The Retribution of Mara Dyer (22 page)

Stella and Jamie had each abandoned their stacks of mail and were now following my lead, looking through the papers on the floor. “These papers are at, like, a fourth-grade reading level. What does this guy even teach?”

“ ‘Pacific Islander Gender Studies from 1750 to 1825,’ ” Jamie said, reading from a paper and not looking up.

“This is useless,” I said as I rose from my crouch. “If the key was mailed here, whoever told Ginsberg to mail it here could have picked it up already. We might be looking for something that isn’t even here.”

“So, what, we just leave?” Stella asked.

“We have a better chance of finding what we’re looking for in the archives,” Jamie said. “As I told you before, FYI. Look, there’s going to be a ton of stuff there, obviously, but we’re bound to stumble onto something we can use to find out who’s behind all of this. Eventually,” he added.

I hated to admit it, but this was in fact turning out to be another dead end. “Let’s just put everything back where we found it before someone finds us rifling through his shit.”

Stella looked stricken. Jamie was eager to leave, and started putting things away as fast as his hot little hands could move. I rearranged the pile of notebooks I was holding on the corner of the desk and turned around, but as I did, I tripped over a small wooden carved statue I’d moved to the floor earlier. I threw my hands out against the bookcase to break my fall, which worked, but the movement sent something tumbling down from the top of it, right onto my head.

I swore and held both hands against the crown of my skull as I mimed kicking the stupid bookcase. Jamie picked up the thing that had fallen on me.

“I would’ve thought your head would be hard enough to break the glass,” he said, holding the picture frame.

“You’re going to feel crappy about making fun of me if I have a concussion.”

“You don’t have a concussion,” Jamie said. He turned the picture over. “Does anyone remember where this was?”

I said, “I think it was on top of the bookcase?”

Jamie reached up to put it back. The picture was facing forward—it was of someone speaking at what looked like a graduation ceremony. McCarthy, I think, was the grizzled man at the podium. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. In the background, standing off to the left of the stage in front of
dozens of robed graduates and in a cluster of suited academics, was someone I thought I recognized. I snatched the frame from Jamie’s hand.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Not what,” I said. “Who.” I was pointing at Abel Lukumi.

37

S
TELLA STEPPED OVER A PILE
of academic journals on the floor and stood next to us. “What are we looking at?”

“The person responsible for all of this,” I said without hesitating. There was no other explanation. “That’s Lukumi.”

“Wait—the guy from Miami? From Little Havana?”

“As opposed to the one from Sweden?”

“Shut up.” Stella punched Jamie’s arm.

Jamie snapped a picture of the photo of Lukumi and McCarthy immediately, and then we hastily rearranged the professor’s office to look the way we’d found it. Mostly.

“What are the odds, though?” Jamie asked as we walked.

I shrugged. “One in who cares? He was in the picture with that professor—the head of the department where Ginsberg mailed the key. And he was on the train platform in DC. And he was in the hospital after Jude slit my wrists. He’s been following us the whole time.”

“Not us,” Jamie said quietly.

Jamie had it exactly right. “Me. He’s been following me. Ever since I met him.” My thoughts raced faster than I could speak. “He has to have been the one who sent the note, with the doctor’s bag, when I got sick. Which means he has to have known what was happening to me, what was inside me, which means—”

He would know where Noah was too. Maybe he was the one keeping him.

“But then why would he need the access key?” Jamie scratched his nose. “If he’s the man behind the man or whatever, if he orchestrated all of this, funded all of it, and is following us to, I don’t know, monitor what’s happening to us, wouldn’t he have access to the archives already? Why would he need the key?”

“Maybe that’s not how this works,” I said. “Maybe, to stay anonymous, he organized the corporation that funds Horizons so that only one person at a time can access the archives—so he needed to get the key before he could check whatever he wanted to check, and because even the people who work for
him don’t know who he is, he had the key sent here to his friend.”

“Far-fetched,” Jamie said.

Stella wound her hair around her finger. “I’ve heard worse theories. But wait . . . does that mean he has the key now? If one person at a time can access it, maybe—”

“Maybe he’s there,” I said, finishing her sentence. “Maybe he’s there right now.”

We all looked at one another. It was more than past time to end this. “Let’s go.”

We caught the train just before the doors closed, and Stella and I squished in between an older lady with purple hair clutching a Bloomingdale’s bag to her chest and a Hasidic teenager slouched over a copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
. Jamie mocked a man in a business suit jamming audibly to something on his headphones, but otherwise we were silent until we got off. When we emerged from the subway, the sun was setting. Whatever neighborhood we were in looked pretty industrial. There were hardly any people walking around at all. It almost looked deserted.

“Okay,” Jamie said. “Two blocks east, three north, and we should be there.”

The sun slipped behind the jagged city horizon as we walked. It was almost dark when we arrived.

“This is it,” Jamie said, looking up at a mammoth shuttered
warehouse. There were dozens of windows reaching up several stories high. Most were boarded shut with wood, and others were just dark. Adrenaline surged through my veins.
This
was where we were supposed to be. I could feel it.

“How are we supposed to get in?” Stella kicked the huge metal shutter enclosing what must have been the entrance.

