Page 34 of The Change
“Car?” Amber asked. “My car hasn’t been running. I walked into town. And in case you haven’t noticed, somebody’salwayskilling women.”
Amber’s house was a single-wide trailer parked on a bald patch of sandy dirt. Broken toys lay scattered around the building and a run-down Corolla with three wheels and no license plate sat parked in front. The trailer’s rusted screen door looked as though it had been kicked in multiple times, and a broken window was patched up with duct tape. Jo had always known there were people around Mattauk who weren’t well off. But she couldn’t have imagined this kind of poverty existing a few miles away from her middle-class subdivision or the mansions on Culling Pointe. Mattauk hid its poor people well. Or maybe, Jo realized to her chagrin, she’d never really bothered to look.
Jo had wondered what kind of job would have driven a sixteen-year-old girl to walk five miles down a deserted road in her best dress. Now she knew—and she could have kicked herself for being so dense. A girl who lived in a place like this would have walked five miles for any job that would pay her. Whatever the salary, the money was desperately needed.
A potbellied little boy wearing a pair of basketball shorts stood on the other side of the screen door. The light from a television flickered on the wall behind him. He watched, one hand digging into a bag of Cheetos, as the car pulled up. When the headlights went out and he saw his mom in the passenger seat, he darted out of sight.
“That’s Dustin,” Amber said.
“He’s cute,” Jo said. “How old is he?”
“Seven.” Amber sighed. “Damn it. He was in bed when I left. His brother shouldn’t have let him out. I bet all three of them have been up the whole time. Mandy would have—” She stopped and stared through the windshield, her eyes focused on nothing in particular.
“I’m sorry,” Jo said. “If there’s anything I can do...” She wished she knew how to offer help without offending Amber’s pride.
Amber turned to her. “You kept me out of jail tonight. That’s the best thing anyone’s done for me in a really long time. And if your friend can find Mandy’s body, that might just help more than anything else. I can’t go anywhere until I know there’s no chance at all that she’s coming home again.”
“What time do you get off work tomorrow?” Jo asked.
“My shift at the Stop & Shop ends at seven,” Amber said.
“Okay,” Jo said. “My friend Nessa and I will pick you up after work.”
Why Amber Craig Turned to Arson
Her sophomore year in high school, Amber Craig, reporter for theMattauk High Herald, was sent to interview the area’s oldest resident, who’d recently turned 102. The woman lived in what had once been the guesthouse of a gilded-era mansion that her family had erected more than a century earlier. When Amber rang the bell, she expected the door to be answered by a nurse or a housekeeper. Standing there instead was the woman herself, as alert and high-strung as a rat terrier. They spent the better part of an hour chatting about Mattauk over the decades before Amber got to the clichéd question her journalism teacher had insisted she ask.
“So what’s the secret to a good, long life?”
The woman leaned forward as if she’d been waiting for that very question. “You must do whatever you can to rid yourself of bad luck.”
Amber chuckled politely, imagining it was some kind of old-person joke.
“If it finds you, it will stick to you.” The old lady was dead serious, Amber realized, and she believed her advice was urgently needed. “Should that happen, you must not be afraid. You’ll need to fight back with all your strength. Do whatever is necessary to free yourself quickly, or else you will never escape.”
Amber sat there with her mouth wide-open, unable to muster a response.
“I am telling you this because you are a sweet, smart, pretty girl.I was like you once,” the woman informed her. “Bad luck waits for women like us around every corner. When it found me, I dealt with it expeditiously. And that is the only reason we are here talking today.” Then she smiled, as though it were a relief to have unburdened herself of such weighty knowledge. “Now, would you care for some more apple strudel, my dear?”
Six months later, it was this advice that led Amber to set her softball coach’s beloved boat on fire.
Amber’s father had always wanted a boy. Everyone knew it. He didn’t complain, nor did he do anything to hide his disdain for the feminine creature he and his wife had produced. A lobster fisherman, he spent long days offshore. His wife worked full-time as a receptionist at a clinic in town. Every night, she came home to a second shift of cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Amber was expected to help her mom with the housework, while her father sat drinking beer and watching any baseball game that happened to be on TV. After her chores were done, Amber would often sit beside him, cheering for whichever team he seemed to prefer. Unless she was handing him a fresh Budweiser, her father didn’t seem to know she was there.
Looking back on that time, Amber couldn’t recall ever feeling deprived. Her family wasn’t rich, but she had everything she needed. She ate three balanced meals every day. She had clean clothes to lay out at the bottom of her bed every evening. She made good grades and won awards at school. She had plenty of friends and could name no enemies. Then she joined the softball team.
It was only a lark. The guidance counselor had suggested a sport would look good on her college applications. Amber never expected to excel at anything physical. She was as surprised as anyone when she hit a home run her first time at bat. When the coach put her onthe mound, she only gave up one hit. She saw him watching from the dugout, arms crossed. As usual, his face gave nothing away. It was the astonishment of the girl sitting beside him that told Amber everything. Jamie Roberts had been the team’s best pitcher for the previous two seasons, and she’d just been blown away. Amber couldn’t help but notice the girl looked thrilled.
“Keep pitching like that, and you’ll have a full ride to any college you like,” the coach told Amber after practice.
Until then, Amber had kept her hopes modest and her ambition in check. Her father wasn’t a lawyer. Her mom wasn’t a doctor. There was no college fund sitting in a bank account with her name on it. Now the coach of the island’s best softball team was saying her options might soon be limitless. And John Rocca wasn’t the sort to lie. At thirty, he was already a decorated police officer and a deacon at St. Francis. His prim, pretty wife and three little boys attended every softball game. Though Rocca was ten years younger than her father, he was the kind of man her dad held in high esteem.
“That girl of yours is a phenomenon,” Rocca informed Amber’s father the day of her pitching debut.
Over twenty years later, Amber could still see the pride on her dad’s face. Until she was sent to juvie, he never missed one of her games.
Everything was going well. Amber didn’t want to jinx it. So when it all started, she tried her best to brush it off. Rocca’s appearance in the locker room when she was getting out of the shower was an accident, as was the way his hand often landed a little too high on her thigh. She wrote off all the lingering hugs as evidence of his affectionate nature. It had to be her imagination that he always seemed to find excuses to touch her. The other explanation justdidn’t make sense. There was no way a handsome, happily married police officer would be making the moves on a gawky fifteen-year-old. Rather than make a fuss or complain, she always managed to squirm away.
Jamie, the pitcher who’d been sitting beside Rocca the day Amber tried out for the team, quit two weeks into the season. She was a senior, and she wanted to enjoy her last year in high school. At least that’s what she told the other girls on the team. But whenever Amber saw her, Jamie never seemed to be having much fun. She sat on her own at lunch and walked home alone every afternoon. Amber caught her staring whenever they passed in the hall. Then one day, the girl reached out a hand, grabbed hold of Amber’s sweater, and yanked her over to the side.
