Pretty Wanted (22 page)

“Really,” I said, disbelieving.

“It’s my fault. I drove the guy away. I was too hard on him. I shouldn’t have hinted that stuff about the teacher. I was just trying to—I don’t know. I was just trying to get it all out in the open, I guess. I wanted you to know the truth.” He looked up at me from under his long lashes, almost shyly. “Anyway, I’m not going to let you shoulder all the blame for this. I’m going to take care of it.”

“How?” I asked.

“I can get the money. I’ll call home. I can get my dad to liquidate some assets, tap into my trust fund—
something.
I know he has it.”

“You’d do that? For him?” A few hours ago, he seemed like he hated Aidan.

“We have our differences, me and Murphy. But I made a mistake,” he said. “And we can’t give up now. The guy’s life is on the line.”

As if I could forget. “Getting the money, that makes you more of an accomplice. That ties you to me and Aidan. Are you sure you want to get deeper into this?”

“Am I? Not really.” He gave a little shrug. “You know, at first I thought I could come out here and save you but this situation is deeper than I realized.”

“Yeah,” I said, allowing a smile to tease at the corners of my mouth. “And there’s also the little problem that I didn’t exactly want to be saved.”

“There’s that.”

“Back in California, you told me you had boundaries that you weren’t willing to cross,” I reminded him.

“I know,” he said. “I still think that. But this is life or death. I can’t sit back and pretend like I’m not part of it.”

“You know, I think you’re getting warm and fuzzy in your old age, Tre.”

“I like to think of it as changing my priorities. Not going soft.”

“Either way. You’re pretty much the best.” I gazed at him gratefully.

“So I hear. C’mon. Let’s get out of this dang mall.”

We walked out past the stores with their arrangements of goods and promises of convenience and better times, and into a restaurant called Duff’s, offering an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. We went in and got a table, though I wasn’t feeling especially hungry. If nothing else, it was a place to sit and think things through.

We sat down at a table for two close to the back of the room. The waitress brought us some coffee, set down some cream and sugar, and told us to help ourselves to the food. I let Tre go first. The room was only half full, a couple with two little kids occupying a corner table, a few businessman types drinking coffee and reading newspapers scattered around.

I pulled out my mom’s date book again. In all of the action of the past few days, I hadn’t had time to go back to it again, to really take another look. And something was bothering me—it was that weird code.

SPARROW

DOVE

CROW

BLUEBONNET

BROADBILL

And then there was the paper we’d stolen from Granger. I drew that out of my pocket, too, and unfolded it:

Crow and broadbill spied

the lark. The nest has fallen.

But nestling fledges.

I knew the two were related. It was obvious. But I couldn’t decipher them.

Tre sat down with his plate overloaded with eggs and sausages and fruit and muffins. “Your turn.”

“Hmm,” I said, distracted by what I was seeing on the paper. I paged through the book again and saw the tattered edges where the missing pages had once been.

He forked some yellow clouds into his mouth. “So we agree I should call my dad,” he said.

“No,” I said, holding up a hand. “Not yet. We need to go see Toni again.” If she knew more than she was letting on, then we needed to know what that “more” was.

It was a weekday morning, so we could only assume Toni was at work with the rest of the world. I looked up her company, Belles Nuits, and found a downtown address. Tre and I walked there and found a brick building taking up most of a block.

We asked for Toni at the front desk—no point in breaking in or doing anything disreputable. She would either see us and cooperate, or she wouldn’t.

The older blond receptionist looked at us over red-framed bifocals, then got on the phone and called Toni’s office. “There are some kids here to see you.”

Toni herself came out a moment later, carrying a sheaf of paper and frowning. “I should have known I’d see you again.”

“We just have a few questions,” I asked.

She looked around behind us, checking, perhaps, for the presence of policemen or unsavory characters, and then put the paper on the receptionist’s desk before ushering us back to a small conference room. We all took seats at a round table.