“Fool of a Took!” Jamie hissed through his teeth. “If someone’s in there, they probably heard that,” he said, and stooped down to the ground. “Look. Padlock’s off.”

“So someone
is
in there,” Stella said. “Lukumi?”

“Maybe,” I said. Or maybe Noah.

Jamie looked at me. “Are you sure we should do this?”

“No,” I said honestly, staring up at the building. “Lukumi has been leagues ahead of us this entire time. He’s known everything we’re about to do before we’ve done it. He’s probably expecting us.”

Stella tugged at her hair. “I don’t really like the idea of that.”

“I don’t either, but the alternative is turning around and going home,” I said. “And I can’t do that.”

Jamie looked at me and then crouched and lifted the shutter with both arms. You could probably have heard the metal groan all the way in Miami. We stood in front of a dark brown, or maybe rusted red door with a window covered in newspaper in it.

“Well,” Stella said, “if he didn’t know we were here before, he definitely does now.”

I put my hand on the doorknob. It turned without effort, and I led the three of us in. The darkness outside was nothing compared to the darkness inside. It seemed solid, almost. Like if you reached out your hand, you would feel it.

“Should we look for a light?” Stella whispered.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” Jamie asked.

“I’d rather not break my neck tripping over you.”

“And I’m pretty sure we already announced ourselves unintentionally,” I said. “I vote for light.” In no small part because I suddenly felt
very
afraid of the dark.

Jamie turned and scanned the wall behind us for a switch. It took a while, but soon—

“Bingo,” he said, and flicked it on.

Rows and rows of lights slammed on, illuminating the vast space, which was lined with shelves that nearly scraped the ceiling. We heard something crash to the floor.

“Ow!”

Jamie and Stella looked at each other. Neither of them had spoken.

I didn’t look at either of them. I just stared straight ahead, my mouth hanging open. I
knew
that Ow.

“Daniel?”

38

W
HAT—
MARA
?” DANIEL SAID AT
full volume. And then he poked his head out from behind a shelf at waist height.

I couldn’t run fast enough. My brother was kneeling on the floor, rubbing one knee, and I dropped down and gave him the hug of his life.

“What are you
doing
here?” I asked, my voice muffled by his shoulder. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t believe how good it felt to be hugged by my big brother. Or hugged period, really.

“I heard the shutter opening and flipped off the lights and hid, sort of, behind the stacks. And then you turned the lights on, and I tripped over a footstool.”

“You
are
a genius,” I said, smiling.

“What are
you
doing here?”

I pulled back, and the words just came pouring out of me—what had happened to me at Horizons, what had happened to me
before
Horizons, all of it. The dam had burst, and there was no putting it back together. Daniel’s expression morphed from confusion to shock to horror to resignation and back to confusion as I spoke, breathless and flushed by the time I finished.

“So you’re telling me . . . ,” Daniel started. “You’re telling me it was all real.” A nervous laugh escaped from his throat. “Everything you—everything you said you were writing, for that Horizons assignment, that fiction thing? It wasn’t fiction. There was no protagonist. You were talking about you.”

I smiled, thinking of what Noah would have said if he were there. He’d thought I was being too obvious about my little problem, by telling Daniel it was an “assignment.” I wished he were there, so I could say,
I told you so
.

Instead I said to my brother, “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Because it’s— How is it possible?”

“We don’t know,” Jamie said. “We’re here to try to figure it out.”

Daniel closed his eyes. “I need a minute.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. “You’re not telling me—you can’t fly or anything.”

“Nope,” I said.

“And you can’t, like, scale tall buildings and shoot webs out of your fingers.”

I shook my head.

“Okay,” Daniel said. “Okay.” He looked around, his eyebrows drawn together, and he seemed to notice Jamie and Stella for the first time then. “I don’t know you,” he said to Stella. “But I know you.” His eyes were on Jamie. “The Ebola kid, right?”

“Daniel.”

“Right,” Jamie said, a smile turning up the corner of his lips. “Jamie Roth,” he said, holding out his hand. Daniel shook it slowly, still dazed.

“Stella Benicia,” she said next, introducing herself. “And now that you know who we are, and we know who you are, mind telling us what you’re doing here?”

Daniel looked a bit taken aback.

I sighed. “We were expecting—”

“A Santeria priest,” Jamie interrupted. “You didn’t happen to see anyone else here when you arrived?”

Daniel shook his head, looking even more confused, if that were possible. “It was just me.”

“How did you get in?” Jamie asked.

“That’s kind of a long story,” Daniel said.

“Lucky for us,” I said, “we have a bit of time.”

Daniel narrowed his eyes at me. “I bet you do. Follow me, Little Sister.”

Daniel led us up a winding, rickety metal staircase and then down a narrow passageway that led to the back of the building. He pushed open a door to an exposed-brick room with a bare bulb and a drafting table. Several books and files were neatly organized on and around it.

“I think this was a garment factory once,” he said, pulling up a stool. There were a few dusty old sewing tables and crates leaning against the walls of the small room. We each pulled one up and sat on them as Daniel began to talk.

“I first figured out something was wrong after the Horizons retreat,” Daniel said, looking at me. “When Noah didn’t come back.”