And it wasn’t just that Riddle was a problem.
Sam wasn’t working out that great either.
A really good big brother would want to play games and tell secrets and even be some kind of commander.
He would take the littler kid and make him an apprentice.
But Sam didn’t do that.
He hung out with Emily all the time.
And when he didn’t have his arm around her, Sam was in the basement playing the guitar or listening to music for hours and hours and hours with Jared’s dad. It was like his father and Sam had a secret clubhouse down there in the studio, and that was just plain creepy.
Plus, for the last few months, his mom and Emily were both really happy all the time, which meant that they really weren’t paying attention.
That happens, Jared thought, to really happy people.
They don’t notice the little things.
Riddle couldn’t tell if Jared was asleep.
He’d gone upstairs first, and he had the lights off by the time Riddle got to the room. So Riddle tried to be very quiet as he slipped under the covers. Felix hopped up onto the foot of the bed and circled around three times before flopping down on Riddle’s feet.
Riddle then whispered, “Good night, Jared.” He didn’t get an answer, but that was okay.
Riddle shut his eyes, and in the orange sparkles of darkness he saw letters.
They were everywhere now. Even in front of him before he fell asleep.
The world was full of the symbols, which made confusing sounds. It had been so much easier to just see letters as interesting shapes. The idea that they got together to make up a code was alternately electrifying and horrifying.
If he had been able to read, maybe he could have contacted his mom. Maybe it would have all been different.
Despite how hard it was to make sense of the letters, Riddle went to sleep every night thinking the same thing. Maybe his father would come back for him. Maybe he and Sam weren’t really safe.
He didn’t tell anyone, but the main reason he wanted to learn to read was so that he could write a note if he ever was taken again. He wouldn’t just draw pictures of things.
He’d use words to find help.
Destiny took small sips from the can of Sprite.
Emily and Sam and Robb Ellis all held cups of coffee. They were sitting now in the parking lot outside Tommy’s Market on Seventeenth Street, which was a block from the college.
Once Destiny had gotten all the beer and Thai food out of her stomach, she began to return to the land of the living, or at least the land of the talking, which was the only place she knew.
As Destiny explained it, she’d been on the road for a few years. First with a truck driver. Then on her own. But she’d only been in this town for ten days.
The first thing she did when she arrived was go to the college rec center and take a shower in the women’s locker room, using the explanation that she’d left her student ID in her dorm.
From there it wasn’t very hard to actually find the housing quad, which she could easily access during the daytime hours. She left her overpacked duffel bag downstairs in the laundry room in a storage closet that no one seemed to use, and she slept on the first floor on the couch in the room designated for dorm meetings.
The very next day, Destiny got a job at the Orange Tree. The owner paid cash.
Destiny didn’t know how long she’d stick around. She didn’t have much of a life plan. And she also didn’t have more than forty-eight dollars to her name.
Sam opened the car door, turning to Robb. “I’m going back into the market to get some gum. You wanna come get some?”
Destiny piped up, “I’ll come get gum. My mouth tastes sick.”
Sam shot Emily a look, and she reached her hand over to the door handle and kept it there. “You aren’t up for walking around a store.”
The two boys got out of the car and headed across the parking lot.
Emily glanced over at the clock on the side of the market. It was almost midnight. This was turning into one long dinner. They had to find a way to end it. She wished Robb had stayed with Destiny. Then she and Sam could have come up with a plan.
She knew for a fact that Sam didn’t chew gum, so something was going on in there.
Her thoughts were interrupted when Destiny let out a small burp and said, “So what’s the story with your boyfriend? Where did he grow up?”
Emily gave what had become her standard answer. “He moved around a lot.” But she realized that she sounded defensive, which she was. And she didn’t volunteer anything else.
Destiny turned away from the dark glass to look at her. “He’s totally hot. That part’s no mystery.”
Inside the market Sam seemed a million miles away. Robb didn’t want to stare, so he pretended to look at a magazine as he asked: “How much of her story do you believe?”
Sam shrugged. “All of it. Most of it. Enough—put it that way.”
Robb thought everyone was always lying, so he was disappointed with the answer. “Even the stuff about driving a big rig?”
“You don’t stand five feet tall in heels and pretend that you can operate an eighteen-wheeler.”
Robb digested the answer. There was a lot he could learn from this guy. Sam had a certainty about him that was appealing. No wonder Emily liked him so much.
Robb picked up a pack of cinnamon gum from the rack, and the two boys headed to the cash register. Robb dug into his pocket, but Sam had money already out on the counter.
“So what do we do with her?” Robb asked.
Sam sighed. “She’s a stray cat. We already fed her. She’ll be hard to shake now.”
Destiny said that she lasted only one night at the dorm before the girls called security. Since then, she’d been sleeping in the library, hiding in the fourth-floor bathroom until the building closed down at midnight and then curling up on a soft couch in the reference room until 6:00 AM, when it reopened.
