“It’s helping me,” I said sullenly.
My eyelids were becoming hard to hold open, so I let them fall shut. Images I never wanted to see again exploded in my mind like flashbulbs.
The safe in Lark’s bedroom.
The passport. My name. My picture. My birthday.
The debit card. In my name.
The credit card. The platinum credit card. In my name.
It was all so surreal. Leaving the family nest in Pennsylvania and coming to D.C. was a monumental step—the largest I’d taken in my eighteen years—and I’d expected to encounter some difficulties. On the drive to our nation’s capital, I’d worried about a million things: renting an apartment, finding a job, making friends, and acclimating to life in a major city after a lifetime in small-town America.
But instead of merely changing zip codes, it was as though I’d changed solar systems. After less than forty-eight hours in the District, I’d somehow managed to become entangled in a highly publicized and baffling missing person case, involving a girl whose family was mentioned in the same breath as other American royalty, like the Kennedys.
As I’d delved deeper into Lark’s life—her real life, not the crap that the world heard on the nightly news—I started to feel a connection to the missing girl. A part of me felt like I knew Lark, and I wanted to figure out what happened to her.
But knowing that somehow, some way, Lark Kingsley had meant for me—me—to find her journal and follow the cryptic clues, to uncover her dark secrets and expose the skeletons hidden in her walk-in closet…I wished that I’d never heard the name Lark Kingsley. This was way too much responsibility.
Why me?
Those two words played like a broken record in my mind. Why would Lark Kingsley choose me?
The other question that arose was equally vexing: How had she chosen me?
Suddenly, my head began to spin, and I worried that I was going to be sick. That worry turned to certainty when my gut began to churn, and hot bile crept up my throat. I jumped up and sprinted down the hallway, Asher on my heels. He was the one to open the toilet lid as I fell to my knees beside the porcelain throne. I wanted to tell him to leave, but when I opened my mouth, liquefied pizza shot out like water from a fire hose.
Asher rubbed my back and made soothing sounds as I continued to heave until nothing more than choked sobs were left inside of me. Mortified, I rested my feverish forehead against the toilet seat and reached blindly for the lever on the tank. Again, Asher was faster. For a moment, I was able to forget about what I’d found in the safe and concentrate on the sound of water and puke disappearing down the pipes, taking my pride with it.
“Up you go,” Asher said, gently lifting me to my feet.
Wrapping an arm around my shoulders, he tucked me snuggly against his side, supporting much of my weight. I rested my cheek against his chest and noticed, even in my condition, how good he smelled.
At some point, Asher must have left the bathroom without me noticing, because a glass of ice water and two aspirin were now sitting on the sink ledge. He grabbed them both as he led me from the bathroom. Instead of heading toward the common area, he turned right toward the bedrooms.
“Not hers,” I urged, voice raspy but firm. “Guest room.”
I needed physical distance from Lark and her life. Had I not just yacked up my dinner, I would have insisted we return to our building on Gibson Street. But it seemed like a million miles away, and I was so tired.
“Here. Take these.” Asher wrapped my fingers around the water glass, and pressed the pills into my other palm.
Wobbling a little, I watched as Asher turned down the covers on the daybed in the guest room.
“Take those, Raven. You’ll thank me in the morning,” he called over his shoulder, struggling to figure out where to put all of the superfluous pillows.
Glad that someone else was calling the shots, I obeyed. Even after the pills were swallowed, I continued to drink, letting the water soothe my raw throat.
“Good. Now, get in.” Asher nodded toward the bed.
Once again, I complied without a word. Lying on my side, I faced the wall so I wouldn’t have to see the worry in Asher’s soft, brown eyes. He sat down on the edge of the bed, settling the covers over my shoulders and tucking them beneath my chin.
“I’ll be on the couch,” he said gently. “Just yell if you need me.”
“You don’t need to stay. You should go home,” I mumbled, my feeble protests falling on deaf ears.
