Embers & Echoes (5 page)

“Just tell me everything you know.” Thomas Wilde’s voice bubbled with an excitement Ash hadn’t heard since before Eve had run away the first time. “I’ll take the week off and buy a plane ticket immediately.”

“Dad,” Ash tried to interrupt him.

But her father just kept going. “Gloria,” he said to her mother on the other end of the line. “I need a notepad and a pen!”

“Dad!” This time Ash screamed it, and her father went silent. “I have to go alone. Eve is skittish enough
already. If we all show up at her doorstep wearing matching ‘Welcome Home, Evelyn’ T-shirts, she’s going to run again.”

“I’m her father.” He sounded almost angry now. “I’m
your
father! I’ll be damned if I let my sixteen-year-old daughter go scouring whatever dangerous streets your sister has stumbled into. Now, where is she?”

Ash took a deep breath. This next part was going to hurt. “When Eve came back to Scarsdale, who did she come to first? To you? To Mom?” She paused long enough to let it all sink in. “No. She came to school. To find
me
. Eve’s been on the lam so long that she’s grown to fear the word ‘home.’ If you don’t let me do this—and now, before she runs again—we will lose her forever.”

“I’ve lost one daughter already. I will not lose another one
.
” His voice broke, but Ash could hear his will breaking too.

Ash knew she just needed to hammer the last nail home. “Dad . . . without Eve, without my big sister, I might end up lost too.” A tear slipped down her cheek, because between all the lies and half-truths, this much was true.

This time the pause on the other end of the line was interminable. Finally her father’s sigh of defeat was so loud that the receiver crackled on Ash’s end. “You better call your mother and me every five minutes to let us know you’re okay. Just tell me where I need to make the plane ticket out to.”

“I love you, Dad,” she whispered. “The ticket should depart from Portland, Oregon.” She stopped in front of
the flight prompter, and couldn’t help but smile a little at the irony—the three-letter acronym for her new city of destination was “MIA.”

M. I. A.

Missing In Action.

“Destination: Miami, Florida.”

Tuesday

When the plane finally landed, Ash was
still mentally back in the late spring cool of the Pacific Northwest. That is, until the airport’s electronic door whisked open and the wall of hot air billowed inward. She staggered back into a family of four, who quickly skirted around her and walked into the outdoor oven as though they didn’t notice the abrupt climate change.

“Out of the ice cube,” Ash said, “and into the kiln.”

On the bright side, she thought as she walked out into the humid high-ninety-degree air, she could at least be grateful not to have a bag to cart around.

By the time she finally flagged down a taxi, her body had gradually embraced the saunalike conditions, and she reminded herself,
You’re a freaking volcano goddess. This weather should be your element.

“Where to?” the taxi driver asked as Ash clambered
into the backseat. He peered around her, perhaps looking for a bag, and then seemed to appraise her dirty clothing. He raised his eyebrow.

“Um . . . ,” Ash said. She hadn’t even thought that far in advance—probably something she could have taken care of on the seven-hour flight between restless naps. And it wasn’t like the taxi driver could just type “Explosive Little Girl” as a destination into his GPS. No, she needed a home base first. “A hotel would be a good place to start.” It sounded more like a question when it came out of her mouth.

“Ah, yes.” The driver narrowed his eyes at her in the rearview mirror. “I will take you to the
one
hotel we have here in Miami.” The driver sighed, flipped his Hurricanes cap around so that it faced backward, and then slammed his foot on the gas.

Twenty minutes of awkward cab silence later, they arrived in Miami Beach. The driver only smiled once he’d counted his tip, and he screeched away from the curb as soon as she slammed her door closed.

He had dropped her off in front of a high-rise, next to the Ritz-Carlton, that overlooked the ocean beyond. After a few minutes of exploration, she was in love with the hotel. It was beautiful, luxurious, and attentively staffed, and had its own tropical grotto in the back. But even though her fake ID listed her as twenty-five, she knew a nice place like this was likely to take one look at her rumpled clothing and see through her ruse. The
fifteen hundred dollars remaining in her bank account—all the money she’d hoarded last summer working as a paralegal at her parents’ firm—wouldn’t go far at a four-star affair like this, and there was still food, clothes, and transportation to think about. And asking her father for money was just inviting him to get on a plane, if he hadn’t already.

Instead she wandered across the street to a shady, run-down motel. The owner there barely looked away from his soaps on a little flat-screen, which looked modern and strange next to the peeling fleur-de-lis wallpaper and the yellowed ceiling fan. He just ran the card through the machine, pulled a key down off one of the hooks behind the desk, and handed it to her as though it were radioactive.

The room smelled like an ashtray, but she kind of liked it, a fresh break from the suburban comforts of Scarsdale and the pristine Blackwood dorm rooms.
Sad
, she thought, when a beachside motel felt like “roughing it.”

Next on the priority list: replacing her belongings that had been incinerated in the car wreck. Ash felt the vaguest pangs of guilt that she had to spend half of the money left in her bank account on a new wardrobe. Everything—from jeans and tank tops right down to underwear and socks—was just as expensive in South Beach as she remembered it being in Manhattan. The one luxury item she did splurge on was a nice swimsuit, a red two-piece that cost practically as much as all of her jeans combined. She wrote it off
as blending in with the locals and passed the cashier her plastic.

