“Sorry for busting in,” Jake said. “We didn’t have anywhere else to crash.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve had so many surprises over the past few days, and this is the only good one. I’m so glad you guys are here.”
“Stan told us that you’d stopped in at the farm. He could tell you were pretty disappointed that we were gone, and we were worried that something was going on with you. He signed off on a couple free days for us.”
“You can stay?” Wally asked, embarrassed by how happy she was to hear it.
“For a while, anyway,” Jake said. “So, what’s been going on?”
“No, you guys go first,” she told him, eager to avoid thinking about her experiences of the past few days—she could feel the memories of it pressing on her, ready to overwhelm her if she let them. “That farm is such a beautiful place, and Stan seemed like a good guy. He said you were off to a 4H thing?”
“It was really awesome, actually,” Ella said, her eyes lit with pure enthusiasm. “They taught us all about hydroponic farming. I know it probably sounds boring, but—”
“You can grow food year-round,” Jake said. “Even upstate, in winter. You can put together a farm that’s totally self-sufficient. It’s like your own little country.”
“I love it,” Wally said. “That’s awesome you’re so into it. It sounds really cool.”
“Jake has become Stan’s right-hand guy,” Ella said proudly. “He’s totally crushing it.”
To see her old friends doing so well was such a great surprise. The three of them had come together just over a year and a half earlier, a group of runaways on the streets of New York City who—along with their other friends, Tevin and Sophie—had formed a tight family unit. Relying on each other, the crew had survived—no, they had thrived—for nearly a year, until everything had come apart violently. For Ella and Jake to be sitting there with Wally in her little Greenpoint apartment—alive and healthy—felt like a miracle.
Jake was a former football and wrestling jock from Ohio. He’d always had a dark, skeptical nature and was constantly frustrated with the world and with himself. Seeing him now—so confident and positive—made it obvious he’d found a sense of purpose. As for Ella, she had always been flighty and ethereal—magical Ella—and that lovely, unaffected part of her nature was still there. Her time away, though, had added an aura of substance to her. In the past she had relied on Jake for everything, almost as if she might float away without him to tether her to earth. The Ella sitting before Wally now had become her own anchor. She had grown up.
“I’ve been wanting to see you guys for so long,” Wally said, feeling herself beginning to choke up.
“That’s what we wanted too,” Ella told her. “But we didn’t hear from you and we figured . . . I don’t know what we thought. Why didn’t you call?”
Wally hesitated. She had avoided this moment for a long time, but there could be no more hiding.
“I was so ashamed,” she finally said, surprised by the pent-up tears that spilled out. “I was responsible for what happened to Sophie and Tevin—I know that. I was afraid that if I reached out to you guys, I’d find out that you couldn’t forgive me. I wouldn’t have been able to handle losing the two of you.”
“You cared about Sophie and Tevin as much as we did,” Jake said. “Things got out of control, but you didn’t ask for that to happen. You would have done anything to keep them safe—we know that.”
“Except let go of my obsession with finding my mother. I let it block out everything else. Our friends died because of it. It should have been me.”
“None of that matters now,” Ella said.
“How can that be true?” Wally asked. “After everything that happened, how can you say that?”
“It just can,” Ella said. “You didn’t mean for any of it to happen. We were devastated when Tevin died, but so were you. It doesn’t mean we should lose each other too. Yeah, maybe we needed some time to get past everything, but we have. That’s love.”
“That’s love,” Wally repeated, letting it sink in. She laughed through her tears. “I’ve read about it, sure.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “You can be a pain in the ass, Wally, but we actually love you anyway. And we’re here now.”
Wally nodded. “We’re all still here.”
“Hey,” Wally said as she began to recover from the intensity of their reunion, “how did you find my place, anyway?”
“We called your friend the cop,” Jake said. “We had no choice.”
“You called Greer?”
“Yeah,” Ella said. “He’s kind of a weird dude, but he gave us the address. Said it warmed his heart that we were looking for you—he actually used that phrase. What’s his deal?”
“He’s even more of a pain in the ass than he used to be,” Wally said. “He means well.”
“And you need to get a new dead bolt on your front door,” Jake said. “Took me less that twelve seconds to trip it.”
“Seriously? I paid good money for that thing. . . . ”
“We also met your new downstairs friends,” Ella said, making an obvious effort to disguise her jealousy and disapproval. That wasn’t much of a surprise—Wally couldn’t really imagine Jake and Ella getting along with January and Bea, at least not at first.
“January and Bea, you mean.”
“Wally, they’re like brain-dead sorority party girls,” Ella said.
“Trust me—they’ll grow on you if you give them a chance.”
“Hmm.” Ella didn’t sound convinced.
They were all starving, so they had pizza delivered just after midnight: pepperoni and pineapple on a thin, crispy crust with grilled vegetables on the side. As they ate, Wally laid out every detail of the past five months of her life—her ongoing search for Tiger, her work at the Ursula Society, and, of course, Kyle. She described her whole ordeal with him, from his first appearance at the Society to the explosion of violence at the lodge. Kyle’s sudden disappearance in the middle of nowhere was the final, frustrating act of the story.
