See Jane Run (12 page)

“They're going to isolate you. They won't let you talk to anyone.”

The heavy iron gates of the Blackwood Hills Estates flashed in Riley's mind. So did her father, scrutinizing her cell phone bill.
That's normal,
Riley told herself.
I'm seventeen, not a prisoner.

“Why should I believe anything you say anyway?”

Tim turned to face her, his eyes a slicing crystal blue. “Because I'm your brother.”

The breath was snatched out of Riley's lungs.

“Come with me.”

She fumbled backward. “No.”

His hand was on her arm again. “Come on, Jane. You're not safe here. If they even know that you've seen me, they'll hurt you. They'll hurt us both.”

Riley's heart was pulsing in her ears. Her skin suddenly felt too small, too tight.
I
don't believe you,
she wanted to scream.
I
don't believe a goddamn word you're saying.
But she couldn't force her lips to move.

Tim was digging in his pocket, his eyes scanning the crowd before them. Riley's breath hitched.

He's crazy and he's going to shoot me now. He's going to stab me, to set off a bomb. That's what crazy people do. Crazy people who claim they're my brother.

Instead, he pressed a card into her hand. “Call me. I will come and get you from wherever you are.” His eyes cut back to the crowd. “They're dangerous, Jane. Don't say a single word or they'll disappear again.” He shifted his gaze back to her. “You'll disappear.”

The coffeehouse was directly in front of them, and Riley found herself begging for her parents while pleading that they shouldn't come. If this man was going to kill her, she didn't want her parents to get hurt. But she desperately wanted them to save her.

The door opened as if on cue, and Riley's parents stepped into the store.

Tim saw them too.

She gasped, sucking in air like it was her last breath and rooting her feet to the ground.

“Come on.” He tugged her arm at the same moment Riley's father caught her eye. Suddenly, it was as if the whole mall was staring, and there was a cool spot on her wrist where Tim's hand had been.

Riley stared out the window the whole ride home. Her parents were taking turns lecturing and grounding her, but all she could think about was the man—Tim—his fingers gripping her wrist, and his voice:
Your
parents
are
lying
to
you.

She glanced up and stared at the backs of their heads, catching first her father's reflection in the rearview mirror and then her mother's.

Not
my
parents.

Riley shifted in her seat, feeling the heat of panic as it inched in.
What
happens
now?
The man said she wouldn't call the police because she “wouldn't do that” to her parents.

Do
what?

Riley swallowed and clamped her mouth shut. Her stomach was in her throat, and she was certain that if she opened her mouth, she would vomit.

This
can't be happening…I don't have a brother. I can't believe I'm even considering what this guy is saying.

But he knew her name. And he knew Jane.

I'm Jane Elizabeth O'Leary?

No.

My
parents
aren't liars. I just want this all to go away.

They pulled through the neighborhood gates and Riley glanced down at her phone. There was a text from JD.

FOUND SOMETHING.

Riley's breath caught. Her fingers were flying over the keyboard when her mother leaned into the backseat, her hand closing over the phone.

“We said no phone, Ry.”

Riley looked up, stunned as her mother slipped the phone into her purse.

“You can't do that!”

“And you can't just take off whenever you want to.” Her father cut the engine and stepped out of the car.

Riley was about to respond, but he looked over his shoulder at her, his glare so severe that it gave her the chills.

“Go to your room.”

Riley silently climbed the stairs then immediately turned on her laptop, tagging JD for a chat.

SMILYRILY:
Whatd u find out?

HNTR41:
Hi to u too

SMILYRILY:
Sry. Hi. Parents took my phone.

HNTR41:
Sux. Was doing some research on ur Jane.

SMILYRILY:
AND?????

HNTR41:
Wait. Downloading the pic u sent.

SMILYRILY:
I didn't send you anything. What did you find out???

HNTR41:
Do you know if Jane had a brother Tim?

SMILYRILY:
OMG I met Tim today. He grabbed my arm.

Riley sat back from the screen, wondering how much to tell JD. And even if she told him the truth—the truth as it happened—what could she say? The computer chirped when JD messaged her back.

HNTR41:
Holy crap, R! That's creepy. How did u do that?

SMILYRILY:
Wait—Do what???

A photo icon popped up on her screen.

HNTR41:
U sent this.

