by Julie Daines
“Is it expensive?”
“No. Anyway, my dad’s paying, so you can get whatever you want. He’s loaded, and I’m sure he won’t mind.” I grinned.
I spent his money all the time, and he never said a word. A couple of years ago, I stole his credit card. He didn’t say anything. When it expired, I found a new one sitting on the kitchen counter. I figured it was his way of giving me money without having to be in the same room with me. He kept me as far away from him as possible, and with my own card, I’d never have to bother him with financial needs.
Right before I left, I’d taken five thousand in cash from his safe. I’d never done that before.
“I want something with chips,” Scarlett said.
It took me a second, but I got it—she meant french fries. “Okay, that doesn’t really narrow it down because you can get fries with pretty much anything. Are you thinking hamburger or a steak? But I’ll tell you, this probably isn’t the best place for a steak. They have fish ’n’ chips?” She was so thin, maybe she only ate salad. Fries and a salad.
“A burger’s fine.”
The waitress brought our drinks. “Are you ready to order?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll have the double bacon cheeseburger.”
“And you, miss?”
“I’ll have that as well.”
The waitress looked at her, I’m sure calculating her size versus where she would put a double bacon cheeseburger. She must have decided it wasn’t her problem because she finally nodded and made for the kitchen. More food, more tip.
“So, Scarlett,” I said as I took a sip of soda and set my drink to the side, “tell me where you want me to take you.” But where she was going didn’t interest me nearly as much as what she’d told me in the car. I redirected. “I mean, what were you doing, sneaking into a stranger’s car?” She must’ve been pretty desperate. “You know, something a lot worse than getting left for five minutes on the freeway could have happened.”
“I know.” She shrank into the depths of my jacket.
“When did you get in? At the gas station or the cemetery?”
“The cemetery.” Only with her accent, it came out like “symmetry.”
She put a hand on the table and searched for her hot chocolate. The waitress had set it too far away. I moved the mug to the middle of her paper place mat, rotated it so the handle was on her right, and placed her hand on it. Her fingers were icy cold. She wrapped both hands around it.
“Why did you hide in my car?”
She blew on her mug of chocolate. “Dunno. I needed to get away, and yours was the only car I heard.”
“So you thought you’d just secretly ride with a stranger to whatever unknown destination he was going to?” Her plan had serious flaws.
“I thought I could hide and then get out at the next stop. Didn’t figure it’d be the middle of the motorway, did I?”
“Hey. That wasn’t my fault. I said I was sorry.”
She took a tentative sip of cocoa.
Could I ask about the kidnapping thing yet? More gently I said, “What happened to you?”
Too soon. She shook her head, and her lip quivered. I could see it, even through her big, dark sunglasses. She was going to cry again.
Switching over to a just-kidding voice, I said, “Anyway, what did you expect, breaking and entering like that? How was I supposed to know you weren’t a terrorist or something? I was afraid for my life.”
She laughed a little. Crisis averted.
The waitress appeared with our food and clunked the plates on the table in front of us. “Anything else?”
“No, thanks,” I said, and she left.
I grabbed the ketchup and squeezed it on my burger. Then squirted a pile for my fries. The hamburger fixings were stacked to the side, trying to trick me into thinking they were something special rather than the restaurant’s way of avoiding special orders. I layered on the lettuce, tomato, and pickles, pushed the onions away, then topped it off with the bun. I opened my mouth to eat and glanced at Scarlett. Her food was untouched. I really stank at this.
“Okay,” I said, unrolling her silverware from the napkin. She wouldn’t need the utensils so I set them aside, but I pressed the napkin into her hand. She laid it on her lap. I named the fixings on her plate, asking if she wanted them all.
“No onions,” she said.
“Good choice.” I built her a sandwich just like mine. Then I lifted her hand and touched it to her food. “Here’s your burger, and here’s your fries. Do you want ketchup for your fries?”
“No ketchup. Have they got malt?”
Malt. Not sure what she meant by that, but since the only things on the table were salt, pepper, ketchup, and a sticky pitcher of maple syrup, I assumed no. “Negative. No malt.”
“Right.” She lifted the burger with surprising skill and took a huge bite.
We ate in silence for a while. She really packed it away. I’d expected a bite or two and then, Oh no I couldn’t; I’m way too full. But she wolfed it down as fast as I did. Score one for the miniature blind girl.
We neared the end of our meal, and I still knew nothing about her supposed kidnapping or where I should take her. “Now will you tell me how you got here?” I asked. “And what I’m supposed to do with you? If you were kidnapped, shouldn’t I take you to the police?”
“No police.” She nearly shouted it then cleared her throat. “I already went to them, and there’s nothing more they can do.”
“Okay.” That worked for me. A visit to the police station while leaving town with my dad’s money wasn’t high on my priority list. “Isn’t there someone you know who can help? Somewhere that’s home? I could buy you a ticket and send you back to England, to your school?”
“We only go to school till we’re sixteen. I have no place there.”
“There has to be something. Where did you live after school and before my car?”
“Shh!” she hissed.
Wow. She really didn’t want to talk about it.