“Holy shit,” Jake said when she was finished.
“I killed that man at the lodge,” Wally said, astounded by her own admission. She’d experienced terrible violence before—and had committed some brutal acts of violence herself—but she had never taken a life.
“You had to make a choice,” Ella said. “I’m glad you were strong enough to do it. Not that I’d ever doubt that. You did what you had to do, or you might not have survived.”
“I know you’re right, but I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s a sick feeling, no matter what. I feel like I left something behind up there. Now it’s gone up in smoke with the lodge and everything else.”
“So what do you do next?” Jake asked.
“I just want to sleep some more,” she said. Already she was exhausted again. “You guys take my room, okay?”
They were about to object, but she insisted. Wally guessed that she had a fitful night to look forward to—it was usually that way when her thoughts were spinning like this—and she wanted to be able to move around the apartment without worrying about disturbing them.
Once Jake and Ella were tucked away behind the closed door of her bedroom, Wally took a long, hot shower and changed into more comfortable clothes. She turned out the lights and curled up on the couch, pulling a warm blanket over herself.
In the dark silence of the room, her thoughts turned to Kyle. However angry and disappointed she was with him, Wally couldn’t help wondering where he was right then and if he was safe. At the same time, worrying about Kyle made her angry with herself.
After all, Kyle had been the cause of the trouble at the lodge, and he’d left her behind.
Like Tiger. Why couldn’t she just let go? What was the point of living in the past? It was a landscape of pain and
anger and regret, a scorched earth.
The sound of a ringing telephone interrupted her thoughts, but the ringtone was unfamiliar. She looked to the dining table, where her cell phone was charging. It wasn’t ringing. Wally concluded that the offending phone must be Jake’s or Ella’s, but then realized its source: her messenger bag, slung over the back of a chair at her dining table.
Only then did Wally remember the burner phone that she’d taken from the Jeep Cherokee that Alabama and the other gunman had parked near the lodge. Wally climbed off the couch and opened her messenger bag, still full of the photos of all the women that she had found in Richard Townsend’s secret cache. Sitting under the photos was Alabama’s phone, and it was ringing. There was no caller-ID information on the screen.
Wally hit the answer button, saying nothing. After a moment of silence, a man’s voice spoke out, sounding tired and impatient. Wally guessed that he was middle-aged—probably a smoker and drinker, judging by the roughness of his voice.
“Do you have her?” the man said.
Do you have her? The caller thought he had Alabama on the line, or Alabama’s partner, who would never answer a phone again.
Do you have her? Have whom? Was he asking about Wally? But that didn’t make any sense. Townsend had sent those men to retrieve his son, Kyle . . . hadn’t he?
“Speak, goddamn it,” the man said. “Do you have the girl or not?”
A chill shot through Wally. The man on the other end of the line was asking about her—it had to be. Which meant that every assumption she had made in the past few days had been completely wrong.
Wally’s mind reeled. She was still half asleep, but certain memories began to slip into place. The man waiting behind Harmony House had reached for her first, not Kyle. When Alabama had her in a choke hold and it looked like Wally might be hurt, the Asian guy had freaked out.
Those men hadn’t come for Kyle—they had come for her. But why? None of it made sense.
“What the hell is wrong with you? Do you have the girl or not?”
“Not quite, asshole,” Wally answered.
The other end of the line was quiet—the silence broken only by the sound of breathing—and then the man hung up.
Wally, numb, let the phone drop to the floor. What was she supposed to do now? The phone call had scratched the surface of something, but what? She was obviously in some sort of danger. Whatever it was that this man wanted from her, it was vitally important to him. She couldn’t expect him to stop.
More men would come.
She suddenly realized that the burner phone was giving away her position. She was about to remove the battery, but first she checked the phone for other content. There were no contact numbers listed and the call history had been erased. It was a cheap model, so there was no GPS that she could use to track the movements of Alabama and his partner. The last folder in the storage card was for photographs, and there were two photos stored there. Wally opened up the first one—the image was small but sharp.
It was a picture of Wally, taken from a distance with a telephoto lens. It took her a moment to figure out where it had come from, but to one side of the frame she could just make out an incredibly large, muscular arm, the short sleeve of a black T-shirt stretched tightly around it—the bouncer at Cielo. The photograph had been taken just two nights earlier, outside the dance club as Wally and the other girls had passed through the entrance.
The image made Wally remember the strange feeling she’d had inside the club: the sense that there had been eyes on her. It turned out she was probably right, that Alabama or one of the other men had followed her there, maybe even planning to grab her that night if they had the chance. Wally remembered that a cab had just pulled up to the curb when she’d stepped out of Cielo. Maybe that bit of lucky timing had saved her—for the moment. Life was a game of inches.
