Trust Me (13 page)

The microwave beeped, and Rae pulled out the mugs, took them over to the table, found the tea bags, and plunked
one in each mug.
Tonight you can’t get pissed off,
she told herself.
You have to let him talk. You need information.

You’ve got to find out about “the group” and why someone in prison knew about you and your mom.

It wasn’t as important as dealing with the Anthony disaster, but there was nothing she could do about that now. He
was going to need some cooldown time before they could talk.

Rae sat down at the kitchen table and plopped a couple of vegetable dumplings on her plate. “Those are all for
you,” her dad told her as he took a seat across from her. “I was in the mood for pork ones.”

“Um, Dad, did you and Mom name me while she was pregnant?” Rae blurted out. “Or did you wait until I was born
to see, you know, what kind of name went with me?” There had to be a smoother way to bring up the Mom subject,
but the time frame Rae was interested in was while her mother was pregnant with her. At least the question got them
there.

Her father rubbed the bump on the bridge of his nose, the one that matched the bump on Rae’s. “We started
talking about names almost the moment your mother found out she was pregnant,” he answered, not even reacting
to the random factor of her question. “Boys and girls, since we wanted to be surprised. I think your mom bought
every baby name book ever published. She’d read them to me every night before we fell asleep. It took us a while,
but we finally narrowed it down to Rachel Morgan Voight for a girl.” He smiled at her. “I think it suits you.”

“I like it,” Rae answered. She took a tiny bite of her vegetable dumpling, hoping her stomach wouldn’t revolt. “So
did Mom have any strange cravings when she was pregnant?”

Her father laughed. “She craved meat. I don’t know how you became a vegetarian.”

“Hmmm,” Rae said, trying to act interested. “What else? Like, what did she spend time doing? You know, some
people knit or wallpaper the baby’sroom. Or they join some kind of mommies-to-be group. Was Mom in a group like
that?”

Rae’s father lowered his eyes to his plate and busied himself spooning out some lo mein. “She
was
in a group,” he
finally acknowledged. Rae’s heart rate increased as she waited for him to continue. “It was a bit of a New Agey thing.

But she joined it before she got pregnant. It wasn’t for people expecting kids.” He frowned. “It was funny, though.

Quite a few of the women members did get pregnant around the same time. They always joked there was something
in the coffee.”

“Did you ever go to the meetings?” Rae asked.

Her father shook his head. “I teach medieval literature, remember? New Age is just too… new for me. But your
mother seemed to enjoy it.”

He’s holding back,
Rae thought. But why? There was one easy way to find out.
Sorry, Dad,
she thought as she
reached for the lo mein carton, sliding her fingers over the surface.

changed her
pork smells great
nice to eat with Rae
secretive
changed her
didn’t talk to me about /

Rae focused on the thoughts that were about her mother
-changed her, secretive, didn’t talk to me.
From those
thoughts she picked up an oily mix of guilt and betrayal and anger from her father. Like thinking anything negative
about his dead wifeshouldn’t be allowed, even though he was angry with her for keeping secrets. The hair on the
backs of Rae’s arms stood on end, and she realized she’d gotten another emotion from her father-a ripple of fear.

Whoever left the print on the basketball was afraid, too. Not just of the group or my mom, but afraid of
me,
too. Or

at least afraid of the possibility that I might have been born while my mother was in the group.

“So what’d they do in the group?” Rae asked.

Rae’s father took off his wire-rim glasses, polished them on his sleeve, then put them back on. One of his favorite
stalling techniques. “Your mom didn’t tell me much about them. It’s good for people in a couple to have a few things
that are completely their own.” He took a big bite of lo mein and spent more time than necessary chewing it. Then
he smiled at Rae. “You know what she used to do? She used to put the headphones of her Walkman against her
stomach and play you music. Mostly stuff from her high school days-Supertramp, Styx, ELO. I told her she
absolutely couldn’t play you ABBA, but I know she sneaked it in.” He laughed. “I used to play you Gregorian chants
when she was sleeping. And some country-western.”

“No wonder I’m such a freak,” Rae joked.

Her dad’s expression turned serious.
Oops,
Rae thought.
I guess we’re not far enough away from my hospital days

for me to be joking about not being quite normal.

“She would read to you, too. All kinds of things. Even the back of cereal boxes,” he added.

Rae tried to smile. But it was hard. Because she knew he was talking about a woman with a violent streak. Her dad
seemed to be able to forget that part so easily.

She pushed herself away from the table and stood up. “I’m not really that hungry tonight. I think I’ll go hit the
books for a while.” It was clear she wasn’t going to find out any more about the group from him. And she couldn’t
take any more anecdotes about Saint Mom.

“The leftovers will be in the fridge if you get hungry later,” her dad called after her. He sounded a little worried. But
not as worried as Rae felt. She had to find out the truth about the group. She had to find out why whoever left the
print on the basketball was unnerved by the idea that she’d been born while her mother was a part of… of whatever
the group was.

“That place across the street, the one with the green shutters, is the first one we’re going to hit. We’re going in
Friday night,” McGee told Anthony.

“Big,” Anthony muttered. One of those places that could hold three or four of Anthony’s family-and give each kid a
separate room.

“That’s why we need the extra muscle,” Aaron Kolsen said from the backseat.

Anthony didn’t know Kolsen very well, but he’d seen him and McGee’s other guy, Chris Buchanan, around. They
were a couple of years older than Anthony. Seemed decent enough.

“We’ve been watching the place in shifts,” Buchanan said. “It’s just this couple who lives there. Fifty something.”

“There’s a gardener and a cleaning person, but they’re never around at night,” McGee added. “And you won’t
freakin’ believe this-wifey left this afternoon with enough suitcases to crash a plane.”

“So we just have the guy to worry about,” Anthony said.

