Lies I Told(75)

If Parker hadn’t been caught. If.

But once the loop was discovered on the Fairchild monitors at Allied, the police would lower the boom. They would ask Warren if he’d experienced any kind of intrusion or theft. Warren would check his stash, just to be sure. Everything would happen quickly after that. We needed to be as hard to find as possible—and as far away.

I lost track of time as we sped north. By the time we exited the freeway, I was starting to feel drowsy, lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the car, the heat blasting through the vents, the loss of adrenaline now that we were out of immediate danger. I sat up straighter, trying to pay attention. It was too soon to be tired. We weren’t out of the woods yet, and Parker was still in danger.

We dropped the car at a seedy outdoor lot, and I followed my dad through the rows of parked cars to a gray Honda Civic. It was older, but clean, and we headed out of the Valley, back to the freeway.

We merged into traffic and headed south on the freeway. I looked at Cormac with surprise when we made the turnoff for Long Beach.

“Isn’t that a little close to home?” I asked. Long Beach was only forty-five minutes from Playa Hermosa. We’d just spend two hours driving north to pick up the dummy car only to double back to within an hour of where we started.

“It is,” he admitted. “But we’ve taken every precaution, and Long Beach has both an airport and a seaport.”

I nodded, understanding. If we couldn’t get out by air, we had other options by sea, especially if there were cargo ships and cruise lines.

Almost three hours after we left Playa Hermosa we pulled into a derelict parking lot, a sign reading SEA VI_W MOTEL blinking forlornly over a faded one-story structure. Weeds pushed their way through cracks in the asphalt, and a swimming pool filled with a few feet of dirty sludge stood beyond a rusting chain-link fence.

Cormac stopped the car in front of an Office sign. “Be right back.”

I listened to the soft tick of the engine, wondering how long it would be before we could sleep. More than the rest, I needed the darkness, the blankness that would come with it. My head was too full of worry—about Parker and my mom and Logan. I was approaching shutdown.

The driver’s side door opened. “The exchange must have been easy,” my dad said, starting up the car. “Your mom’s already picked up her key.”

I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

We parked in front of room 213. There were only two other cars in the parking lot, a beat-up old Impala and a Town Car that looked too nice for the Sea Vi_w Motel.

Cormac used the key to unlock the door, and we stepped inside. It smelled like every other motel room I’d ever been in—like moldy carpet and pine-scented cleaning product with an undercurrent of cigarette smoke. An AC unit rasped noisily in the window.

A light was on in the bathroom. My dad headed for it. “Renee? That was quick,” he said, moving through the room.

I looked around, taking in the full-size beds covered in tacky polyester bedspreads, the generic artwork on the walls, the old-model TV. My eye caught something on the table near the window, and I walked over to it and set down my bag. For a minute all I could do was stare, my mind drawing a blank, unwilling to comprehend what I was seeing.

A single gold bar sat on the table. Next to it was a key attached to a plastic tag marked 213. Against the bar of gold was a handwritten note.

I’m sorry.





Fifty-Eight


“This can’t be right. There must be some kind of explanation.”

I was sitting on the bed, still in shock. Cormac’s face was white as he paced the room, muttering to himself and running his hands through his hair. He’d greeted the sight of the gold bar as I had—with shock that had quickly turned to denial. Now he doubled back toward the table, sweeping its contents onto the floor with a roar of anger.

I jumped as the gold bar fell onto the carpet with a thud. My bag landed between the table and the bed. “Dad . . .”

He stood up, straightening his jacket like that would somehow put things right. When he looked at me, his eyes were clear for the first time since we’d found my mom’s note.

“It’s exactly what it looks like, Grace,” he said. “She’s gone.”

“She wouldn’t . . . she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t leave us. Wouldn’t leave me.”

His laugh was bitter. “And yet that’s precisely what she’s done, isn’t it?”

I stood, wanting to reason with him, to stem the tide of words eating away at the life I’d known—the life I’d sacrificed for—like waves eroding sand on a beach.

“She’ll be back,” I said. “I know she will. We just have to wait.”

“Stop being so f*cking naive!” Cormac shouted, his face red. “This isn’t something you do at the last minute. She planned this all along.” He sighed, trying to compose himself. “She’s gone, Grace. And we can’t sit around here waiting. We have to go.”

I shook my head. “We can’t leave. Parker—”

“Parker’s f*cking gone, too.” He threw his phone onto the bed. “I got the local news alert on my phone twenty minutes ago.”

I picked up his phone and clicked on the alert, still open on his screen.