The Safest Lies (28 page)

“Annika, I have to ask you something.”

But I could see her pulling back already, concentrating on the next hand, her eyes going slightly unfocused.

“Eli, have you heard from him?” I asked.

“What?” She started on her second hand without pausing. “Oh, no, the date was weird. Scratch that:
he
was weird. After you called, he insisted he bring me home. I think he just wanted an excuse to end it early. He was so obviously not into me. And the feeling was mutual.”

“Can I see his picture again?”

She gestured toward the table. “My phone’s over there. What’s this about?”

“I thought I saw him at school today.”

She shook her head, a curl escaping, and she blew it out of her face. “No, he doesn’t go to your school. Dropped out, he said. I told you, he works doing landscaping.” She looked out the window. “Another reason I think I’ll stay inside, thanks.” As if this was an argument she’d already had with her mother.

I pulled up his picture, zoomed in—it was definitely him. I handed it to Ryan so he could see.

“I’m going to send this to myself,” he said.

Annika looked alert for the first time, back rigid, shoulders straight, eyes moving between me and Ryan and her phone. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Annika,” I began, “can you call him?”

“Why?”

I swallowed. Looked at Ryan, who was better at keeping people calm.

Ryan came closer, lowered his voice. “We think he may not be who he says he is.”

She shook her head. Shook it again. “You’re scaring me. Do you think…” She raised a hand to her mouth. “Oh God, are you saying I was sitting in a
car
with one of them?”

“I don’t know. I want to call and talk to him,” I said.

She shook her head. “No. Please. Leave me out of it. I just want to forget it.”

“I’ll do it,” Ryan said, entering the info into his phone instead.

She turned to face me. “I’ve known you longer than anyone, you know that?”

Annika had moved here three years earlier, but we only saw each other summers and breaks. Still, she was the person I knew best, other than my mother and Jan. I thought our friendship mostly worked one way, but it seemed it was the same for her.

“I’m always the new kid. Do you know what that’s like?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. I knew the feeling exactly, of walking into a place for the first time, of feeling the vastness, the terror, the loneliness in the crowd.

“We moved around so much when I was younger. Everywhere I go, I’m scared nobody will notice.”

“How could anyone not notice you?” I asked.

She grinned. “I got asked to leave my last two boarding schools, did you know that?”

“No,” I said. And then I wondered why we never did this before. I thought how much easier it would’ve been for the both of us with somebody else who understood. I thought how alike we were, the secrets we kept.

“Oh, I got noticed all right,” she said. “The first time, breaking curfew. By a few days.” She grimaced. “I only went to see my brother. It’s not like I
know
anyone else. This last one, though, was just a strong suggestion—end of last year they told my mother I didn’t seem to mesh well with
the school mission.
” At this, she laughed. “I think the school mission was to bore everyone to death, so I can’t exactly argue.”

She leaned closer, her eyes watery, as if she had a bigger secret. “But now…now I want to disappear. I just want to go back to school. I can’t sleep. Every noise makes me jump.” She placed her hand on my arm, her cold fingers circling my wrist. “I’m sorry, Kelsey. I am. I know it’s worse for you, and I feel awful, but I just want to leave this all behind, forget it ever happened. I need to for a bit, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I wish I could, too.”

She sighed. “I’d hug you, but.” She held up her hands. “You’ll let me know, right? When they find your mother?” She tipped her head against my shoulder. “I’ll be back, I promise.”

Ryan lowered the phone.

“What?” I asked.

“The number is disconnected,” he said.

Annika’s eyes grew wider. “Oh God,” she said, and her arms began to shake.

Ryan held up the phone again, Eli’s image on the screen. “I’m going to bring this to the police. Just…if you see him, call, okay?”

Annika wrapped her arms around her knees, streaking one of her nails. “I just want to go,” she said. “I need to go.”

She buried her face in her knees, and I wrapped my arms around her from the side, and I said, “It’s over, Annika. It’s over.”

Little lies. The safest lies.

—

“I need to get back to school,” I told Ryan as he sat frozen in the driver’s seat. “I have to drive Cole and Emma home.”

But Ryan looked at me like I didn’t understand. Except I did. Someone was out there, and I wasn’t safe. This wasn’t over.

“I’m following you back to Jan’s, and then we’re going to the police together.”

As Ryan drove to school, I saw him checking the rearview mirrors every few minutes. A fear he couldn’t see and couldn’t shake.

“I want you with me,” he said.

“What?”

“Now. Always. I want you
with me.
” But what could he do? If walls and bars and locks couldn’t keep me safe, how could he?

The danger is everywhere.

It’s everyone.

It’s the parts we keep hidden, and the darkness inside, fighting to get out.

The only thing I did was take people down with me. They tied themselves to my anchor, and we fell.

D
etective Mahoney stared at the photo on Ryan’s phone. “Who is this again?”

“We don’t know,” Ryan said. “He was there the night her mother disappeared. He was taking Annika out on a date, and he brought her home after Kelsey called her. He said his name was Eli.”

The detective paused, seemed to think it through. “So this would be before the cell phones were blocked?”

“Right. We didn’t think it was related until Kelsey saw him at school. He’s not a student there.”

“There are twenty-five hundred kids at the high school. How can you be sure?” Detective Mahoney asked.

“We called the number, but it’s disconnected. We think Kelsey calling Annika tipped them off that Kelsey was back at the house, and that’s what triggered everything.”

“Hold on, so you think they came
because
she was home, not accidentally?” The detective looked at me as he asked this.

“Why else would the cell phones be blocked?” I said.

