by Paula Stokes
“. . . apparently not only decided against . . . Secretary of Labor . . . also resigning from the Senate . . . entire D.C. community shocked . . . wake of family tragedy . . .”
Holy shit! Preston’s dad is leaving politics because of Preston’s death. Why would he do that if he just killed off the only witnesses to his crimes?
“. . . rumblings of a possible divorce . . .”
I turn the volume up, hoping to hear more, but the radio station fades out.
The sprawling suburbs dwindle, gas stations and strip malls giving way to patches of vegetation and then the hills of the Angeles National Forest. I alternate between watching my rearview mirror for cops and watching the minutes on the dash clock tick forward. 11:18. Forty-two minutes to find Parvati.
As I lose the lights of the suburbs, the winding roads seem to fill with shadowy ghosts, swirls of darkness that condense and dissolve in the ravine at the side of the highway. I blink hard. It’s just the residual effects of my head injury, combined with fatigue. But the twisting shapes at the corners of my vision don’t go away. Suddenly, one of them darts out into the road, and I slam on my brakes. The shadow grows in size as it approaches the truck, but when it gets close I realize it’s not just a shadow.
It’s a boy, about my age.
Preston.
THIRTY-SEVEN
HE TAPS ON THE GLASS as I slow to a stop. I roll down the window, almost like I’m in a trance. Crickets sing in the high grass. Darkness wraps around the truck.
“Boy, Maximum Overdrive, am I glad to see you.” His hat obscures part of his face, but the voice is unmistakable.
I reach forward and flick on my emergency flashers. Obviously, that tree trunk did some permanent damage. Only Preston doesn’t seem like a hallucination. He looks real, sounds real, he even smells real—a little sweaty, like he’s been running.
“What the fuck, dude?” For a moment I’m at a loss for words. I touch one hand to the back of my head. The spot where I hit the tree is tender, but it’s not leaking brain matter or anything. I blink hard again, rub my eyes. But Preston doesn’t disappear. My throat constricts a little as I choke out, “We just . . . buried you. Everyone thinks you’re dead.”
“Not everyone,” he says. “They grabbed us in the woods by the cemetery and took us to the cabin. I managed to escape because Parvati created a diversion, but we’ve got to go back for her.”
Parvati! Preston’s materializing out of the swirling dark like some horror movie phantom almost made me forget that I was on the clock. 11:33. Twenty-seven minutes. “Who? Who grabbed you?”
“DeWitt’s goons.”
“Your dad seriously hired guys to kidnap you?” Even though I’ve been thinking the same thing, it still seems so unreal. “Are you sure? I found cocaine in your room. Can’t that shit make you paranoid?”
“That’s not my coke and DeWitt’s not my dad,” Preston says. “My name isn’t even Preston.”
A pair of headlights appears over the crest of the hill. Both of us turn in unison to watch as the car cruises past. Neither of us speaks. The scarlet taillights dissolve into the night, and we’re alone again.
“What do you mean your name isn’t Preston?”
“Preston’s dead.” At my look he adds, “Don’t be sad. He’s been dead for years. You never met him.”
“Huh? I don’t understand.”
“It’s a long story.” He opens the driver’s side door to the pickup. “You look exhausted. Move over. I’ll drive.”
I want to hear every piece of this long story. I need to figure out what’s happening. But then my eyes catch the clock on the dash. “We have to get to Parvati by midnight.” I quickly fill him in about the phone call.
“Did you call the cops?” he asks.
I shake my head as I scoot over the console and into the passenger seat. “I couldn’t reach the FBI, and it’s not like anyone else would have believed me.”
“Yeah. Half the cops are probably on DeWitt’s payroll anyway. Let’s go get her.” He flips off the emergency flashers and guides the truck back onto the road.
“So if Preston has been dead for years, who the hell have I been hanging out with?” I ask.