But that hardly seemed like a plan to the rest of the group, and it didn’t matter anyway, because the library was now closed.
There was an extra bedroom at Sam’s apartment, because Riddle didn’t sleep there much.
Emily waited for Sam to bring it up.
But he didn’t, and she was so relieved. She wondered to herself if that was wrong. Was it not the charitable thing to do?
And then Robb Ellis came through.
Robb found himself wondering later if that had been Sam’s plan all along. Maybe that’s why he took him into the store to get the gum. It set him on the course of feeling more responsible.
Robb had the keys to his parents’ two-story building downtown, and of course he knew the security code to get in.
There was a comfortable couch in his father’s office, and after a quick stop at his house, a sleeping bag became part of the arrangement.
At one in the morning, Destiny, now fairly sober, pressed her head into a pillow on Derrick Ellis’s leather sofa. A slow, crooked smile crossed her face as she said, just before she fell asleep, “And I’m already in my pajamas.…”
12
Monday was the appointment.
Early.
An armed prison guard named Denny Piercey was his escort.
Clarence called Denny “sir.” He made sure to be extra compliant and overly cooperative. He thanked Denny over and over again for his effort.
And when the time was right, Clarence began to cry.
He stared out the window through the wire grate, knowing that the guard could see him in the rearview mirror.
He remembered being a kid in Alaska and how a logging truck had lost its brakes and plowed into the front of David’s Candy Shop.
Clarence was eight years old. When he’d walked down Main Street, he saw other kids coming toward him. They were all stuffing their faces with candy.
Little Clarence ran as fast as he could down the hill to the accident, and when he got there, he heard the news. With the f
ront of his store destroyed, David Dewey had given away all his shop’s candy.
And Clarence was too late.
He’d missed the biggest freebie in the little town’s history.
The incident didn’t just put a lump in Clarence’s throat; it broke his tiny, already twisted spirit.
And now, dozens of years later, it could still make him weep. Without a sound he managed to get tears to spill from his muddy eyes and tumble down his pale cheeks.
When they reached the city of Merced, it was even better than he’d imagined.
The area outside the two large medical office buildings was hectic. The parking lot was full, and there was a rack right in front that was packed with bikes.
Clarence did his best to make it seem that he looked at nothing as he was escorted from the van.
But he saw it all.
Once they were inside the medical center, Clarence asked if he could use the bathroom.
The corrections officer looked at Clarence and his tear-stained face, his ill-fitting fake leg, and decided to remove the handcuffs. He didn’t want to unzip the guy’s pants.
Clarence was over-the-top grateful as he disappeared inside the stall to relieve himself. He did his business quickly and made a point of carefully washing his hands with lots of soap and hot water, not rinsing them completely so that the sweet, clean smell would linger.
Upstairs, with the handcuffs back in place, the two men sat together in the doctor’s waiting room.
There was an aquarium lining one wall in the office. As Clarence stared at the brightly colored fish he suddenly saw them being plucked off a tropical reef.
Now they were prisoners.
And like him, the fish had done nothing wrong. Clarence got tears in his eyes for the second time in one day.
But these ones were real.
When it was his turn to go in, the prisoner spoke softly to the doctor about the phantom pain, about the ill-fitting replacement leg, and in a special touch, he told the physician that his fish in the waiting room were an inspiration—they were so free in their movement.
Clarence had spent hours before the visit rubbing his prosthetic leg back and forth, wearing the skin down to a raw stump. He now behaved like an absolute gentleman, thanking everyone who came within three feet of him.
And all the while, he was taking in the details.
This doctor, the expert, was on the second floor.
And the bathroom for the patients was at the end of the hall.
When the examination was over, Clarence complained about his sour stomach. He was escorted again into the bathroom, and corrections officer Denny Piercey waited on the other side of the stall door.
Clarence undid his prison-issue work pants and silently removed the doubled plastic bag that was tucked deep in his underwear. Inside the bag was the decomposing dead mouse.
Clarence quietly pulled apart the zip-lock and held the bag, now open, against the stall door. On the other side, the prison guard got a sudden whiff of the putrid smell of death.
He stepped back, exhaling. “I’m going to wait outside while you do your business.”
Behind the door Clarence smiled. “Sorry about that, sir. I’ve got all kinds of trouble with my digestion.”
Clarence heard the door shut, and in an instant he was out of the stall and the dead mouse was floating in the toilet bowl. The plastic bags was shoved back into his prison underwear as he went to the window.
It was large but covered by a security grate. Clarence removed a dime and two pennies from his left sock. Lady Luck was on his side. The dime fit into the slot of the screws that held the metal bracket that supported the grate.
Moving quickly but not hurrying, because hurrying led to mistakes, Clarence loosened all four screws on the grate.
But he didn’t pull it down. He left it there, hanging now by a thread. Literally.
