Chapter 17 Kaiden #3
I shower. Change. Black slacks. Black dress shirt.
The top two buttons open because I’m not a fucking accountant.
Sleeves pushed to my elbows—the tattoos visible, the ink and the dark fabric and the particular way I carry myself in clothes that cost more than most people’s monthly rent.
The boutonniere goes on—white anemones and blush roses, matching Cat’s corsage.
I look in the mirror. The boy who looks back is not the boy who walked through the Edgewood archway in September. That boy was playing a role—king, bully, the dark prince of a prep school kingdom that meant nothing. This one is playing for something real.
I grab my keys and head for the car.
Thomas answers the door. That’s the first wrong thing.
Not Cat. Not Penny yelling from upstairs to hold on, she’s not done with the eyeliner.
Thomas. Standing in his doorway in a suit that means he was getting ready for the dance chaperone duties he volunteered for.
But his face isn’t right. Not the warm assessment from this afternoon. Something tight. Confused.
“Kaiden?”
“Yeah. I’m here to pick up Cat.”
“She’s not here.”
The sentence doesn’t compute. I stare at him, waiting for the rest of it—“she’s at your house” or “she went to Penny’s” or any of the reasonable explanations that should follow “she’s not here.”
None come.
“What do you mean, she’s not here? She said she was getting ready at the school with Penny then coming here. I was picking her up at seven.”
“I know. But I called her fifteen minutes ago to say I was heading to the school for chaperone check-in. No answer. Penny’s phone goes straight to voicemail.”
The wrongness intensifies. A low hum in my chest—the frequency that precedes dread.
I pull out my phone. Call Cat. Straight to voicemail.
Her voice—“You’ve reached Catherine, leave a message”—sounding normal and alive and completely unreachable.
Call Penny. Same. Voicemail. No ring. Straight to the recording.
“Phones off,” Thomas says. His voice has changed—the politician falling away, the father surfacing. “Both of them. At the same time.”
Call the coach. Three rings. “Kaiden?”
“Coach. Have you seen Cat or Penny at the school? They were supposed to be getting ready in the girls’ locker room.”
Silence. “I cleared the locker rooms an hour ago. Both of them. The building was empty.”
The dread goes from a hum to a roar.
“Fuck. Thanks, Coach.” I hang up. Look at Thomas. “The building was empty. They’re not at the school.”
Thomas’s face drains. Not gradually—the color leaving like a switch being thrown. The same way Cat’s face looked when she saw the photographs on the kitchen island. The family resemblance in crisis.
We move at the same time—both of us out the door, across the lawn, through the gate. My house. My father is in the kitchen.
“Cat and Penny are missing.” The words come out of my mouth and they don’t sound real. They sound like a line from a movie, the kind of thing that happens to other people in other stories. Not to us. Not to her.
But they’re real. And the look on my father’s face—the instant, total shift from evening-at-home to combat mode—confirms it.
Thomas is already on his phone. “Edgewood Police. I need to report two missing persons. Both female. Both seventeen. Last known location Edgewood Preparatory Academy.”
My mother appears from the hallway. Reads the room in under a second. Her face goes still—not blank, focused. The particular concentration of Saoirse Monaghan when she has decided that efficiency will save what panic will waste.
“Thomas. Sit. Tell the police everything.” She points to my father.
“Callum. Call every parent you have a number for. Penny’s parents first.” She turns to me.
“Get your friends here. Now. And start pulling up social media—if anyone at that school posted photos from the locker room area in the last two hours, we need to see them.”
I text the group chat.
Me: Cat and Penny are missing. Phones off. Building empty. Come to the house NOW.
Iz: On my way.
Xander: fuck.
Danny: Five minutes.
Ryan: Already running searches.
I start scrolling. Instagram. GlossX. Snapchat.
Every platform, every post, every story from every student at Edgewood from the last three hours.
Game photos. Celebration videos. Selfies in the stands.
Penny and Cat in the background of someone’s story—walking toward the school building after the game, arms linked, Penny talking, Cat laughing.
Timestamp: 5:47 p.m.
After that: nothing. No posts. No stories. No check-ins. Two girls who were visible and documented by dozens of phones simply…stop appearing. As if they walked through the school doors and ceased to exist.
The boys arrive. Iz first. Then Xander—moving fast, his face a mask, his energy the particular vibrating tension of a person whose body is flooding with adrenaline and hasn’t found an outlet yet. Danny and Ryan together, Ryan already on his laptop.
Xander doesn’t speak. He paces. Three steps one way. Three steps back. His hands are fists.
