I started boiling water for pasta, my mind still trying to take it all in. Something played at the edges—something I couldn’t quite see yet. But it was there. I sat by myself at the kitchen table. My stomach still hurt from that punch. It would be sore tomorrow.
That niggling in the back of my brain picked up steam. I got the laptop and booted it up. I wanted to take another look at my buddy Antoine LeMaire at Ashley’s locker. I watched the tape. Antoine opens the locker, looks inside, sees it’s empty, gets upset. I watched the tape again. Then I realized what was bothering me.
The locker was already empty.
Antoine had hoped to find something inside the locker—but whatever it was, it was already gone. That probably meant that Ashley herself had cleared it out. I wondered when. And more than that, I wondered if I could see that moment, if I could see exactly when she had last been in the school. If she had cleared out her locker, it goes to figure that she’d planned to run—that she hadn’t met up with foul play or the White Death or whatever other horrible thing could happen to a girl who had some connection to the Plan B Go-Go Lounge.
It stood to reason that Ashley had emptied out the locker and was on the run.
Or did it?
I called Spoon. He picked up on the first ring. I expected him to open up with one of his crazy non sequiturs. But he surprised me.
“Did you find Antoine?” Spoon asked.
“What?”
“You must think Ema and I are morons. A basketball game? Please.”
I had to smile at that. “I didn’t find him.”
“So what happened?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. In the meantime I have a favor.” I told him what I wanted—my theory on Ashley’s last visit to the locker being important.
“Hmm,” Spoon said, “we don’t know when Ashley was last at the locker.”
“No.”
“And it could have been during the school day.”
“Could have been.”
He considered that. “I guess we could hit speed reverse and see if we can come up with something. Assuming I can get into the security files again.”
“Do you mind?”
“I’m all about the danger.”
Spoon hung up. Three minutes later, Ema called me. “Have you eaten yet?” she asked me.
“I’m boiling water now.”
“Do you know Baumgart’s?”
I did. It was Uncle Myron’s favorite restaurant. “I do.”
“Meet me there.”
There was something funny in her voice, something I hadn’t heard before. “I didn’t find Antoine.”
“Spoon told me. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
“What’s up?”
“I did some research on that tombstone.”
“And?”
“And something is really wrong here, Mickey.”
Half a century ago, Baumgart’s was a Jewish deli and old-fashioned soda fountain—the kind of place where Dad might order a pastrami on rye while the kids sat at the Formica counter and twirled on stools while waiting for a root beer float. Sometime in the 1980s, a gourmet Chinese chef bought the place. Rather than alienate his base, he simply added to it. He kept all the Jewish deli and soda fountain touches and then added nouvelle Chinese to the menu. It made for an intriguing hybrid. Since then, three more Baumgart’s had opened up in various New Jersey locales.
Ema sat in a corner booth nursing a chocolate milk shake. I sat with her and ordered one too. The waitress asked whether we wanted something to eat. We both nodded. Ema ordered the peanut noodles, Myron’s favorite, and something called sizzle duck crepe. I went with Kung Pao chicken.
“So,” she said, “what happened when you went after Antoine LeMaire?”
“Why don’t you go first?”
She played with the straw in her milk shake. “I still need time to wrap my head around this.” Ema took a sip and leaned back. “By the way, do me a favor: if you want to play overprotective daddy with me, just say so.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t lie.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Good,” Ema said. “So what happened with Antoine?”
I told her about my visit to the Plan B Go-Go Lounge. The waitress came and brought our food, but neither one of us noticed. When I finished, Ema said, “I won’t even bother with the ‘whoa.’ This is beyond whoa. It’s like whoa on steroids. It’s like whoa raised to the tenth power.”
The smell of Kung Pao chicken rose up from the plate and suddenly I realized that I was starving. I grabbed my fork and started digging in.
“So,” Ema said, “you think, what, your prim and proper Ashley danced in a go-go bar?”
I shrugged mid-bite. “So what did you learn about that tombstone?”
Her face lost a little color. “It’s about Bat Lady.”
I waited. She hesitated.
“Ema?”
“Yes?”
“When Chief Taylor was dragging me away, I saw Bat Lady in the window. She was trying to tell me something.”
Ema’s eyes narrowed.
“I can’t swear to it,” I said, “but I think she was telling me to save Ashley. I know that makes no sense. But whatever it is, whatever you’ve learned, I need to hear it.”
She nodded. “We already know about that Jefferies quote, right?”
“Right.”
“So I searched the other stuff. That line about a childhood lost for children.”
“And?”
“I found nothing on that exact quote, but I did find this website on . . .” She stopped, shook her head as if she couldn’t believe that she was about to go on. “On the Holocaust.”
I stopped with my fork half in the air. “As in Nazis and World War Two?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was a reference to some of the Jewish children who joined the underground resistance in Poland. See, some of the kids who escaped the death camps lived in the forest. They fought the Nazis in secret. Kids. They would also smuggle goods into the Lodz ghetto, for example. Sometimes, when they could, they even rescued kids heading toward Auschwitz, the Nazis’ biggest and most notorious concentration camp.”
I just sat there and waited. Ema picked up her milk shake and took a deep long sip. “I still don’t understand,” I said. “What does this have to do with the tombstone in Bat Lady’s garden?”