There was still another photograph stored in the cell phone, and she opened it next. What Wally saw there, on that tiny screen, took her breath away. The picture was a straight-on shot from the waist up of a young man in a white T-shirt standing against a bare cement wall. His face was completely expressionless, as if he was posing for a passport photo. His hair was shoulder length and black, and his eyes—like her own—were dark gray. She had stared into those eyes just two nights ago for a fleeting moment before she had spoken his name aloud and he had ended the encounter.
Tiger.
16.
WALLY WAS WAITING WITH COFFEE AND DOUGHNUTS
when Jake and Ella emerged from bed the next morning. The sight of her sitting at the dining table—impatience written all over her features—put them on alert.
“What?” Jake asked. “What happened?”
She told them everything: from the late-night phone call to the photograph of Tiger on the burner phone and the game-changing conclusions she’d arrived at. Just a day earlier, Wally had debriefed Jake and Ella about everything that had been going on with her. Now, less than twelve hours later, she had a very different version to tell.
“So, the men who came at you outside Harmony House—” Ella began, processing it all.
“—and up at the lodge,” Wally added.
“AND up at the lodge . . . they were after you, not Kyle?”
“And the pictures in the phone tell me that they aren’t just after me,” Wally said, “but Tiger too, wherever the hell he is.”
And then Wally told the two of them what she had left out before: the surprise face-to-face, late-night meeting she’d had with Tiger on Facebook. Wally was nervous about how Jake and Ella would react when they heard how all-in she was in her search for Tiger. It had been Wally’s obsessive need to find her Russian birth mother that had brought so much chaos to their lives just five months ago. But their reaction took her by surprise.
“It’s not like a shock or anything,” Ella said. “He’s your brother—of course you want to find him. And you are, after all, you.”
“Truth,” Jake chimed in.
“There are days I wish I wasn’t,” Wally said. “Believe me.”
“As long as you protect yourself . . . ”
“I will,” Wally said, thankful for her friends’ acceptance.
“First thing,” Jake said, “we have to find out what we can about these assholes who keep coming after you.”
We have to find out, Jake had said. We.
“Yeah,” she agreed gratefully. “We don’t have much to go on, but—”
Wally held up the burner phone that contained the photos, letting them speak for themselves.
“This is what we’ve got,” Wally said. “What do we do with it?”
It took a moment, but soon Ella’s face lit up with excitement.
“Paige!” Ella said. “I haven’t seen her in so long. . . . ”
Paige Jefferson. The Cell Phone Whisperer. Of course. Why hadn’t Wally already thought of her?
“Her shop opens at ten,” Wally told them, and checked the time. “Which gives us an hour.”
“Let’s hit it,” Jake said.
“There’s something else I have to do, though,” Wally went on. “After figuring everything out, I realized how messed up all of this was for Kyle. There’s a crew of gunmen out there, and all along we figured they were after him. No matter how much of a psycho his father is, it turns out that hanging with me was probably the most dangerous thing he could have done. Plus, I totally went off on him when we were driving away from the lodge. He’s got to be tied up in knots by now.”
“There really was something there, huh?” Ella asked, reading Wally. “You and Kyle?”
“I think so,” Wally said, although nothing was clear anymore. “I don’t know. I guess I’d like it to be something. There were moments . . . ”
“What are you going to do?” Jake asked.
While Jake and Ella got ready to go, Wally grabbed her cell phone. She had weighed the situation and was clear on what needed to be done. It was true that being with Wally had put Kyle in harm’s way, but that didn’t change the fact that his conflict with his father was still explosive.
First, Wally punched the code into her phone that would prevent the person on the other end of the line from seeing her phone number come up on caller ID. Then she dialed 911.
“This is 911,” a woman’s clipped, stern voice sounded on the other end of the line. “Please state your emergency.”
“Hi, uh . . . ” Wally made her voice sound as young and scared as she could. “My good friend hasn’t been to school in like a week, and no one has heard from him. I’m really scared about it. I tried to call his cell and his home number, but there’s no answer at either one.”
“I understand,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “But this is an emergency line. I can give you the number for Social Services—”
“I told our dean at school, but he said it was none of my business. The thing is, Kyle’s father is physically abusive. He beats him all the time, and it seems like no one cares. Almost anything could have happened to him.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, and Wally couldn’t be sure her report was being taken seriously. Her only goal was to be absolutely, positively certain that New York City authorities paid a visit to Kyle’s home, and soon. She’d heard lots of stories about terrible domestic situations falling through the cracks at Social Services, and she was prepared to say anything to make sure that didn’t happen. Also, the call was untraceable, so there was no way in hell there would be any blowback against her for making a false report.
“I was visiting his apartment last week,” she went on, “and his father had, like, a lot of drugs in the house. I mean, a lot, packed like bricks? In tall stacks. Plus lots of guns lying around. Big ones. It didn’t seem very safe.”
Tiger Page 12
