The Stranger Game Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Nanci, my partner in crime

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Sarah

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Sarah

  Chapter 4

  Sarah

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Sarah

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Sarah

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Sarah

  Chapter 11

  Sarah

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Sarah

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Sarah

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Sarah

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Sarah

  Chapter 21

  Sarah

  Chapter 22

  Sarah

  Chapter 23

  Sarah

  Chapter 24

  Sarah

  Chapter 25

  Sarah

  Chapter 26

  Sarah

  Chapter 27

  Sarah

  Chapter 28

  Sarah

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  I KNEW MY SISTER was dead. I felt it in my body, as if my bones could tell me the truth. They were, after all, her bones too. The same parents had created us, we carried the same DNA, the stuff that makes us who we are. I even looked like her: a little twin, a few years younger. And both of us were images of Mom, or how she was in her high school yearbook, with long blond hair and hazel eyes.

  When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t just see my own face but my sister’s too, the one from the Missing posters we had put up all over Mapleview four years ago—the one on the news, in newspapers across the country. Now that my braces were off I could even smile like her, the way she had in our last family photo. The smile of a girl who was head cheerleader. Who had an older boyfriend. Who had secrets.

  I wanted so much to believe she was alive, to cling to hope like Mom. I tried. I let myself imagine that Sarah might walk through the door any day. At night, that hope failed me. In my nightmares I saw all the terrible things that happen to girls like Sarah. When I woke, the vivid images still in my mind, my heart racing, I would lie in bed and watch the lights from the occasional car move over my ceiling and walls and think about the people in those cars. Where were they going? Where had they been, out so late? What were their lives like, lives without the giant gaping hole that is left when someone in your family goes missing?

  I tried to picture Sarah now, how she might look: older, her hair longer or shorter, her skin tanned golden like it had been the last time I saw her. As the days ticked by, the volume of her absence increased. Weeks turned into months and then into years. I knew the truth, even if I could never speak of it to anyone. I knew the darkened bedroom next to mine would always be empty, the door always shut, because this time Sarah wasn’t coming back.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE PHONE NEVER REALLY rang at the help line. Instead, a red light lit up on the keypad, and then the incoming number slowly scrolled onto the screen with the approximate location of the caller. All you had to do was push the button next to the red light to accept the call and speak into the headset: “Teen Help Line. Hi, this is Nico, what’s your name?”

  We had a script we were supposed to follow, and hours of training before we were allowed to answer incoming calls. Even then, Marcia, the supervisor, paced the room, watching over us and clicking on to calls with her own master headset. She would come and stand behind you and write notes if she had something she thought you should say. If a call got totally out of control, she was there to switch lines and take over.

  When I showed up to volunteer, usually one afternoon a week, there was always a volunteer older than me, with more experience. They would take most of the calls and I would just sit and listen. “No better training than this, watching what the other volunteers do, how they react,” Marcia said, probably thinking that I was bummed I didn’t get to take more calls. That wasn’t the case, though—far from it. I was actually relieved. For months, I had been terrified I would take a call and say or do the wrong thing. We had people’s lives in our hands here; so many of them called in ready to do something serious: hurting themselves or someone else. I was happy to sit and listen in, with no responsibility of my own. But sometimes, like tonight, Marcia would ask me to take a call.

  “That’s you, Nico, line two,” she said. The two other volunteers, Amber and Kerri, were already on calls, and for some reason, our fourth person hadn’t shown up.

  I put down the slice of pizza I was eating and wiped my hands quickly before pressing the button next to the red light. “Teen Help Line.” I barely got the words out before I heard her on the other side. Crying.

  “Oh, there’s really someone there?” A small voice sniffled. “A real person?”

  “My name is Nico, what’s yours?” I followed the script, Marcia nodding as I spoke. The caller’s name and number came up on the screen. She was on a cell phone outside Denver. She wasn’t lying about her name, like lots of callers did; the phone was registered to her. I listened closely as she talked, about the girls at her school and how they were treating her, about how she had started cutting and wanted to stop but didn’t know how. “Sometimes I think about just running away, like, just starting over somewhere. You know? Just disappearing,” the girl said.

  A shiver ran down my spine. “I know, I totally understand. We all feel that way sometimes. . . .” I gave the advice I was supposed to, clicked the resource link next to her location, and gave her the names and numbers of the places closest to her where she could get help. But the whole time, my mind was not really on this crying girl. I was thinking of Sarah. Would I know her if she called? That couldn’t happen—would never happen. Coincidences like that were for the movies, not real life. Still, part of me had to admit the truth about why I had chosen to volunteer at the help line to meet the school community service requirement.

  I could have been at the animal hospital, nursing a baby rabbit back to health.

  Or at Mapleview Home for Seniors, reading to some nice old blind lady.

  But here I was, answering calls from teens who wanted to disappear—and then sometimes did.

  By the time I ended the call, the Denver girl had stopped crying. Marcia looked over and gave me a smile and a thumbs-up, even though I could tell she was already listening to another call. I noticed with a start that it was 9:02. I dug my community service form out of my backpack and put it on her desk on my way out.