“I don’t know. It’s not so hard to get a cell jammer. Maybe they didn’t want any witnesses to make a call during the burglary. I will definitely look into it, but what I’m thinking is that it would be very bold for anyone to come after you now. Not with so many witnesses.”

“There were witnesses before,” I said.

He sighed, ran a hand through his hair, making him seem younger than he actually was—which appeared to be closer to my mother’s age. “They’re after the money,” he said.

He opened a file on his desk. Pulled out a photo. “We traced the money in your house to part of an unsolved crime spree. A good chunk of the money your mother had in your basement was in sequential order, which raised some flags—it’s surprising to see outside of a bank. It can indicate a shipment of new money, in which case it can be traced back, if it was logged. If it was stolen…So I made a few calls to some colleagues in Treasury, and turns out this specific batch was linked to a violent bank robbery more than seventeen years ago.” The photo was a pixelated shot of two men in masks with guns. “But there was more money. A lot more.”

I leaned closer to the photo, tried to read something in the image. “That’s not my mother.”

“We know that. But then how did she come into possession of the stolen money?”

I didn’t know, but I saw their story forming. “You think she was with them?”

“We think she must’ve been.”

I sat up straight, my hand flat on the image. We had them. We
had
them. “So this is them, then. These are the people who took her.”

He tapped his pen on the desk. “It’s possible she went willingly now.” He paused, tapped his pen some more. “And so we have to operate under the possibility that she could’ve gone willingly
then.
”

No, no, no. They didn’t understand. My mother was not capable of that. My mother was
not.
“She had chemical burns on her back. She was found running, smelling like gasoline. She was panicked and delusional and she has
nightmares,
” I said. “Something terrible happened. And they came for her. And now they’re coming for me.” Couldn’t they feel it? This wasn’t even close to over. Couldn’t they see the danger everywhere?

“This money was with you in the safe room,” he said. “It’s possible they expected more. It’s possible they asked for you by name because they thought you might know how to get it.”

Ryan sucked in a breath. “So it’s possible they think she still might know, right?”

The detective looked pointedly at Ryan. “I think that’s a stretch.”

I was going to be sick.
Violent robbery. Crime spree. Willingly.
Everything I thought I knew about her: a lie. Everything I thought I knew of myself—that only half of me came from terror. But that wasn’t true.

I was made of terror and lies.

I was shaking in my chair, and I thought Ryan was saying something, but his words weren’t coming through, not with the buzzing in my head. “Do they know who that is?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “This happened in Virginia. And it’s a cold case,” he said.

“Doesn’t this change things, though?”

He tilted his head slightly. “How would this change things? We still don’t know anything about their identity.”

“Because.” He was going to make me say it. Or maybe he didn’t know. “Did you talk to the police in Atlanta about my mother?”

“Briefly. Your mother went off the grid pretty soon after reappearing. They didn’t have much to go on. No statement at all, really. She said she didn’t remember anything, and she didn’t want to talk.”

Were her medical records sealed? Maybe. Maybe he really didn’t know, because he was missing something major. Me. He was missing me.

“You want a lead? Here it is.” I held my arm on the table, pushed my sleeve up. Ryan looked away, eyes closed. The detective narrowed his eyes.

“My blood,” I said.
It’s not my fault. It’s who I am.
“His DNA is in here. Subtract my mother’s. It’s all that’s left.”

—

Ryan finally agreed to leave me at Jan’s front door, but only after making sure Jan was home and wouldn’t be leaving, and that Cole and Emma were home. He didn’t say anything at all about what the police said—because what could he possibly say?
Kelsey, sorry your mom was lying her entire life. Sorry she abandoned you. Sorry she was not who she said.

“I’ll be here tomorrow morning,” he said.

“I’m driving this week. I don’t need a chaperone.”

“I know you don’t, but it will make me feel better.”

I gave him a look.

“Okay, don’t look at me like that. It’s not my fault. It’s in my blood. This is what we do for…”

“For people in danger?”

We heard voices behind the door. “I wasn’t going to say that,” he said.

Jan opened the door, looked between the two of us. “I thought I heard you,” she said. “Ryan, right? We’re ordering dinner. Would you like to join us?”

He nodded. “I would,” he said.

“Oh, come on,” I said, dragging him behind me.

—

That night, I couldn’t sleep, like always. Imagining Eli out there somewhere. Watching. Reporting back. And for what? For
what
? I felt I was missing a major piece of the puzzle. Either my mother had left, or they had her. What could they possible want with me? They didn’t want me to leave that house. They asked for me by name. My mother was gone, and they were after me.

My mother was gone and they were after me.

I was collateral.

Eli taking my pictures, following me. A warning:
We know who she is. We are watching her.
A threat.

And my mother, where was she in all of this? If they were taking pictures of me, they knew where to reach her.

Because they had her. “Mom,” I whispered.

I went back to Jan’s office. Tore through that box again. Sat between a heap of papers and reports, trying to find her. Digging deeper, growing more frustrated, my breath coming in short pulls. It took a moment to realize I’d been crying.

“You’re going to wake everyone up.” Cole stood in the doorway, eyes roaming over the mess I’d made.

“Oh.” I looked around the room. Wiped my eyes with the back of my arm. “Shit,” I said.

He laughed. “Looking for something in particular?” he asked.

“They think she was never kidnapped,” I said, begging him to argue.

But he didn’t. “Is that what you think?”

What did I really know? The police painted one picture; my mother, another. “She was seventeen, and she had a terrible home life, and she wanted to escape, it’s true. But she also taught me how to escape being captured. She was obsessed. She…” I looked up at Cole. “She had to have been held. She was held against her will, with spiders she could not escape.”