“X.” Iz, calm. Steady. The anchor. “We’re going to find them.”
“Penny,” Xander says. One word. The name carrying a weight that has nothing to do with friendship and everything to do with whatever he’s never been able to say to her. “If something happened to Penny, I—”
“We’re going to find them,” Iz repeats. The same words. Firmer.
Ryan has his laptop open. “Phone GPS. Cat’s phone last pinged off the cell tower nearest the school at 6:02 p.m. Penny’s at 6:04. After that, both signals drop. Either the phones were turned off or they were destroyed.”
“Destroyed.” The word sits in the room like a dropped bomb.
“We need to go to the school,” I say. Standing. Already moving. “Their stuff is there. Their bags, their phones—there might be something.”
My father nods. “The police are on their way there. Be careful. Call me.”
Five cars. Five boys. The drive to Edgewood takes seven minutes and I make it in four, the Skyline’s engine screaming through the back roads, my hands on the wheel so tight the leather might tear.
The school. The parking lot. Half-full—homecoming dance still going inside, the bass thumping through the walls, students inside who have no idea that two of their classmates have vanished.
We split. Iz and I take the girls’ locker room. Danny and Ryan take the exterior. Xander goes for the security office because Xander Anderson knows that the cameras will have answers even if people don’t.
The girls’ locker room. The door is unlocked.
Inside: two garment bags hanging from hooks.
Two pairs of heels on the bench. Makeup spread on the counter—Cat’s eyeliner, Penny’s mascara, the particular debris of two girls who were in the middle of getting ready and stopped.
Their bags are on the floor. Cat’s backpack with the keychain I recognize—the tiny lacrosse stick Iz gave her as a joke.
Penny’s tote with the band patches sewn onto the strap.
They were here. They were getting ready. And then they weren’t.
Danny’s voice from outside. “Kaid. Come here.”
I walk out the side door of the locker room. The one that leads to the small parking area behind the athletic building. Danny is standing ten feet from the door, looking at the ground.
Cat’s phone. On the pavement. Screen shattered. The case—the clear one with the pressed flower inside that she bought at a farmer’s market with Penny—cracked in half. Not dropped. Smashed. The kind of damage that comes from being thrown or stomped, not from falling.
Three feet away: Penny’s phone. Face-down on the asphalt. Screen intact but powered off.
I pick up Cat’s phone. The screen is a web of cracks. Underneath, frozen on the lock screen: our photo. The one Iz took at the game last week—me kissing her forehead, her eyes closed, both of us lit by stadium lights. The image fractures through the broken glass like something seen through water.
My hand starts shaking. Then my arm. Then my whole body.
Ryan appears. Laptop in hand. “Xander got into the security office. The exterior cameras were disabled. Manually. Someone cut the feed at 5:58 p.m.—four minutes before the phone signals dropped.”
Disabled. Not malfunctioning. Disabled. By someone who knew where the cameras were and how to shut them off.
“Pennington,” Iz says. Not a question.
The name lands in the parking lot like a detonation. Because of course. Because it’s always been the Penningtons. Because every terrible thing that has happened to the people I love has the same family name attached to it.
Xander comes running from the building. His face is white. His phone is in his hand.
“Jon wasn’t at the dance,” he says. Breathing hard. “I checked the sign-in sheet. The chaperones confirmed. Jonathan Pennington never showed up to homecoming.”
The world narrows to a single, absolute point: Cat is gone. Penny is gone. Jon is gone. The cameras were cut. The phones were destroyed. Two girls walked into a building and didn’t walk out, and the boy whose family has been destroying ours for years is unaccounted for.
I look at the shattered phone in my hand. At the photo beneath the cracked glass—my mouth on her forehead, her eyes closed, the stadium lights.
I close my hand around it. Feel the glass bite into my palm. Don’t care.
“We find them,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
It sounds like something that’s been forged—hammered, heated, cooled.
The voice of a person who has moved past fear and into the place beyond it, the place where the only thing left is action.
“We find them tonight. We tear this town apart. We call every person we know. We check every property the Penningtons own. We find our girls.”
Xander is already moving. Danny and Ryan behind him. Iz at my side. The police arrive. Sirens in the distance, getting closer. Blue and red lights reflecting off the school’s stone walls.
I stand in a parking lot behind the Edgewood Prep athletic building, holding the shattered remains of Catherine O’Farrell’s phone, and the thing in my chest—the thing that’s been growing for weeks, the word I haven’t said—is no longer a quiet, patient presence.
It’s a scream. And it won’t stop screaming until she’s safe.