The Disappearance Read online

  “Well,” McGill said finally, playing a little drum solo on top of his notebook, “here’s the thing. The footage is kind of useless on that front.”

  “What?” asked Joe, brow furrowed.

  “Yeah, how?” I added. “Did the camera malfunction?”

  “No, it’s actually much more irritating than that,” McGill said, frowning. “There was a plant blocking the view of the camera on the walkway, and the lobby cameras show nothing unusual.”

  A plant? I thought, trying to make sense of that. Did someone block the camera on purpose, then? Or was it just a coincidence?

  I looked at Joe and could tell he was mulling all this over too. It was a lot to take in.

  And we still don’t know where Harper is, or whether she’s safe.

  Gomez stood up. “Listen, you boys should go home and get some rest,” she said. “Let us handle this. We’ve got it.”

  When we didn’t move, McGill shot us a sympathetic look. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re taking your friend’s disappearance very seriously. We’ve had a couple other people disappear from UrMotel rooms recently, so this is part of an even bigger investigation. Rest assured, no rock will go unturned in our search for your friend.”

  Joe and I shared a look. This might be part of something bigger? That was not reassuring.

  Officer Gomez must have picked up on our concern, because she quickly added, “They’ve all had reasons to want to disappear, though, so we’re not even sure if Harper’s case is related. She could even turn up later today.”

  Reasons to disappear. I thought back to what Patty had said—about Harper being ‘wild.’ ” And I remembered Matt’s crazy voice in the messages he’d left for Harper.

  Did Harper have reasons to want to disappear?

  “What will you do next?” Joe asked. Even as long as we’d been there, he seemed, like me, reluctant to leave.

  “First we’ll interview more people,” McGill said. “Try to do some more research into Harper’s life, starting with her phone. Then forensics. Hopefully that will give us a lead.”

  I looked at Joe and nodded. None of that was surprising, but it was comforting in a way to know the police at least had a plan. As it was, every sleuthing cell in my body was freaking out at the idea of leaving Margate with a case unsolved. But we had to, right? The police were on it.

  After a second, we stood up.

  McGill and Gomez stood up too. “I’ll walk you out,” Gomez said, gesturing toward the door.

  She led us down a hallway that passed by another interrogation room. Inside, through the window on the door, I could see Matt. He looked flushed and uncomfortable.

  Gomez saw me looking. “Oh, don’t bother waiting for your new friend,” she warned. “Mr. Driscoll isn’t going home any time soon!”

  “He isn’t?” asked Joe. “Why, is he a suspect?”

  Gomez shook her head. “You know I can’t answer that,” she said. I watched her glance back with contempt at the room that held Matt.

  I remembered how tense Harper had been last night when she saw he’d called . . . and how completely she’d changed when she hung up with Matt.

  Did he do something to Harper?

  5

  SAMPLE TEST

  JOE

  THERE ARE TWO WORDS THAT should never be used to describe studying for the SAT:

  “Fun.”

  “Easy.”

  Especially when you’re me, Joe Hardy, and you’re kind of in the middle of a case that is unsolved and maybe seems impossible. That’s when my brain goes nuts with every possible explanation, motivation, secret method, wild theory . . . or it tries to, at least.

  The day after we got back from Margate, my brain kept being rudely interrupted from focusing on my practice by SAT questions. I read:

  15. As used in line 18, “claim” most clearly means

  A. to declare one’s own

  B. an entitlement

  C. to maintain

  D. a spoiled clam

  But what my brain understood was:

  15. Shortly after waking up at her UrMotel, Harper heard a disturbance outside. It was

  A. the mean neighbor guy, with a baseball bat

  B. a totally friendly guy she’d met at Comic-Con, asking her to get breakfast

  C. Matt, in some kind of psychotic rage

  D. a talking seagull, wanting to discuss politics

  There’s always one answer you can eliminate off the bat, they tell me. Rumor has it it’s usually D.

