The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(55)

“Now that we know what we know from Sophie, I think we’ve got to come around to the fact that Stella’s genuinely missing. It’s been a long fucking night, and I’ve thought about it. Two of us have killed ourselves already—Sam hung himself, Beth jumped in front of a train.” Mara dips her head, knowing what’s coming, that I’m right, before I say it. “We should work with the others. Match the pieces we have with whatever they’ve got. You and Jamie and Goose, despite his appearance to the contrary, are brilliant.”

“So why don’t we figure it out on our own?”

“Because we had no idea who they were. They might have some documents and tapes and reports and shite, but we don’t know the people this has been happening to, Stella excepted. Sophie and Leo do. It’s their friends committing suicide so far, but there’s a grand design somewhere, and a clock counting down, and we’ve no idea when, or for whom. If we want to find a connection, we need to look, really look, at the people connected, and so far, that’s them.”

Mara wilts into a curl of sulk.

“What? You don’t want to go?” You don’t want to help Stella is the question I don’t ask.

“It’s not that. I’m just—I hate leaving Daniel alone.”

“He needs it.”

Mara reaches out, tugs at the hem of my shirt. “Why don’t you come with us?” she asks.

I wind a finger around her hair, concealing the tiniest hint of resentment and self-loathing in my voice. “I want to look through the things the solicitors sent over. From England,” I lie. Sort of.

“And you want to be alone.”

“No,” I say. “It’s just that you sorting through old architectural plans and whatever else is likely to be less productive than you sorting through what Leo and Sophie collected. No one knows more about what really happened at Horizons than you,” I say. “And Jamie.”



Jamie descends the stairs first. “Off to find the droids we’re looking for, I hear.”

“You’ll keep yourself entertained, I trust?” asks Goose, right behind him.

“Always,” I say as they pocket their mobiles and shrug into jackets. The sun arrows through the glass clocks, slicing the apartment’s shadow with white.

Mara tosses one watchful look over her shoulder, so I half smile at her. “Don’t be too long,” I say, just loudly enough for her to hear it.

She turns away, but not before I glimpse her eyes rolling and a grin on her face. I shut the door behind them.

And head straight for Daniel.





32


MEN OF STRAW

I KNOCK ON HIS DOOR, not politely. I try the door and it’s locked. “Daniel!” I shout. “It’s an emergency! I need your—”

He opens the door, eyes bloodshot but wide. “What is it? What happened?”

“Time to wake up.”

His face puddles into confusion. “What—”

“Nothing happened. Everything’s fine.”

“Then what the hell—”

“I need your help.”

“You’re going to have to live with disappointment,” he says, and begins to close the door.

I stop it with my hand. “Sorry, but no. Get dressed. You’ve got class.”

“I’m skipping.”

“Daniel, Daniel. Remember who you are.”

Nothing. His eyelids droop, his arms cross against his chest. “I just want to be alone, okay?”

He sounds pathetic, and it does pull at the single heartstring in my chest, but.

Petulant, he adds, “You said I’d be left alone.”

“I say a lot of things. And anyway we did leave you alone last night. Time’s up. Get dressed.”

His nostrils flare, and for a second I see the family resemblance that’s normally hidden between him and Mara. “Where are we going?”

“I think you know.”



I’d never wanted to see the place before, and now that I stand here, looking up at it, nondescript and shuttered in a toxically ugly part of Brooklyn, I feel justified. There are windows stretching up for stories, boarded shut, crudely. Father always was good at hiding.

“You’re serious?” Daniel asks, staring at the building.

“Deadly,” I say. I lift the metal shutter; it groans in protestation, and I feel my way for the lock. The rusted red door opens, and I slide my hand over the wall for the light switch.

The lights slam on at once, the sudden artificial brightness a bit shocking. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything in here that’s going to help prevent whatever’s going on,” I say, looking up at the towering shelves, “but you do. And I trust you with whatever might or might not be in here.”

Daniel’s quiet, staring ahead at the aisles that go on forever.

“So this is what’s happening today,” I go on. “Mara, Jamie, and Goose are at the brownstone with Leo—”

“And Sophie, probably,” Daniel mumbles.

I shrug a shoulder, as if it doesn’t matter. “Perhaps. No one’s texted yet, and I don’t much care, honestly. But listen—there was a map that I just barely got a glimpse of—I have a near-photographic memory, but the room was dark and I couldn’t make everything out. Now that we’re all on the same team—”