“Shoot,” she said, still looking uncomfortable. “I don’t have much time.”

We didn’t, either. About an hour and a half had elapsed since we got the call, which gave us precisely twenty-two and a half hours to come up with the money or another solution. Part of me wondered what the hell we were doing here, but another part of me knew that the only way we could help Aidan is if we understood what was really going on.

“I want to know about the book,” I said. “My mom’s book.”

“The one you stole from my house?”

“That one,” I said, allowing a smile. “There are some missing pages—pages that look like they were ripped out. I think they could be important in telling us the story of what happened to her, why she was murdered.”

“Are you sure you really want to be involved with this?”

“How could I not be?”

She rubbed her temples worriedly. “I got the book when they cleaned out her locker at work—our boss asked me if I wanted something to remember her by, so I took it. I always loved her poems and I thought that’s all it was, a poetry journal. Until I realized that some of those pages might be code. I could never figure out what it said but I knew they could explain something about what happened. I was afraid, so I hid the book away all these years.” As she spoke, the doubt fell away and I became certain: She wasn’t guilty of anything except being my mom’s friend.

“And then when we came to your house, you ripped out the code pages.”

“I wanted to protect all of us, okay? I figured the past was past.”

“And now?”

She shook her head. “Look, I’ll tell you everything I know—you can decide to do with it what you will.”

I nodded.

“Angie—that’s what I always called her. She was a sweet girl. We met at the restaurant. She’d just moved to the area. She was older than me, but we were fast friends. You know how that is, when you connect with someone, and it feels like you’ve known them all your life?” She looked up. I did know how that was. That’s how Cherise and I had been, back when I started at Valley Prep.

“We both daydreamed about what we were going to do with our lives. She talked about her writing, how when she saved up enough money she was going back to school. My passion was cooking. I always wanted to start a catering company.” Her dreamy gaze broke off as her eyes trailed downward. “Well, here I am. It happened for me.”

“But she never had the chance to pursue her passion,” I said.

“No.”

“So what do you think happened?”

“I knew she had some secrets. There was a dark feeling to her, a shadow that kind of stuck to her. I knew she’d had a baby real young—too young.”

“Leslie,” I said softly.

“Angie’s parents threw her out because of that. By the time I knew Angie, Leslie was a teenager. Angie was always worrying about her grades and whether she was getting mixed up with boys. She said school had to come first, that a degree in boys wouldn’t get you anywhere.”

I had to laugh. “That’s what Leslie always says to me. Now I know where she got it.”

She looked at me. “And you. You were just a baby. I watched you a couple of times when she was out. She worried about you, too. She really wanted to do the best for both of her girls. I got the feeling that’s why she’d moved. She was trying to get a fresh start for you all.”

My throat tightened. “So did you know what she was running from?”

She closed her eyes, as if conjuring some image on the backs of them. “One night, this man came into the restaurant. She took one look at him and her face turned real white. I asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘It’s some guy I used to know. I can’t face him now.’ So I told her I would cover her table.”

“Did you get any information about this guy?” Tre asked. “Did you get a good look at him?

“I did. I mean, after she had such a strong reaction, I remembered his face. It was only years later, when he was on TV all the time, that I realized who he was.”

“David Granger,” I murmured, locking eyes with Tre.

She nodded. “I assumed something personal, maybe something romantic was going on but I was too afraid to ask her—I guess I was watching my own back in those days, trying to stay out of trouble. I’d had my own issues as a teenager—some struggles with the wrong type of people. So I drew a line in the sand. It seemed that whatever she’d been involved in was bad, that maybe she’d made some mistakes that weren’t just relationship mistakes.”

I had to ask—the question rang through all the other noise in my head, sharp and clear as a whistle. “Is he my father?”

“I honestly don’t know the answer to that.” She twisted her wedding band.

“So then?” I asked.

“So then the next thing, maybe a couple of months later, she was gone.” She paused, letting the last word rise up and hover over us.

“Do you—” Tre started.