  “Nico,” Marcia called to me as I was almost at the elevators. “Great work tonight, really,” she said. Her eyes were on the form I’d left on her desk. “Where am I supposed to sign this?”

  I walked back to her desk and showed her. “But you also have to fill out the evaluation section,” I reminded her. “So I’ll pick it up from you later.”

  “Give me a minute and I’ll do it right now.”

  I glanced at the backlit clock on the wall. Now it was 9:05. “I can’t, I have to go,” I said.

  “Really, it’ll just take a sec,” she insisted.

  I stood next to her desk for a moment while she wrote something on the lines. Her black pen moved so slowly. Halfway done. 9:07. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest.

  “I’ll get it from you next week,” I said, running out the door. I didn’t
give her a chance to answer. I pressed the elevator button hard, over and over, until the doors opened. I did the math in my head. By the time I got to the lobby and out the doors, it would be 9:10. I felt my phone vibrating in my bag before I even made it outside.

  There was Mom, her car idling by the curb where she always parked. I could see the bluish light of her cell phone reflected on her face, the lines on her forehead deep and worried. I moved fast over the sidewalk and across the grass, where bits of slushy spring snow soaked my sneakers. I tapped the passenger side window. She looked up at me and for a moment I could see the shock on her face. In the dark, with my long blond hair down under my hood, she thought I was someone else. I knew who.

  I pushed the hood back, showing her my face. She smiled and rolled the window down.

  “You scared me! Come on, get in, it’s freezing.”

  I got into the warm car, smelling leather and Mom’s perfume.

  “You’re late, and I tried to call you. Nico—”

  “Not my fault. You know we aren’t allowed to even take our phones out in the center. And Marcia was filling out my school forms and taking her time.”

  Mom didn’t say anything, just looked into the mirror as she pulled out of the spot. She didn’t have to say anything. I knew how she worried, how unacceptable it was to make her feel like that. Our agreement about always being in touch, no matter what. But sometimes, it was impossible. Impossible to be perfect, to always be on time, to never, ever make Mom and Dad worry about me the way they had about her.

  “What’s the homework situation?” Mom finally spoke in a normal tone of voice as she turned left onto the street that led to our neighborhood.

  “Almost done. I have a chapter to read for chemistry.”

  “And you ate already?” she asked.

  “I ate, Mom,” I answered with a sigh. Always the same questions. Always the same answers.

  She pulled into our driveway, brightly lit by two floodlights over the double garage doors and lanterns on either side of the front door. As we waited for a garage door to open, Mom turned to me. “You know that I’m so proud of you for working at the help line, don’t you? Your dad is too. I want you to know that.”

  I nodded, giving her a weak smile. What wasn’t said, the dark undercurrent of her compliment: You’re not like her. I was that age now, the age she was when the trouble really started. When she ran away the first time. But I was so different, a good girl. Straight-A student. Volunteer. Captain of the tennis team. Mom and Dad didn’t have to worry about me. I wasn’t like Sarah and I never would be.

  In Mom’s headlights, I could see the three bikes lined up in the garage: mine, Mom’s, and Dad’s. The police had found Sarah’s bike at the park the day she went missing, and they never gave it back to us. I pictured it in some dark evidence-storage room, a paper tag with Sarah’s name on it dangling from the silver handlebars. Black powder covering the places they had dusted it for fingerprints, the tires now flat and cracked with age, the purple paint peeling and rusted. No one would ride that bike ever again.

  SARAH

  THE FIRST NIGHT WASN’T that bad. The room was dark, and I was used to sleeping with the lights on. But I didn’t want to make them mad, so I didn’t say anything, I didn’t complain, I didn’t cry.

  I could hear them in the next room talking, the clink of ice in a glass. Much later, the voices got louder, and one said, “A girl! We got a real girl!”

  More voices, so loud I couldn’t sleep. Then someone opened the door, unlocked it from outside, and a shaft of light came in, falling on my face. I closed my eyes fast and pretended to be asleep. I had to breathe so slowly, so carefully. They didn’t come into the room, just stood in the doorway and looked at me, whispering. “There she is, I told you!”

  “I can’t believe it, and she’s beautiful,” another voice said.

  “Like an angel.”

  “Let’s hope she acts like one.” Someone laughed.

  The door closed and I heard the lock slide into place. I was alone again, in the dark.

  CHAPTER 2

  RIGHT AFTER SARAH WENT missing, people everywhere thought they saw her. In the shampoo aisle of a Target in Missouri. Sitting in a parked car at a gas station just outside Las Vegas. At a fall pumpkin festival in Ohio. Walking with an older woman at a Best Buy in Florida.

  They called the number printed on the Missing poster and gave all the information. She was the right height, had long blond hair (or, in one case, her hair had been cut short and dyed black, to disguise her—but the person was still sure it was Sarah). She was wearing jeans and a dusty pink tank top, just like in the photo. Sometimes she was wearing sunglasses or a hat. Or the tank was white, not pink. Or her shirt had changed. And her jeans. Maybe it was a dress or shorts. Maybe it was the outfit she was wearing that day: a white sleeveless dress that came to the knee, a thin gray cardigan, and brown suede boots. But everyone was sure they had found Sarah—the beautiful, blond fifteen-year-old girl who had disappeared. Who had gone to meet her boyfriend at the park and never come home.

