Chapter 54
COOPER
The day moves slowly.
It seems like five o’clock will never come. Mrs. McCauley often leaves as early as three o’clock on Fridays, but maybe because of the missing money, she is staying later, so there’s no chance of sneaking out.
Worse, she keeps stealing looks at me like she doesn’t trust me.
At one point, she followed me into the break room and stared at me while I heated up my Cup Noodles in the microwave.
I had planned to eat in the break room, but I ended up taking the food back to my office and closing the door behind me.
It’s about half past three when my phone starts ringing on my desk.
When I see Lexi’s name on the screen, I feel a jolt of surprise, followed by worry.
Lexi never calls me. Her generation doesn’t seem to make many calls in general, but I can’t even remember the last time she placed a call to me in particular.
If she needed anything, she’d almost certainly call Debbie before me.
Then again, Debbie has been acting very strangely lately. Maybe Lexi feels uncomfortable reaching out to her with a problem. I know the feeling.
I reach for my phone and click on the green button to take the call. “Lexi?”
“Dad?” There’s a tremor in her voice. “Where are you?”
That’s a strange question. It’s three o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Where does she think I’d be? “I’m at work. Why?”
“Do…do you think you can come home? Like, now?”
I look down at my watch, knowing that it’s way too early to leave with Mrs. McCauley keeping watch. “Is it an emergency?”
“Kind of.” She sounds much younger than her seventeen years. My kids are both teenagers, but they sound like babies on the phone. “I think there’s something wrong with Mom.”
What?
I clear my throat, trying not to jump to conclusions. Debbie and I have always taken a united front when it comes to parenting. I don’t want to betray her. “What do you mean?”
“It’s just a bunch of things that have happened,” she says. “And it’s all…it’s making us think Mom has, like, gone all vigilante.”
“Gone all vigilante?”
“So Izzy got kicked off the soccer team,” she says, “and then the very next day, Coach Pike gets arrested.”
I suck in a breath, not wanting to admit my own suspicions about that night. “Well, I’m sure it was a coincidence.”
“Yeah,” she says, “but then last night, I was telling Mom about some…problems I was having with Zane. And then this morning, he…he drove his car into the school.” Her voice breaks. “He’s in the hospital now.”
I nearly choke. “He what?”
“She didn’t tell you?” Lexi sounds surprised. “It happened this morning. She had to pick me and Izzy up from school.”
No, Debbie didn’t happen to mention that our daughter’s boyfriend was in a serious car wreck. Apparently, it didn’t seem important enough to tell me about.
Christ, what happened to us?
“And then,” Lexi continues.
Oh God, there’s more?
“I had to print this thing out for school, and my printer wasn’t working. So I went downstairs to use Mom’s desktop. And she had this document open on the screen, and it was…really weird.”
“What do you mean by ‘really weird’?”
“Um, I think you better come home and take a look, Dad.”
I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’m not sure if I even want to know. But it’s pretty clear I’m not going to get any work done.
“Where’s your mother?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Lexi admits. “She said she was going on an errand, and that was, like, an hour and a half ago. She’s not back yet.”
An errand? Like the errands she went on the last two nights?
I open the Findly app on my phone to see where she went. But when I click on it, the last known location for Debbie updated two hours ago. She must’ve turned off location sharing.
She doesn’t want me to know where she went, and that scares the shit out of me.
“I’ll be home in a minute,” I tell Lexi. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
I can lie to my children too, apparently.