The mattress lifted a fraction of an inch when Asher stood. Part of me wanted to ask him to stay right here with me, wrap me in a warm embrace, and never let go. Another part of me desperately wanted to be alone.
“We’ll find the truth, Raven,” Asher said after a minute, his voice soft and distant. “You were right all along. You’re the one meant to help her, to find her. And you will. We will. I really believe that.”
I felt his presence as he lingered a heartbeat longer.
“Stay” was on the tip of my tongue, but something, or maybe someone—Kim?—held the plea back. And then it was too late. Soft footsteps marked Asher’s retreat to the living room.
Alone, my thoughts flew back to the items I’d found in the safe. The inexplicable items I’d found. Taking a deep breath, I tried to consider them rationally.
Having grown up in the digital age, I’d heard enough about identity fraud to know it happened all the time. It wasn’t exactly difficult. With someone’s name alone, you could set up accounts online, essentially faking the other information. So the how she’d done it wasn’t the big mystery. But, naturally, I was plagued by the word that seemed to be the most prevalent in my life these days: why?
Why on earth would someone like Lark Kingsley, who had unlimited resources at her disposal, steal my identity? And, having done so, why would she lead me down a trail of clues to find out about it? Was she giving it back to me? Or was she playing a twisted game with me? If Lark’s disappearance hadn’t been headlining news, I might have considered that a real possibility.
And then, of course, there was the other item. It was more troubling than the cards because it wasn’t as easy to get: my passport.
How did Lark Kingsley have a passport with my picture and my name on it? Since I’d never traveled outside of the US, I’d never acquired one. So she hadn’t stolen it from me or somehow ordered a duplicate. And how and where did she get all the information on it? I didn’t even know my own social security number.
“Disconcerting” didn’t begin to describe the way it made me feel. “Baffling” wasn’t sufficient to describe the depths of the mystery.
Was I a random choice? Had she blindly thrown a dart at a map of the US and hit my hometown of Nowhere, Pennsylvania? And then scoured public high schools for a girl her same age? Even if that was what she did, what about me had made it seem like I could help? I was no one special. I had no remarkable qualities that made me stand out from my classmates. My grades were average, as were my looks. I’d been a member of my school’s debate team, but I hadn’t been a star. Joining clubs was never my thing, nor had I played in the band or sang in the choir. Basically, my list of extracurricular activities sucked.
So…why me?
As for social media, I’d never really gotten into the craze. Truthfully, I only had a handful of friends from school, and none of us had been particularly caught up in creating and cultivating online personas. Having grown up in our town, we didn’t really have anything to say to the world that people would care about.
With a body-shaking yawn, I accepted the fact that nothing would be solved tonight. There was too much alcohol coursing through my system for my brain to form many coherent thoughts, so I gaze up. However, just before sleep finally claimed me, I vowed to find Lark Kingsley alive, because she was the only person who could truly answer the question: Why me?
CHAPTER THREE
LARK
I needed to watch the pilfered videos, pronto. After overhearin
g my father and McAvoy discuss the mining town, it was clear I couldn’t put off the task any longer. My parents were steadily becoming nosier, frequently popping into my room to “check on me”, so I couldn’t risk watching the files when they were home.
Two weeks after the conversation between my father and his COO an opportunity finally presented itself. It was a Saturday, and our penthouse was eerily quiet. My father was in Washington, D.C., and my mother had an appointment with the tailor for a wardrobe fitting. If her past fittings were any indication, she wouldn’t be home until late in the evening. Jeanine had left after breakfast to run a list of errands a mile long. The rest of the staff had been asked not to disturb me, as I was supposed to be doing schoolwork.
Instead, I was sitting at my desk with a piping-hot cappuccino, staring at the offensive jump drive and wishing that I’d never heard the word Kingstown. But I had. More importantly, I’d seen the fear in my father’s eyes, if even just for a second, and that was enough for me. I couldn’t hide my head in the sand any longer.