  Anyway, I was not getting very far in my studies. I was finding it very hard to concentrate, even though Frank and Jones were in our living room, doing research on the case so I didn’t have to. That’s how Frank described it, anyway.

  With a sigh, I closed my laptop and stood up. I’d just tell Frank and Jones this one thing, I promised myself. Then I’d study the whole rest of the day.

  Jones spotted me immediately, and they both looked up from the desktop computer to shoot me frustrated looks.

  “What are you doing out here?!” Frank demanded. “You’re supposed to be studying. Get back in there, bro! We’ve got this.”

  “It’s just . . .” Faced with all that pushback, my brilliant observation suddenly seemed less important. “I was thinking,” I went on. “Maybe Harper met someone at Comic-Con that we don’t know about. She got there before us, right?”

  Jones rolled her eyes, which I thought was somewhat uncalled for. “Way ahead of you, Joe. Don’t worry, we’re looking at all possible angles.”

  I have to admit, it didn’t feel great to see someone else doing active sleuthing with Frank. We’d both dated girls before, but before now, no girlfriend had taken over as co-sleuth on any case.

  So I ignored her and looked at Frank. “Did the police call?”

  He shook his head. “No, Joe. Go back to studying.”

  “So there’s no news?” I pulled my sweatshirt sleeves over my hands and crossed my arms, feeling restless.

  “No.” Frank sighed. “Seriously, Joe, nothing is happening. Go study!”

  I nodded, like I understood, then took a step back toward my room. But I couldn’t do it.

  “I can’t concentrate,” I whined, turning back around.

  “Joe, I know it’s hard,” Frank said in his calm, measured voice. “But we decided to trust the Margate police to handle this, remember?”

  I groaned.

  “You have to study, anyway,” Frank reminded me. “The police are on it. And we’re doing some investigating. Just go focus on your practice tests.”

  “Think of the Bayport police, though,” I said, thinking through all our old cases. “I mean, they try, but . . . What if the Margate police are like that? And if they are, can they really be ‘on it’?”

  Frank just sighed again. “Joe . . .”

  “You can’t say they are,” I pointed out. “Because you know they might not be. Police are fine and all, but they miss things. And what if Harper is in danger?”

  Frank and Jones looked at the computer screen. “Right now,” Frank said, “we have no reason to believe that she is.”

  “But . . .” I stepped into the living room, peering over their shoulders at the screen. “What was on her phone? Anything helpful?”

  But wait, a person might think, I thought they gave Harper’s phone to the police in Margate. And we did. But this wasn’t our first time at the rodeo, so we took certain precautions before handing it over.

  Frank and I always travel with a small, powerful flash drive. In our car on the way to the Margate police station, before the cops even knew Harper’s phone existed, I’d copied some of its contents onto the drive while Frank drove. We didn’t have a ton of time (small towns, man), so I’d had to limit it to only messages, calls, and e-mails that had been exchanged over the last week.

  Now Frank had the drive plugged into the family desktop, and he and Jones were poring over the contents.

  Jones shook her head. “Not really,” she said
. “She and Matt had kind of a messed-up relationship, they fought a lot, but we knew that. There aren’t any threats here or mentions of any specific incidents where she felt threatened.”

  “I mean, Matt clearly had a temper,” added Frank, “but we kinda knew that from spending half an hour with him.”

  I stared at the screen, quickly reading through some day-to-day texts between Harper and Matt. Frank and Jones were right: some messages were testy, but it was nothing that couldn’t be explained by a bad mood.

  “Are there texts from anyone you didn’t expect?” I asked. “A new suspect, maybe?”

  Jones tapped the corner of the screen. “There’s one mystery texter—a Jersey number, not in Harper’s contacts. They’re all about an appointment that Harper kept putting off.”

  I shrugged. “That could just be her doctor, maybe? Or her dentist? Maybe she’s just putting off her yearly cleaning in the hopes of making it look like she’s been flossing all along. We’ve all been there, am I right?”

