Pretty Sly (23 page)

My mom and I are hiking up a steep hill. The woods are strangely dark for morning. There’s no trail, so we just make our way through the brush. Thorns scrape at my ankles and mud sucks at my shoes but I don’t care. She’s with me. And she always knows the way.

“This is easy, isn’t it?” she says, looking over her shoulder at me, her smile dazzling and wide. She turns to face forward again, and I notice her hair hanging in a long blond braid down her back. It’s about a foot longer than I remember it. Has it been that long since I saw her last? In this place I don’t have a sense of time.

There are no trees here. The land stretches out in front of us in bands of blue and purple and red. It’s bald and spare, but the colors are like jewels. I want to grab handfuls of sand and stuff them in my pockets.

We’re reaching the top of the hill and I can hear birds now, calling back and forth to one another, and the sounds of small animals scampering on the ground. I look down at my feet and see nothing except the footprints we’ve left.

“Can we stay here?” I ask.

“Now? No,” she says, like it’s obvious.

But it’s beautiful,
I want to say.
We love this place.

Don’t we?

For some reason I can’t say these things out loud. I’m out of breath. I’m just trying to follow her, trying to keep up. Her braid bobs in front of me.

“Mom,” I call.

“I have no choice,” she says.

The bird chirping is getting louder, like we’re walking straight into the nest. And then it becomes a rattling sound, like bricks or stones being thrown. I’m worried that this is an earthquake. That the color-splashed ground is about to split open and swallow us.

“Mom,” I try again.

She stops, finally, and cups her hands in front of her face. “I’ve got to go,” she whispers, like she’s afraid someone is listening to us. “I have no choice.
”

That’s when a gloved hand reaches out of the brush and grabs her around the neck. Another hand covers her mouth. I can’t see whose hands they are but they’ve got her and they’re dragging her away. She doesn’t even fight them. Her body is limp as they take her.

“Mom! Mom!” I yell out for her, even though the rattling sound is louder now. Even though I know that it’s already too late.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

NINETEEN

I SHOT UPRIGHT,
eyes open, electrocuted by fear. The sheets were half-torn off my body and I felt hot all over.

My mom. Oh God.

My vision adjusted, pulling the room into sharp focus. Even though I could see I was in Rain’s house, I couldn’t shake the lingering feeling of dread and terror, the burning images in my head. And I could still hear the rattling, like it was inside me.

She’s okay,
I told myself.
It was just a nightmare.

Breathe.

I tried to focus on inhaling and exhaling, allowing my breath to catch up with itself.

But the rattling continued, so I knew it wasn’t just in my dreams. It was a noise from real life. And it sounded like it was coming from the front of the house.

Someone was trying to get in.

I threw myself over the side of the bed, feeling for the
door in the dark, and stepped out into the hallway.

“Willa?” It was Cherise—I could make out the shape of her in the inky half darkness. She grabbed my arm. “The police. We can hide you. C’mon.”

Tre was in the hall now, too, his T-shirt half-tucked into his pajamas. “We can’t hide her. Where are we going to hide her?”

“She can slip out the back door,” Rain hissed. “It’s not too late.”

“We can bundle you up,” Cherise said.

“Be real, you guys,” Tre said, grasping his elbows and pacing back and forth. “We can’t play around anymore.”

“He’s right.” I stepped out a little farther, feeling the bass beat of my heart pulsing through the bottoms of my feet. I was barefoot, for crying out loud. Half-asleep. There was no good way to escape even if I wanted to. This was madness.

I started for the stairs.

“Willa! Where are you going?” Rain cried out, holding out her arms to block me.

“There’s no point in hiding now,” I said. I was going to turn myself in, anyway. Isn’t that what I’d decided earlier?

The noise at the door continued. We all looked at one another for a moment, listening.

“Are you totally sure this is what you want?” Cherise asked.

I wasn’t. How could I be? What sane person would
want to walk into police custody? And there was something else, some other doubt nibbling away at the back of my mind that had to do with the dream. But right then, I didn’t know what else to do. I’d come as far as I could. Too tired to fight anymore. In a way, it felt like a relief.

