A Gift of Thought (6 page)

“So, this must be the morning routine, huh?” he asked, feeling cheerful. He wondered what grade Rachel was in. She looked like she was about his age. Maybe he’d start hanging out at her school. He was just as glad that he never had to take another math test, but he’d always liked history and English. He wouldn’t mind sitting through a few classes. He peered over the seat, trying to see if she had any books out, but her backpack was tucked neatly at her feet.

“We need to go over your schedule.” Sylvie pulled an iPhone out of her pocket.

Score, thought Dillon. Ty must have lent her the phone. He wouldn’t text her right away. Maybe he’d wait until tonight, so that she wasn’t at work. And so that it wasn’t so easy for her to throw the phone away. He stayed turned in his seat, watching Sylvie and Rachel. It wasn’t as if he needed to wear his seat belt, after all.

“If we have to.” Rachel’s voice was flat, expressionless, and she didn’t look at Sylvie.

Sylvie glanced at her, but didn’t otherwise respond to her attitude. Scrolling through the calendar, she began calmly reciting a list of activities: piano lessons, dance rehearsal, SAT prep, soccer practice, a dentist appointment. It seemed endless. Rachel didn’t answer to any of it with more than a sigh, until Sylvie said, “Friday at 3:30, you have an appointment with Dr. Oshuda.”

“What? Why?” Rachel’s head snapped toward Sylvie so quickly that Dillon winced. That looked like it hurt.

“I don’t make the schedule, I just keep it.” Sylvie’s tone was matter-of-fact, but her glance at Rachel was sympathetic.

“I hate her,” Rachel whined. “I really hate her.”

Wow, Dillon thought. That was a serious whine, high-pitched and nasal and annoying. He could tell from the flicker of Sylvie’s eyes that it annoyed her, too, and a muscle in the driver’s jaw jumped as James clenched his teeth.

But then Rachel turned away, staring out the window fixedly, and Dillon saw the gleam of light in her brown eyes that said they’d filled with tears.

Sylvie didn’t sigh, but her mouth tightened. “Just tell her about your dreams. Therapists love that.”

Rachel didn’t look back at Sylvie, but Dillon could see her swallow. James, though, flicked his gaze up to the rearview mirror and raised his eyebrows at Sylvie. She shrugged one shoulder.

“Do you have third period free today?” Sylvie asked.

Rachel nodded silently, sullenly, still staring out the window.

“Do you want us to bring you a Frappuccino?”

Rachel looked back at her, one corner of her lips turning up. “Can I sit in the car?”

Sylvie smiled at her, and held out a hand. Rachel reached for her backpack and pulled it up to her lap, unzipping the front pocket, and reaching inside.

“You’re supposed to be wearing it,” Sylvie said, as the car joined a line of slow-moving cars trickling through a circular driveway.

“It’s not like I ever go anywhere without my pack,” Rachel replied, pulling out a small circular device. She handed it to Sylvie who adeptly popped it open.

“Not the point. It needs to be on your person at all times.”

“Except when you’ve turned it off?” Rachel’s tears were gone now, and her tone almost mischievous.

Sylvie’s lips twitched. “Even then. Which is only when you’re absolutely safe,” she added, before saying to James, “Alarm or just dead?”

He looked disapproving, but answered. “Just dead. That noise is fu—is annoying.” He caught himself before he swore and Sylvie grinned at him as she did something that Dillon couldn’t see to the device, and then handed it back to Rachel.

“Put it in your pocket,” Sylvie ordered. “And you do not leave the school building.”

Rachel nodded, a reluctant smile tugging at her lips.

As the car reached the front of the line, Sylvie looked out the window, seeming to scan the environment. Dillon looked out the window too. Was this a girls’ school? There were teenage girls everywhere, pouring into the front doors of the brick building, but not a boy in sight. Wow.

“We’ll be back within the hour,” Sylvie told Rachel. “I’ll come get you for the security check, and you can stay with us while I ‘repair’ your alarm.”

Rachel nodded.

“Clear?” Sylvie said to James. He, too, was scanning the scenery, looking carefully in every direction.

He nodded. “Clear.”

“I think so, too.” Sylvie nodded at Rachel. “Go ahead. We’ll see you soon.”

