Pretty Wanted (12 page)

No, we had to stay on this side of the house. I turned around and my eye caught on the window through which we’d been watching Toni earlier. That was going to have to be our way out.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Tre said, reading my mind.

“Trust me, okay?” I whispered, slipping on my shoes. And it occurred to me that Tre was not just a voice in my head as he had been during so many jobs. He was here with us.

In a few strides I was over there, attempting to wedge the pane open. I checked the locks but they were in the open position. Tried again. No give. It was like no one had opened the window in
years
. Was it painted shut? By now, I was hyperventilating and my hands were sweating.

“C’mon,” Aidan said. “Just do it.”

“I’m
trying.
”

I wiped my hands on my pants and tried again, applying more pressure to the pads of my fingers. The window slid up a bit—then stuck again. I gave it another heave until it was as open as it could get, a gap of about ten inches or so. Cold air rushed in.

I reached through and worked the screen up. I stuck one leg through and then balled up my torso, making it as small as possible until I was out, landing awkwardly on the lawn. It made a loud sound but it was nothing you could hear unless you were standing near the window.

Of the three of us, I was clearly the smallest. Aidan had to work harder to fit himself through, practically straddling the sill in a way that made me uncomfortable to watch. Soon he was on the grass next to me.

It was Tre’s turn. He had his upper body through, but then he seemed to freeze. His frame was too broad—he was caught halfway. We watched in horror as he struggled, unable to move forward or back. He bit his lip, wriggling. It made me think of when you got a ring stuck on a finger—sometimes the wriggling made it worse. You had to wait until the swelling went down. But of course in this case there was no time to wait.

The look on his face was awful. Even if he managed to get out, he would never forgive me.

There was a pause and then the garage door sounded again, signaling its descent.

That meant she was at the door. Maybe even through it by now. Steps away. It wouldn’t take her long to hear Tre in the office. And then call the cops on us.

“Crap,” Aidan whispered next to me.

Not like I needed him to point that out.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

NINE

WE STOOD THERE
, still as the statues in the backyard, watching as Tre strained in the small space of the open window. Then, suddenly, he seemed to jerk himself upward, using the angle of his shoulder to unstick the pane. It inched up, giving him enough room to push all the way through.

By the time he was free, Aidan and I were already sprinting for the neighbor’s backyard. Now that we knew he’d made it, there was no time to stand around and watch Tre close the window and screen. We had to move.

We ran silently behind Toni’s house, our feet crunching and chewing up the snow. Aidan jumped a stone wall and I followed so that we crossed onto a neighbor’s property. Double your trespassing, double your fun.

Another long stretch of flat land and then we had to hop a smaller picket fence, grabbing its splintery wooden slats in our bare hands. This yard had a tennis court and a series of gazebos, all snowed over. A guesthouse. I could see inside French doors into some kind of bedroom.

It was remarkably quiet out here but the noises inside my head were loud enough.

Running. I was always running.

Oh, the irony: I’d avoided running all those times in gym and now I was practically an Olympic sprinter. Criminal living could do that to a girl.

Tre caught up to me, running and shaking his head.

“Damn, that was close,” he said. “You owe me one.”

I would always, perpetually, forever more owe him one—and it started long before today. We both knew that.

Up ahead was the main road. A getaway car would’ve been real nice in this situation. But the bus was all we had. We caught sight of it just as it was starting to pull away from the stop and we tripled our pace.

We had to catch it. Who knew when the next one would arrive?

“Wait! Wait!” I called out, waving my arms maniacally so the driver could see us.

It stopped. We ran the rest of the way and hopped on, breathless, reeling, Aidan next to me and Tre in the seat in front of us. We were too frazzled to worry about anyone else, and this time Tre didn’t say anything about where we were sitting.

As the bus lumbered back toward central St. Louis, I gripped the journal tightly. Then I noticed a yellowing strip of paper sticking out from the top edge of the pages. I opened the book and slipped it out. It was an old newspaper clipping.

POLITICAL RALLY IN FOREST PARK DRAWS HUNDREDS

November 8, 1996

A group of concerned activists including local clergy, community groups, and business owners labeling themselves The Equal Minority gathered in the Forest Park neighborhood today to protest the city’s adoption of riverboat gambling. Police were called to the scene but the demonstration appeared to be a peaceful one. “They weren’t bothering us,” said MaryBeth Drummond, a neighbor. “They just seemed to want our attention.”

But the rally took a more passionate turn when an anonymous young man got on the microphone and drew the crowd into a frenzy with his rhetoric, saying that city managers were mortgaging the future of its citizens, exploiting the poor, encouraging crime, and filling the coffers of wealthy casino owners. Organizers claimed they didn’t know who the man was. “He certainly seemed to understand our cause,” says Michael Peskin, pastor of United Church on Beacon Street and a co-organizer of the rally. “Whoever he is, I’d love to make him our spokesman.”

I turned it over. On the back was a handwritten note:
We did it, baby. D.

D. Who was this D? Someone my mom knew well enough, apparently, for him to call her “baby.”

I wondered why my mom was interested in this rally. Maybe there was more information out there. “Tre, can you look up this date on your phone and search for a rally in Forest Park?”

He did as I asked, holding out his phone for me and Aidan to see. “Looks like there’s a video here.”

“Let me see,” I said, practically jumping out of my seat.

He opened up the link to YouTube and handed me the phone. I pressed on the little play arrow.