  The police and later the Center for Missing Children followed up on every lead. They had officers question people at stores, review surveillance tapes, interview local convicts—and, perhaps worst of all, interrogate convicted rapists and child molesters—in every town where someone thought they had seen Sarah.

  The first time we got a call, just four days after Sarah disappeared, my parents were sure they had found her. As if it would be that easy. Mom jumped every time the phone rang. And on that afternoon, she could see on caller ID that it was the police station. She took a deep breath, swallowed, ran her palms down the front of her pants, then picked up the phone.

  It was a sighting at a Target store in Missouri, where Sarah had been reportedly browsing in the shampoo aisle. My sister was vain about her blond hair and wouldn’t use anything but a salon shampoo. It just didn’t make sense. But there she was, shopping for shampoo and wearing, it seemed, an identical outfit to what she had on in the Missing poster.

  The detectives told Mom and Dad they would call again in an hour with more information. The moment Mom put the phone down, she turned to me. “It’s her, they found her. Thank God.” She sat down beside me on the couch and we stayed like that for the whole hour, waiting for them to call again, while Dad paced in the kitchen. I had this weird feeling that if I moved, if I stood up and went to the bathroom or into the kitchen for a drink, somehow the spell would be broken and Sarah would vanish again. When the phone finally rang, Dad snatched it, his face growing ashen as he listened, nodding and saying “uh-huh” every few seconds.

  “What is it? What is he saying? Is she okay?” Mom whispered. Dad only shook his head. Mom covered her mouth and quietly sobbed.

  “It’s not her,” Dad said, then took the phone into the kitchen to talk about next steps in the investigation. And with those three little words their hopes were crushed. Mom followed him, asking things like “Are they sure?” and “How do they know?” I stayed on the couch in the living room alone for what felt like hours, listening to Mom weep. No one reminded me to brush my teeth. No one told me to go to bed. Finally I went upstairs on my own, down the dark hallway, past Sarah’s bedroom. I reached in and pulled her door shut before I went into my own room.

  The calls came almost every day after that—from all over, fast and furious. And with each false alarm, I watched Mom turn in on herself, her hair sprouting white-gray roots among the honey blond, tiny lines appearing around her eyes and lips as her weight plummeted. She had always been a thin woman, but now, even without her twice-weekly Pilates classes, she grew bony and fragile. Dad became sullen and quiet, finally returning to work two weeks after Sarah disappeared, and then quickly throwing himself into a new merger. His hours got longer: he left at dawn and came home long after we had eaten dinner. It was as if he couldn’t bear to be around us, the blond girls, the constant reminder that his favorite was gone. Mom would practically attack him from the moment
he arrived home, weary and stooped, carrying his briefcase like a heavy weight, and tell him all the updates about the search for Sarah in a quick rush, following him into the den, where he would pour himself a Scotch.

  Mom never went back to her part-time job at the law firm, instead taking on the full-time job of running the search for Sarah. The home office turned into a command post, with a huge poster of the United States taped to one wall, red pushpins at every location where someone thought they had seen Sarah. By the end of the first month, it looked like most of the United States had chicken pox.

  I went back to school, even though I had missed the first couple of weeks of seventh grade. Every morning, I would wake, barely rested, a gritty feeling under my eyelids, and just for a moment forget that Sarah was gone. Sometimes I wouldn’t remember until I’d stumbled to the bathroom or heard Mom telling me it was time for school. Then it would come back to me all in a rush, that sick feeling of dread, of emptiness. It wasn’t a bad dream. It wasn’t a book I had read, a movie we had watched. It was real.

  At first, school was no escape. I was known as “Sarah’s little sister” or “that girl.” People always asked—they had to ask: Was there any news? How are your parents? But after a couple of weeks the worried looks from teachers and visits to the counselor’s office were less frequent. Sarah had gone missing in August, and as we tumbled into October and then November, the holidays loomed like the mouth of a dark cave that no one wanted to enter. I had been walking around in a daze, taking the pills that Mom’s doctor gave her, not really connecting with anyone at school. I hadn’t noticed the new girl who started at our school that fall. A girl who had never known Sarah, who didn’t know anything about me. Except one thing.

  “You lost a lot of weight, huh?” she said, joining me at my locker after English class one day. I hadn’t been trying to, but she was right. A growth spurt and lack of appetite over the past few months had led me to thin out. I thought no one had noticed.

  “Me too, or I’m trying to,” she whispered, leaning in close as she walked with me to my next class. “I wanted to make a new start at this school, and I didn’t want to be known as the fat girl, you know, so I went on a cleanse. . . .” She smiled and I noticed that just the ends of her dark curls were dyed a light purple hue. “You’re Nico, right? I love your name. I’m Tessa.” The bell rang and cut her off. “Well, see you at lunch.”