The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die

  “I wish I could figure out what to do next.” I rest my cheek against the warmth of the mug.

  “Well,” Ty says, “what do you want?”

  “I want to know who I am.” I think of all the things I’ve heard in the last day. That I’m something to be gotten rid of. That I’m mentally ill. That I’m a killer. “I want to know what happened to me and why I don’t remember anything. I want to know what those guys thought I knew. And why they want to kill me. I want to find my family. I want to know what really happened to Officer Dillow. And then I want to figure out how to make everything get back to normal.” Thinking of Officer Dillow, I amend it with, “As much as possible.”

  “Basically, you need information,” Ty says, and a lightbulb goes on.

  “There must be a library somewhere around here, right? With computers people can use?”

  “Yeah there is,” Ty says as he pulls out his cell phone and checks the time, “but it won’t open for more than an hour.” He sees the way I’m staring at his phone. “What?”

  “The only way those men could have figured out where I went is because of Brenner’s phone. What if they can figure out where we are through your phone? Maybe you should turn it off. And take out the battery.”

  His mouth twists. “What if James tries to call?”

  “You could check your voicemail later from a pay phone.”

  With a sigh, Ty turns his phone off and slides open the battery compartment.

  Another customer has come in, a young woman with a baby in a stroller. Audrey walks around the counter to admire the sleeping infant.

  “So how do you know Audrey?”

  “I was homeless for a while last summer.”

  I blink in surprise.

  “Audrey was too. Still is.” He looks at her and then away, and runs his thumb across his lips. “It’s rougher for girls out there. I tried to keep an eye on her. When I moved in with James, I gave her my tent.”

  Audrey is making the other woman’s coffee, laughing.

  “She’s homeless?”

  Ty flicks the underside of his thumbnail against his two front teeth. “How is she supposed to live on minimum wage when she only works twenty hours a week?”

  “So she sleeps in a tent?”

  “There’s a good spot near the bike path. I showed it to her. Most people don’t know about it. Sometimes she sleeps on the floor here, although her boss said he would fire her if he found her here again. We’d let her sleep at our place, but she says she doesn’t want to be a burden. She has a lot of pride.”

  “But … homeless?” It still seems like such a huge thing.

  “It’s not all bag ladies. There’s lots of kids who get thrown out, or who have to leave, or who think it will be an adventure. The adventure lasts about a day. There are kids who go to my school who live in cars. There are people who brush their teeth and comb their hair in public bathrooms before they go to work pumping gas.”

  “So … how did it happen to you? What happened to your family?”

  “It’s not important.” He looks away. His lips press into a firm line, then he turns back to me and they relax. “Let’s talk about your family instead. Didn’t you say you had a picture of them?”

  I pull the backpack onto my lap and take out the framed photo. “I took this from the cabin. I think this is my family because that’s obviously me.” I tap my face. “But that’s all I know. And it’s not like you can tell anything by looking at it. Just four people in a snapshot.”

  “Wait a minute.” Ty points at something in the background. “What’s that?”

  CHAPTER 22

  DAY 2, 9:32 A.M.

  Ty’s not pointing at anyone in the photo but rather at something behind us.

  I haven’t really looked at the background until now. But the four people—the two adults who must be my parents, the little kid who I guess is my brother, and the girl I’m beginning to recognize as me—are all standing in front of a brick building. The sign reads MULTNOMAH ACADEMY OF—and then it’s cut off by the man’s shoulder. My dad’s shoulder.

  “That must be where I go to school,” I say. And it feels as if another piece of the puzzle snicks into place, or nearly does, which I’m starting to think is about as good as it gets.

  “Multnomah must mean Multnomah County,” Ty says. “Which means Portland.”

  “So then what am I doing out here in Bend?”

  Ty shrugs. “Didn’t you say that place where you woke up looked like a vacation cabin? Maybe your family was out here for a weekend and something went wrong.”

  Then where’s my family? Why was the ransacked cabin empty except for me and the two men? I just nod, tracing my finger over the figures of the mom, the dad, the little boy. Will I ever touch my family in real life? If I had gone deeper into the woods instead of out of them, gone to the place where Michael Brenner was dragging me, would I have found them sprawled on pine needles, with bullet holes between their eyes? If I never remember them and they’re already dead—as I am beginning to fear they must be—will it be as if they were never alive?

  Ty touches my hand. “I should go back and get my car. Then we could drive over to Portland and see if someone there knows what happened. Maybe your family’s even there.”

  “You can’t go back, Ty. It’s not safe. If they tracked Brenner’s phone to the mall and then to your apartment complex, it won’t be long before they figure out that you’re the one who has both things in common.”

  Ty opens his mouth to argue, then closes it when he sees my expression. Despite the men hunting me, despite my missing fingernails, I think this whole thing is still a game to him. Crowding into closets like kids playing hide-and-seek. He never heard Brenner’s breath hitching as he lay so still on the ground. He never saw Officer Dillow’s face when I pointed the gun at him.

  Dillow’s gun is now digging into my stomach. At this moment, I might be the only girl in America with a gun in her waistband and a coffee mug cradled in her hands.