And then he went to the stall, hit the flushing mechanism with his foot, and proceeded to the door.
Clarence smiled as he limped, in real pain, out to the hallway. He had always taken pride in the fact that he had a rattlesnake tattoo swirling down his leg. But his amputation had sliced the reptile in two.
Now his mind only had one thought: they could cut off the tail of a snake, but it could still coil.
13
Destiny’s eyes opened Monday morning, and she found herself staring at a golf club. It was leaning against a wood-paneled wall.
She looked around in the dim light and took in the two matching leather club chairs, the solid mahogany desk, and the framed educational degrees next to prints of green-headed ducks.
Where was she?
Destiny pulled her knees to her chest and swung the powder-blue sleeping bag down to the floor as she sat up.
It was all coming back to her now.
The guy Robb had a father. And this was where that man worked.
It was a lot more impressive in the day than at night, after too much beer and a lot of Thai food that she’d seen twice.
Destiny climbed out of the sleeping bag and went to the desk. It was covered with files and documents. There was so much to check out.
And Destiny loved looking through other people’s things.
Sam had trouble sleeping.
He tossed and turned his way to daybreak and then got up, took his guitar, and worked on a series of chord progressions he’d been going over with Emily’s dad.
He needed to center himself.
But even two hours of music didn’t work to slow his heart, which felt like it was beating too fast.
Something was really wrong, that was for sure.
And so Sam put on his shoes and left the apartment. He stuffed his cell phone in his pocket and headed out the door, but he wasn’t going to drive. He’d walk.
Hopefully it would calm him down.
Once outside Sam forced himself to confront the demon that was making him so uneasy.
It was Destiny.
She was trouble.
He couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d looked in the soaked pajama top. He could see the outline of her body, and he could feel her gaze as their eyes met.
Sam sucked in a deep breath and walked faster.
And then he made a decision.
He had an ATM card now. And he had money. A valuable penny had been sold at auction months before, and he and Riddle had received the profits. The Bells were watching over the funds, but he had access to the account.
He knew what he had to do. He would take out cash and give it to Destiny Verbeck, and in exchange for that she would agree to leave town.
Sam started toward the bank on Olive Street, wondering what time Destiny showed up at the Orange Tree so that he could get it all done.
Hadn’t his father always said that people could be bought and sold? Sam knew what it felt like to have nothing. And Destiny had admitted that she fit into that category.
Knowing that he had a plan made him feel better.
He needed that girl gone.
Robb Ellis set his alarm clock for eight thirty that morning.
It was Monday, but his father had a court appearance and would not be going into his office until after lunch. And his paralegal and his assistant didn’t roll in until ten.
This gave Robb more than an hour to get to the building and make sure that Destiny had followed directions.
She was supposed to put the sleeping bag in the storage room at the end of the hall, where all the office supplies were kept, and then exit out the back door without setting the alarm.
All he had to do was drive by and make sure everything was cool in his dad’s office and then set the security system and take off. He’d then swing by Mickey D’s and get an Egg McMuffin and a Coke before going to work at the restaurant.
Easy.
But Robb Ellis had nothing like intuition or a sixth sense. Half the time he had no understanding of a situation even when it was laid out right in front of him.
It was kind of
amazing that his mother was a detective, because he had to work hard to understand anything about people.
So when he opened the front door to the Law Offices of Ellis and Company, he was genuinely surprised to hear loud music blaring.
Robb felt queasy. This wasn’t good.
Moving fast now, he went past the receptionist’s desk and down the narrow corridor to his father’s office.
No one was there.
But closer inspection revealed that his blue sleeping bag was on the floor, and so were what looked like a pair of pink pajamas. Wasn’t Destiny wearing them the last time he saw her?
Robb now realized that on his dad’s desk was a small transistor radio. He found the Off button and silenced the pounding beat. And that’s when he saw a cardboard box that said Disaster Preparedness Kit.
Wasn’t that normally in the hall closet?
The box was open, and a wrapper for an energy bar and two empty water bottles were next to the little battery-powered radio.
Robb’s eyes moved around the room as if he were investigating a crime scene—which, he felt certain, was now the case.
He then took a deep breath and turned toward the doorway and found himself slamming straight into Destiny.
She was in a leopard-print bra and little matching panties.
And that’s when Robb Ellis screamed.
Emily woke up with a headache. The clock on her bedside table showed that it was almost ten.
How had she slept so late?
Emily pulled herself out of bed and grabbed an extra-large sweatshirt from a chair covered in several layers of previously worn clothing. She slipped on the hoodie and went downstairs.
A note on the counter said that her mom had taken the boys to a goat farm. What was up with that? Then she remembered that Riddle was very interested in goat cheese. But Jared? She couldn’t imagine he wanted to go hold a baby goat. The note said that they’d taken Felix with them.
Emily poured herself a cup of cold coffee and took a seat at the kitchen table.