The boy formerly known as Preston laughs. “My name’s Adam. The truth is pretty fucked up. We might not get all the way through it before we get back to the cabin, but rest assured I’m still the same guy that you know.” He bumps his fist lightly against his chest. The gesture is so Preston-like that I can’t help but smile. I should be furious. He lied to me about hooking up with Parvati and videotaped us having sex. I should seriously kick his ass right here and now. But somehow all I can do is stare, like he’s magically risen from the grave. Who cares what he did or what his name is? We can hash out all of that bullshit later. My friend is alive. That’s all that matters.
“Adam Lyons,” I say.
“Yeah, watch this.” Adam punches a couple of buttons on a phone and scrolls through a long list of files. After selecting one, he tosses the phone into my lap. A video of Claudia DeWitt starts playing on the screen.
She’s flipping through TV channels in her living room. A phone rings. Claudia mutes the television before answering it.
“What? How is that possible?” she says.
A pause. She turns away from the television. Walks toward the big picture window that looks out onto the lawn.
“You swore all that was in the past. You promised me.” A pause. She lifts one hand to her forehead. “Don’t tell me not to be dramatic. We covered up a death, Rem.”
Rem. As in Remington. She’s talking to her husband.
Her voice cracks. She dabs at her eyes with the back of her left hand.
“You know as well as I do that you’re guilty of child endangerment . . . perhaps more.” A pause. “I’ll never forgive myself for the things we did . . . to both of them.”
The clip ends. The hamster wheel in my brain starts spinning.
“Play the next one,” Adam says.
It’s Preston, or who I always thought was Preston, and his dad.
“I’m tired of pretending to be someone else,” Preston says. He paces back and forth in front of the plasma TV.
“You agreed,” DeWitt says. “You agreed to be the son we want you to be until you’re twenty-one.”
“And what happens then? I just disappear?”
“We’ll figure something out,” DeWitt says.
Preston turns to face his father. His face is red, his hands clenched into fists. “Do you regret it?”
“Forgetting to secure the gun? Every day of my life.”
“I’m not talking about what you did to him,” Preston says. “I’m talking about what you did to me.”
“I like to think Claudia and I gave you a good life. We bought you whatever you wanted, computers, fancy phones, private surfing lessons. We even allowed you to enroll at public school.”
Preston goes back to his pacing. “But you told the doctors I was crazy. The shock treatments, the medicine—you screwed up my brain. Sometimes I think about the past and realize I’m remembering something that never even happened.” His voice cracks. “You tried to erase me.”
The screen goes dark. Adam reaches over and lifts the phone out of my hand before I can even begin to process what I’ve seen. Shock treatments? Medicine? What the hell?
“So you know how DeWitt is CEO of DeWitt Firearms, right?” he asks.
I nod. “Yeah.”
The truck swerves hard to the left as Adam dodges a pothole I don’t even see until we’re right on top of it. “So of course he’s always been politically aligned with gun nuts, the NRA, etc.”
“Yeah?” I don’t really get where Pres—er—Adam is going with this.
“When he was nine, the real Preston DeWitt accidentally shot himself with his father’s gun.”
“Holy shit!” If I were driving I probably would have rammed the truck into a tree. We covered up a death, Rem. “Now that is some news that never made
the LA Times.”
“Exactly,” Adam says. “Daddy’s close advisors told him if the news got out his political career would be finished. Not to mention DeWitt Firearms. Not only would he be arrested, the press would destroy him and his company. Pro-gun politician’s kid shoots himself with Dad’s gun. Can you imagine the headlines?”
“So . . .” Maybe I’m thick, but I still don’t get it. “Where do you come in?”
“Apparently the senator covered up Preston’s death and then sent his goons looking for a suitable replacement. They found me in a boys’ home. I was about the right size and shape, with hair and eyes that could be fixed.”
I glance over. Preston had blue eyes, but Adam’s are a weird greenish gray. So that’s why I never knew “Preston” wore contacts—because they were part of a disguise. And the frequent haircuts I used to mock him for were probably to mask his curly hair. And now the picture in front of the Rosewood Center for Boys makes sense. Because Preston really was there, only he wasn’t Preston.