She sat completely still for a moment, and I’m not even sure she took a breath. Then she said, “Christian, where’s the loo?”
“The loo?”
“The loo, the toilet, whatever.” She sank so low in the booth that her head barely peeked over the top. “Quick. Take me to the toilet.”
“Okay, sure.” Who was I to argue with a girl’s bathroom needs? I took her hand, and she latched onto my arm like it was the only thing keeping her from falling off the face of the planet. I led her to the restroom door, and she pushed it open, dragging me inside.
“Dude,” I protested. “This is the girl’s bathroom. I’m not coming in with you.”
“Are we alone?”
I checked for feet under the stalls, glad that the only person to witness my humiliation couldn’t see. “Yeah.”
“Christian, listen. I climbed into your car because I needed to get away. They kidnapped me in London and brought me here. I ran away and hid. First in the cemetery, then in your car.” She breathed hard, and her pale face grew even whiter. “But he’s here. I heard his voice in the restaurant. How did they find me?”
Kidnapped from London and dumped in a Portland cemetery? Unlikely. Plus, if she really was kidnapped, wouldn’t the police have shipped her home? And there’s no way they—whoever they were—could have tracked her here to the restaurant. The only person who saw us together was the airport traffic guard.
Either she was taking me for a ride, or she was crazy. A lunatic. An escapee from the Shepherd Hill School for the Totally Insane. I’d wasted enough time with this pink-haired psycho. Maybe I should let whoever scared her into the bathroom take her home to her padded cell.
I cracked the door and peeked out. Our waitress stood by our table, talking to two men in dark suits. She lifted a napkin, probably looking for money. The men showed her something in a black wallet that looked suspiciously like a police badge. Perfect. Crazy and a criminal. I knew it. I turned to Scarlett.
>
She groped her way along the bathroom wall, her hands up high, searching for something. A window? There were none.
“I’m gonna go talk to them,” I said.
She spun around, her back pressed against the yellow tiled wall. “No.”
I left the woman’s bathroom—thankfully—and approached our table slowly, listening. I ducked behind a half-size wall topped with fake plants that had faded to an unnatural color of green.
“I don’t know,” the waitress said. “They were here a minute ago.” They all stared at the table—their backs to me—as if by watching long enough, I might materialize out of thin air.
“Did you see them leave? Did you give them a bill?” The man asking the questions was the taller of the two, lanky with light-brown hair. He had a calm, deep voice that came from his throat. “Did you run a credit card?”
“No, they must’ve left without paying.”
I pulled out two twenties then walked over and dropped them on the table. “Sorry about that. I went to get some cash.” I motioned toward the ATM machine I’d noticed in the vestibule as we came in.
“Where’s the girl?” the shorter cop asked. He had reddish-blond hair and a nasty scar across one eye.
When I saw them close up, they didn’t look like cops. The tall man wore a cheap, poorly tailored suit, the other man, a tough-guy leather jacket. They looked like suspects on America’s Most Wanted. But more than that, they didn’t feel right. My guts screamed at me to keep out of it. When I left the bathroom, I’d planned on turning Scarlett in, but it felt like leaving her on the I-205 all over again.
“She left,” I said, hopefully in an easy-come, easy-go kind of way. “I gave her some money and put her on a bus.”
The tall guy stepped aside and started punching numbers on his phone.
“Which bus?” the one with the scar asked.
I knew nothing about public transit in the greater Portland-Vancouver area. I tried to bluff. “Who are you? Do you have some kind of warrant or license or something? Maybe I should call the cops.” I got out my cell phone to show I meant business.
“You don’t want to do that,” Scarface said. He opened his jacket to reveal a big handgun parked in a shoulder holster. “Which bus?”
I glanced at the waitress. She was stacking our dirty plates and hadn’t seen his threat.
I should’ve left Scarlett on the highway. Well, maybe not on the highway but at least at the airport. This was more mess than I wanted to be involved in. “I don’t know. The big one with Portland blinking across the front.” Hopefully, Thou shalt not lie didn’t apply when dangerous-looking men were flashing guns at you.
The tall guy repeated that information into his phone.
“How do you know her?” Scarface asked.
Who were these guys? What could Scarlett possibly have done to have men with guns tracking her? She seemed pretty helpless to me.
“Speak up,” he commanded.
“Look, I don’t know anything, okay. I found her on the side of the highway. I gave her a meal and money for the bus. That’s all. Why? What’d she do?” I doubted they’d tell me anything, but it didn’t hurt to try.
He got all concerned-looking and said in a sugary voice, “She ran away from home, and her parents are worried sick.”
From London? With no bags or money? How stupid did he think I was? “You know what? I think that’s a load of—”
I didn’t get to finish because he launched forward and punched me hard in the face.
Chapter Three
Christian vs. The Audible
I flew back, crashing onto the table behind me. I’d never taken a right hook to the jaw before. It hurt a lot more than I expected.
The waitress rushed over. “Hey! That’s enough. We answered your questions; now you’d better leave. Or I am calling the cops.”
The tall man glared at Scarface. “Nice work, Connor,” he said as they walked toward the door. “We told you to keep a low profile.”
