Pretty Sly (19 page)

Aidan’s eyes widened in fear. I grabbed his wrist and clutched it tightly while we listened, frozen still.

A sound like a key in a lock.

Every muscle in my body clamped up. We had to get the hell out of there.

Tre always told me to leave the way I came in. Only this time it was impossible, at least without a ladder. Which we didn’t have, obviously.

My mind raced. I gathered up the files as best I could and stuffed them into my bag, throwing it onto my back as we scurried around, looking for an exit. There was a wooden deck off the master bedroom, but it was three stories up. Maybe we could swing down to the deck on the next story? I quickly made the calculations. It was a weird angle. Dangerous. But no more dangerous than popping through the skylight, was it?

Meanwhile, the front door squeaked open, the bottom pulling on the carpet. Then we heard the footsteps,
the creaking of floorboards. The rustling of bags.

We had seconds to make a decision. Or meet the owner of this house and go straight to jail, do not pass Go.

Aidan glared at me, demanding a solution.

You’re the boss,
I could hear him thinking.

Crap. I so did not want to be the boss right now.

I slid open the glass door as quietly as I could and we stepped out onto the deck. I silently gestured to him, showing him my plan.

He waved his hands across his chest like I was crazy.

I heaved my shoulders, letting him know without speaking that it was this or nothing. This or wait to get caught.

He pointed me to the snowdrifts on the ground, which sloped down a hill beyond the condos into a thicket of trees.

Fine. Whatever,
I mouthed. My only comforting thought was that if I hurt myself I’d send him the hospital bill.

I climbed over the railing of the deck, edging my feet on the other side. I looked over my shoulder. He was watching me, flapping a hand to tell me to hurry up.

“Hey! What are you two doing?” We turned to see a man. The man. The owner of the condo, who was tall and balding and wore little round glasses, and now he was racing for the door. After us.

Oh no. OH NO.

Here goes everything,
I thought, and let go.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

FIFTEEN

LOOKING BACK, I
guess we were pretty lucky. I mean, we could’ve died right there, landing funny from the three-story jump. Backs and necks had been broken on shorter heights. Or we could have gotten lost in the woods, frostbitten and buried in a snowfall only to be discovered a week later, two teenage Popsicles. We could’ve been shot down by the bald man, or by cops. The worst-case possibilities were endless, really.

But somehow, whether it was luck, or my closed-eye wishing, or fate or whatever you want to call it, we made it. Because now, after running for what felt like an hour, we’d finally reached an opening. We were coming back to civilization.

“Quick,” Aidan said, pointing to a white bus with the words
Tahoe XPRESS
painted on the side. It was stopping in front of the entrance to the Blackjack Hotel across the street. “The shuttle.”

Energy surged through my bones, pushing me down the home stretch. I followed Aidan as we dashed over the pavement, racing to the bus. The door was already open, and we climbed up the steps, gasping.

“No hurry,” said the driver, a lackadaisical white-haired gentleman with a baseball cap. “I would’ve waited for you two, you know.”

“How much?” Aidan demanded, reaching into the pocket of his pants.

“Shuttle’s free,” he said. “I make stops at all the major hotels, casinos, and the airport. Get on and off as you like.”

Aidan nodded and made his way down the aisle to a seat, and I followed him into our getaway vehicle.

It was only as we sat down, sweat-dampened, wheezing, fried with adrenaline, that I noticed that everyone was staring.

“That was close,” I whispered, because two young guys sitting in front of us had given us an especially lingering eye. My heart was still racing, even as the squat little bus pulled away from the curb and lumbered down the street.

We’d made it.

Aidan brushed snow off his sleeves. “Too close.”

“Look, I didn’t know he would come home,” I said.

He turned away to stare out the window. “That’s just it. It wasn’t thought through.”

I felt myself tense, all the adrenaline flaring and
burning out into frayed ends. “I made a mistake, okay? You could’ve stopped me.”

I looked up as I said the last part, knowing it wasn’t entirely true.

