See Jane Run (3 page)

“Are you seriously freaked out about this?”

“No—no, it's just, I don't know—”

“A coincidence?”

Riley turned to face her friend. “Coincidence? Five seconds ago, my dad was a baby-stealing Wild Bill Hickok.”

“I'm pretty sure it's Hitchcock. And why don't you just ask to see your real birth certificate or something? If they won't let you, then you know.” Shelby's eyes were glazing again as she came up with a new storyline for Riley's so-called life. “And then you can confront them with the evidence.”

“And what am I supposed to say? ‘Hey, Mom, Dad, did you snatch me away from my birth parents?'”

Now Shelby was biting her bottom lip. “Right. If they really are criminals, accusing them like that could make them snap. That could be their trigger.”

“Their trigger?”

“For going on a murderous rampage. And since you have no next-door neighbor, I would have to give the interview saying that the Spencers were nice, quiet people who kept to themselves mostly. The girl seemed well adjusted, nice enough. Kind of paranoid, but I guess that's to be expected of a child cut out of her own mother's womb.”

Riley crossed her arms in front of her chest. “So now my parents aren't just kidnappers; they're psychopaths on a murderous rampage who cut me out of my mother's womb.”

“It's possible I watch too much TV.”

• • •

Shelby blew Riley a kiss before dancing down the newly constructed front steps and locking herself in her Toyota Corolla—a rusting, paint-chipped heap that lacked a left turn signal but had a radio that could be heard from space. She cranked up a Death to Sea Monkeys song, and Riley poked her head in through the passenger side window while she and Shelby belted out the last refrain of “Underwater Universe.” At the last drumbeat, Riley stepped away, watching the Corolla roll down the driveway and into the street.

Riley suddenly felt very alone—last person in the world alone—as she watched Shelby's ancient clunker head away from the house. The car looked remarkably out of place against the stark, modern houses all lined up in orderly rows. She stood on the porch, watching as the sun dipped, bleeding a heavy pink into the twilight. There was no sound out here. No sirens, no cars, no horns or echoed conversation, and suddenly the birth certificate, the emptiness, struck an icy finger of fear down the back of Riley's neck.

I'm being ridiculous.

But still she couldn't tear her eyes from scanning the horizon, from scrutinizing every house she could see: the black, gaping windows, empty driveways, open roads. It looked as if she was in a universe all her own, as if someone had sucked up every human being and left everything else as it was. Out here, all alone, in the middle of nowhere.

Riley thought of the birth certificate, of Shelby's ridiculous stories about Riley being snatched and hidden away from her “real” family.

But if you wanted to keep something hidden, the Blackwood Hills Estates was the place to do it.

Riley's phone was chirping with a missed text when she came back into the house.

RY-PIE DAD & I ARE GOING TO BE LATE. 9:30? EAT SOMETHING. DO HOMEWORK. LV MOM

She instinctively called back, chewing the inside of her cheek while her mother's phone rang and rang.

Did they ever say where they were going?

Random, irrational scenarios played out in Riley's head: her parents were shopping for another child. They were spying on her birth parents. They were going to check on Jane.

She shook her head and laughed at herself for letting Shelby's crazy ideas get to her. Her parents were her parents, and they were late because they were at a fundraiser or at her father's work or watching one of their mega-boring foreign films.

But baby Jane…

Riley shimmied the birth certificate out from the biology textbook she had absently shoved it in and settled herself in front of her laptop. She typed JANE ELIZABETH O'LEARY into the search engine, culling through the pages and pages of hits that came up. When she exhausted her Google search, she tried out a few others—People Search, People Find, Yellow Pages. Each turned up a handful of names that semi-matched her search parameters, but nothing was a direct match. Riley snatched up the birth certificate then carefully typed in Jane's city and state of birth, Granite Cay, Oregon. The same pages she had filtered through the night before popped up, but this time, a little animated map also showed up as well. Riley clicked on it then felt her breath catch. Granite Cay, Oregon, was just a few inches from the California university she was about to visit.

When the doorbell rang, she sat bolt upright, not immediately recognizing the slow, melodic chimes.

No one had ever come to visit yet.

Heart thumping from the start, she picked her way down the stairs carefully, turning on lights as she went, each splashing a wash of yellow over the few family pictures that lined the walls.

“Who is it?” she called as she reached the door.

No one answered.

Riley paused, half crouched, her hand on the doorknob. She breathed hard before rolling up on her toes and squinting through the peephole.

There could have been someone there, but Riley couldn't tell through the blackness. She couldn't remember if the porch light had a bulb yet.

Had someone taken it? Had it ever been there to begin with?

Her heart started to pound, her mind throbbing, clogging with images: a police officer, come to take her away; Seamus and Abigail O'Leary, wringing their hands while looking for their daughter Jane; a lackey for her parents, certain they knew what Riley had found.

Stop
being
a
paranoid
freak
, she commanded herself.

She was breathing hard now, her runaway mind pretzeling her body into a panic attack. She felt the telltale beads of sweat on her upper lip and at her hairline. Her chest felt as if it had been wrapped tight, every breath she tried to take an exhausting effort.

“I'm OK, I'm OK.” She spat out the mantra Dr. Morley had told her to say, and concentrating on the words did calm her, slowly, each syllable carefully chipping away at the block that held down Riley's lungs. She paced the front room, peeking out the long window there to see that there was no one on the porch, no one parked on the streets.

A glitch, Riley decided. The bell had rung due to a mechanical glitch.

When she was breathing normally again, deep breaths in, long breaths out, she double-checked the lock on the door. It was locked. Riley had initially liked the thick, heavy bolt on the door, but that little niggling voice in the back of her head was suddenly wondering whether it was there to keep the bad people out—or in.

