The Boy from the Woods(106)

“Yes.”

“There’s a new Grand Theft Auto, but Mom won’t buy it for me because it’s too violent.”

“Funny.”

“Bye, Wilde.”

“Talk soon.”

He hung up as the gate agent called for Group 1 to board. Wilde watched the passengers start to mingle near the boarding line.

Nothing.

The gate agent called for Groups 2, 3, and 4.

Still nothing.

For a moment Wilde wondered whether he had gotten it wrong or perhaps someone was again trying tactical deception with him. Perhaps they had booked more than one flight to throw him. Perhaps they’d never intended to fly today.

But when the gate agent called the final group, Wilde spotted a young girl getting into line wearing, yep, a baseball cap and sunglasses.

Naomi Pine.

Standing in front of her, holding both their tickets, was Ava O’Brien.

For a few seconds, Wilde didn’t move. He didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to approach them. He could, like with Gavin Chambers and Saul Strauss, simply melt away.

But he didn’t.

Enough stalling. Wilde walked over and tapped Naomi on the shoulder.

Naomi jumped, startled. When she turned and saw his face, her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God. Wilde?”

Ava spun now too.

For a few seconds, they all just stood there.

Ava said, “How did you…?”

“Do you remember when you were leaving 7-Eleven and I told you to roll down your window?”

“What?” Ava looked baffled. “What about it?”

“I leaned in and put a GPS tracker in your car.”

It was the same deal as with Gavin and Strauss—Ava, too, had overdone it with the tactical diversions. When he’d told her about Crash disappearing, all of a sudden Ava had remembered that Naomi had mentioned a possible romance with Crash, strongly hinting that the two teens had run off together.

Ava had been trying to throw him off the scent too.

The question was, why?

She clearly had nothing to do with Crash Maynard.

“You’re from Maine,” Wilde said.

“Yes, I told you that.”

“Why would you move to New Jersey to take a job you were overqualified for?”

Ava shrugged. “I wanted a change.”

“No,” Wilde said. “You’ve also been back to Maine four times in the past three weeks.”

“I have family up there.”

“Again: No. You stayed at the Howard Johnson’s in South Portland, where you had Naomi hiding. But more than that, you visited the Hope Faith Adoption Agency in Windham twice.”

Ava closed her eyes.

“You didn’t take the assistant teaching job because you wanted to live in New Jersey,” Wilde said. “You did it to be closer to the daughter you had to give up for adoption.”

For a moment, it looked as though Ava might deny it. But only for a moment.

“You have to understand,” Ava said. “I never wanted to give Naomi up.”

So there it was.

“I was only seventeen. I didn’t know any better. But I just had…I don’t know, it was a feeling or a want or a premonition or…So I went back to the agency. I begged them to tell me what happened to my daughter. They wouldn’t. Not at first. So I paid someone off. They gave me Naomi’s new name and address, but they explained that I had no rights. That was okay. I just wanted to see her, you know. So I just figured…”

“You’d take the teaching job to be close to her.”

“Right. What harm would it do?”

“Wilde?”

It was Naomi.

“Don’t make me go back.”

“I just wanted to see how she was,” Ava said. “That’s all. I didn’t want to mess up her life. But then I saw the hell she was living through. Day after day, I had to sit back and watch my child being bullied with no support from home.”

“So you became her friend,” Wilde said. “Her confidante.”

“Is that so wrong?”

Wilde turned to Naomi. “When did Ava tell you the truth?”

“That she was my real mother?”

“Yes.”

“After I came back from the Challenge,” Naomi said. “At first, I thought she was making it up or like it was a dream come true, you know? Do you remember our talk in my basement? How I wanted to change everything?”

Wilde nodded.

“It wasn’t just at school. It was everything. My father…”

Her voice just faded out. Bernard Pine would not come out of this unscathed either. Rola was working up a way to make him pay for what he’d done.

“So you two decided to run away,” Wilde said.

“I didn’t want that,” Ava said. “I wanted to do it legally.”

“Which is why you went to Laila.”

“Yes. I told her how awful Naomi’s adoptive parents were, but I still had no rights. Laila said it would take months or years to prove neglect or abuse, and even then, winning was unlikely.”

“So that’s when you hatched this plan,” Wilde said. “You’d run away and hide. You”—he looked at Ava—“you’d get Naomi a fake ID while finishing out the school year. If you left your teaching post right away, that would draw suspicion. So you two waited. And now it’s time to flee the country together.”