“I didn’t know any of that at the time, of course,” Adam continues. “The truth leaked out over the past few years. Claudia tends to get chatty when she’s drunk.” He glances over at me. “At the time, DeWitt’s men just told me if I wanted to get out of the boys’ home and go live in a big pretty house in the city I would have to change my name and pretend to be someone else. They made it sound fun, like acting. They said they’d buy me whatever I wanted. I’d get my own room, my own maid.”
“So DeWitt . . . hired you? To become Preston?”
“Basically.” Adam’s mouth twists into something harsh and ugly. “His men helped me run away from the center and brought me to the DeWitts to start my ‘great new life.’ Only it wasn’t great.” He bears down on the accelerator, and the pickup’s engine grinds in protest. He looks confused for a second.
“You need to slow down or shift up,” I say. “The gears are sensitive on this thing.” I watch as he wrestles with the gearshift. How completely bizarre would it be if Adam and I were at Rosewood together? I was only there for about three weeks, but it’s still entirely possible. I try to recall the faces of some of the other kids, but they’re all blurs. Nameless blank figures who sometimes stared at me but never talked to me. All I remember is Henry.
“For the first two years, they kept me in the house,” Adam says. “They told everyone I’d been in an accident and needed plastic surgery. Then they said I went straight from recuperating to boarding school. Only instead of classes I got drilled and redrilled by Claudia about what it meant to be Preston DeWitt. When I screwed up, she locked me in my room for hours until I promised to try harder. Do you know how hard it is to learn to be someone else?” he asks. “I ran away once, but they caught me and I ended up in a psych ward. Some shrink decided I had paranoid schizophrenia. He jacked me full of meds and zapped my brain. After that, I didn’t run away again, but my memory began to get choppy. I started filming everything I didn’t want to forget, just in case.”
“That is seriously messed up.”
“Tell me about it. And then I started talking to my real mom again—I found her online—and she gave me the great idea to start recording the DeWitts,” Adam says.
“Violet?”
He nods. “She raised me by herself because my dad split early. But then the state took me away from her when I was seven because she sometimes left me home alone while she was working. After I found her again, I didn’t want to be Preston anymore. Mom said we could get a lot of money from my fake parents. I rigged the house with cameras; getting them to incriminate themselves was child’s play. I wanted to save up so me and my mom could disappear and start over somewhere else.” He whips the steering wheel to the right to avoid what looks like a dead raccoon. “But those bastards set her house on fire. They tried to kill us both.”
“But there was a second body. Who—”
“Some loser frat guy Mom brought home from her job.” Adam stares straight through the windshield. “You were right about her being a stripper, by the way.”
“But DeWitt—”
“Identified the remains as Preston?” Adam’s mouth twists into a scowl.
“Why the hell would he do that?”
We almost fly right past the turnoff to the Colonel’s cabin. My eyes flick to the dashboard. 11:51. Adam hits the brakes at the last second, turning off onto a dirt road. Even with the brights on, I can only see a few feet ahead of us.
“I’m surprised he even reported me missing in the first place. Maybe Claudia did—she seemed to take everything a little harder than dear old Dad. But my guess is that once Langston and his guys got close, they probably wanted to hunt me without any interference from the FBI. DeWitt IDs me as dead, and suddenly everyone stops looking for me. No one would ever expect a distraught father to lie about something like that. And if they did, DeWitt would just pay them off, I’m sure.”
“It just all seems so . . . insane.”
“Yeah, it does. And now even if I turn up claiming to be Preston, they’ve probably got real Preston’s fingerprints and DNA locked away somewhere. If need be, DeWitt can just pull them out and call me a fraud, perpetrated by political opponents or some shit.” Adam squints into the dark. “It’s not like he’d let me go back to being Preston after finding out Mom and I were blackmailing him.” He glances at the dashboard clock. 11:54. “We need to grab Parvati and then find a safe place to hide out until I can mail my videos to the cops.”
“Why not just turn them in yourself?”
Adam shakes his head. “I’ve got enough money to start over. I don’t want to hang out here to testify. I’d rather just let the world think both Preston and Adam are dead.”
