Page 11 of Good Half Gone

“They put something in her drink,” I rush. “And probably mine too, but I didn’t drink much of mine.”

He stared at me hard and then turned to his partner. “Send someone over to collect the cups.”

Puzzled, I watched as she left the room. How would they know which cups were ours? Was he patronizing me?

He made his eyes big when he looked at us again, his lips folded inward. “Anything else you can remember, Iris?”

“Dupont,” I said suddenly. “He goes to our school, Chris Dupont.” I had to be chill, or they wouldn’t believe me. They’d continue patronizing me, wasting time, when they could be out there looking for Piper. “Chris Dupont introduced us to Colby and those guys, Chris will know something. His mom works in the deli at Farmer’s Market.”

Gran looked at him expectantly. “Call that young man and find out where my granddaughter is.” So straightforward. So point-blank. Simple.

Yet he sighed and positioned his pen over the yellow legal pad. “What did you say his name was again?”

I slapped my hand over my face as Gran literally spelled it out for him.

Gran and I sat side by side in that little room for what seemed like hours, just waiting. I offered her the doughnut they’d given me, but she shook her head and stared at her hands. It was unbearably hot in there, and I started worrying about Gran when she took out her pill case and pushed a white something between her lips. She wouldn’t tell us what they meant or what was wrong, but I’d snuck into her medicine cabinet once and found pill bottles lined up neatly like her perfumes.

I never told Gran what I found, but ever since then I’d been watching her carefully for signs of sickness. So far, she seemed normal, and that had somewhat made me feel better. But now, sitting in the meanly lit room with my sixty-seven-year-old Gran, I could see she wasn’t well.

I was about to ask Gran if she was okay when Detective Audrain came back into the room. His face looked all wrong, and I knew something was definitely not okay.

“We spoke to Mr. Dupont…”

Mr. Dupont. I lifted my eyes to his face, both afraid and anxious; Gran grabbed my clammy hand with her dry one.

“He says your sister seemed fine when he saw her in the mall. He said he didn’t go to the movie with you and has no idea who you were with or why.”

“He’s lying! He introduced us to those guys. He knows who they are.”

Audrain shrugged apologetically—possibly patronizingly, as well. “It’s your word against his. There are no witnesses who saw what you saw.”

I was speechless, flabbergasted. Was I not enough of a witness?

“I’m going to put out a bulletin that she’s a runaway.”

Gran and I stared at him, not understanding.

“But she didn’t run away, Iris has told you that.Shewas a witness—she was right there!”

“And we will continue to investigate, but at least getting her picture out there and on law enforcement’s radar—”

“Gran,” I said, gripping her sleeve, desperate to be heard. “She didn’t run away.”

She placed her hand over mine and nodded. “I believe you.” Her voice was final. I believed her. We both looked at Detective Audrain, who stood unflinching; his conviction was as strong as ours. They weren’t going to look for my sister because they thought she was a runaway. Piper would never not tell me if she was planning on going somewhere.

“What about the cups?” I said urgently, marveling at the irony that what I once thought was a ridiculous stretch was now my last hope.

For a moment he looked lost—like he didn’t know what I was talking about. His dark eyes blank, like he’d already moved on to something else, some other case.

A thought so painful flitted through my already overcrowded brain, almost doubling me over in pain—they were never going to find my sister. They weren’t even going to look for her.

Cognizance finally blinked in his eyes. “The cups! Yes, we will look into that and let you know.”

But he knew as much as I did that they’d probably cleaned the theater by now, thrown out the drinks that RJ and Angel brought from the concession stand. It would have been easy to sneak something in before they came back. I pictured the only evidence buried in a dumpster of other cups, hopelessly lost.

“Here is my card, ladies. Call me right away if you hear anything from Piper—anything at all.”

The patronizing. It was thicker than the despair.

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