Betrayal (27 page)

“Yes,” she said. “I'm here.”

“Is something the matter? Are you all right? I've hoped against hope that we'd talk again someday. And now, after all these years, you are calling me.”

“I'm not calling to get reacquainted . . .” she said. “You know that I care about you, but this isn't a social call. This is a warning.”

“A warning? What do you mean, ‘warning'?” Tony asked. “I don't like the sound of that at all.”

“I'm sorry. But I need your help.”

“Anything.”

“If I know my daughters—”

“You have daughters?” he asked.

Valerie thought for a minute. “I do. Twins. Like I was saying, I think my daughters are going to try to find you. I need you to keep our secret safe. Please.”

“What you did was a good thing, Valerie.”

“I know,” she said. “I don't doubt that. But I've never felt completely right about . . . you know, about parts of it. I've never told my family any of it. Nothing.”

The line went quiet for a beat. “What makes you think they will come to me?” he asked.

“Two reasons,” she said. “They found some old news articles about what happened and, more importantly, because I told them not to.”

“They don't listen to you?”

Valerie looked expectantly toward the door, sure that Jade, like a bad penny, would come back around any second. She didn't know how to answer Tony.

“Not really,” she finally said, before correcting herself. “I mean, not all the time. I guess they are a little too much like me.”

“Meaning?”

“Let's just leave it at that, Tony. Please, don't tell them anything.”

Valerie put down the phone and exhaled. She wasn't sure if she'd made things better or worse for herself. She just wasn't ready to tell her girls the truth. She hoped that she would never have to.

Chapter 29

TONY ORTEGA HUNG UP THE RECEIVER of the lemon-yellow wall-mounted kitchen phone. If Valerie Ryan was imagining the young man she once knew, then she had forgotten to allow for the passage of time. Tony Ortega's blue-black hair was no longer thick and glossy, but thin and gray. His eyebrows were matching gray caterpillars. His hands bore the calluses of decades of hard work—first on the docks in Seattle and then later as a night custodian at South Seattle Community College.

His life was small by many measures. He had a cottage in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods and a job that never could have been called a career. Yet he felt that he was a blessed man.

His wife, Suzie, looked up from her Sudoku puzzle. “Are you all right? What was that all about? It seemed like an important conversation. Definitely not someone trying to sell us vinyl siding.”

“I'm okay,” Tony said, his voice a little unsteady.

“Really?” Suzie cocked her head, looking into her husband's deepset brown eyes. She pulled a pair of golden cat's-eye glasses off her nose and continued to study Tony's craggily handsome face, trying to place his expression. She knew her husband of fifteen years quite well.

“You don't look all right,” she added. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

Tony walked across the room to the TV and turned off ESPN, his choice of background noise while he read and Suzie played her game. He surveyed the tidy living room, the photos of his stepchildren, and their graduation tassels from high school and college. Tony had hung them on a thin wire strung between two bolts mounted to the wall. He knew that what had just happened—and what was about to occur—was life-changing.

“In a way,” he said, kneeling next to his wife, “I just did.”

She put out her hands and held his face. “Tell me, Baby.”

Tony nodded. He held his breath a moment before speaking. He'd never told Suzie exactly how he had been spared execution and freed from prison. She had heard the framework of the story, of course, and that he had been accused—and found guilty—of killing his father and mother to protect his sister. Suzie loved him for the man that
she
knew he was. He was good. He was honest. She was sure that Tony had never hurt anyone. She didn't know and hadn't asked how he had managed to slip through the legal system. Suzie was just glad that he had.

Tony's phone call, though, seemed to change their status quo. Even sitting in a wheelchair, Suzie could have sworn she felt the ground shift beneath her.

“I told you about the warden's daughter,” Tony said tentatively, watching the reaction in her gray eyes. “Remember Valerie?”

She nodded. “Yes, of course. The girl was lost and then she was found. It was a miracle.”