Stop being such a wuss, I admonished myself. With a trembling hand, I slid the drive into the USB port and clicked the icon to open the folder. There it was: the list of files I’d copied. The secret that McAvoy and my father wanted to keep hidden, even from me, was somewhere among the list of dates and numbers. Clicking to sort the list chronologically, I debated between starting with the oldest or newest file. Oddly, the words of Maria Von Trapp flitted through my mind: Start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
Nervous laughter bubbled up within me. I was hunting through the darkest secrets of my father’s company, and a song from The Sound of Music was my guiding force? Clearly, I was losing it.
I quickly clicked the earliest file. It was so quiet in my room that I could hear the faint sound of the hard drive whirring. Knowing that there was no going back, I held my breath until the video loaded and the Kingsley Diamonds’ boardroom came on screen. I recognized most of the key players but not all, since the recording was made not long after I was born. From what I knew of our company’s current board meeting structure, this one was pretty routine. The agenda included items such as: contract renewals with several high-end jewelry retailors; candidates for the newly-created Vice President of Digital Marketing position; and a vote on whether to procure a defunct mine in South America. Not only were the topics routine, they were also boring, and I found myself skipping large chunks of the two-hour recording.
It wasn’t until the last thirty minutes that I finally heard someone mention Kingstown. I rewound the recording, to the start of the conversation of the current agenda item.
“Purchasing another of these nonoperational mines already is premature,” said John Anderson, Kingsley Diamonds former CFO.
“I agree,” McAvoy added, tapping his Mont Blanc on the table. “Kingstown was a risk—”
“One that is paying off,” interjected a woman I didn’t recognize.
“It is too soon to make that pronouncement,” McAvoy countered. “We acquired the mine three y ears ago, but it has only been up and running for six months.”
The board members debated back and forth for another fifteen minutes, while my father sat back and listened. Finally, when everyone looked to him for input, he said, “I agree with William, we really should wait to see how Kingstown performs in the next fiscal year.”
Talk about anticlimactic, I thought as they board wrapped their meeting with talk of charitable contributions.
The next file was another board meeting, in which the only mention of Kingstown was with regards to financing a perimeter fence to keep out wild animals. Odd but not scandalous.
Am I reading too much into all of this? I wondered as file after file passed without secretive whispers and nefarious dealings.
Around noon, I switched from coffee to Pellegrino and several of the board’s dinosaurs were replaced with younger models. Kingstown had been mentioned several more times, all in conjunction with quarterly earnings reports. Apparently the Canadian mine produced quite a bit more of revenue and that a lot of that money was used to upgrade the town. Since buying the mine, the town had been outfitted with heated sidewalks, a domed high school stadium, three luxury spas, and a state-of-the-art hospital with cutting-edge technology. Again, all odd additions—and, personally, I thought there were better ways to spend that money—but not terribly troubling.
By mid-afternoon, I was seriously considering calling it quits, and had to keep reminding myself of the fear in my father’s eyes. My head was resting on my arms, my eyes closed, and only the occasional word found its way through my daydreams of Blake and our upcoming date. Just as I was about to stop the playback and click on the next file, a woman’s name broke through: Kimberly. Whoever she was, she was causing problems in one of the mines.
Interesting, I thought. Maybe they had to off her.
As morbid as the thought was, it woke me up enough to reengage in the search for answers. I backed up the current video and hit play.
This time, eight men sat on either side of the long, oak table, my father seated at the head. It was another board meeting in my father’s office, but by the harried look of the men, this wasn’t a routine gathering.
“We need to discuss Kimberly and what this means for our future,” my father said gravely.
“What about Washington?” an aging man with gray hair asked. He wasn’t a current board member, and I couldn’t recall having met him before. “Can’t we count on Washington to go to bat for us?”
“We can’t rely on suits. This is the future of the company we are talking about,” McAvoy interjected, his disdain for the older man evident with every word. “No matter how much support we throw their way, none of them will risk their careers over this.”