Back upstairs, Riley shoved the birth certificate aside and yanked her biology book closer. She was done being Nancy Drew—an errant doorbell had nearly made her pee her pants—but it was what was on her computer screen that caused the blood in her veins to run ice-water cold.

The headline letters were thick, an almost throbbing red.
HAVE
YOU
SEEN
ME?
The picture underneath was a grainy black and white of a chubby, round-cheeked baby girl. There was no name, no contact number, no additional information.

“Oh my God,” Riley breathed. “My God.”

Riley didn't recognize the baby—nothing about her seemed familiar—but her black eyes were round and wide.

Trusting.

My sister?

She found herself leaning in and pulling the laptop closer as she scrutinized the screen. Did this baby have her eyes, a lopsided smile like her own?

Her stomach started to churn, bile burning at the back of her throat.

Or is that me?
The phrase zipped through Riley's head, was gone before she had a chance to catch it.

She shoved the computer from her as though it were a snake, coiled and ready to bite. But it wasn't the child or the missing poster that scared her the most—it was how the webpage ended up on her screen.

With trembling fingers, she pulled down her web browser history, alternately praying for some easy explanation or for the photo to disappear—or to never have existed at all. The history popped up as quickly as it faded out when the screen went black.

The lights zapped out.

Riley went to the window. Her heart was beating in her throat, pounding in her ears, the sound like thundering footsteps. Her whole body was humming with adrenaline electricity, but all of that stopped when she saw the figure in the front seat of the dark car parked in front of her driveway. Her breath was choked, strangling. She wanted to pound the window, she wanted to scream, but her voice was lost in the gunning engine of the car. Her cry was muffled by the pinching squeal of tires speeding off into the darkness.

• • •

Riley didn't remember falling asleep.

She remembered being curled into a tight, uncomfortable ball underneath her bedroom window, the sound of those tires ricocheting through her skull until she couldn't take it anymore. Every muscle in her body was tense and exhausted from hours on high alert. After the picture on the computer screen and the realization that someone might have been watching her, Riley waited, unmoving, for the lights to come back on in the house. She waited for her parents to come home. Somewhere between those two, she must have pulled herself into bed and fallen into an achingly deep sleep.

She dreamed of Jane Elizabeth O'Leary—a naked, chubby-faced baby girl with Riley's features and Riley's grin. In her dream, she was at the beach and baby Jane was sitting in the sand in front of her, the tide coming in and washing over her fat baby thighs. Baby Jane squealed and slapped at the shallow water, looking up at Riley as it receded. Riley felt herself grin until she saw the next wave coming in. It crashed a little later than the first one did, and the tide swallowed Jane's thighs and came up to her chest, receding much more slowly this time. Another wave smacked the shore, and Riley knew that it would lift the baby from the sand and suck her backward out to sea. She couldn't let that happen. Riley ran toward Jane as the water made its way in, but the sand was wet and heavy underneath her feet. She tried to warn Jane, but it was as if the sand had moved into her throat, snatching her breath, her voice. She sank deeper and deeper into the wet sand as the water snaked around Jane, narrow fingers snatching at her. Riley clawed at the ground, trying to move as the water whooshed over Jane's head, slapping against the sand, teasing the tips of Riley's fingers. When the water receded, Jane was gone.

Riley couldn't get the dream out of her mind. Who
was
Jane? Was Jane missing, out in the world, alone somewhere? Or was Riley really Jane? Could there be some truth to Shelby's crazy stories?

Stolen.
Riley could have been stolen; she could have been kidnapped.

“No,” she said to herself as she stepped into the shower. “I was not kidnapped. My parents aren't criminals.”

Adopted?

The word shot through Riley's mind, and she fought to press it down.

“You're being ridiculous. Your parents are your parents. I was not kidnapped.” She repeated the words so many times they lost meaning, and the niggling feeling was back at the fringe of her mind, tapping:
but
what
if?

She dressed quickly, finding herself validating her every move:
the
blue
shirt. Her favorite color. Was it her favorite color? Her mother bought it for her. She remembered the wry grin as she handed it over and Riley—naïve, innocent Riley—held it to her chest.

“It's blue—your favorite. I couldn't resist.”

Riley
narrowed
her
eyes. “Why? Are you trying to butter me up
or something?”

“Can't a mother pick up a shirt for her daughter?”

Her
mother
grinned
then, a smile Riley once thought was a larger version of her own. But it wasn't really. Her mother's lips were pouty and full with a constant deep pink hue. Riley's were pin thin and she was eternally painting them with Cool Coral lip gloss just so they would show up.

“Ry? Are you coming down? You're going to be late!”

Riley stepped carefully down the stairs as if each one was a minefield—was she a missing child, stolen, or wasn't she? She paused to study the few family pictures on the wall—her smiling as a toothless second grader, the family at the beach the year they lived near Carmel. Why had they moved again?

“Riley Allen Spencer, I'm not going to ask you again.”

“Sorry!” Riley said, entering the kitchen as she had done a thousand mornings before. Her parents were looking at her, and heat shot up the back of her neck.
Did
they
know
what
she
found? Did they know what she suspected?

“What's up, guys?” she asked, doing her best to act nonchalant.

“We could ask you the same thing,” her father said, eyes dropping back to his paper.

Riley snapped bolt upright. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” her mother said as she pulled out Riley's chair, “that we don't usually have to send in the brigade to get you out of bed.”

Riley felt her cheeks redden. “I guess I just overslept.”

“Well, eat up. You're not going to school on an empty stomach. And you have the carnival tonight too, right?”

Her father looked up, eyes bright. “A carnival?”

“It's a dumb school thing. Fund-raiser.”

“Eat.”

Riley reached for the cereal box and looked down at her bowl before she poured. It was the china she had remembered since—
when?
The napkin, the spoon, the juice glass—and the little white pill.