“Yes, it was a miracle,” Tony said. “But it was so much more than that.”

As her husband recounted for the very first time what had happened over those two days when the warden's daughter was missing, Suzie Ortega folded her hands and knew in the bottom of her soul that the miracle was not Valerie being found but what Valerie did for her husband.

As he spoke, Tony could feel the anguish he had held inside for such a long time began to vaporize. Tony wasn't sure exactly why he was telling Suzie just then. He just had to.

While he still could.

VALERIE RYAN WENT TO SLEEP that Tuesday night knowing she would revisit—
relive
—that frightening time when she was a little girl. All of it would come back in her dreams, and there was no stopping it. Some nights, especially when she was younger, she'd purposely stay up late watching TV or, in college, studying at Denny's when she really didn't need to study at all. She'd try anything to avoid the dream.

While Kevin snored next to her, Valerie closed her eyes and gave in to the inevitable.

The dream began with Valerie running. She was a small child, out of breath, running toward something off in the distance. Something or someone was chasing her, pushing her closer and closer to the brightness at the end of the corridor. She was under the prison, her father's prison. Valerie could feel her heart race.

I'm coming!

A slice of light slanted to the floor from an open doorway down a long, dank corridor and she heard a song from an old radio, or maybe a cassette player, somewhere in the darkness.

Valerie looked down at her hands. They were small and cold. Her nails were powder-puff pink, an indulgence her mother had allowed just that once. Her ID bracelet glinted. She was the only child on the island, yet her parents had insisted she wear her name and address on her wrist in case she got lost.

She touched her face. More ice. And though she was freezing cold, she was determined and defiant. She had to be.

The song played louder.
What was it?

Valerie knew that
she
was doing the right thing. She knew right from wrong, and what they were doing was wrong. She had tried talking to her parents, but it was like running in circles. They didn't believe mistakes could be made in a system that was designed to ensure truth and justice.

But even at nine years old, she knew that they were making a giant mistake. She could feel it.

Valerie hurried toward the light, trying to reach it as fast as she could. She heard footsteps behind her. Closer, closer.

In her dream, she cried out. “Leave me alone! Let him be! This isn't right! This isn't fair!”

She heard the sound of her father's voice, reprimanding her.

“Nothing is fair, child. Sometimes you just have to let things ride out.”

Valerie grew up on McNeil Island—a prison island—and she knew more than her share of swear words. But what she said to her father that night was worse than any four-letter word she could have said.

“You know better,” she said.

Valerie awoke with a start, arms flailing into her sleeping husband's face.

“What the—” Kevin sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Val, are you okay?”

She tried to shake it off. “Just a bad dream. Go back to sleep. Sorry I woke you.”

As Valerie watched Kevin roll back over into slumber, she put her hand on his shoulder and tried to imbue every bit of love she could in that touch. She hated holding things back from him. She detested that some things in her life were off-limits from everyone, even Kevin. And deep down, nothing pained her more than the secrets she kept from her daughters. She knew that they deserved the truth, but by not saying anything, Valerie told herself it would all simply go away.

She was wrong.

UNDER THE VERY SAME ROOF of house number 19, Hayley Ryan had a dream of her own. Like her mother's, Hayley's took place in a dark space and as it grew brighter, a single image came into focus: Darth Vader.

Hayley hated
Star Wars
,
Star Trek
, and basically any of the space shows that most kids latched onto in second grade and kept on obsessing over some thirty or forty years after they'd been popular. And while she immediately recognized the figure in her dream, something about this particular Darth Vader seemed familiar.

“I can do this,” Darth Vader said, in that James Earl Jones voice of his. “I can do this for us.”

The dream faded to white, and then the imagery went completely blank and Hayley woke up.

Darth Vader?

Gently, Hayley nudged Hedda, asleep by her feet. The little multicolored dog inched her way up to Hayley's face, reminding the teen that dog's teeth needed brushing. Despite the bad breath, the dachshund was warm and cuddly. Hayley patted her and fell back to sleep, trying to make sense of what she'd seen.