  Frank rolled his eyes. “Speak for yourself, Joe. I floss every night.”

  “You would,” I muttered, still reading the screen. “But actually, why would her doctor be in Jersey? And it looks like she has a couple doctors identified in her contacts, and this didn’t come from them.”

  “It could be anything, though,” Jones said. “Maybe it was a therapist, or a career counselor, or a job interview. The point is, it doesn’t seem like a motive for anyone to hurt her.”

  I sighed. “I guess so.”

  Frank turned around to look at me. “Go back and study, Joe,” he said. “I told you, we’ve got this.”

  Frowning, I obeyed this time and shuffled reluctantly back to my room. I opened up my laptop and tried to focus on my practice test.

  16. Harper was secretly mixed up with:

  A. the Mafia

  B. a drug dealer

  C. a cult

  D. a very nice dermatologist

  I shook my head to clear it, which only made me sneeze violently.

  “Ugh,” I muttered, making a mental note to dust my room. I reached into the pocket of my sweatshirt, thinking maybe I’d find a balled-up tissue.

  But I didn’t. What I found was better.

  “Guys! Guys! ” I ran into the living room, waving what I’d found.

  “Dude,” Frank said, looking up at me with his nose wrinkled. “Get a tissue!”

  “Sorry.” I ran into the bathroom, grabbed a tissue, wiped, and tossed it—then ran back out. “But I found something!”

  “What’s that?” Jones asked.

  I held up the item from my pocket again—a business card. “The guy we met at Comic-Con,” I reminded them. “The guy Harper seemed to be avoiding.” I looked at the card. “ComiczVon. Remember? Does the number 201-555-3549 sound familiar?”

  Jones stared at the screen. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the number that was texting Harper about the meeting!”

  I threw my hands in the air. “Change of plans, then!” I yelled. “We have a suspect! We’re driving back to Atlantic City!”

  Jones and Frank looked briefly excited—but then they looked at each other and their expressions suddenly turned guilty.

  “But, Joe,” said Frank. “You really should study. . . .”

  “Look,” I said, putting my arms down and putting on my best I’m serious face. “I know you guys mean well, but the truth is, I’m never going to be able concentrate on some practice test until I know Harper’s safe.”

  I could see their expressions softening.

  “And, Frank,” I added, “you were there when we talked to the police. I’m afraid they’re going to look for the easiest answer—either Matt did something to Harper, or Harper took off herself.”

  Frank looked thoughtful, but Jones raised a finger.

  “But what about Occam’s razor?” she asked. “You know—the theory that the simplest answer is usually the right one.”

  “Sometimes it is,” I agreed, “But a lot of times, it’s not. Frank and I know that better than anybody.”

  Frank let out a breath through his nose. “Joe’s right,” he said. “A lot of the cases we’ve worked on have been, well, complicated.”

  I nodded. “See? Now, are you guys going to sit there and argue with me, or are you going to get in the car and help me solve this case so I can focus on studying?”

  Frank looked at Jones beseechingly. Jones shook her head.

  “All right,” she said after a few seconds, “I’ll help. But only on one condition.”

  “Name it,” I said.

  She pointed at my pj pants. “You have to put on some real pants.”

  Frank laughed. “I’ll go fill Mom in on what’s going on while you do.”

  • • •

  A couple of hours later, I was wearing a pair of clean-ish jeans and sitting in Frank’s car, watching a picnic area in a park outside Atlantic City. Jones was in the backseat, her laptop on her lap.

  “Tell him we’re here, and the package is under the bench,” Frank instructed from the driver’s seat.

  Jones typed out a message on her keyboard. Using information from Harper’s phone, Frank had found an app that would allow us to send texts from Jones’s laptop that would look like they came from Harper’s phone. For the last hour or so, we’d been corresponding with ComiczVon, aka Von, the guy we’d met at the convention. Posing as Harper, Jones had set up a meeting in this park.

  Now we were just waiting for him to show up.

