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“Go where?” I said.
Rita jerked her hand back from my car as if it had burned her. “Oh!” she said, “I don’t have— I don’t know, it just seems— I mean, I thought if we could— Oh, no …” she said, and she came around the car and clamped onto me, putting her head down onto my chest and snuffling, right where Jackie had so recently pressed her face.
I pried Rita away from me and gave her a gentle shake. “Rita,” I said. “Is there someplace to go? Have you heard from Astor?”
“No, of course not, no, but, Dexter,” she said, “what do we do?”
“First,” I said, “we calm down.” I didn’t think Rita would accept this suggestion with any enthusiasm, and she didn’t. She sniffled again, and moaned, hopping up and down, for all the world like a child who has to go to the bathroom. “All right,” I said, taking her elbow. “Let’s go inside.” And over her incoherent protests I led her into the house and sat her down on the couch.
“Now then,” I said. “When is the last time you heard from her?”
“Oh, God, Dexter, you sound just like a— I mean, it’s Astor, for God’s sake, and you’re just—”
“Yes, I am,” I interrupted. “We won’t find her by being hysterical.”
“Oh,” she said, “I suppose you’re right, but …”
“When,” I said very deliberately. “When did you hear from her?”
“I didn’t,” Rita said. “Just … like I said, this morning I dropped her at school? In the same place as always, and then they called to say …”
“All right,” I said. “But you left her in front of her school.”
“Yes,” she said. “And then I— I mean, Cody was being so grouchy, and Lily Anne needed a change, so I just … I drove away.”
It took only a moment’s thought for me to realize what that meant. In a strange way, it was disappointing. I had raised my Other Self up on point, ready to seek and destroy whatever nervy pervert had grabbed Astor, and as always, I felt a little diminished when I had to let all that icy glee drain away. “She wasn’t snatched,” I said. “She left on her own.”
“What!?” Rita said, sounding horrified. “Dexter, but that’s stupid! She would never—”
“She did,” I said firmly. “There’s a cop there at the school in the morning, and hundreds of parents, and bus drivers and teachers—all watching very carefully. Nobody could grab her there without being seen. So they didn’t. She walked away.”
Rita stared at me with big round eyes and a mouth stretched open in almost the same shape. “But … why?” she said. “Where would she go?”
“Almost anywhere,” I said. “Walk up to Metrorail—it’s not far—and then … did she have any money?”
“Her allowance,” Rita said. “And …” She bit her lip. “I think she took some money from my purse. Forty dollars.”
“Well, we can rule out Singapore,” I said. Forty dollars and Astor’s allowance—maybe another ten or twenty dollars, if she’d saved up—would not get her far. “Has she said anything? Like a new friend, or somebody online? Any hint at all?”
“Oh, no,” Rita said. “I would never let her— You know what she’s like. She doesn’t make friends very easily, and— She didn’t say anything.”
“Okay,” I said, and I stood up. “I’m going to look in her room.”
“What?” Rita said. “Dexter, she’s not there; I’m sure I would have—Oh! You mean look for something.…”
“Yes,” I said, and I stepped around her and down the hall to the room Astor shared with her brother. It was a small room, too small for two growing kids of different genders, which was one of the main reasons we had bought the new and larger house, where they would each have their own room. One side of the room was taken up by the bunk bed—Cody on top—and the other side was carefully divided between His space and Hers.
The room was cluttered with all the junk you would expect a couple of ordinary kids to collect—but there were differences, because these, after all, were not ordinary kids. Their Bio Dad’s violence, and probably his DNA, had set their feet on the Dark Path, and they would never ever walk in the happy-face light of Normal.
And so a few odd touches stood out to the eye of any trained observer, especially if he was also a Monster like me. For example, Cody had a number of action figures—he got very cranky if you called them dolls—as any boy his age might. But every one of them had been neatly and lovingly beheaded. The tiny plastic heads were lined up in a careful row on the top tier of his toy shelf, aligned exactly, perfectly, not a single one out of place.
The entire Cody side of the little room, in fact, was alarmingly neat. His shoes were lined up, toes together, his books stacked with the spines aligned, and even his dirty clothes lay neatly in a blue plastic laundry basket, looking like they had been folded first. Preteen boys are never that neat, but since I had been the same way myself, I didn’t worry. Something in a Monster just likes things tidy. Since Cody shared my other, Darker tastes, I just assumed that his Neatness was simply part of the package.
Astor’s half, on the other hand, was as chaotic as a very small space could be. She had a small desk with a hutch on it, and a chair pulled halfway out. Clothing, both clean and dirty, was piled on the chair and on top of the hutch, everything from shorts and jeans and dresses to oddly colored socks and underpants with bright patterns on them. It was a mess, even more than usual, as if she had taken every stitch of clothing she owned and sorted through it, throwing it all around as she did.
If she had, in fact, sorted through it as she prepared to leave, the things she chose to take away might be significant. I was no expert on Astor’s wardrobe, but I could recognize some of the most important pieces, since I had listened to her screech about them when they were not laundered yet, or too stupid to wear, or the wrong color for Friday. I picked through the mound of shirts and skirts and sweaters and hoodies, not sure what I was really hoping to find—and finding it anyway.
There had been some kind of fall dance at school a few weeks earlier, and to my surprise, Astor had insisted on attending. Even more, she had gone into a weeklong towering tizzy about having nothing to wear, which struck me as even odder, considering that the floor of her closet was heaped with enough clothing to start a boutique.