Riley clicked on the icon and watched it bounce as a picture loaded, the image filling the whole screen. There was a glowing laptop in the center and a pair of hands resting on the keys. They were female hands and she immediately recognized the Panic Purple nail polish—because she was wearing it too. The head that was blocking the screen was familiar as well. Even in silhouette, she could see the tendrils that were falling out of the back of her ponytail.

“Oh my God!”

Riley jumped back from her screen and turned, clawing at her wall for the device that was filming her—there had to be one. But her walls were smooth, completely unmarred.

She yanked open the bathroom and closet doors, half hoping that her phantom photographer would be inside, half begging that he was long gone. The tears were burning tracks over her cheeks, and every step that Riley took she was sure that someone was tracking, watching, listening to her every breath.

When she heard a car door slam, Riley's mind started spinning, and she was taking the stairs two at a time. She heard her parents yelling at her but was too focused to make out the words. She flung open the front door and was hit with a cold rush of night air then the burning of something tightening against her throat, pulling her backward. Her father had a handful of her T-shirt.

“Riley, stop!”

“Dad, Dad, there's someone out there! There's someone outside, they—they took a picture and—”

“Riley! Stop. Breathe.”

She whipped her head toward the street and then back to her father. “There was…” Riley's words drifted off.

There was no one in the street. It was dark—not ominous, just regular nighttime dark—with a crushing wind that made skeletal leaves cartwheel past.

“What are you talking about?”

Riley tried to pull in a deep breath, but it was like trying to breathe through a straw. She pressed her hand to her chest and blinked away the tears that rimmed her eyes.

“Breathe, Riley. One, two…” Her mother was speaking to her now, her hands on Riley's arms, slate-gray eyes focused on her daughter.

Riley tried to do as her mother said. She felt a bead of sweat start at her hairline and make its way down the side of her face.

“Maybe we should call Dr. Morley and have him check your antianxiety medication. Maybe your body is getting used to it?” Her mother's eyebrows were knitted with worry, and Riley pinched her eyes shut.

Antianxiety,
she breathed.
My
parents
aren't trying to drug me.

After what seemed like a lifetime, she was finally able to take in a full breath.

“What happened, Riley?” her mother asked gently.

Riley looked from her mother to her father then out to the darkness on the street. “I thought I saw someone outside. Someone watching me.”

Her parents shared a look. “Like a Peeping Tom?”

“No.” Riley shrugged out of her mother's arms. “Someone driving by. Or in a car, stopped. Just like—I was instant messaging—”

“Instant messaging? You're grounded, remember?”

“Yeah, but I—”

“Your father and I were very clear, Riley.”

“But, Mom, it was just a—I was just talking to a friend and then—”

Riley watched her father suck in a deep breath. He knitted his brow and set his lips, and her stomach dropped. Riley knew that look; she
loathed
that look.

“Go up to your room.”

“Dad—”

“You want to make your punishment worse? Up to your room.”

“Someone was watching—”

“There was no one outside, Riley. Your father and I were here the whole time.”

“Trust me, if someone has their eye on us—on you—we'd know about it. Now up to your room before I get unreasonable,” her father said.

Riley opened her mouth and then closed it, looking at the hard expressions on her parents' faces. She knew that if she said anything—if she protested or confessed—her parents would dismiss her. They weren't going to listen to anything she had to say.

She trudged up the stairs, her heart a stomach-dropping thud each time her foot fell. She didn't want to be in her room. She didn't want to be locked into a box where someone—somehow—had photographed her.

Riley swallowed at the lump in her throat as she reached out to turn the doorknob. She flung open her bedroom door and finally let out the breath she didn't know she was holding. She scanned the room with wide eyes before tiptoeing across the carpet and snatching up her laptop. Her parents had commanded her to her room—she was willing to compromise. Riley slid down in the doorway and pulled her computer onto her lap.

She went back to her screen and blinked at the message now displayed.

“‘Internet connection lost'? What the hell?”

She typed in her password, groaning when nothing happened. She typed in the WEP key and the server password. The computer dinged and red letters lined the screen: SMILYRILY NO LONGER HAS ACCESS TO THIS ACCOUNT.

• • •

Riley's eyes were bloodshot and raw the following morning. She had spent the night turning, considering: the open front door that she knew she had locked. The postcard, the photograph—Tim. She shuddered. Something about him—about the way he said her name, the way he looked down at her and said
she
was Jane—it struck something cold and dark way down in Riley's belly. Not fear, exactly.