Cherise gave me a worried look. I nodded to let her know that I was okay, that I appreciated all of her help but that this was something I had to do on my own and they couldn’t protect me from it. Even if they could, it wouldn’t be right.

“It’s her choice, Rain,” Cherise said finally.

“If you say so.” Rain dropped her arms and let me pass.

I angled for the door.

“Willa! Are you in there?” It was a male voice, muffled through the heavy wood, calling from the other side.

I’d hoped to turn myself in, to go of my own free will, but now I was probably going to be dragged away in handcuffs.

In the end, it didn’t really matter, did it? Either way I was going to jail.

More pounding, and then the voice again. “I can hear you moving around. Open the door!”

Time seemed to slink and slow as I unlocked the dead bolt and slid open the chain. Its links dropped one by one until it was hanging free. My hand was on the knob.
I braced myself for the frozen wind that was about to blow inside Rain’s house, and for everything else that would follow. This was it.

I opened the door.

“Willa!” Aidan stepped forward. His cheeks were pink from the cold. Eyes blinking back bits of snow. He was here.

My head snapped back in complete and total shock. As I’d imagined, the cold air whipped around my ankles and fingers and nose. But I hadn’t imagined this. Not at all.

“Aidan,” I said stupidly. “Where are the cops?”

He looked behind him into the darkness. “Cops?”

“I thought—”

“Are you going to let me in or what?”

Of course I was. I moved out of the way. Body was working. I just couldn’t get there mentally. Yet.

He was covered in snow—it coated his legs up to his knees and it was dusted all over his head and jacket. Had he
hiked
here?

When he was fully inside, I reached out to hug him, wrapping my arms around the dense muscles of his shoulders and back.

He’d found me. It didn’t feel real, somehow, even as the chill clinging to his body passed into mine. I squeezed my eyes tight, and everything else fell away.

There were other things to think about, I knew— that girl and those text messages, all of his secrets. And
yet, now that he was in front of me, the worries and doubts didn’t seem as important. We were here. Of all the places in the world we could be, we were both here and that felt like a sign.

He let go first. The world came rushing back into the space between us. I was a little embarrassed at my shameless display of emotion. Also, the goofy pajamas I was wearing.

“I got off the bus and tried to look for you, you know.”

“You did?” A smile played at the corners of his lips.

“I thought you were going home,” I whispered. “I thought you were finished.”

“I couldn’t do it,” he said, staring at me the whole time. “And we’re not finished.”

The four of us sat down at the kitchen table, Aidan and me on one side, Cherise on the other, and Tre at the head of the table. Rain hovered around us, throwing down snack packets of cereal and granola bars and mugs of coffee to fuel our brainstorming. Yes, the cops were still out there, but now that Aidan was back everything had changed—I was less sure I wanted to give up. Either way we had to make some decisions, and make them fast.

I spread out the FBI files around the table. Aidan thumbed through them. “Time to bring out the big guns. Can we use your computer, Rain?”

“Sure,” Rain said, leaving the room to retrieve it. She
returned with a laptop, which she set down in front of Aidan.

“What are you doing?” I asked him as I watched his fingers dance over the keyboard.

“What I should have done earlier. Hacking into the database.”

“Into the
FBI
database?” I repeated.

“Awesome!” Rain said.

“No. Not awesome,” Tre said, clapping a hand to his forehead. “Dude, you’re insane.”

Aidan looked up from the screen. “Look, Tre, we’ve got to get some information. This is the only way I know.”

“And how exactly are you doing this?” Cherise asked, coming behind him to peer at his work.

“Code. It’s called an injection. You use log-in strings to manipulate a routine through the front-end form.”

Cherise waved a hand. “Ah, forget I asked. You can explain it to me later.”

“It’s a time-honored technique,” Aidan said, typing. “Never mind. Just give me a couple of minutes, okay?”

Cherise came over to me and watched as I thumbed through the photos again. I showed her the mug shot. “That’s the guy that’s after her.”