The conversation had my full attention. Something that could risk the future of Kingsley Diamonds was exactly what I was looking for.
Their conversation turned to an in-depth discussion of the senators and congressmen they could count on, and I made a list of the names so that I could investigate the “suits” later if need be.
“—real issue here is Kingstown.”
Finally, I thought, and once again rewound the video to hear the full extent of the conversation.
“When it comes down to it, the only real issue here is Kingstown,” McAvoy said. He tapped his pen with each word, emphasizing their importance.
“And the other mines?” asked my father, raising one eyebrow.
“Kingstown is the only one that will raise red flags,” McAvoy assured him. “The security alone will warrant an in-depth search into our practices there.”
“What if we close the mine?” suggested a man I’d met once or twice at our family’s annual fundraiser.
“Financially, we would take a huge hit,” McAvoy replied.
“Better than the alternative,” my father said calmly.
“True. Whatever we decide, we should scrub our books before Kimberly becomes an issue,” McAvoy said.
From there, the discussion veered off on a tangent about revamping our records by converting everything to digital and either archiving or destroying the literal paper trail. I continued to listen, but minimized the video and brought up Google. I’d already researched Kingstown, and knew that the board did not vote to close the mine. Had scrubbing the books taken care of the Kimberly problem? McAvoy had mentioned the intense security measures raising red flags….
I pulled up Google earth and plugged in the coordinates for Kingstown in the Northwest Territories. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, an error message appeared. Odd, I thought. I tried again and received the same result.
“Okay, what now?” I asked the empty bedroom.
A thought occurred to me, or more accurately, a name: Lincoln Baxter. McAvoy had mentioned him in my father’s study. I plugged his name into the search bar and sat back as the results populated my screen.
“No, no, this isn’t right,” I muttered, as news bulletins from all ove
r the world appeared, all with titles like: Lincoln Baxter, Most Dangerous Mercenary in the World; Baxter Moves Up Three Spots on FBI’s Most Wanted; From Special Ops Hero to Blood-Thirsty Opportunist; Lincoln Baxter, Muscle-For-Hire, Presumed Dead in Kiev Bombing.
It’s a common name, I tried to tell myself, because surely my father wasn’t employing a known criminal.
Even as I told myself the lie, I thought about the extraneous security in Kingstown, the ridiculous amount of money that our company poured into that town, and all the secrecy surrounding our mining operation there.
What the hell was going on in Kingstown?
I didn’t know, but I was determined to find out. And I knew where to start looking for the answers. With Kimberly. Whoever she was, it was only once she entered the picture that my father started to worry.
CHAPTER FOUR
RAVEN
It was dark when I woke. Mouth dry and head full of cotton, I rolled over onto my stomach and stretched. The pillow was impossibly soft and smelled faintly of expensive perfume. Despite being unfamiliar, the scent was oddly comforting. In the distance, I heard a chirpy female voice saying that the temperature was going to break one hundred in D.C. today, a record for this time of year.
Great, I thought. Another day of sweating my ass off.
Snuggling deeper into the covers, I savored the feel of the cool sheets against my warm skin. The fact that the television was on meant that Asher was already awake.
As embarrassing as it was to admit, I’d never spent the night with a boy, even one who was just a friend, and I had no idea about proper morning-after protocol. Should I make a dash for the bathroom to wash the sleep crusties out of my eyes before going to say good morning? How did I get rid of the inevitable creases etched into my face from the pillow?
Oh no…what about morning breath? A concern on an ordinary day, but last night’s vodka had left a fuzzy coat of grossness on my tongue. Maybe Lark had a spare toothbrush in her medicine cabinet. She probably had a stash of makeup here somewhere, too. If I was quiet, I could tiptoe to Lark’s bedroom and make myself presentable, with Asher none the wiser. Although, what if he thought I cared too much?
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