Something much, much worse.

She thought of the hard look in her father's eyes as he yanked her into the house.

Did her parents know that she had met Tim?

“Stop it, Ry,” she muttered.

“They're going to try to isolate you…”

The severe red letters barring Riley from her email account flashed in her mind.

She had had her phone and Internet taken once before, but that was after she
failed
a midterm—not after an impromptu trip to the mall.

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE…

Was
the
note
from
Tim?

The thought stabbed at her heart, and guilt washed over her. Would she really believe a stranger, someone who approached her in a mall, more than she believed her own parents?

Her eyes instantly went to her laptop and the folded-up birth certificate hidden underneath. She wanted to snatch it up and tear it into a thousand tiny pieces. If she could tear it small enough, make it disappear, then maybe everything would go back to normal and she wouldn't be Jane Elizabeth O'Leary.

“I'm not her,” Riley said defiantly, as if somehow Tim could hear her. “I'm not Jane O'Leary.”

Even with her admission, she knew that she was beyond the ability to stamp out errant thoughts about Jane. Even when she focused on the hot water pouring over her head in the shower, Jane was there, whispering, wondering about Riley.

No
baby
pictures…the nightmares…

Riley had been plagued with nightmares for as long as she could remember. They were always the same. They always chilled her to her very core, leaving her skittish and cold for hours after she woke.

Maybe
I'm remembering something…maybe it was the night Jane—I?—went missing…

She turned off the shower and dressed, not bothering to flick on the radio like she usually did. She didn't even dry her hair, opting instead to weave the wet strands into some semblance of a bun. She picked her way down the stairs as if she were a stranger in her own house, averting her eyes at the memory wall her mother had finished—pictures of Riley and her parents at a park, at Disneyland, a three-year-old Riley hugging Mickey Mouse, her eyes the size of saucers.

Nothing
before
three
years
old,
that same suspicious voice in her head breathed.
Because
Riley
Alan
Spencer
didn't exist before that?

She shook off the thought and walked into the kitchen where her father glanced up at her over the edge of his newspaper. Her mother was scrubbing something more intently than she needed to, and Riley pulled a chair from the table, sitting down silently. Her mother had left her a bowl and a spoon, her pill and her juice, and now she turned, setting the “end of” cereal container in front of Riley. It was Riley's favorite—a big plastic container that contained all the leftovers of cereal boxes when there wasn't enough for a respectable bowl. Everything got shoved in there willy-nilly, and Riley loved the surprise, loved the taste of sweet-crunchy-healthy-marshmallow packed into every bite.

But now it made her stomach roil.

Her mother sat down wordlessly and poked a knife into a grapefruit half while Riley chewed her cereal, biting down until it was paste, her jaws aching after four bites. She glanced at her father, who snapped his newspaper and turned the page. She could see her mother in her peripheral sight, hear the sound of the serrated knife sawing through grapefruit flesh. She could hear the pulse of her own heart, throbbing in her ears. Everyone was so deathly silent, but the silence was so deafeningly loud. Riley reached into her pocket and fingered the edge of the birth certificate. On a whim, she had pulled it from under her laptop and stashed it there. She set her spoon down.

“Why are there no pictures of me from before I was a toddler?”

Her mother looked up, her eyelashes fluttering as though she were stunned. “What do you mean, Riley? You know about the flood.”

Riley sucked her teeth, taking in a deep, slow breath. “Dad said the roof leaked.”

She didn't bother to look up, but Riley knew her father did. She heard his newspaper as he laid it on the table.

“What's this about, Riley?”

“Before we moved to the house on Kemper, where did we live?”

Her mother laughed, and Riley couldn't help dissecting it—a guilty laugh, trying in vain to cover up her nerves? A standard giggle because Riley had asked the question before? She didn't want to examine her parents the way she was, but everything inside her told her that something was wrong.

Her father carefully set his hands on the table and leveled his gaze at Riley. “Before we moved to Crescent City, we lived in Chicago. Do you remember the tiny apartment there?”

“Tiny?” her mother giggled. “Do you remember, before we brought Riley home, how big we thought that place was?”

Riley's head snapped up. “Brought me home from where?”

Her mother's stare was steady, her lips held in a thin line. “From the hospital, honey. You were too young to remember—you probably don't remember that little place at all. We left when you were—”