  Ty takes a last sip and then looks at the clock on the wall. “We could probably leave now and get to the library just as it opens. I’ll make sure the street’s clear.” He gets to his feet and heads toward the door.

  I set down my mug. If it isn’t, what will I do? I look around. There’s a door for the bathroom, but that’s about it. No back entrance. Even Audrey must come in the front. My breathing speeds up. I have the gun, but could I really use it?

  Before I completely hyperventilate, Ty sticks his head in the door and gives me an all-clear sign. He calls a good-bye to Audrey. I nod at her as I follow him out the door.

  It takes about twenty minutes to walk to the library. Thankfully, Ty doesn’t suggest we try to skateboard. I watch every car that drives by. Whenever we pass a store window, I look at the reflections to see if anyone is behind us. But all I see are normal people. Men in pickup trucks, women in minivans. A lady jogging with a black Lab. A guy wearing a neon green windbreaker and riding a bike.

  The second floor of the library has rows and rows of computers. Ty drags over a second chair so that we can sit together in front of a computer in a far corner.

  “First, let’s see if we can figure out why you can’t remember,” Ty says in a low whisper. He puts his fingers on the keyboard. “Then we’ll work on what it is you’re not remembering.”

  “Why and what? You forgot the who, when, where, and how.” I start out half joking, but by the time I finish my sentence, our task seems impossible.

  Ty squeezes my shoulder. “We’ll get there. One step at a time.” He turns back to the computer. In the search box, he types in “sudden memory loss.” More than 17,000 results. He follows a link to a medical site, skims a few lines, clicks back, selects another link, and then repeats the process, clicking back and forth almost faster than I can follow. Most of the sites are filled with medical jargon.

  He pauses on one site. “Your head wasn’t bruised or cut. And you said you haven’t been having headaches.” His voi
ce is low, like he’s talking to himself. “But if it’s not from a blow to the head, then what is it?”

  He clicks on another link that leads to a site about brain tumors. I freeze. Could that be it? But Ty is running his finger down the list of symptoms, shaking his head.

  He moves on, checking out more links, as I try to keep up, my eyes scanning hundreds of words. I keep getting stuck on symptoms and diagnoses. I’m not running a fever. I’m not sleepy. I’m probably not an end-stage alcoholic.

  Then he stops on a page. “Look at this.”

  In a rare and poorly understood form of amnesia called dissociative fugue, some or all memories of a person’s identity become temporarily inaccessible. In the fugue state, which can last several hours or even several years, individuals forget who they are. They don’t remember their names or anything about their former lives, nor do they recognize friends or family.

  Unlike most forms of amnesia, dissociative fugue has no known physical or medical cause. Rather, it is thought to be precipitated by an emotionally traumatic event, an event so painful the mind seems to shut down and erase everything, like a failed computer hard drive.

  During the fugue state, memories that occurred before the event cannot be retrieved. But unlike a computer whose unsaved information is lost forever, most patients suffering from dissociative fugue eventually recover their “lost” memories. Typically this happens just as suddenly as the memories disappeared.

  Ty turns to me. “Maybe that’s what you have.”

  It’s already clear that something bad happened to me. Whatever it was, it was bad enough to push restart on my brain. Does that mean it has to have been even worse than the things that have happened since? I pulled a gun on Officer Dillow. I left Brenner to die in the quiet woods. But I remember those things.

  Ty is still waiting, watching me with his dark eyes. I give a small nod.

  “So something bad happened that you had to forget,” Ty says. “It must have been them pulling out your fingernails.”

  I look down at my bandaged hand. I’m glad I can’t remember the pliers. But would that have been enough to make me forget everything? Would that have been enough for my mind to build a barrier, walling me off from everything that happened beforehand?

  It’s like I can feel the wall in my mind. Do I really want to know what’s behind it? Is something knocking on the other side? I shiver.

  Ty seems to think we’ve solved one mystery. My fingernails got pulled out and I forgot who I was. But what if it was something worse?

  “That’s only part of it,” I whisper to him. “What kind of men would pull out a teenage girl’s fingernails? What did they think I knew?”

  “Let’s see if there’s any more in the news,” Ty says, typing in the web address of a TV station. It’s not hard to find the latest version of what happened to Officer Dillow; it’s the lead story.

  GIRL SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING IN MURDER OF NEWBERRY RANCH SECURITY GUARD

  Newberry Ranch, Ore. (AP) — A 16-year-old girl is being sought in connection with the homicide of a security officer who was found shot to death in his vehicle at the Newberry Ranch and Resort near Bend, Oregon, late last night.

  The girl has been identified as Cadence (Cady) Scott of Portland, Oregon. When asked whether Scott was a suspect, a Bend police spokeswoman would only characterize her as a missing person whose safety was in question. “We have reasons to be concerned about her and we want her found,” she said.

  However, a source says that security camera footage from Newberry Ranch shows Scott standing outside Dillow’s security vehicle and pointing a gun at him. The actual shooting itself was not captured, as the security camera pans the area and had already moved past the location. The source said that a gunshot can be heard on the tape.

  A motive for the murder has not been established, but it appeared that Dillow may have been attempting to take the teen into custody.

