Accomplice Read Online Free Page B

back then—that was part of the reason for moving out of the city. Not much reached Cam, but he’d spend two hours brushing a horse. He was really into systems—he liked maps and schedules, and lately he’d been sort of obsessed with the skeletal structures of the animals on the farm. So Colt River was a good town for him. He never went to school with us—he got bused over to some research facility in Princeton—but by the time of the disappearance, everyone in town knew Cam and knew to let him take his own time with things.
    That night, Cam was building something with dominoes. I could see from the trailer’s screen door—it covered the whole table. Later Chloe would say I banged on the door, but I don’t remember it that way. My hands were cooking against the pie plate, and Cam was looking right at me. I just hadn’t learned yet that didn’t mean he saw me. So I yelled. And when I yelled, Cam yelled, and then he jerked his hands and then the clatter of all those dominoes falling filled the steel cylinder of the Caffreys’ trailer. Chloe rushed over to the door to swing it open, and I almost fell backward. Mr. and Mrs. Caffrey came tearing out from some back room. Their mom went right to Cam and sort of held his arms at his sides. And Mr.Caffrey took the pie without even saying thank you. He barely looked at Chloe and me when he said, “You girls should stay outside and play.”
    “What’s wrong with your brother?” I remember asking Chloe. It must have been the first question that a lot of people asked Chloe.
    I never heard a different answer from the one she gave me that night, either. She just stared at me and said, “Nothing.” As if it was that simple and obvious. Back then when people looked back at Chloe, it wasn’t because she was pretty. Her two front teeth stuck out almost horizontally, and she was so skinny that her elbows and knees jutted even farther. That first night, she was wearing a blue checkered dress—like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz . It wasn’t a real dress—it was one of those Halloween costumes, the kind made of really thin material so that your mom makes you wear long underwear underneath. Chloe just wore it on its own, like it was a real dress. She even had on sparkly red shoes. And when I asked her about the costume, she said something like, “It’s not a costume.” In the same flat voice she used to say that nothing was wrong with Cam.
    I had waited a long time to have a kid live close by. It didn’t even have to be a girl—just someone around my age who didn’t suck. Another set of legs climbing onto the school bus from my stop on the corner of the long road alongside our farm. I wanted a neighborhood likethe ones on TV where kids ran back and forth between each other’s houses and ate at each other’s dinner tables all the time. My neighborhood was, well, us. The farm. Back then, I couldn’t even ride my bike to the nearest house.
    So finally there was the possibility of something else. But one kid was inside crying over dominoes. And then there was this girl dressed up like Dorothy, clicking her heels in a lawn chair outside of her trailer. Not what I’d pictured at all.
    I helped torment Chloe until February. There’s no other way to say it. She dressed like a cartoon, and her teeth made me cringe, and even though my dad never said it out loud, he seemed sad now when he looked out our kitchen window onto what used to be all of our land and saw another family living there. So I helped pick on her. I laughed when other kids pointed, and I could draw an accurate diagram of the strange angles of her skewed smile. She looked like some doll that had been tossed into the dryer for too long.
    Right after our Valentine’s Day party, when we were supposed to be packing up little envelopes and waxy bags of candy, Chloe was bent over her cubby, wearing her Dorothy dress, and Ryan Neylon started it—darting over and flipping up her skirt. Yelling guesses about the color of