  It soon became clear from our texts that Von was very concerned about something Harper owed him. We had no idea what it was. Money? Some kind of rare comic book? Something illegal? (Harper had seemed like a girl on the up-and-up to me, but hey, if there’s one thing sleuthing teaches you, it’s that everyone has secrets.) Von never threatened Harper, but he kept talking about getting this thing she owed him, so Jones-as-Harper had finally said she’d bring it today. Von had instructed her to put it under a particular bench. So we’d tied up a little parcel in brown paper. The parcel actually contained one of Aunt Trudy’s famous banana breads, because everyone loves banana bread, and if all went well, we could snack on it while discussing what Von wanted with Harper.

  Besides, maybe the thing Harper owed him was banana bread. Unlikely, but you never know.

  “Is that him?” Frank asked suddenly.

  A smallish guy was chaining up his bike to a bike rack about twenty yards from the bench, in a little copse of trees.

  “That’s him,” Jones confirmed. “He’s even wearing the same military jacket.”

  This was true. But despite the tough-guy jacket, Von looked pretty diminutive and nonthreatening in the light of day. As he stepped into the light, his distinctive blue-dyed buzz cut became visible. He was wearing a Simpsons T-shirt, a pair of black jeans, and Converse sneakers that were covered with Day-Glo Batman symbols. Also, he’d ridden his bike here: not exactly a popular getaway vehicle for hardened criminals.

  “What is he up to?” I murmured.

  He walked from the bike rack over to the bench, looking around as though he expected someone to attack at any moment. When he came close enough to spot the parcel, a look of utter relief came over his face, and he sped up.

  As he knelt down and reached out to claim the package, Frank and I leaped into action, bolting out of the car and running over to corner him.

  “Hey, Von!” Frank yelled out.

  “You two,” he muttered, looking from Frank to me as we walked closer. I guessed he was disappointed to see us instead of Harper. “What are you, her bodyguards or something?”

  “Who?” I asked, just wanting to make sure we were all on the same page.

  “Harper,” he replied. “Of course. The reason we’re all here.”

  Frank raised an eyebrow at him. “Why would she need a bodyguard?” he asked.

  Looking frustrated, Von huffed. “You tell me!” he said. “I’m just trying to get what she owes me. I’m not looking to hur
t anyone.”

  Frank and I exchanged a glance, and I reached for the parcel and began unwrapping it. “Okay,” I said. “Two questions, then . . . One, what does Harper owe you? And two, do you like banana bread?”

  Von liked banana bread very much, it turns out. Like most people.

  He relaxed a bit as we chatted and it became clear that Frank, Jones (who emerged from the car after a few minutes), and I just wanted to talk to him. He explained that he’d met Harper on the InkWorld forum, and they spent months flirting online. He thought it was pretty serious, and they soon began making plans to meet in person. But Harper always backed out at the last minute. And before they could meet up, Harper asked Von for a loan, claiming she needed it to pay for some medicine.

  “I gave it to her,” Von said, reaching for his second piece of banana bread. “I realize now that was really naive of me. But at the time, I really thought she might have feelings for me. I thought we had a future together. And she said she needed the money for medication! I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  “You sent it to her online?” Jones asked.

  Von nodded. “Yeah, through an app she told me about. Once I sent it, there was no way to get it back, and no record that I’d even sent it. It was listed on my bank records as a purchase.”

  He spent months, he said, waiting for Harper to offer to pay him back, and hopelessly waiting for her to agree to meet in person. But finally he wised up and realized he’d been had. He said he felt silly for being so gullible and didn’t want revenge—he just wanted his money back.

  “I was starting to realize she lied about everything,” he explained. “As time went on, she got careless—she’d tell me one thing, then forget, then tell me something totally different. She thanked me for sending the money so she could fix her car, and I was like, what? You said it was for medicine.” He shook his head. “She’d seem to confuse me with other guys and start talking to me about stories they’d shared with her. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got this private message on InkWorld.”

  Frank’s eyes widened. “From who?”