Buchanan tapped Anthony on the shoulder and held up a fatty. Anthony shook his head. He hadn’t had a buzz
before McGee found him out by the Dumpster, and he didn’t want to get one now. If he was doing this thing, he was
doing it smart. Trying to plan a robbery while high was a Bluebird move.

“Yeah, just the guy,” McGee agreed. “He isn’t home yet. Usually doesn’t make it in until about nine.”

“Workaholic,” Kolsen added. “Maybe that’s why wifey left.”

“I’m going with alcoholic,” Buchanan said. “Ourbud doesn’t always look so steady on his feet.”

“Are we doing this before he gets home, then?” Anthony asked. Going in there at seven or even eight seemed
dicey. There’d still be lots of people around the neighborhood. He felt the back of his neck break out in droplets of
sweat.
Just don’t let it start up on my back,
Anthony thought. If McGee and the other guys saw him sweating
through his shirt, they might not think he was someone who could handle himself.

And he wanted in. That house had to be reeking with high-ticket items.

“We’re going in at about seven. That gives the gardener and the maid time to get home and leaves us some space
before our guy gets home,” McGee explained. “I borrowed my cousin’s van. We-”

“We painted it with the Salvation Army colors,” Kolsen cut in. “So it’ll look like we’re just doing a regular pickup for
them.”

McGee shot him an irritated look, clearly not happy to have been interrupted. Anthony reminded himself to stay on
McGee’s good side. At least until the jobs were over.

“I got some Salvation Army uniforms,” McGee continued. “We’ll go in wearing those. Since it’s early and the alarm
won’t go off, nobody should get suspicious. Those guys pick up donations from people at all kinds of weird times.”

“What about when they see us carrying out the big stuff?” Anthony asked. “The Salvation Army doesn’t usually
pick up stereos.” Because he wasn’t going to get caught loading a wide-screen TV into a Salvation Army van. Just
the thought got more sweat pumping. Why did he have to be born a friggin’ sweat machine?

“We’ll put the van in the garage and load the stuff through the garage door,” McGee answered. He sounded the
way some of Anthony’s special-ed teachers had-like he couldn’t believe how much of a moron Anthony was being.

“Sounds good,” Anthony said quickly. He was not going to mess this one up.

Rae slipped out of bed that night, carefully pulling her covers back up to her pillow. There was no way she was
going to be able to sleep until she got answers to at least some of the questions jangling inside her head. What was
the group-and what was so scary about it? That was question number one. But there were other questions about
her mother that she could never quite stop thinking about-had her mother had the fingerprint ability Rae did? Did
she know she had it, or had she thought she was losing her mind? Did the disease, the degenerative disease, have
anything to do with the power? And if it did, was Rae going to die, too? Were the numb spotsshe’d been getting the
beginning?

She’d been trying to pretend that she didn’t even have most of these questions, trying to shove them so deep into
her brain that they wouldn’t resurface. But if Anthony could take learning the truth about his dad, then she could
take learning the truth-the entire truth-about her mom. And herself.

And there was one obvious place to start-the box with her mom’s stuff in it. Rae tiptoed out of her room, down the
hall, and into her dad’s room. Luckily he was a heavy sleeper-and from the sound of his snoring, he was in deep by
now. Quietly she made her way over to the closet and eased open the sliding door. The cardboard box was in the
same place as always. Rae pulled it down from the shelf- /
love you, Melissa
/ why am
I do
ing this /
sweet/

–above the clothes rod and hurried back to her room with it. Her heart felt like it had moved from her chest to her
throat. The throbbing lump made it impossible to pull in a deep breath.

There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just stuff,
she told herself as she set the box down on the bed. But she opened
the box gingerly, using only her fingernails, as if something deep inside was going to spring out and attack her. Her
eyes immediately lit on an old-fashioned glass perfume bottle, the only thing inside the box that she’d ever touched.

“Can’t deal with that right now,” she whispered. The last time the blast of pure mother love she’d gotten off the
bottle had almost annihilated her. If her mother had been a different person, it probably would have been the best
sensation ever. Rae probably would have treasured the bottle and touched the fingerprints on it as often as she
thought she could without wiping them away. But an overpowering rush of love from a mother who was capable of
the kind of violence and rage Rae’s mother had been-it was almost like it wasn’t love at all, but just the opposite
because the person who felt it was so twisted inside.

Next to the bottle lay a pink-and-white doll. It was shaped sort of like a snowman-snowbaby- with three fuzzy orbs
for a body, and it had a little plastic face with two straggly pieces of yellow yarn hair drooping over its forehead. Rae
gently picked it up. She got mostly static off the body, static and a feeling of deep contentment and affection. This
freaky little dolly had been held a lot by someone who adored it. “Had to have been Mom’s,” Rae muttered.

She swallowed hard, then ran one finger slowly over the doll’s face. Static, static.
for Rachel
little baby Bonnie/

Rachel’s name radiated pride and love and joy.

She quickly put the doll aside. That wasn’t what she came here for. That wasn’t what she wanted.

Just keep going,
she told herself. She hooked a plastic mug by the handle and pulled it out. On the front was a joke
photo of her parents as Tarzan and Jane. The smile on her father’s face brought hot tears to Rae’s eyes. The way he
looked at her mother… God. She blinked away the tears and did a fingerprint sweep.

/can’t believe I got him to do this/best day/I’m changing/we should go back/coffee/

Rae’s hands began to tremble, and she almost lost her grip on the cup. It suddenly felt much too heavy. She pulled
in a deep breath and let the emotions finish sweeping through her, the love, the amusement, the fatigue, and the
sweaty-sweet mix of apprehension and excitement. Rae moved her finger back to the spot where she’d felt that thrill
of danger. /I’m changing/