  Scott is thought to be a runaway. On Tuesday, she did not show up for classes at Portland’s Wilson High. That morning, her parents left a message for their daughter on the school’s answering machine. According to another source, the message said they had discovered that she had sold the family’s Datsun on Craigslist, and that she shouldn’t come home until they had cooled off. The rest of the family has not been seen since. Reportedly, the Scotts’ Portland home showed signs of a struggle.

  Anyone with information related to the shooting or the whereabouts of any of the Scotts is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 541-555-8588.

  I shiver. The library is all blond wood, white walls, and high ceilings. The tall windows let in shafts of sunlight. It’s hard to believe we are in such a light-filled place and reading about such dark, dark things.

  Below the article is the photo of me that Ty talked about earlier. My raised fists are clenched in triumph, and a grin I don’t think I could make anymore splits my face.

  I shift my focus until I can see my reflection in the computer monitor. With my dyed, shorn hair, I don’t look anything like that girl on the website.

  At least I hope I don’t. Because this article tells people that I’m probably armed and definitely dangerous.

  CHAPTER 23

  DAY 2, 10:33 A.M.

  Ty turns to me. “Are you okay?” he whispers. Before I answer, I scan the room without turning my head. Most of the computers are now in use. I’m probably the top story on every local news site. How many people are looking at my picture right at this moment? The changes in my hair and clothes suddenly feel like a mistake. Will my androgynous appearance make people stare at me longer, trying to figure out whether I’m a guy or a girl?

  I answer Ty’s question with a question. “You know I didn’t kill him, right?”

  He blows air through pursed lips. “Awfully convenient, a camera that panned away at just the right moment.”

  “What do you mean?” My mind whirls. “Do you think they planned the whole thing in advance?”

  “I don’t see how they could do that.” His brow furrows as he turns it over. “They couldn’t have known which way you would drive after you left the cabin. But they had—what?—at least a couple of hours before Dillow’s body was found. They must have altered the footage. Taken out the part that showed you running away.”

  “Why didn’t they just add the sound of the gunshot when I was pointing the gun at him?”

  “Because it would have needed to be more than just the sound. The gun would have kicked, there would have been a puff of smoke.”

  I realize Ty is saying these things because he knows. He sees the way I’m looking at him and shrugs. “My mom’s boyfriend used to take me out in the forest to shoot handguns. He made fun of me because they scared me.”

  I’m starting to get an idea about why Ty ended up living on the street.

  I look at the article again. “I’ve spent the last day thinking my name’s Katie when it’s really”—I lower my voice further—“Cady. Cadence.”

  “Cadence,” Ty repeats softly. “I like it. It’s different. I wonder why your parents chose it. Was it because they liked music or poetry or…”

  Right now, I wouldn’t care if they had named me after their favorite brand of paper towels. Just as long as I could find them. “And where are they anyway?” I interrupt him. “This article is hinting I did something to them.”

  “‘Signs of a struggle’ covers a lot of ground.”

  “None of it any good.” My stomach churns.

  “If something really bad happened to your family, it seems like they would have found them by now.” He pats my hand. “The fact that they weren’t there is a good sign.”

  “Yeah, but if they’re not at our house, and they weren’t in the cabin, where are they? They’re probably dead.”

  “Don’t go there,” he says. “Not when you don’t have to.” His eyes are kind. Kind and sad. He sits back and thinks for a moment. “At least Cady isn’t as common as Katie. Let’s see if you have a Facebook page.” He types in my n
ame. Cadence Scott. There are a half dozen results, but only one with a picture of me.

  He clicks.

  “I’m female,” I joke, looking at the screen. “That’s a relief.” The profile picture Facebook has is the same one the TV station used. Maybe that’s where they got it.

  Then Ty scrolls down to look at my timeline. He sucks in his breath. I lean forward to look at my status updates for the past few weeks—my messages to the world.

  TUESDAY

  Please don’t hate me. It was all a mistake. I didn’t mean to.

  OCTOBER 11

  I’ve made so many mistakes in my excuse for a life that I’m not sure I can make up for them.

  OCTOBER 8

  I feel buried alive.

  OCTOBER 4

  Would anybody care if I died?

  SEPTEMBER 30

  I’m sick of trying.

  SEPTEMBER 17

  I can’t ever make anyone happy!! What’s the point of even trying anymore??

  SEPTEMBER 2

  Nothing to gain, hollow and alone, and the fault is my own.

  AUGUST 20

  I feel like I’m stuck in a hole and can’t dig out.

  My stomach rises and presses against the bottom of my throat as I reread the time on the most recent entry. It was posted less than an hour after Officer Dillow was shot.

  I must really have done it.

  Even if I don’t remember doing it.

  CHAPTER 24

  DAY 2, 10:39 A.M.

  My nose burns. The inside of my head fills with liquid, tears ready to fall at a single blink. But crying won’t help me.

  “I did it,” I whisper. “I really did it.”

  Ty’s eyes go wide. “You remember doing it?”

  “No. But look at the time I wrote that. That’s right after he was shot.” I start hitting the top of my head with open hands. “My memory must be all full of holes. Or making up things that aren’t true.”