Who was that with the light saber at Brianna's party?

HAYLEY TOLD TAYLOR ABOUT THE DREAM the next morning when they took turns brushing their teeth in the tiny bathroom they shared. Remembering the night before, she had already scrubbed Hedda's not-so-pearly whites.

“He was holding a light saber, but I got the feeling it wasn't really a light saber,” Hayley explained.

“Weird,” Taylor said, scrutinizing her face in the mirror.

“I think I saw a Darth Vader at the party, but it was later on and he never took off his helmet,” Hayley said, turning her attention to her long, damp hair. She picked up the blow-dryer and held it like a gun.

“Well, whatever your dream was about, may the Force be with us. We still need to find out who killed Olivia and Brianna. Plus, we need to track down Text Creeper and sort out the story about Mom being lost at the prison. Nothing came up on Google other than the clips we already read. I vote we check out the prison. She totally lied to us the other day,” Taylor rattled off in one of the most take-charge moments Hayley had ever seen.

“The Force is strong in you,” Hayley joked and turned the dryer on full blast.

IT WAS SATURDAY MORNING and the house was exceedingly quiet. The floorboards didn't creak, and the wind didn't ricochet leaves off the windows.
So quiet.
Their mother had some errands to do and left early. Their father was away on a research trip. No one was around. Beth was off at a used records store looking for what she called “pure vinyl.” Colton was doing stuff with his father.

The girls took their father's car and drove south toward the launch to McNeil Island.

“If no one will give us answers,” Taylor said, “we'll get them ourselves.”

Hayley agreed. She liked how feisty Taylor was just then.

“About time,” she said.

Chapter 30

“GRANDPA'S PRISON LOOKS KIND OF PRETTY,” Taylor said as she and Hayley stood on the shore facing McNeil Island. The winds were calm, but the November air was still bracing. The girls had come prepared with down vests over fleece jackets—pink for Taylor and aqua for Hayley. “You know, pretty in the way that some ugly things can be,” Taylor said. “I'll bet seals have taken over the landing on the other side.”

“I bet it really stinks over there, then,” Hayley said.

While they'd seen some photographs of the island on the state archives website, they didn't know exactly what they'd find when they got there. They knew only that the prison might hold the answers to questions about their mother and their past. They hoped the place would send them a message, a feeling, or a memory . . .

… a memory that belonged to their mother—one she refused to share.

Touching objects, going to places where things had happened, and sometimes even being in contact with water seemed to trigger the feelings best. Hayley, more logical than her twin and had read somewhere that tragedy lingers in a place. When something dark and disturbing happens, a residue of that moment stays forever, kind of like hauntings where spirits are bound to a place because of what happened in it. Though Hayley dismissed the whole ghost idea and she would be embarrassed to admit it publicly, she did very much believe that extreme fear and grief left behind an imprint of a feeling.

As she stared across the water, Hayley wondered,
Was it possible for such an imprint to last for decades? Could the trigger be a building? A house? A laptop?

A prison?

BEFORE IT WAS SHUTTERED by the Department of Corrections in 1989, the Washington State Prison at McNeil Island was accessible by a small but exceptionally noisy ferry that spewed diesel fumes over the water—the kind that would make today's eco-friendly society cringe.
The Sinking Ship
, as patrons called it because it seemed to take on an inch of water by the end of the mile-long crossing, carried family members for scheduled visits with inmates. It also transported family members of the staff and guards who didn't live on McNeil, as well as the children of those who did and attended school off-island.

More than once or twice, the twins' mother had talked about how “getting off the island was the best part of living on it.” And when Hayley and Taylor complained about how hard their lives where, Valerie would pull out the Sinking Ship card and trump any argument they had.

“Try living on an island with no TV, no stores, and, oh, yeah, convicted felons. Trust me. You don't know how good you've got it.”