Hmm, thought Dillon. His mom was only going to Starbucks. She might even be going to a drive-through. He could spend the next hour with her in the car, probably almost silently, or with Rachel in a school filled with girls.

The choice wasn’t hard.

*****

Sylvie watched Rachel until she disappeared into the school, then leaned back against the car seat.

“To Starbucks, James,” she said in a mock posh accent.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he replied, shifting into gear and pulling out. “You’re going to get us into trouble if you keep that up. That’s the third time this year.”

“I know. Ty would flip.” She grimaced, thinking about how Ty would react. Ballistic wasn’t the word. She’d just disabled Rachel’s alarm and GPS tracker, the one that would alert the security team if Rachel moved outside a prescribed area. When they got back from Starbucks, she’d go into the school and notify the principal that she needed to investigate the equipment failure during Rachel’s free period. The principal might frown at her, but in McLean, Virginia, home of the CIA, private schools took security seriously. Rachel would be allowed to join them.

“I don’t get why you do it. The kid’s a brat,” James complained.

Sylvie smiled at him. She loved James. He didn’t understand and it didn’t matter: he backed her up 100%, anyway. “Then there came the color green,” she quoted to him, reciting a chant that she knew he knew.

“Yeah, right,” James scoffed. “She’s mean, all right. But she ain’t no Marine.”

“No.” Sylvie looked out the window. “But she reminds me of what it felt like.”

“Boot camp? She’s a spoiled rich kid at the fanciest school in northern Virginia,” he protested. “They’re not doing ten mile marches between classes.”

“Might be easier,” Sylvie answered, still staring at the passing scenery. She didn’t like Rachel. It was almost impossible to like Rachel. But she’d never sensed anyone unhappier. The girl was living in a world of despair, and if a Frappuccino and a chance to escape from school for forty minutes lightened that darkness for a minute or two, Sylvie was willing to take a few chances.

James turned into the parking lot of Starbucks. Every space was full. “You’re buying the coffee.”

“No problem,” she agreed, reaching for the door handle. “You want some frou-frou drink?”

“Damn straight. I’ll take one of those peppermint things.”

“Ick. You’re such a girl, James.”

As she entered the coffee shop, his call of ‘sexist pig’ still ringing in her ears, Sylvie was smiling. But then her smile faded. From outside, the textures of the people in the crowded café blended together like the multiple instruments in an orchestra playing a single tune. But now that she was inside, she could hear the individual notes.

‘
What the hell are you doing here?’

‘
Closest coffee shop to Rachel’s school,’
Lucas answered.

Sylvie joined the line at the counter, refusing to look around her. He might be here but she didn’t have to acknowledge him.

‘
You were bound to show up eventually,’
he continued.

Sylvie gritted her teeth. Ty would scream himself hoarse if he heard that. And damn it, he’d be right. She’d gotten careless if she was so predictable.

‘
We have to talk.’
His feelings were a mess, she realized dispassionately. The calm, practical Lucas on the surface was barely holding his chaotic emotions under control.

“A peppermint mocha, a Frappuccino, and a black coffee, just straight coffee,” she told the clerk. It was always easy to get the weird drinks at Starbucks, hard to get the simple ones.
‘No, we fucking don’t,’
she thought at Lucas.
‘You didn’t want to talk at the mall the other night. Why now?’

‘
What are you talking about?’
he thought back at her. ‘
What mall? No, never mind, that’s not important. Have you seen Dillon? Heard from him? Akira’s freaking out. She wants to come up here but Zane doesn’t want her flying when she’s pregnant.’

Sylvie frowned. Had Lucas made any sense at all? Or was he talking pure nonsense? She moved down the counter to the space where drinks were served. ‘
Zane?’

‘
Gone insane. Protective’s not the word. Paranoid. Obsessed with the idea that since she’s already died once, they’re living on borrowed time.’

Okay, Sylvie had no idea what Lucas was thinking about. Without moving away from the counter, she did a slow turn, as if she was casually shifting positions. The blur of feeling from the crowd was hard to separate into individual pieces, but she spotted Lucas immediately. He stood in the corridor that led to the bathrooms, placed where no one coming in the front door could spot him. He hadn’t shaved, and maybe he hadn’t slept either. It didn’t matter; just the sight of him sent a melting shiver down Sylvie’s spine. Damn him.