The road narrows. Tree branches slap against the outside of the pickup like clawing fingers. We’re getting close to the cabin. “We should park here and hike in on foot,” I say. “If we get much closer they’ll know we’re coming.”
Adam nods. “DeWitt’s got a whole group of ex-military thugs doing his dirty work. They’ll be ready for you. Hopefully some of them are combing the woods trying to find me. They won’t expect me to come back. I can be your secret weapon.”
He pulls the truck off the side of the road until it’s halfway buried in the trees. We both jump out of the truck and head into the woods. My heart races in my chest. What chance do I have against guys like Langston and Marcus? Almost none. “Wait.” I touch Adam’s arm as he plunges into the trees in front of us. “Why the hell would they take Parvati from the cemetery? Why would they bring you guys here?”
Adam looks back at me. His eyes glow gray in the moonlight. “She knows too much. Not sure why they brought us here. Probably to throw suspicion onto someone else.”
“Someone like me.” I tell him about the fake eyewitness, the bloody cell phone, my shark’s tooth pendant showing up in the fire.
Adam snorts with disgust. “I’m not surprised. DeWitt doesn’t care who suffers as long as it’s not him.”
The Colonel’s cabin comes into view, and I pull my hood even lower and drop down into a crouch. My blood roars in my veins, drowning out the symphony of bugs and rustling leaves.
Ducking down below the front window, I put my ear to the wood and listen. I can’t hear anything except the slamming of my heart. No voices. No movement. Where is Parvati? Adam and I exchange a glance. He makes a motion like he’s suggesting we split up, each of us going around one side of the cabin. I nod. I creep around to the near side and listen below the bedroom window. Still nothing. I do the same in the back, just outside the small kitchen. Silence.
I look to the right, expecting to see Adam’s broad form approach. Nothing. Where did he go? Through a window? The back door? Did someone snatch him? My eyes scan the tree line, looking for movement, gun barrels, for the glowing red dots that mean snipers. I don’t want to lose my friend right after I got him back.
Suddenly I wish I still had the gun Parvati gave me, or that I was a kickass martial artist like she is, or that I w
as good at anything besides surfing. Focus, Max. Once upon a time I survived on the streets. I was brave. No, screw that. I’m still brave. I don’t know if Parvati and I will be together when all this is over with, but I’m not going to let her die.
I wrap my fingers around the doorknob. I turn it just a half inch to see if it’s locked. The knob twists freely.
I swear at the moonlight. Unless everyone is tucked away in a bedroom, they’ll see the back door open when I try to enter. The best I can do is wait until a cloud passes in front of the moon and be as quick and quiet as possible. I lower myself into a crouch and look up at the sky. My heart rattles in my chest. Every beat feels like a lifetime. It has to be after midnight by now.
Just as a ribbon of gray clouds starts to blot out some of the light, something presses hard against my back. A gun.
Someone clamps a rag over my nose and mouth. It smells sweet, like incense or pipe smoke. I try to pull away, but my body won’t obey my brain’s commands. My attacker holds the cloth tight over my mouth. My lungs are burning. I gasp for air. My fingers blur on the doorknob. My knees start to buckle and my muscles all go slack. I end up on my back in the gravel, the stars twisting and spinning in the sky above me.
THIRTY-EIGHT
MY STOMACH CONVULSES THE SECOND I open my eyes. I swallow hard and take a deep breath. I’m inside the Colonel’s cabin, sitting slumped on the vinyl sofa. My hands and ankles are bound with duct tape. A blurry form sits next to me, dressed in flowing white. Parvati. Her eyes are closed.
“P,” I hiss. “Are you okay?”
Her eyelashes flutter, but she doesn’t respond.
Adam appears from one of the bedrooms. “Did you know you can actually make chloroform out of stuff just sitting around in chem class?” He twirls a gun around on his finger before pointing it at me.
“Adam, what the hell are you doing?” I glance around, looking for DeWitt’s men, looking for anyone else.
