Pretty Sly (15 page)

“Are you crazy? You think I would do that?”

He looked genuinely offended. Then I remembered seeing the way he was with the animals at the shelter. How his affection and playfulness with even the mangiest mutts just about melted me into syrup that day.

No, not really.
But how well did I even know Aidan? Less and less all the time, it seemed.

“Never mind. I got something here.” He produced a family-sized bottle of talcum powder and a hair dryer. “You get the door, and I’ll get this.”

I frowned. “How is this going to work?”

“Just trust me, Willa.”

I just looked at him. The problem was I didn’t exactly trust him, not anymore. Not after that text message.

“I got this, okay?”

The dog’s barking had turned to vicious growls. I could practically feel his breath through the crack in the door. A few more minutes and a neighbor would hear us and call the police. Then we’d be dunzo.

Aidan plugged in the hair dryer. “On the count of
three. Ready? One . . . two . . . . three!”

I flung open the door and the dog burst into the bathroom, jumping on his hind legs. Aidan flipped on the hair dryer and simultaneously squeezed the plastic bottle so that the powder blew up and out into a white cloud, surrounding the dog’s muzzle. The dog dropped down to all fours and paused, shaking to clear his head, trying to find his way through the haze.

In the meantime, we slipped by him and shut the door. “Now,” Aidan said. “Step two. We need to stop the barking.”

I followed him back into the laundry room, where he found a ten-pound bag of dry food. He opened the bathroom door a crack and slipped it inside. “That should keep him busy for a while.”

He dusted off his hands and looked at me, waiting for my approval. Even I had to admit that he’d done a good job. “Nice one,” I allowed.

We walked through the house into the kitchen. It was a small house, much smaller than Beasley’s place, but it was neat and charming. Perfectly round windows like the one in the garage hung over the cabinetry, and frosted white beams arced over the ceiling. The floor was lined with wide planks and finely woven oriental rugs, and the walls were embellished with colorful paintings.

In the attached living room, the plush armchairs and polished end tables looked as if they were waiting for guests. A potted lemon tree sat in the corner, giving off a faint citrus fragrance.

“It’s like a fairy-tale place,” I said, wishing suddenly that I could stay here. Like
really
stay here. Move into this cottage and hide forever. Maybe if I could, things would all work out okay. Maybe that foreboding cloud, which had been hanging over my head ever since we found my house ransacked, would finally lift.

I opened up the stainless-steel double doors to peer inside the fridge. It was stocked with food.

“Lasagna!”

I brought the dish out and set it on the butcher-block counter. We ate quickly, with our hands. I tried not to think about it too much but the freshness of the food kind of messed with my theory about the owners being away for a while. I had no idea how much time we had here.

“This is disgusting, you know that?” Aidan said, licking tomato sauce off his fingers.

“Dude, beggars can’t be choosers.”

“What about thieves?”

I chewed on a mouthful of noodles. “How about ‘Thieves can’t be whiners’?”

Aidan found a laptop on the kitchen desk. We washed our hands so as not to leave marinara fingerprints, and went to work.

I opened up Google. The first thing I wanted to do was search for my mom and see if there were any news reports or other mentions of her that might help us in our quest. Obvious, maybe, but at this point I had to try everything.

I typed in “Joanne Fox,” and about a hundred entries popped up right away. Most of these were on LinkedIn— networking profiles for a communications specialist, a real estate agent, a biologist, and a town mayor somewhere in Rhode Island. There was an Australian water-polo player by that name, too, and a woman on Facebook who looked like she was sixty-five. Six Google pages of results in, there was no trace of anyone remotely resembling my mom.

“This is weird,” I said. “It’s like she has no online presence at all.”

“Well, that happens with some people,” Aidan said. “You said she’s not on Facebook or anything. Maybe she’s just old-school like that. Analog.”

I kept scrolling down. Nothing. Then I tried doing a news search. That brought up something, a news item about Joanne Fox on a site called Obituary.com.

I looked up at Aidan, blood rushing to my head, breath burning in my chest. My stomach plummeted. I felt like I was going to puke again.

