Girl One(37)

“Did you get the plate numbers?” Tom asked.

“No, but I saw a V or a U.”

“Not from around here, then. That’s a long way to come just to rubberneck,” Tom said.

“Think about it. He’s like Bonnie’s attacker in two ways. He ran away immediately, and he acted after dark, when nobody could identify him.” I ticked these off on my fingers.

“Then why not attack us in our beds?” Cate asked. “He could’ve just—” She made a quick slicing gesture across her throat, the blade of one finger pressing into her skin. I flinched.

“This attack might not be exactly like Bonnie’s,” I said, “but it’s exactly the same as my mother’s.”

“But your mother vanished,” Tom said. “We’re still here.”

I was still here. I was sitting with the sun moving hot across my skin, with the wet grass piercing my thighs.

“My home is ruined. My business is gone. Nothing is safe,” Cate said, a dull litany. “And, what?” Cate turned on us. “You two come into my life, you raise hell, and now you’re just going to fuck off into the horizon.” She flung her hand upward, a sweeping gesture that didn’t conceal the surprising ache in her voice. She was hurt. I hadn’t expected this; I’d thought she’d be relieved to see us go.

“I don’t know where we’re even fucking off to.” Tom sounded tired. The Bishops hadn’t answered our calls. We’d spent all evening calling and reached only their brisk, chilly answering machine. This is Patricia Bishop, please leave a message. It was Wednesday morning and I didn’t feel much closer to figuring out where my mother had gone. I could be home by tonight, back in the lab by morning.

Cate dropped to the ground in a low crouch, kneeling with her head bent. She groaned.

“If I go back to Chicago,” I said suddenly, “what will you do, Tom?”

He blinked, lifted his glasses to scrub at one pink-rimmed eye. “I’ll go to Vermont. I still want to talk to the Bishops for my book, if nothing else. I’m not ready to walk away from this.”

Tightness clamped around my heart; I felt territorial, jealous. Tom going on without me, hunting through my history. Now I was torn. I did truly want to return to Chicago. I wasn’t at the school as a publicity stunt. I was there because I belonged, using the brain that Bellanger had created to make him proud.

But I looked down at the notebook that Tom had managed to retrieve from Cate’s house last night. What if Cate was right? What if finding my mother’s notebook inside her cheap broken clock hadn’t been an accident but a message? Come find me, Josephine. It was the first time I’d felt my mother actively pulling me into our past. Inviting me in. How long had I waited for this?

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I have time to go to Vermont. I mean, who knows—what if my mother is there? With Patricia. She visited Emily, she visited Deb—”

Tom looked at me like he didn’t quite believe me, though already a smile was building at the corners of his mouth. “Yeah?”

“Do you think there’s any hope of returning to Chicago by the weekend if we do this?”

“We’ll drive all night if we have to.”

“One last stop,” I said. “What’s one more?”

Cate straightened. She stood, swaying, looking down at us. Her face was calm and unyielding now. “If you’re going, then I’m going with you,” she said.

My heart jumped.

“You’re welcome to come,” Tom said. “Of course—but it’s also a big decision, and—”

Cate held out a palm, stanching his words. “I know how to make a big decision. I don’t need your permission here.” She looked at me. “Josie? This is a search for your mother. I don’t want to intrude.”

“You’d just leave everything?” The idea of Cate coming along with us was unexpectedly happy, a brightness that nearly made me forget the smoke leaking into the morning sky.

“Goulding can wait. It’ll be here when I get back.” She was different now, that anger turned, through some private alchemy, into resolve. “This may be my best chance to find out what my mother was going to tell me after all these years. Maybe my mom would’ve wanted this.”



* * *



“This is the second attack on a Homesteader in the past week,” I said. “It all has to lead back to Ricky Peters. That’s the cleanest explanation, isn’t it? Occam’s razor and all that. The three attacks must be connected. Bonnie’s, my mother’s, this one.”

Cate was inside packing while Tom and I were loading our suitcases into the trunk. Everything reeked of smoke now. We’d carry it away with us. Tom was quiet, focusing on the task at hand. Usually he was totally forthcoming with his own theories. His silence grated.

“What?” I was sizzling with nerves. I gave his suitcase an unnecessarily hard shove with my elbow. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

Still, he held fire for a second. “Josie,” he said, not looking at me, resting his hands on the lip of the trunk. “Listen. You want to know what my book is about? What’s going to make it stand out?” He took a deep breath. “I’m not convinced that Ricky Peters had anything to do with Bellanger’s death.”