On the walk back to the hotel, it occurred to her that she’d left her cell phone off since the plane had landed. She juggled her bags until she had a free hand to withdraw the phone and power it on. Sure enough, to her expected horror, there were five voice mails in her in-box, four of them from her mother, along with a text message from her father that simply said, “Call your mom.”

The fifth voice mail was from Ade. It began with a long silence during which she could hear only the patter of rain and canvas—the thunder god must have been calling from his tent on the construction site in Haiti. When he finally spoke, his voice was as deep as a chasm, and as hollow, too: “Today would have been his seventeenth birthday.” Another long pause. “I miss him.” Then he hung up.

Ash closed her eyes and tried to imagine what Rolfe would be doing today if he were still alive. She pictured him at the beach, sitting on the hood of his station wagon, watching the first rays of dawn spilling over the Pacific. There was still so much about the Norse god of light she didn’t know. So much she would never know. All because of Lily.

With Rolfe dead; Lily rogue; and Serena, the blind siren, as strange as ever; Ade and Raja were the only two gods left who could understand what Ash was going through.

In the end Ash could only bring herself to text Ade back: “I miss him too.”

Ash allowed herself a shower and a change of clothes back at the motel before she headed off to Ocean Drive in search of some dinner—and answers. Ocean Drive, true to its name, was a long strip of restaurants on one side of the palm-lined road, with the beach and ocean beyond on the other. At five p.m. many people were just getting up from their lunches at the sidewalk bistros, polishing off appetizers and oversize mojitos.

Ash found a club down by Tenth that was fairly empty, and slipped into a bar stool directly beneath a ceiling fan. The bartender, a middle-aged Cuban man, was hunched over the counter, staring off into the rafters. Despite his age he had a symmetrical beauty and a chiseled body that seemed to come standard with anyone who worked this part of the strip. A tattoo of a crucifix on his neck poked just above his collar, and he wore a name tag that identified him as Osvaldo.

When he finally noticed her, he asked with his slight accent, “Just here for a drink,
chulita,
or do you want to see lunch specials too?”

“Lunch specials?” Ash echoed. She pointed to the wicker clock that was half-hidden behind a row of multicolored vodka bottles. “It’s almost six!”

Osvaldo grinned. “Still on New York time? Things run on a different schedule around here.”

Ash threw up her hands. “I give up. Is my accent that obvious? Am I really that transparent a tourist?”

“Relax—everyone’s basically a tourist in South Beach.
And when I say that, I include half of the people who live here.” He slipped a dinner menu in front of her. “In any case, once your jet lag wears off, commit this to memory: breakfast at noon, lunch at five, dinner at ten, sleep at dawn.”

“That a rule, or just a general guideline?”

“I can give you some lessons on how to better blend in. For instance, when I ask what you’d like to drink, you say . . .”

Ash bit her lip. “I’ll have a Diet Coke?”

Osvaldo sighed. “I know a lost cause when I see one. At least order something with a lime in it next time.” He scooped ice into a pint glass and pressed a button on the back of the soda nozzle.

Now that they were building a rapport, Ash figured it was a good time to fish the waters for some answers. “So if I can ask some more touristy questions, I was just wondering . . . if I were a cargo ship coming into harbor in Miami, where would I go?”

Osvaldo looked up. The cola overflowed. “You call
that
a touristy question?” He dried the sides of her glass the best he could before he slid the soda across to her on a coaster. “You come to the most beautiful city in America in the middle of the summer, while half-naked gorgeous people walk up and down the beach across the street, and your first thought off the plane is,
Where can I find incoming cargo ships?”

Ash sipped her cola with the most innocent expression
she could muster, then shrugged. “I’m a sucker for sailors, I guess.”

“Well, if you want to go chase deckhands, I guess you can lurk around the Port of Miami. That’s where all the big ships come in. Maybe you’ll come to your senses and decide to take a cruise instead.”

“And what if I were a smaller ship?” She stirred the straw counterclockwise. “Maybe one that wanted to fly under the radar.”

“Listen,” Osvaldo said, suddenly serious. He checked on the few stragglers still at the bar—a couple canoodling a few seats down at one end, and a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt—before he leaned over the counter. “I’m not an idiot. I see a girl like you come through the door, and I don’t bother to check your passport, because I know a lost soul looking to have some fun when I see one. But I’m not about to let some high school student go prancing about in seedy areas by herself like some sort of mouse that wandered into the cat’s lair.”

Ash pushed her drink aside. Nothing ever went the easy way. “Give me your hand,” she said impulsively.

“Are you . . .” Osvaldo shook his head. “Are you coming on to me now? Because you’re my daughter’s age, and Mrs. Osvaldo has a
nasty
temper when she gets jealous.”

She held out her hands, palms up. “Just do it.”

Osvaldo toweled off his wet hands, and with a last self-conscious look at his few remaining customers, he placed his sun-freckled hand delicately into her own, so
that this fingers just barely tickled her palm. She took her other hand and placed it on top of his so she was cupping it between them. She closed her eyes.

Just as she had been learning to do over the last two months, she reached into her soul and found the magical valve. Only this time, rather than wrenching it on, she was careful to tweak the valve just a little bit.

When she opened her eyes again, the warmth radiated out of her palm onto Osvaldo’s hand, just the first whispers of heat, like the sun emerging from behind the clouds. The bartender’s face contorted with surprise, and he instantly started to retract his hand. But then he suddenly relaxed, and allowed it to bask in the strange warmth.