She slid a little closer to me. “Don’t you see? He chickened out. I can’t explain this well. I’m summing up hundreds of texts and conversations. It was like something scared him from telling me the truth.”

“You’re right,” I said.

“I am?”

I nodded. “You’re not explaining this well.”

Ema punched me in the arm. “Just listen, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Jared and I finally set up a meet.”

“Jared? His name is Jared?”

“Oh, now you’re going to make fun of his name?”

I held up both hands.

“He lives in Connecticut. About two hours from here. So we agreed to meet at the Kasselton Mall. Jared had just gotten his license and could drive down. He said that he had to tell me something really important, something he could only tell me in person. He said that once we met, I’d understand everything.”

“Understand everything about what?”

“About him. About us.”

I was lost, but I just said, “Okay. So then what?”

“Then…” Ema stopped, shrugged. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“What do you think I mean?” she snapped. “That’s it. I went to the Kasselton Mall. I waited exactly where we said we’d meet-in that back corner of Ruby Tuesday’s. But he never showed. I waited one hour. Then two. Then… all day, okay? I sat there all day.”

“Jared never showed?”

“You got it.”

“So what did you do then?” I asked.

“I texted him. But he didn’t answer. I e-mailed him. Same thing. I went into our chat room, but he didn’t come back. I even checked his Facebook page, but there was nothing there. It was like he had suddenly vanished into thin air.”

Ema typed something onto her laptop and then turned it to me. It was a Facebook profile for a boy named Jared Lowell. I took one look at his profile picture and without thinking said, “You were catfished.”

“What?”

The guy in the profile picture was ridiculously good-looking. I don’t mean everyday-high-school-quarterback good-looking. I mean TV-hunk, fronting-a-hot-boy-band good-looking.

“Forget it,” I said.

Ema was angry now. “Why did you say that?”

“Forget it, okay?”

“No, why did you say that I was catfished when you saw his picture? It’s because he’s cute, right?”

“What? No.” But my words sounded weak even in my own ears.

“You don’t think a guy who looks like that could ever go for a girl who looks like me, right?”

“That’s not it at all,” I sorta-lied.

“If I were Rachel Caldwell, you’d have no trouble believing it-”

“It isn’t that, Ema. But, I mean, look at him. Come on. If I told you I was having an online relationship with a girl I met in a chat room and, when you saw her picture, she looked like a famous swimsuit model, what would you think?”

“I’d believe you,” she said. But now it was her voice that sounded weak.

“Right,” I said. “Sure. And then when I was supposed to meet Miss Swimsuit Model in person, she suddenly vanished-would you still believe it?”

“Yes,” she said a little too firmly.

I put my hands on her shoulders. “You’re my best friend, Ema. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

She looked down, her face reddening in embarrassment.

“I could lie to you and tell you that this all sounds on the up-and-up,” I said. “But what kind of friend does that? I’m not saying your relationship with Jared isn’t real. But if I don’t have the courage to tell you how it looks, who will?”

That stopped her. Ema kept her face down. “So you think, what, it’s a prank?”

“Maybe,” I said. “That’s all. Maybe it’s just a joke.”

She looked up at me. “A joke?”

“A cruel one, but yeah, maybe.”

“Well, ha-ha.” Ema shook her head. “Mickey, think about it. Let’s say it was a prank. Let’s say it was the mean kids in school. Like Troy or Buck, right? Let’s say they set this whole thing up.”

I waited.

Ema spread her arms. “Where’s the payoff?”

I had no answer to that.

“They would have let me know, right? They would have mocked me. They would have rubbed it in my face or put the intimate conversations online. They’d let the world know what a fool I was, wouldn’t they?”

A tear slid down her cheek.

“Why would Jared the prankster just vanish without having the last word?”

I swallowed. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Mickey?”

“What?”

“It is easy to make fun of these relationships. I used to do it too. But think about it. When it is just in writing like this, when it is just texts or e-mails, just your words and nothing else, it is actually more real. It doesn’t matter what you look like or what table you sit at during lunch. It doesn’t matter if you play quarterback or head up the chess club. All of that becomes irrelevant. It is just the two of you and your intelligence and your feelings. Do you see?”

“I guess,” I admitted.

“Listen to me, Mickey. Look at my eyes and really listen.”

I did. I looked into those eyes, and for a moment, I felt happily lost. I trusted those eyes. I believed in them.

“I know,” Ema said. “Don’t ask me how. But I know. We have to do this-even if you think I’m crazy.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not up to us,” Ema said.

“Huh? Of course it is.”

Ema shook her head. “These things come to us, Mickey. It’s bigger than we are.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“What, you think this is Abeona?”

She moved closer to me so we could share the laptop. I smelled her perfume. It was something new, something different. I had smelled it before, but couldn’t place it. She pulled up Jared’s page again. “There has only been one new photograph added since Jared disappeared…”

When I saw the screen, I nearly gasped out loud.

There, on Jared Lowell’s page, was a photograph of a butterfly.

Again, to be more specific, the Tisiphone Abeona.

“We have no choice,” Ema said. “We need to find him.”

We sat there for another moment, staring at that butterfly. I smelled her perfume again and felt a small rush. I looked at her. She looked at me. Our eyes met. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be said.

And then my cell phone rang.

Our eye contact broke as though it were a dry twig. Ema looked away. I looked toward the caller ID on my phone. The number was blocked.

“Hello?”

An adult male said, “Is this Mickey Bolitar?”

The voice was grave and serious and maybe there was a small quake of fear in it.

“Yes, this is he,” I said.

“This is Mr. Spindel, Arthur’s father.”

It took me a second to place the name, but when I did, I felt my pulse quicken. I always called Arthur Spindel “Spoon.” His father, the man on the phone, was the head custodian at Kasselton High School-and Spoon’s father.

“Is Spoon okay?” I said quickly.

Mr. Spindel didn’t answer that directly. “Do you know where Emma Beaumont is?”

Emma was Ema. “She’s right next to me.”

“Could you please both come to the hospital?”

“Of course. When?”

“As soon as possible,” Mr. Spindel said, and then he hung up.