You Can't Catch Me(32)
“I don’t know why we’re going to Philly.”
“Sure you do. We’re going to meet another Jessica so we can compare notes.”
“If I had her name and address, it might be more believable.”
“You know her name. I don’t have her address.”
Jessie turns toward me. “What? How are we going to find her?”
“We arranged to meet at a Starbucks.”
“That doesn’t sound suspicious at all.”
“She’s cautious. I don’t blame her.”
Jessie gives me a withering look as the cop car pulls off the highway. The cop station doesn’t take long to get to. It’s a low, nondescript building with a wall of windows looking out over a parking lot. If I had to come to work here every day, I might kill myself.
We follow the officer into the building. He directs us to sit and wait.
“Together?” I ask.
“Is that a problem?”
“No, of course not.”
There’s a family of Middle Eastern origin sitting in the waiting area and four police officers standing behind a set of glass enclosures, raised up higher so they have a vantage point over us. They seem to be in the middle of a coffee break, clustered together and chatting.
Jessie sits in one of the chairs and I sit next to her.
“I guess we have some time,” I say. “We could discuss our strategy for Philly.”
She shakes her head. “Not here.”
“Right, good idea.”
“No, bad idea.”
“That too.”
Thirty minutes later, we’re still sitting there, as is the family. No one has been called up to a window. Three more people have come in, including one guy who looks homeless and seems to be missing a shoe. I’m beginning to think that the waiting is a tactic.
Jessie seems better equipped than I am to deal with it. She takes a book out of her purse and opens it.
“Any good?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s called The Marriage Lie. What do you think?”
“Would you like me to stop talking?”
The answer is clearly yes, but instead, Jessie closes the book with a sigh and folds it onto her lap.
“Wonder how long they’ll keep us waiting,” she says.
“Until we crack, obviously.”
“We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“True. It’s the name thing, right? Making sure we’re both legit.”
“I’m assuming so. Systems don’t like coincidences.”
“Why are you so worried?”
She flips her book over and then over again. “I haven’t had the best luck with authority.”
“You mean when you reported the theft?”
“That, and other things. My parents died when I was young, and I was put in the foster system. This one family I was with, their son . . . wasn’t very nice.”
“He was abusive?”
“Not like you’re thinking, but he . . . did things. Disturbing things with the family cat and hiding my stuff, and I guess now you might call him a sociopath in the making. Then, he was just this bad seed. Anyway, I told on him to my social worker, and I got punished.”
“How?”
“They pulled me out of the family, then put me in the orphanage for a while. I was hard to place after that.”
“But you hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“That’s my point. Just because you haven’t done anything doesn’t mean you get treated as if you’re innocent. I would’ve thought you knew that.”
I stare straight ahead. I do know that, but it’s not something I like to talk about.
“You’re right.” I stare at the police officers behind the counter. They’ve gone back to their stations now, but that doesn’t seem to have changed the pace of service. “I was raised with a bad guy too.”
I rub at the spot on my wrist where my scar is. As usual, it’s covered by a long-sleeve T-shirt. It’s a stylized version of Todd’s initials, Todd Blakemore. A T and a B woven together in an intricate pattern. Only, he never told us that’s what it was. Until Liam told me, I thought it was a symbol of togetherness. It was on lots of things in the Land of Todd—our uniforms, over the entrance to the Gathering Place. I’d always been told it meant “us.” What a joke.
“What did he do?”
“Lots of terrible stuff. He was definitely a sociopath.”
I got the scar—the brand—when I was twelve. There was this ceremony Todd did for all the kids at that age, a kind of initiation because that was the age of reason, according to him. When you could choose to join the group formally. And we did. We all did, because what other choice did we have?
“I don’t like to talk about it,” I say.
“I get it.”
“It’s—”
“Jessica Williams!”
We look at one another. Here we go.
“Yes,” we say together, and stand.
Chapter 13
Not a Lucky Number
In the end, the police let us go without anything more than a speeding ticket. Us being together caused a glitch in their system, the policeman behind the counter says, but our documents checked out, so we’re free to go. Jessie should update her car registration; she has two weeks to do so. We thank him and leave.