Dead? Could she really be dead?

This is what I’d been fearing all along, wasn’t it? I covered my face with my hands. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to know.

But I would know, wouldn’t I, if that’s what happened? I mean, was this how I was supposed to find out . . . if she were?

“Go on. Click on it,” he said softly. “Remember what
you said about the truth setting you free? If something happened, you should know.”

My hands shook as I moved my finger over the mouse pad. “I didn’t mean . . . this.”

“Want me to do it?”

I nodded.

He reached over, placing his hand over mine, and guided the mouse.

Joanne Elizabeth Fox

October 12, 1997, St. Louis, MO

I exhaled all the breath I was holding in when I saw the date: 1997—that was fifteen years ago. My mom was still alive.

I ran my hands through my hair. “This isn’t her.”

“Thank God,” Aidan said. He moved his hand to click away, but I stopped him, remembering that my mom was from St. Louis.

A search crew from the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Department discovered the body of a sixteen-year-old girl, identified as Joanne Elizabeth Fox, in Luther Ely Smith Park yesterday. Reported missing from her foster home since December 1, Fox was a runaway who had left multiple foster homes many times over the past three years. An autopsy revealed she was two months pregnant at the time of her death. Police suspect there was no foul play and have ruled the death an accident. She has no surviving relatives.

I leaned in and squinted at the screen. The photograph looked nothing like my mom—this girl had dark hair and blue eyes and was much more petite. Yet there was no denying the name. Was that just a weird coincidence?

“No,” I said to myself out loud. “It can’t be a coincidence.”

“I don’t get it,” Aidan said, looking over my shoulder. “This is a girl who died fifteen years ago. What’s the connection?”

“Yes, but this girl died around the same time I was born,” I explained, trying to articulate the thoughts that had flashed through my head and wound themselves together. “My mom would have been the same age and pregnant then, too. My mom has the same name and she grew up in the same town. That’s too many same things, too many links for a coincidence.”

“So you think it’s her, that she’s still alive? That she duped the police somehow?”

“Maybe, or maybe she’s living under this person’s identity for some reason.” Even as I said it out loud it hardly made sense. “She must have changed her name along the way and assumed Joanne Fox’s.”

“But why?”

I pushed myself away from the island and took a few steps back from the computer. “I don’t know. Because
she knew she was in trouble with these guys who were after her?” I said. “Whoever they are.”

For a moment I thought of my father, who I’d never known. Could this have something to do with him? He could’ve been anyone. Was she trying to escape him? That thought was disturbing, too.

When it came down to it, I really knew very little about my family history. I knew that my mom had left her parents’ house when she was pregnant with me because she was only sixteen and they hadn’t approved. I’d never even met my grandparents. All I had was the bird necklace around my neck—that was my only connection to them.

But if my mom’s real name wasn’t Joanne, then what was it? And what other things about her were lies? Everything, all that I’d assumed to be true, was unraveling in front of me. And with that came a crippling wave of vertigo, a feeling like my body had gone liquid.

Aidan’s hand was on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“It’s just . . . so strange. I mean, why do you change your name?”

“I don’t know, Willa. But there’s usually a good reason for everything, you know? We have to keep believing that.”

Fine, but what was the reason for us being here, in the middle of this strange house, in an unfamiliar town? What was the reason for any of this?

“I guess,” I said. I was drowning in uncertainty. In maybes. In what-ifs.

He hugged me and I felt his stubble brush against my cheek. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. I’m going to work on finding her car, okay? Why don’t you wash up or do whatever you need to do? Then we can get back on the road.”

I moved aside so that Aidan could sit down. As he logged on, I looked away to give him privacy, though I couldn’t help but wonder if he was going to get more messages from Sheila, whoever she was. For all I knew, he had an in-box of long-form sexts in his Gmail account. Ugh. Or maybe there was a good explanation for that text. I told myself that there had to be.

