Page 34 of Come Find Me
Her face softens even more. “I know, honey.” She pivots the computer screen my way so I can see. There’s a column of approved names: I see his lawyer’s name and Joe’s name, not that Joe has ever visited, to my knowledge. And then a column markedUnapproved.There’s only one name on it. She taps her purple fingernail against the screen. “There’s a note here, with your name. It says, specifically, you’re not approved.”
My teeth grind together, and I can feel the people behind me in line growing restless. “Who would do that?” I ask, thinking of Joe. Or Elliot’s lawyer. The police. “Let me talk to someone—”
She shakes her head. “It won’t help. Also, darling, you can’t come in regardless without a guardian present. You’re a minor.”
“Aguardian.” I almost laugh. “That’shim.” I point to the computer screen. I have no guardian anymore, not one that counts. Technically, Joe is the person to put on the school forms, and he can probably claim me as a tax deduction or something. But my true guardians are either dead or locked up behind that wall. Elliot, at eighteen,shouldbe my legal guardian.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” she says, already looking behind me, to the next person.
I pull the envelope out of my pocket, the one with the readout from the radio telescope inside. The thing, I’m sure, only he can decipher. “Can I get this to him? Please. He won’t…” Call, accept my letters, anything. I need him to see this. To tell me what it means. He built it; he would know.
She seems to be debating something, and it’s awful, the hope that precedes her words. “No, Ms. Jones. The inmates set this list.” She waits for me to understand, and when it seems I haven’t gotten the point yet, she lets out a sigh. “This list, this decision, is from him.”
I shake my head, not understanding. Elliot won’t see me?Elliotwon’t let me visit? Not the lawyers, or Joe, butElliot? Elliot, who never acted like I was a pain in his butt, even when I so obviously was. I don’t understand. Ineedhim to give me answers.
Suddenly I feel a hand at my elbow. A voice at my ear. “Come on,” he says. It’s Nolan, beside me, the line of people growing louder behind us. They’re completely unsympathetic to my cause, and I get it, I do. Look where we are; everyone’s got a problem. We’re at ajail.They’re probably immune to scenes like this. To people like me.
He leads me back into the sunlight, against the barren landscape. I hold the paper out to him so he understands. “He built it. The satellite dish. The computer program. He’ll know what it means.”
Nolan frowns. “Can’t you email or something?”
I feel my jaw clenching. “He doesn’t have email. He doesn’t use the phone. I don’t know if my letters get to him.” I used to send them, but eventually they were returned, unopened. I didn’t understand. Idon’tunderstand.
The lawyers, Joe, none of them would let me see him. I thought it was because ofthem.Or because I’m working with the district attorney. For the facts. Just the facts. That’s what I told them. When his lawyer starts in on cross-examination, I’ll be able to tell them there must be another explanation. Elliot, who had never hurt anyone in his life, not even me. Elliot, who once tried to help me clean a cut on my knee (a slip off the railing, the first time I tried to sneak out), and who almost got sick just from looking at it. Mom called me her wild one, which made Elliot the stable one, the reliable one.
Elliot with his prints on the gun; Elliot, covered in blood. Elliot, running from the house, running away.
My nails dig into my palms.
“Maybe there’s someone else who would understand…,” Nolan says.
But I shake my head. “When Lydia looked at the program, she said something about the date,” I explain. “The date the program began.”
“What date?” Nolan asks.
“December fourth,” I say, and I stare at him until I see the information process.
December fourth. Before. After. The split in my life, in the universe.
Something happened then. Elliot Jones was not himself.
“Don’t you see? This signal has to be some sort of warning. Something happened that night,” I explain. “Something dangerous.”
He’s shaking his head, but then he stops. He looks me over carefully.
“You see, don’t you?” I ask, but he seems to be somewhere else. I can tell from his expression, though—he does. He must.
December fourth. The day, according to the papers, that Elliot Jones killed his mother and his mother’s boyfriend, and then ran; schools remained closed in both their county and ours, for safety, until he was found the next day.
The story was this: Elliot’s mother and her boyfriend, Will Sterling, another professor at the college, were at some holiday event. Something happened when they came back to the house after midnight. The daughter—Kennedy, arriving home, sneaking back inside—saw Elliot running from the house. And then she found the bodies on the stairs.
It was a near miss, Sutton said. That Kennedy wasn’t home. That Kennedy was late. He knew her, he said, the girl who survived it. She was at her boyfriend’s house when it happened. Marco, I now know.
I’d seen the pictures in the paper, on the news: the two professors—the woman, with dark hair, smiling in her photo, with the sky and ocean behind her, and the rest of the photo cut away; and the man, with salt-and-pepper hair and a graying beard covering a square jaw.
But Elliot’s photo is the one that haunts me the most: the dark, hollow eyes; the expressionless face as he stared back through the lens of the police camera.
The next day, while the search parties were still out, Elliot suddenly appeared, walking up the driveway, like nothing at all had happened, seemingly with no memory of the event. He was allegedly in the same clothes, dirty, shaken, the blood still under his nails. Sutton said Elliot made it almost all the way to the crime scene tape across the front door, asking, “What happened?” before someone stopped him.