He pressed his palm on the glass. “I wanted to believe you. Just like I’ve been doing all along.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He peered back in my direction and I felt the plainness of his gaze. The cocky, flirtatious Aidan was gone. So was the rich, tech-genius Aidan. There was just Aidan now.

“It means I don’t know anymore. I don’t know if we’re going to find her, Willa.” He sighed heavily. “It just seems like she doesn’t want to be found.”

The words cut into me—I actually winced as he said them. This was a line of thinking I could not—would not—tolerate.

“Well, she said she didn’t,” I said matter-of-factly. “But we can’t let that stop us.”

“We’ve been away for almost a week and we’ve got nothing.”

“That’s not true. We know she left for a good reason. We know her name. And . . .” I struggled to come up with a third thing.

“We know she’s in trouble. So maybe we should back off and let her do what she needs to do. If that’s going away for a while, then maybe . . .”

“Maybe what?” I challenged him.

“Maybe you have to learn to live with that. Maybe we have to stop meddling. No offense, but her life seems pretty messed up.” He gave me an apologetic shrug.

She’s not messed up,
I wanted to say.
She’s just got problems.
They happened to be big problems. Fine. But it wasn’t like she was crazy or a bad person.

How would he know, anyway? He didn’t know the first thing about her. He’d never even
met
her.

And then my own doubts started to seep in through the cracks between thoughts. My mom had lied to me, then she’d abandoned me. She had some secret past, dark enough that she had to change her own name.

Maybe she
was
messed up. Maybe we both were. Maybe she was even dead by now. Maybe everything I’d done was wrong. How did I know?

Tears brimmed in my eyes, and everything around me—the vinyl seats of the bus, the fir trees outside the window, Aidan’s face hanging squarely in front of mine—was going hazy.

“No,” I said. “I will never learn to live with that. And I will never stop
meddling.
”

Aidan slung an arm around the seat back and rearranged himself so that he was facing me. “Listen to yourself, Willa.”

I folded my arms across my chest and tried to breathe, tried to suck the tears back in, but it was too late because a couple had already escaped and were sliding down my cheeks.

I listened. What I heard was Aidan trying to tell me I was stupid. That I was foolish and naïve for trying to find my mother.

I couldn’t accept that. What else was I supposed to do? Give up and walk away?

No. Screw him for even suggesting it.

The bus was pulling into another casino. A family of older parents and what looked like their adult children got on, a big, happy, laughing family wearing matching baseball caps with the letter Z. They came down the aisle toward us and I felt shamed by their smiling faces.

“You’ll never understand how I feel. You’ll never be in this situation.”

“I know what it’s like to care about your parents.” He cleared his throat. “And I’ve been thinking, maybe you were right. About my dad, I mean. Maybe I need to go home and give him another chance.”

“And what do you expect me to do?” I asked finally.

“I—I don’t know. Come with?” He looked down at his feet. “I just think we’re grasping at straws here and we really don’t have enough information. We’re not detectives, Willa.”

“Yeah, I realize that.” My voice squeaked with sarcasm. I hated that he was seeing me so upset, so unbalanced. By now he’d seen a lot more of me than I wanted him to, including my awful quivering cry-face. Did it even matter, though? It was obvious there would never be anything between us.

“It’s a needle-in-a-haystack situation. Maybe she was here. But maybe she’s left. The point is that she could be
anywhere.
”

I closed my eyes, which were sticky from the tears. “No, the point is that you’re sick of looking. You’re ready to give up.”

“I didn’t say that exactly. I just think we should consider calling the authorities before we get
killed.
” Aidan’s voice had lifted a few decibels with the last word.

The guys in front of us turned around again. They looked at each other, murmured something, and went back to their plastic cups full of tokens. I probably should have been worrying about whether they recognized us, but instead I was mentally counting the tokens. They were each carrying about four hundred dollars’ worth. I was disgusted with myself for even thinking about it. It was like my kleptomania knew no bounds.