They left the restaurant, and the waitress turned to me. “You okay, kid?”
“Just swell.” I rubbed my face where he’d hit me. “Ow.”
The waitress pulled a wad of napkins from the stainless-steel dispenser and handed them to me. “You’re bleeding.”
I dabbed at my lip. He’d cut it when he smacked my jaw. I opened and closed my mouth, making sure I didn’t have a broken bone.
“I’ll get you some ice.” She went to a serving station and filled a plastic cartoon-decorated kiddie cup with ice chips then snapped on a bright red lid. “Sorry, I don’t have a bag.”
“Thanks,” I said, holding the cool relief to the side of my face.
“Sure.”
I nodded and walked back to the women’s restroom. It was empty. “Scarlett?” I checked under the stalls for the second, and with any luck, last time. Nothing. “You can come out now. They’re gone.” I pushed open the stall doors, crossing my fingers that some short old lady wasn’t sitting on the toilet. I’d be scarred for life.
A woman walked in, saw me, and checked the picture on the door.
“I’m almost done,” I said, not really sure what that might mean. But she left.
I opened a cupboard under the sink and found Scarlett curled up amidst a stash of scented plug-ins and ammonia glass cleaner.
“They’re gone. You wanna come out? Or stay here? It doesn’t matter to me.” The weird thing is, it kind of did matter. She’d gotten under my skin, and hard as I tried not to, I cared about what happened to her.
She crawled out. “What did you tell them?”
“I told them you took a bus back to the city.”
“How did they find me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the traffic guy at the airport.” That was a good question. Did they know who I was? Were they following my car? They seemed to accept my story about the bus. But what about Scarlett’s story? I’d just taken a fist in the face for her; she owed me the truth. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay.” She reached out a hand, and I laid it on my arm.
We left the bathroom and headed for the exit. The waitress watched us for a moment, Scarlett clinging to my arm—wearing sunglasses—inside—at night—and seemed to finally digest Scarlett’s disability.
“Hey,” I said to the waitress. “I don’t really know what’s going on. But I have a bad feeling about those men. If they come back, maybe you could pretend you didn’t see us leave together?”
She nodded and turned her back.
I paused before opening the front door and scanned the parking lot. A young family made their way toward the restaurant, the parents wrangling their herd of kids toward the entrance. Other than that, the place was quiet. We hurried out to the car, and I did my best to keep us in the shadows, away from the glow of the street lamps. I pulled out of the parking lot, checking repeatedly in the rearview mirror. No one seemed to be following us.
No one seemed to be following us? Those were words I hadn’t thought I’d need today when I packed up my stuff and left home. Now I glanced over my shoulder every two seconds. What had this girl gotten herself mixed up in? I’d never make it to Canada tonight. Especially not with documentless Scarlett in tow.
I called an audible. My parents had an old cabin in Hood River. A little A-frame snuggled at the base of Mount Hood. My dad hadn’t been there since Mom died, but I went with my buddies on the weekends sometimes. Or by myself when I needed to get away.
I’d take Scarlett there and wait out the night. And in the morning? Well, hopefully I could get more information out of her before then.
I didn’t want to backtrack where Scarface and his pal might be lurking. So I took us east on the Washington side of the Columbia River. It’d add a half hour to the trip, but it was safer. At least I assumed. I had no clue what exactly we were running from.
When we passed Camas and merged onto the Lewis and Clark highway, I couldn’t wait any longer. The time had come to get some answers.
She squirmed in her seat and shivered. I showed her how to turn on the seat heater.
“I sort of saw something they did,” she finally said. “Something bad. I went to the police, but they didn’t believe me. Somehow, they must have found out.”
“Wait a minute. You saw something?” There’s no way she’d been faking her blindness.
“The truth is”—she paused for a second then continued in a melodramatic voice—“I see dead people.”
I rolled my eyes for her benefit then remembered she couldn’t see it. If she’d said that at the restaurant, I would have laughed out loud. But here in the dark, with the green glow of the dashboard reflecting off her sunglasses and illuminating her pale face, it creeped me out.
“Are you telling me you see ghosts?”
She laughed. “No, I’m kidding.” She tucked her legs up and circled her arms around them. “But I do sometimes see people who are going to die. Like a vision of the future or something.”
“You mean, like a fortune teller?” Maybe she had Braille tarot cards.
All the humor faded from her face. “When I was nine years old, we were poor as church mice. We lived with my grandmother. Mum drank and had a hard time keeping a steady job. Anyway, I loved Gran. She took me to the park and read to me. She saved up all her money so I could have books in Braille.” Scarlett ran her knuckles back and forth on the window, making lines she couldn’t see in the condensation. Her accent grew stronger the longer she spoke.
“One night, I dreamed she didn’t wake up. I shook her and shook her, but nothing happened. Mum was out, and I waited home alone all day. I woke up screaming. Gran came in to comfort me, said it was just a dream and that she would be alive for a long time still.
“A week later, Mum was at work, and I went in to wake up Gran. I wanted breakfast. It happened exactly like my dream. Exactly. She wouldn’t wake up. I sat home, alone, all day with my grandmother dead in her bed.”