Sure enough, he was right. It wasn’t news footage—the camera seemed too unsteady. More like someone’s home video. A shaky hand panned over the crowd. They were standing in an abandoned parking lot holding signs that said
No Boats!
,
Keep St. Louis Clean
,
CasiNO
, and
Don’t Roll the Dice on Our Future
. A blond-haired man stood in front, talking into a microphone. He looked extremely familiar—but I couldn’t place him. There was snow, too, just as there was today. But that didn’t seem to stop the people from standing there, listening intently, clapping every so often in the pauses in between his sentences. Was this the mystery man the article was talking about?

The sound was mostly garbled by the wind. I could make out the words like “transformation,” “new ideas,” “forging ahead,” and “better leadership.” “The time is now,” he said. “If we want to save this city we have to take matters into our own hands. The powers that be will keep the status quo, and keep you and me out of the decision making as long as they can. They’ll give our tax money away to special interests and give breaks to corporations that prey on the gullible. This is our moment, and our world.” The crowd went nuts.

“Isn’t that the senator dude we saw on TV?” Aidan asked.

David Granger.
That’s why he looked familiar. “Good call.”

To the right of the podium was a woman with layered brown hair, holding her own sign:
Welfare for All
. It was a reference to the state motto, clearly.

She looked as cheerful and attentive as the rest of the protesters. She looked a lot like Leslie, actually. I hadn’t seen the resemblance in the still photos but here I could see it in her posture, the way she idly swept her hair off her shoulder with her fingertips.

My mom.

I rewound the video and paused on her. My hand shook as I drew my finger over her face, no bigger than the tip of my nail. She was moving ever so slightly, nodding her head in time to the words, like it was a favorite song.

I swallowed hard, feeling an ache inside. It shouldn’t have been all that different from seeing a photo, but it was. She was a living person, here, in this clip. It might even be the only video footage of her out there in the world. And somehow, just by seeing it, I could understand her better.

My mom was an activist. Was this what had freaked Toni out? That she was involved with the antigambling folks? Because it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. In fact, it made me proud that she had something she believed in.

I turned toward the window, resting the skin of my forehead against the cool glass. The snow was still falling, transforming the world into whiteness. Inside the bus, I only had this book, and a few clues to work with, but they were as powerful as the snow, giving shape to some things, covering others. The picture was filling in some more.

Thank God for the book. I’d stolen it, sure, but I realized I couldn’t write an IOU, because deep down I felt it belonged to me. She was my mother. I paged onward, past the calendar to a section of lined paper for notes. She’d used this part of the book, too. It was all in her handwriting, which was tight and controlled, running across each blue line with occasional flourishes like a scooping curl after an
r
or
y
. A few pages had been ripped out here and there.

In the center of the book was a list of what looked like the names of birds:

SPARROW

DOVE

CROW

BLUEBONNET

BROADBILL

I had to smile. Leslie was a huge list maker—she must have inherited that from our mom. But why birds? Maybe she was an Audubon type? Why was
sparrow
underlined? There was also a doodle of a bird in black ink in the right margin.

A few pages later, I came across what looked like a poem.

       
You were waiting for me, that day
,

       
on the steps of the museum. From a distance
,

       
I watched you scratching in your book, making calculations,

       
drawing maps

       
while the wings, spiraling overhead
,

       
reminded me that our time was only a distance between two points.

       
A way of seeing that we’d agreed on until we stopped agreeing to see.

       
We couldn’t help ourselves but we could help others, you said.

       
And I knew the others would always be more important
,

       
and besides, I could no longer follow your maps.

       
So we gave it up: the scratchings, the wings,

       
the us.

She was a poet. Who knew? That must have been where Leslie got her creative streak. Maybe the list of bird names was some kind of sketch, notes for this poem.

I read it again. It was a love poem, wasn’t it? The words were beautiful but they made me sad.

My eyes scanned up to the date at the top of the page. 4/1/97. My birthday was in July, so it had been before she’d had me. She must have been thinking about him, this man, though it wasn’t clear whether this was before or after she’d moved and changed her name. Either way, she
had
loved him, and she hadn’t really wanted to leave him. Or at least, she’d only done so because she had to, for some reason.

And this man, whoever he was, was most likely my father.

Could it be D? And could D be David Granger? As soon as it clicked into my consciousness, the idea startled me.

I don’t know how I’d pictured my father all these years—some guy, someone younger, I guess, a guy who’d made a mistake as a kid and who’d gone on to do other things. Granger, if it was him, was an improvement over that. He wasn’t just some guy. He was on the right side of the law, and he seemed to care about the same things I cared about: evening out the playing field and getting justice for everyone. Somewhere along the way, he’d become a bona fide politician, and he was still working for good.

I traced my index finger across the condensation on the window and made a G. My last name could be Granger. Willa Granger. Actually, if I was going to get technical, it was Maggie Willa Siebert Fox Granger. Hey, I thought, another week on the road and I might acquire a few more add-ons. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

I thought back to Leslie. She’d had her reasons for doing what she’d done, and my mom probably did, too—if she had, in fact, done anything wrong. But was it possible that the thing with Chet was a fluke, a random crime? Maybe she’d never even met him before that day.

The money, though . . . what about the money? Where had it come from?

No, I needed to brush those questions aside. I didn’t want to waste time dwelling on all of the possible negatives when we were closing in on some real facts. What I had to do was to keep digging.

Toward the back of a book, I noticed she had an appointment scrawled in: October 25. That was after she died, a meeting she’d never made it to. The address was written in the little box: 14 Benton Place. Who was she planning to meet?

“What’s up?” Tre asked me from over the seat.

I showed them both what I found but it was too complicated to explain how I was really feeling right then, the kaleidoscope of emotions and questions layering minute by minute. The Granger thing, the poem, the meeting. I couldn’t put it all together in a logical story.