“We can’t,” I whispered. “Or, I can’t. I can’t go back to jail. Not before I find her.”

“Moving forward like we are, with no backup, is a bad idea.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Frankly, at this point, I think this whole trip has been a bad idea.”

That stung.

“If it was such a bad idea, then why did you go along with me all this time?”

I turned away from him and looked across the aisle out the window on the opposite side. We were crossing back over into California. The mountains were coming
into view again, and more thickets of trees. I was sick of seeing scenery from cars and buses. I wished I could get off this bus and get on my bike, ride around.

“You needed a driver. I didn’t want you to do it alone. And, I don’t know, at first it really was kind of fun, like an adventure. Running from the cops. Seeing our names on the news.”

“So you were
humoring
me? You were being a good sport? This is just some kind of game to you?”

“No, no, no, Willa. You make it sound—”

“—like you don’t really care.”

Now the two guys were really staring.

“Can you turn around, please?” Aidan asked them. “This is a private conversation.”

They smiled at each other and turned back. Whispered some more. I wanted to deck them. Both of them.

“Anyway, that’s not it,” he said to me in a low tone. “You know I care.”

“Is it me you care about, or is it Sly Fox?”

“You, Willa,” he said, staring at me, shaking his head gently. “You.”

There was a pause. I wanted to believe him. I wanted things to be the way they were before, back in Paradise Valley. Before we kissed, even. When all of that was in the future.

But that was another time. We were practically different people now. Too much had happened for it to ever feel like that again. It was spoiled.

“No, you don’t,” I said.

His face opened up in surprise. “How can you say that?”

“Because I’ve seen your phone, Aidan.” I was going for broke now. Cashing in my chips. Whatever gambling metaphor you wanted to use.

“What?”

“I know there’s some other girl. Or is it plural?”

His face reddened and he grasped the back of the seat in front of us, nearly grabbing one of the guys’ hoodies. “Did you read my text messages?”

“They came through when I was using the phone.”

“And you just couldn’t help yourself? Dammit, Willa!”

I shrank back a little. His face was red. I’d never seen him so angry.

“What? It wasn’t like I was looking for them.”

Well, maybe not the first time.

“But you didn’t have to read them. I mean, you could’ve just put the phone down. Those were my personal, private messages. That’s low.”

“Obviously, if you didn’t want me to read them then you had something to hide.”

“Brilliant logic.” He choked out a laugh. Then he put his hands on his face and shook his head side to side, like he was trying to wake himself up from a dream. “So this is what it comes down to, huh?”

A knot of suspicion and unease had lodged itself between us. I could feel it as certainly as I felt the
vibrations of the bus engine beneath my feet. I remembered the first time we kissed, only a few days ago, in my driveway.

Maybe I’d gone too far. And yet there was no way to take it all back. “What do you expect me to do?” My voice dropped down to a lower register. “You haven’t given me any reason to actually trust you.”

The bus was slowing down now, stopping in the center of Celestial Village, a big town at the bottom of the mountain. Crowds of people were gathered outside on the walkway for some sort of musical performance. As we got closer, I could see it was a children’s choir.

Holiday carols. They must have been singing holiday carols.

I didn’t even know what day it was anymore. Had we missed Thanksgiving? How long had we even been on the road now? Real life, routines, normal breakfasts, calendar days had slipped out of my grasp.

“No reason, huh?” He looked angry. More than that. He looked disgusted. “Well, if you don’t trust me, then there’s really no point in me being here, is there? Maybe I should just go now.”

People were coming and going, getting on and off the bus, but we just stared at each other.

Those green eyes. With eyes like that, Aidan Murphy had the potential to be the greatest thief of all time.

“Celestial Village. Last call.” The bus driver’s voice yanked me out of my spell.

Something inside me went hot and angry and anarchic. It was a feeling I’d had as a little kid, when a friend from third grade and I stole matches and set napkins on fire in his mother’s bathroom sink. It was the rush you got only when you destroyed something.