“Do I think he had something to do with it?” She nodded. “He’s done a lot for the state of Missouri, but there’s always been something off about the guy. Like he’s too good to be true. Typical megalomaniac cult-leader type. And knowing that your mom was that afraid of him, well . . .”

So she thought he was guilty, too. “But you never said anything to anyone?”

“Not until yesterday. I emailed his office after I saw you all, letting him know I was onto him. I said the truth would come out, that his whole campaign would be over, and that her family deserved to have closure.” She clasped her hands together. “That was probably a crazy thing to do. But after all this time, after I let him get away with it before, I needed to speak my mind before he gets elected again. He has to come clean—and in a public way.”

Fat chance of that. I sighed. “We already met him and he denied everything,” I said. “But you really think he was the one?”

“I’m not saying he murdered her outright. But in my gut? Yes. I think he at least knows what happened.”

We let that sink in.

“Did she ever mention anything about a hit-and-run?” I asked. “Or a robbery?”

Toni shook her head. “No. That’s all I know. I promise.”

I believed her.

“I just wish Angie—Brianna—had lived. She would have had a better life. My business really took off after I left the pub.” She waved a hand around the room as if to show us all that it had bought her. “Maybe her life would have, too. And I wish I hadn’t been so afraid of getting involved. I wish I’d spent more time listening to her, asking her questions, demanding answers. Maybe she would still be alive.”

Sensing that we were coming to an end, I stood up. “Well, thanks for your time and for sharing this information with us. It’s really helpful. But do you mind if I ask what happened, why you talked to us today and not the other day?”

She gave us a tight smile. “Seeing you at the house was very startling. I wasn’t prepared for it. But I guess I have these regrets about your mom. Not doing anything or talking to the police back then has haunted me. And all these years, I wondered what happened to you and your sister. So I’m just glad to see you’re okay.” She reached inside her purse and produced some folded sheets of paper. “Here. Take them. Do what you have to do. I know it’s not my place, but I’m a mom, too. Whatever happens, I hope you’ll try to stay out of trouble.”

We would try, I told her as I accepted the missing pages. But what I didn’t say was that trouble was something we were still very much in.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

SIXTEEN

ANOTHER HOUR HAD
elapsed and we were still in limbo. I felt the clock ticking. Back on the street again, I thought of Cherise. Talking to Toni reminded me of her, and more than ever I needed her advice. Even hearing the sound of her voice would comfort me. But there wasn’t time to call Cherise now. We had to look at the new material Toni gave us. We slipped deep into a bookstore, way back in the travel aisle, where I eyed up the blue-and-white covers of guides to places around the world, wishing I could be at any of them right now, anywhere but here.

The new pages matched the book in size and shape, their ripped edges ragged and yellowing. On them were more haiku.

Sparrow in morning

Bluebonnet + dove migrate

Drop feathers; eggs in thicket.

Crow wings west alone
,

Waits for thaw. Bluebonnet stores

The eggs in winter.

I opened the book. I had to figure out this code of hers. Again I thought of Cherise—we’d taken English class together and she was good with language. Maybe she could make sense of this jibber-jabber.

SPARROW

DOVE

CROW

BLUEBONNET

BROADBILL

I read and reread the words. As far as a code went, it was a strange one. There were no numbers, no calculations to make. But the same bird names kept reappearing. Was the list a key of some kind?

There was the bird doodle, and the reference to birds in her poem, too. What was up with all of these damn birds? Chet had a bird tattoo, I suddenly remembered. And there was the frieze at the museum, and the motto that connected up with my mom’s sign. Welfare for All. That had sparrows on it, too. My hand went to the pendant at my throat.

“What do you know about sparrows?” I asked Tre.

“Nothing much. In Sunday school they always said the sparrow stands for the common man. It’s in the Bible.”

“Could ‘Sparrow’ be the name of their group?” I asked out loud. “I mean, it’s a perfect symbol for the things they stand for.”