I found the master bedroom, a cozy enclave with a sloped beamed ceiling and a huge weathered armoire. In the bathroom, I scrubbed my face and brushed my teeth with my finger. I grabbed another pair of jeans and a momlike ruffled button-down from the closet, quickly changing and stuffing my old clothes into the laundry hamper. I also found a baseball hat for Aidan and a pen and pad and wrote another note and left it on the nightstand.

“I found her car,” Aidan said when I came back. “It was last seen in Tahoe.”

Tahoe. Why Tahoe?

“And guess how I did it? I hacked into the E-ZPass database. Don’t let my brilliance overwhelm you.”

“That’s our next stop, then,” I said, handing him the hat. “And I won’t. Let your brilliance overwhelm me, I mean.”

“You see?” He stood up and stretched his long limbs.
“It’s all coming together. We’re getting close. And there’s a reason for everything, right?”

I wanted to believe it. I really did. I wanted us to be a team, a winning team. If only I didn’t have so many doubts . . .

He turned on the little television mounted underneath one of the cabinets. “Just want to see if anything has happened since this morning.”

Things had happened, all right. Ho-ly.

There we were, the top story on CNN. Photos of us side by side appeared on the screen with the caption: FOX & FRIEND ON THE RUN.

“And now, to the news that’s captivating the nation— the story of two affluent teens turned criminals. Willa Fox, also known as Sly Fox, and Aidan Murphy, son of Hanson Murphy, CEO of MTech Corporation, have skipped probation, stolen a car, and are now thought to be in California. After a high-speed chase this morning, the pair eluded police outside of Montecito.”

“Dude, we’re famous,” Aidan said, grinning.

If that were true, then it was only a matter of time before we’d be recognized, even with our disguises. I felt a new kind of panic setting in. “We also have a lot of people looking for us. We have to find my mom before they find us.”

The screen flashed to an image of Aidan’s dad. He had a thick flap of silvery hair and glasses, and his head bobbed in a box next to the anchorman.

“Joining us live now via satellite is Hanson Murphy. Mr. Murphy, what is your family going through right now?”

“Shock, Bill. Just shock. Aidan was always a good kid. We never expected this from him. All we ask is that, Aidan, if you’re out there watching this, that you come home. Your family needs you here. We just want you back, safe and sound.”

Aidan’s father’s eyes filled with tears. I looked at Aidan and his expression had changed from awe and delight to something darker.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“I think I need to find us another car.” He wiped at his face. I could see the red tracing his eyes—he must have been completely burnt-out with so little sleep over the past few days—and I suddenly felt the urge to hold him again. Protect him.

Before I could, he grabbed his bag and turned abruptly, heading for the door. “You stay here and map our route to Tahoe. Let the dog out and shut the doors and I’ll meet you outside in a few. And erase our browsing history from the computer.”

The voices were still droning on about us. I shut off the TV. I tried to shake off the uneasiness. It hadn’t told us anything we really didn’t know already. We just had to keep moving. Like, ASAP. We had to get to Tahoe.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

TWELVE

A FEW MOMENTS
later, I watched through the kitchen window as a hunter-green Land Rover came speeding around the bend and pulled up in front of the house.

“Get in,” Aidan called from the driver’s-side window.

“A Land Rover?” I asked, my hand on the door. “Really?”

“What’s wrong with it? I felt like we needed an upgrade. None of that broken-window crap. Just get in, okay?”

“Why not a Bentley?” I gave him a sardonic look as I relented, stepping up to the SUV seat. I shut the passengerside door and buckled in.

Aidan hit the gas and we sped away. It was a smooth ride. I didn’t think engines could actually purr— I thought that was just something car dorks liked to say—but this one actually did. The inside smelled like perfumed leather, and was trimmed with real wood
and tortoiseshell accents.

I was pretty certain Tre would not approve of this flashy choice. I was pretty sure Tre wouldn’t approve of anything we were doing anymore. This wasn’t the simple trip I’d thought it would be; that was for sure. Things were way out of control. Every crime led to more crime. But I didn’t know how we could stop it, at least not until we found my mother.