Clarissa Hayes's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Seven years after prom, Clarissa Hayes still kept the corsage in a glass dish by the door. The silk petals had gone brown at the edges. The silver pin had tarnished to the color of old nickels. She touched it every morning before she walked out to the board, the way other people touched a cross. This was the only piece of him she had left, and she was no closer to finding him than the night he walked her to her car and said he wanted to remember the moment. The board stood under a tarp behind her cabin, nailed to a sheet of brick she had hauled out from a torn-down chimney. Photos. Phone records. A witness statement that said nothing. Red string ran from a snapshot of his friend group to a question mark over the word LOCATION. She had pinned a printout of the girl's last known address there two years ago. The girl had moved again. The number was dead. Every thread on the board ended in a pin and no further line. Salem wound between her ankles, rainbow collar bright against the black of his coat. Clarissa picked him up and carried him to the bench at the edge of the yard. She had set the bench where she last saw her boyfriend standing, the night of the yellow dress, the night he watched her shut her car door. The brass plaque held his name and the date. No second date. She had not been able to bring herself to guess one. She sat down with the cat in her lap and opened her laptop on her knees. For three months her inbox had given her nothing but spam and a Christmas card from her mother. Today there was a message from an account with no name. One line. I was there. I saw which car he got into. It wasn't yours. Below it, a photo. A dark sedan, parked under a streetlight she recognized from the school lot. A hand on the driver's door. A class ring she had seen a hundred times in yearbook photos of the girl's older brother. Clarissa read the message twice. Then she stood up so fast Salem hit the grass running. She walked to the board and pulled the printout of the girl's old address off the brick. She tore it in half and let the pieces fall. The girl had not been hiding nothing. The girl had been hiding her brother. Clarissa went inside, opened a drawer, and took out the envelope where she kept the cash she had been saving for a lawyer. She counted it on the kitchen table. Enough for gas. Enough to drive to the brother's last known city by morning.