Parallel Lies (49 page)

“That’s not the point.”

They sat in the car for another five minutes in silence. Nell seemed preoccupied with her own hands. Tyler broke the silence. “I won’t stop you, if it’s something you have to do.”

She snorted derisively and looked over at him. Then she glanced back at the school, taking it in. “I took you for the committed type. Do not tell me you’re not the committed type.”

“I’m very committed to some things.”

“It isn’t showing.”

“I went through the system, dear woman, and it spit me out the other side. The same system I’d given much of my life to. It’s there for a reason, this system. I understand that. And it’s a decent system most of the time, but not always. It deals in evidence—what it calls fact—which works fine until you take into consideration that people can’t always be judged by the facts. How do you suppose it will judge Umberto Alvarez?”

Again, for a long time neither of them said a word. A gray bird made a lot of noise from a nearby tree. The winter sun shone strongly. Tyler slipped on a pair of sunglasses.

Nell snorted several times during those minutes as she worked through an internal dialogue. She shook her head, looked over at Tyler, and then went back to worming her hands as if she were washing them.

“How’d you do in science?” he asked. She didn’t answer. “I liked it,” Tyler answered himself. He looked over at her, studying her, awaiting a reaction. It came slowly, but as
brightly as the sun over the horizon. She was smiling. He dared to start the car.

“I sucked at science,” she admitted.

“Why, do you suppose?”

She grinned. “I probably didn’t have the right teacher.”

“Probably not.”

She took a deep breath, had one last look at the school, and asked, “How long do you think it will take you to pack?”

“What’s the hurry?” he asked, pulling the car out into the empty street.

“No hurry, I suppose. But there’s a red-eye that leaves at eleven. I’d just as soon have breakfast in Manhattan as Rockford.”

“Leaves us the rest of the afternoon,” he said, suppressing a grin. He drove into traffic and headed to the motel, where he hoped they might find a way to kill some time.

This novel was edited by Leigh Haber (Hyperion) and my agent Al Zuckerman (Writers House).

Special thanks to William Eder, Nick Gilman, C.J. Snow, for reading with a trained eye. Matthew Snyder, for the film work. Nancy Litzinger, Debbie Cimino, Mary Peterson, Louise Marsh, for everything you do at the office. Heidi Mack for creating and maintaining the web site. Courtney Samway for being our cyberspace mail courier. Thanks, too, to Ellen Archer and Bob Miller.

Marcelle, Paige, and Storey—as always, yours.

Ridley Pearson
is the co-author of the bestselling
Peter and the Starcatchers
. His novels have sold over six million copies and have been translated into twenty languages. The bestselling author of fourteen novels, including
The Body of David Hayes
and
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
, he is the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in detective fiction at Oxford University. He divides his time between Sun Valley, Idaho, and St. Louis, Missouri.

She lay on her side, her head ringing, her hair damp and sticky. She understood that she should feel pain—one didn’t fall onto blacktop from a three-story fire escape without experiencing pain—and yet she felt nothing.

She saw the Space Needle in the distance, regretting that she had gone up it only once, at the age of seven. Perhaps that had been the start of her fear of heights. Images from her childhood played before her eyes like a hurried slide show until she heard a car start and the first trickle of sensation sparked up her broken legs; she knew undeniably that this was only the beginning. When the floodgates opened, when nerve impulses reached their mainline capabilities, the pain would prove too great, and she would surrender to it.

For this reason, and a desire to glimpse the glimmering black mirror surface of Lake Union, she pushed herself off the pavement with her shaky right arm, its elbow finally propping her up.

She could feel her father’s locked elbows on either side of her, smell his boozed-up breath, although he’d been dead in his grave for two years now. She shrank from the contact of sweaty skin, nauseated by his sour smell and the repetition of his needs, and sought sight again of the body of water that had been a kind of bedtime prayer for her.

She clawed herself high enough to catch a moonlike curve of shoreline, just to the left of a bent Dumpster, pitched toward
its missing wheel, that loomed over her and made her think of a coffin.

The two white eyes that winked and quickly narrowed before her were not headlights, as she first had believed, but taillights meant to keep drivers from striking objects in their rear path.

“Stop!” But her faint voice was not to be heard.

Her head led the way to the pavement this time, and she answered the call of the pain.

Below her she saw the waters she had come to think of as her own, flat black like wet marble. Darkness punctuated by pinpricks of light swirled as he carried her away from the humming car to the bridge’s railing. She had no strength to fight, no will. Not even her acrophobia could power her to kick and claw for her life. Tears brimmed in her eyes, blurring any image of him, blurring the lights, blurring the boundary between the living and the dead.

In the next few moments she would be both.