He looked like a Floridian still, she thought. A little too tan, his leather jacket a little too lightweight for the wintery DC weather. But hot as hell. The easy charm of the privileged teenager had become much more compelling on the man who looked as if he rarely smiled.

She hated the way he could make her feel, truly she did. “Could I get a tray, please?” she asked the barista, already planning.

‘
No idea what you’re talking about,’
she thought at Lucas.

‘
Right, of course not. Sorry, I should . . .
’ The thought came through clearly, but then the emotion around it made it blurry, as if it was all feeling, no words.

Sylvie frowned. What the hell was going on? What was Lucas doing? This wasn’t like him. He sounded almost desperate. And Lucas didn’t do desperate.

‘
It’s Dillon
,’ Lucas continued. ‘
He’s not talking. Is he with you
?’

‘
You told me he was dead!’
Confused wasn’t the word. Sylvie’s fury must have shown on her face because the boy behind the counter took a step backward before pushing her drinks toward her.

She picked up the tray, her hands clenching white-knuckled on the cardboard, and took the two steps to the condiment bar. Should she? Shouldn’t she? Oh, God, this was petty of her. But her back to Lucas, she took the top off the plain coffee cup, trying hard not to think about what she was doing.

‘
No, no, I mean, yes. I mean—we have to talk. I can’t explain this way.’

‘
Is he dead or isn’t he?’
Sylvie tried to think the words as clearly as she could. She could sense Lucas approaching, moving past the counter, closing in on her.

‘
Yes, but—’

‘
Then there’s nothing to say,’
she interrupted his thought, turning quickly, and letting the tray jerk upward, as if accidentally. Coffee spewed out of her open cup, splashing onto Lucas. As the hot liquid hit, he reeled backward in surprise and she slid her foot forward to catch his heel and tug his foot toward her.

It worked beautifully, as precisely as if she’d choreographed it. As he stumbled backward, crashing into the man behind him, she straightened the tray, catching her still half-full coffee cup before it tipped completely over, and turned to the side, avoiding Lucas’s forward rebound as he tried to recover from being tripped. The man behind him was protesting as Sylvie murmured, “So sorry, so sorry, let me get you a towel,” and kept moving. The barista was leaning over the counter to see what was happening, the woman at the nearest table standing, exclaiming, as Lucas tried to avoid falling onto her.

The scene inside the Starbucks was still crazy as Sylvie slipped into the front seat of the car with a sigh of satisfaction. Okay, it was petty, but it had felt damn good. And maybe Lucas would think twice the next time he tried to text her any back-handed compliments.

“What happened in there?” asked James, glancing over at Sylvie as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the roadway. “You’re as revved as if you just robbed a bank.”

“You say that as if you know what it looks like. Were you a getaway driver during your mysterious past?” Sylvie said the words lightly, but her heart was racing, she was breathing a little too fast, her cheeks were flushed. Yes, she was revved. What had Lucas meant? Did this have something to do with why he was searching Chesney’s study?

“Don’t you wish you knew,” James retorted. “I’d be a good one, though.”

Sylvie smiled at him. “You can be my getaway driver any time.”

Could Zane be in trouble? Sylvie knew who he was, of course. He’d been a gap-toothed little kid back in the day, but a lanky adolescent when he and Lucas showed up on her doorstep a few years later. It was just like Lucas’s luck that his little brother had a gift for finding the lost. Not that Sylvie had been lost, of course.

“I prefer to stay on the right side of the law.” One hand on the steering wheel, James reached over and grabbed his peppermint mocha. He took a gulp. “Ahhh, delicious.”

“Girl,” Sylvie drawled her response to their running joke, but it was automatic, most of her brain still obsessing on Lucas’s words. He’d been making no sense at all.

And why did he want to talk to her now? Okay, she’d ignored his phone messages, but that text he’d sent was hardly urgent. And he must have been in the mall the other night: the only way he could have gotten that new phone number was if he’d been close enough to hear the thoughts of the sales clerk assigning it to her. Why hadn’t he approached her then? Why hadn’t he answered her when she tried to talk to him?

“Seriously, though,” James said, shooting her another glance as they paused at a stop light. “What’s got you so wired?”

She shook her head, but answered without thinking. “Just this guy.”

“Oho!” James responded with delight. “What guy? Tell me more. All the deets. Leave nothing out.”