The bell went off again, and a young girl with her blonde hair styled into a sleek bob stepped through the door. Large sunglasses covered half her small face. He couldn’t see her eyes, but her head turned as she surveyed the room.
When Dante rose from the table, her head stopped turning when she spotted him. Then, her gaze went to Cassidy, and her eyebrows knit together before she started searching the room again.
“I’ll be back,” Dante said to Cassidy.
“I’ll be here,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dante wound his way in between the tables, and the people gathered around them, as he made his way toward the young girl. Her attention returned to him, and her shoulders went back as he approached.
“Mr. Vares?” She inquired when he stopped before her.
“Yes, and you must be Paris.”
“I am. Who’s the woman with you?”
“She’s a friend who’s helping me find Julie. I hope that’s okay.”
“Um, yeah…ah… Yeah, that’s fine.”
“Then, let’s go sit and talk.”
Dante let her lead the way back to the table. She pulled out a chair and settled in across from Cassidy. Dante returned to his seat as Paris removed her glasses to reveal her bloodshot brown eyes. She set the glasses on the table, lifted her hand, and wiggled her fingers at the young waiter. He hurried over to take her order.
“I’d like a large, non-fat, extra hot caramel macchiato upside down,” Paris said.
She had the air of someone who had ordered the drink a hundred times before, but Dante didn’t know if she was getting coffee, ice cream, or some kind of upside-down cake.
“It’s one of our specialties,” the waiter said.
Dante would like to believe the waiter was kidding, but he wasn’t. Then, the waiter shot Dante a smug look that said his choice of black coffee was tasteless, before walking away. Dante glanced at Cassidy, who was biting her bottom lip to keep from laughing.
“I don’t have much time,” Paris said as she turned back to them. “I’m meeting friends for a school project soon.”
“I won’t take up much of your time,” Dante assured her as he shoved aside a stake to remove his pad and pen from an inner pocket. “How long have you and Julie been friends?”
Paris fiddled with the earpiece of her glasses as she looked between him and Cassidy. He couldn’t tell if her bloodshot eyes were because she was hungover or if she’d been crying.
“Since kindergarten.” Paris looked over to where the barista was making her drink. “We met on the first day of school and just… clicked, you know?”
“I do,” Dante said, but he didn’t.
He’d had plenty of friends in his life; he was popular in high school and college, and well-liked on the police force. However, by the time he joined the academy, most of his close friends from high school had drifted away, and he lost touch with the ones he made in college. Most of them didn’t know what to say or how to react after Maya went missing.
He was extremely close with some of them, but he’d never had a friend he just clicked with. His friendships were more of a, we all go to the same school, live in the same area, or play the same sports scenario.
However, he knew how to bullshit someone he was interviewing. “Friends like that are special and rare.”
Paris bowed her head, but not before he saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes. “She’s the only friend I’ve ever had like that.”
Cassidy had decided to stay out of the conversation; this was Dante’s terrain, and she was afraid of messing it up by saying something wrong. However, when the young girl sniffled, she couldn’t resist resting her hand on top of Paris’s.
When she lifted her head, she was in control of her emotions again. “Things changed after Julie’s dad died. It was like she didn’t care about anything anymore.”
“Sometimes, when someone loses a loved one, they don’t know how to handle their grief and push away their remaining loved ones. It’s not that they don’t still love those people, but they’re scared of losing them too,” Cassidy said.
“Yeah,” Paris muttered. “I get that, but I’m still mad at her for it. Then she started in with all the vampire crap.”
“Missy told me she got involved with people who believe vampires are real,” Dante said.
“Not only that,” Paris said as she leaned closer. “But some of them made themselves look like vampires. They wore red contacts, sharpened their teeth, dressed in black, and put on makeup to make themselves paler. Thankfully, Julie didn’t get that crazy with it, but those people are nuts. I mean, who really believes in vampires?”
“It is a little crazy,” Cassidy agreed and somehow managed to keep a straight face. Why did people think vampires would walk around looking like Dracula? If that were the case, they wouldn’t exactly be incognito, and people would have known about their existence thousands of years ago.
“Right? But when I tried to tell Julie that she got pissed at me. She was convinced they were real, and I was an idiot for not believing in them.”
“Julie was hanging out at bars with these people?” Dante asked.
Paris started to speak again but stopped when the waiter returned with her coffee. Dante was amazed to discover it was a drink.
“Thank you,” Paris said as she took a sip. She waited for the waiter to leave before speaking again. “Yeah. She got a fake ID and thought it was the greatest thing ever that she could get into those weird clubs. She also went to a lot of house parties.
“All I pictured was a crack house every time she talked about them, but she said they were nice. After a while, I started to get the impression these “houses”—” she held up her fingers to make