When he threw her over, it felt like the act of someone distancing himself from something undesirable, like hearing a rat in the garbage bag on the way out to the cans. But as she dropped, she thought of a ballerina’s majestic beauty; she saw herself as elegant and refined; she found a balance, a weightlessness that was surprisingly pleasant. And she wondered why she had feared heights all these years. This was the ride of a lifetime.

Daphne Matthews negotiated the aisle between cots occupied by, among others, a spaced-out seventeen-year-old methadone addict, a girl shaking from the DTs, and a street-worn fifteen-year-old seriously pregnant. With the continuing spring rains and cool weather, like mice and spiders, the young women migrated inside as conditions required.

The basement space held an incongruous odor: of mildew and medicine, spaghetti and meatballs. Bare bulbs, strung up like lights at a Christmas tree sale, flickered and dimmed over twenty-some teens, two resident RNs, and two volunteers, including Matthews. This was the Shelter’s third home in three years, a cavernlike basement space accessed via the Second Presbyterian Church, one of the five oldest structures still standing in Seattle. A thirty-block fire in 1889 had taken all the rest, just as the streets would take these girls if the Shelter ceased to exist.

For the past five months Matthews had doubled her volunteer time at the Shelter, less out of a sense of civic duty than the result of a combination of guilt and grief over the loss of a despondent teenage girl—a regular at the Shelter—who had taken her life. The girl, also pregnant, had jumped to her death from the I-5 bridge.

Matthews knew the young woman on the cot before her only as Margaret—no surnames were used at the Shelter. She asked if she could join her, and the girl acquiesced, less than
enthusiastically. Matthews sat down beside her onto the wool blanket, leaning her back against the cool brick wall.

Sitting this close, Matthews could see a curving yellow moon of an old bruise that lingered on the girl’s left cheekbone, an archipelago of knitted scars curving around that same eye. No doubt Margaret told people they were sports injuries or the result of a fall. She was fifteen going on forty.

“We spoke the other night,” Matthews said, reminding the girl. The methamphetamine, booze, and pot wreaked havoc on the short-term memories of these kids. Not that they listened to the counselors anyway. They tolerated such intrusions only to serve the greater purpose of a warm meal, a shower, free feminine products, and a chance to wash their clothes.

“You’re the cop. The shrink. I remember.”

“Right, but here, I’m a counselor, and that’s all. You were going to think about calling your grandparents.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it. You were.”

“After five days you have to leave the Shelter for at least one night.”

“Believe me, I know the rules.”

“I don’t like to think of you up there in the weather.”

“That’s your problem. I live up there.” Defiant. An attitude. But behind the eyes, fear.

Matthews rarely lost her temper, though she could pretend to when needed. She debated her next move in what to her was a chess game that could make or break lives. “You can call for free. It doesn’t have to be collect.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting out of here so much,” the girl conceded.

Matthews saw an opening and seized it. To hell with the regulations. She pulled a Sharpie—an indelible marker—from her purse, grabbed hold of Margaret’s forearm, and wrote out her cell phone number in letters the size of the top row of an eye test. Clothes came and went with these girls.
Notes in pockets came and went. Forearms were a little more permanent.

“Day or night,” Matthews said. “No questions asked. No police. You call me and it’s woman to woman, friend to friend.”

Margaret eyed her forearm, angry. “A tattoo would have lasted longer.”

“Day or night,” Matthews repeated and pulled herself off the cot with reluctance.

“Can I ask you something?” the girl asked.

Matthews nodded.

“You think this place is haunted?”

Matthews bit back a smile. “Old, yes. Creepy, maybe. But not haunted.”

“Haven’t you felt it?”

It wasn’t the first time Matthews had heard this. “Maybe a little,” she confessed.

“Like somebody watching.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she said, aware she was sounding like a schoolmarm. “The imagination is powerful. We don’t want to mislabel it.”

“But you’ve felt it too,” Margaret said.

Matthews nodded, stretching the truth. It took a long time to establish anything close to trust with one of these kids.

“I heard this place used to be a storeroom or something. Pirates, or smugglers, or something. Like a hundred years ago.”

“I’ve heard it called lots of things: a slaughterhouse, a jail, a house of ill repute.” She delivered this comically, and won the first signs of light in that face. “Smugglers? Why not?” Matthews hesitated, unsure if she should leave it here—the first tendrils of rapport connecting them—or drive home her point once more. “If you do call your grandmother, we have funding for transportation. No one’s kicking you out, you understand. But I want you safe, Margaret. The baby, safe.”

The girl glanced around the room, uncomfortable. “Yeah,” she said. “We’ll see.”

As Matthews reached the surface and her car, her police radio crackled, and the dispatcher announced a 342—a harbor water emergency—a body had been spotted. The location was the Aurora Bridge. Matthews ran four red lights on the way there.