I head for Scobee’s, which had been my father’s favorite joint, where he’d stopped to pick up his breakfast sandwich the morning he never made it to school.
Open all night, because it always has been.
It’s the only twenty-four-hour place around, even the bars having curfews, nobody ever thinking of calling Cross Rivers, North Carolina, the city that never sleeps.
But it’s not asleep tonight and neither am I.
Scobee’s is where Taylor McCarter Webb works part-time to supplement her salary driving a grade-school bus, all to help her pay for the teaching courses she’s still taking at Appalachian State, and to supplement Burt Webb’s salary as a small-town policeman.
I don’t call ahead to see if she’s there tonight.
If she is, I want to surprise her when I sit down at the counter and order up some homemade cherry pie.
But I know I’m not going there for the cherry pie. Another lie I don’t believe.
I’m going there because I need to talk to her in the worst way, the way we did in high school when she and I would sit in a booth on weekend nights and try to settle the world’s problems.
Or my problems, with the girl I might have been dating at the time or because I was struggling with a course or which scholarship I should accept, even though we both knew I was going to end up at Carolina the same as my father did. It was one of his dreams for me even though he never came right out and said so when he was still around to share his dreams with me.
Taylor had warned me that day in the rehab, how I need to watch out because being alone isn’t good for me, and it sure isn’t healthy.
I’ve never felt more alone in my life than I do right now.
One more time, and despite all of my good intentions, I drive fast.
FOURTEEN
I CAN SEE the bright neon colors of the Scobee’s sign from more than a mile away. But when I pull off the road, and even with all the lights clearly on inside, there are no cars in the small lot out front.
If Taylor is working, it might just mean that Burt dropped her off. Once I’m out of the truck, though, and walking toward the door, I can’t see a single customer at the counter, or in any of the booths. But even at this time of the morning, there are always a few stragglers at Scobee’s, trying to get some coffee in them if they’re on their way home from a bar—coffee or food or both. Or people just looking for company. Or conversation.
When they’re the ones who don’t want to be alone.
I’m starting to think that this is one of the rare nights when they’ve closed up early, and somebody just forgot to turn off the lights before locking up.
Only, the front door is open. I hear the familiar jingle as I walk through it, feeling in that moment as if I really am stepping into a way-back machine and on my way all the way back to high school.
“Taylor McCarter Webb,” I call out. “If you’re here, I want some cherry pie and I want it now.”
I wait.
No response from the kitchen.
“Hey, Tay!” I call out again. “Do you remember the time I told you that the two most beautiful words in the English language weremore pie?”
Still no answer.
There is the unmistakable smell of burger in here, like one had been cooked up not long ago. And as I pass the counter, on my way into the kitchen, I see half a glass of lemonade, with a clear red lipstick smudge on it, the ice in it not melted.
When I’ve made my way through the swinging doors and into the kitchen, I can see that the griddle is still on.
I stand very still in Bess Scobee’s kitchen, all of my senses on high alert, all of my instincts telling me that something is very wrong here.
It’s like the feeling I used to get when my pocket was breaking down and I knew pressure was coming even if I couldn’t see it, from behind me or from my blind side. Vince used to call it my “sick sense.”
And in this moment my brain, almost on its own, goes right back to what I’d heard on the radio on my way into town about another girl having gone missing.
Taylor is no longer a teenager, the way all of the other missing girls have been teenagers, but she sure could still pass for one.