She hugged herself and drew back. “Willa, this is no joke. What you’ve gotten into . . .”

“I know. But what would you do? If it were your parents?”

Her eyes misted over and she swallowed hard. “I don’t know. Everything I could, I guess.”

Aidan slapped his palms on the table. “I’m in.”

Maybe I should have been stressed out about the fact that he’d broken into a federal information system, or disturbed by the delight I saw in his face as he was doing it.

But honestly? It was kinda hot.

On the screen was the familiar blue crest with the gold ring that I’d seen on Corbin’s business card and documents. Within another few seconds, Aidan brought up my mom’s name. Her real name. We read over his shoulder.

“It says here she was born in Wichita, Kansas,” Aidan said.

“I knew that. Scroll down.”

“And her mother is deceased.”

“Right,” I said.

“She was murdered.”

“ What?” My voice broke.

“Brianna Siebert,” he read off the screen. “Born 1965. Died 1997. Death ruled a homicide.”

I covered my mouth and backed away from the computer.

“Oh my God,” Cherise said, grabbing my hand. “I’m so sorry, Willa.”

All I could think was,
Murder. Murder. Murder.

Then the images. I blinked to block them out of my
head. I pulled the necklace out from underneath my pajama top. I ran my fingers over its familiar contours, like it could tell me something.

My grandmother. Killed. What else had my mom lied to me about? For the first time since setting out on this trip, I had to wonder: Did I really even want to know?

“It doesn’t look like there were any arrests connected to that case,” Aidan said.

“It doesn’t matter. It was him.” I didn’t need forensic evidence, or any other kind of evidence. I knew who the killer was. I was sure of it.

“But what about—” Aidan asked.

“We should keep looking,” I said impatiently. “Can you just do that, please?”

Maybe another girl would have been crying or scared, but right then my main response was anger. I was sick of being the last to know everything. We didn’t have time for more questions. The only thing we could do was find my mom, and then everything would be explained once and for all.

“What do you want me to look for?” Aidan asked.

“Surveillance,” I said, pointing to a link. “Let’s see if they’ve got anything new.”

He moused over to a series of photos in thumbnail size and clicked on the first one on the top row, enlarging it. It was her, looming near what looked like a refrigerator stocked with sodas. She was wearing a disguise—big dark glasses, a baseball hat, and a long coat.

“This was from a convenience store in Bend.” He pointed to the caption and numbers on the bottom of the page. “You can see the date there. Yesterday morning.”

His words stirred a vortex in my chest. Oregon. That’s where the Painted Hills were. I turned to Rain. “What do you know about the Painted Hills?”

“Just that they’re freaking gorgeous,” she said. “I was there last summer with my parents. They’ve got a friend out there who’s an artist.”

“An artist?” I asked, locking eyes with Aidan. After all this time on the road together certain things no longer needed to be explained between us.

“Yeah, she says the landscape inspires her. Why?”

I went upstairs into the room where I’d been sleeping, took down the postcard, grabbed the photo of my mom’s painting, and dropped them on the table.

Aidan picked up the postcard, waving it in front of his eyes. “It’s uncanny, actually.”

“That’s got to be it,” Cherise said.

It clicked. We were on the right track again. “How long do you think it takes to get to Oregon? We need to get there before she leaves again.”

“Or before the cops show up,” Tre murmured. “So what’s our strategy, Willa?”

“I vote for something not involving hiking,” Aidan said. He was still shivering, even though Rain had found him a change of clothes.

“Is your name Willa?” Tre was joking, clearly, but underneath the smile I detected the slightest bit of annoyance.

“We need a ride,” I said, raising an eyebrow at Tre. “An alternative means of transport, if you will.”

“Well, I don’t think you guys should be driving anything right now,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s too easy to spot you on the road. No, that’s just asking for trouble.”

“So then what?” I folded my arms across my chest, feeling frustrated. Damn Tre and his safety. He always had a way of making everything more complicated. Safer, but more complicated.