Before You Go (YA Romance) (7 page)

“
Yipes
!” The high-pitched word was an Elizabeth-ism, her Kerrigan friend’s impression of another girl, Kathy Leon. Kathy was a gleeful, gangly dork who grinned at everyone with food in her braces and was always tripping over things and saying (what else):
Yipes
!

As she looked into the blond man’s face, Margo felt a brief shot of embarrassment. The guy—was he old enough to be called a man?—was attractive, with the hard, well-angled face of a movie star and a kissable mouth that formed a small “o” when she bumped into him.

“I’m so sorry.” She stepped back, feeling clumsy and disoriented.

Blondie smiled, revealing a mouthful of straight, small teeth.
Ick.
The teeth were oddly
squarish
and very unappealing. They made him look like an animal, and not a cuddly one.

“I’m very sorry,” she said again. Mr. Teeth smiled at her so long she wondered if there was something wrong with him. Then he said, “It was my fault,” and she realized he wasn’t weird.
Just…Austrian?
Yes, he sounded Austrian, and he was likely also a scientist. Weirdness explained.

He moved back with a courtly wave of his hand, and Margo stepped down onto an oriental rug in a study on the first floor.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said pleasantly, in the voice she reserved for adults she didn’t know.

“Nonetheless, I offer my apology.” He gave a brief bow, and when he rose, he smiled again. “May I assume you are Cindy Zhu’s daughter, Margo?”

Margo inhaled.
Exhaled.
“That’s right,” she told him calmly. “And you are?”

“Daniel. I come from Austria to study—” he twirled his finger, like he couldn’t remember the word— “astronomy.”

“Nice to meet you, Daniel.”

“And you.”

“Well, I’ve got to go.”

“Wait, I—”

She didn’t wait to hear what he had to say. He gave her the creeps, and besides, she didn’t want anyone to know she’d been in the casa at this hour. She he heard him on her heels as she breezed down the hall, and ducked behind a statue, holding her breath. He turned a circle, muttered something, and walked away.

A few steps later, she spotted a housekeeper and ducked behind a stuffed armchair while the woman passed. By the time Margo found another stairway, discreetly placed between a parlor and a sunroom, she felt exhausted by the combination of sleuthing stress and her angst.

She shouldn’t be here—on Isis or snooping in Cindy’s house. And yet, when the stairway ended at the fourth and highest open-to-the-public floor, she didn’t return to the cabana. Instead, she felt energized, consumed by her curiosity about the fifth floor.

After another ten minutes of dead ends, abstract art, and general weirdness (the casa had two entire rooms on the fourth floor dedicated to
taxidermied
birds), Margo slipped into a ladies’ room on the third floor to regroup. And there, in the center of an old-timey powder room, she found a ribbon of stairs that led to the fifth floor.

She came out in a moonlit dome filled with dozens of lilies. The dome fed into two long hallways; she picked the one with royal blue walls, ornate molding, and blood red curtains. She passed studies, workrooms, libraries, and parlors. The rooms got bigger and more elaborate, until finally, at the end of the hall… bingo!

Cindy’s room.

It had to be.

An enormous mahogany bed spread out against the jade green wall, its headboard an immense dragon so intricately carved it seemed alive. Rolling wood flames spewed from its long-tongued mouth, climbing toward a cloud of gleaming mahogany smoke that stretched almost to the ceiling. Each of the bed’s four posts was a smaller dragon; together they supported a red silk canopy that arched over the bed and draped down both sides, an elaborate net with bright yellow tassels.

Beside the bed, a stool.
Beside the stool, a dresser with a golden ship on top, its sails twinkling with diamond water drops.
On the other side of the bed, a narrow, frame-topped table.
Margo stepped across the soft carpet and bent to inspect the pictures: dark-haired girl in a ballroom gown, a doll in her small hands; Cindy with an elderly Chinese woman (Margo’s great-grandmother?); a small house in a rural village, most likely in China; the last, a yellow Labrador
Retriever
. For the longest time, she stood there staring at Cindy and the older Chinese woman who seemed to have Margo’s mouth. Her teeth felt
chattery
, her hands weak and damp.

Spurring herself on with the thought of getting caught here, she walked to a glass-topped desk and opened the top drawer. Empty.
As was the second.
The third held journals, black and leather bound. Margo’s hands shook as she opened the first.
Nothing.
They were all blank. She strode to a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, but nearly all of the titles were in Chinese. Margo turned a circle and noticed a mosaic door she’d originally mistaken for a piece of art. She closed her hand around the lion-shaped knob and pulled.
 

Wowzers
.
Cindy’s closet was bigger than Margo’s old room, and stocked like Bloomingdale’s. There must have been fifty rows of shelves and dozens of clothes rods, plus an entire wall of shoes and accessories.

She scanned Cindy’s wardrobe.
Lots of reds and
golds
and greens.
Vibrant.
Rich
. She stepped inside, feet sinking into fluffy white carpet, and touched the nearest garment: a purple sequined ballroom gown with fringed sleeves. She took another step, grabbing hold of a lipstick-colored pantsuit. She pulled it out, studied the creases in the pants. The thing was ironed to perfection.

Margo squeezed the suit back onto its rack, ran her hands along the row. She paused at a section of skirts. There was something…different about the wall behind them. She pushed the clothes aside and found herself staring at a bookcase with wall-colored, almost-invisible pivots. For a second, she couldn’t breathe. Here it
was,
her chance to learn more about her mother. She dropped down to her knees and traced the edges, looking for a keyhole or a doorknob or…

She moved some books around, knocking a little wooden cube into her lap, and found a
teensie
keypad embedded in a shelf.
Oh
. She shouldn’t be doing this. She dropped her head into her hands.

Numbers…
  

She knew from her mystery books that the most common codes for safes and alarms were birthdays. She figured it was pointless to try it, but she punched her own in anyway. Not the code.
Of course not.
She racked her brain for any number she might have read in relation to her mom. She remembered Cindy’s birthday. The date Cindy’s parents and brother died—the date she had inherited their fortune. The date Cindy earned her doctorate from Stanford.

None of them opened the safe.
 

Sighing, Margo put her head in her hands, and that’s when a long, wide shadow fell into the doorway. She felt a pair of eyes on her, felt the awful heavy beating of her heart. Oh, God. This was it. The terrorists had her.

Margo jumped up in the karate stance.
“
Aaah
!”

She rushed forward, jumping at…a housekeeper? The woman’s hands flew to her cheeks and she tripped over her own feet. Margo rushed to her side, but she was already scrambling up. With a quick, “Sorry,” Margo dashed toward the door.

“You wait!”
   

Against her will, her feet stopped moving.

“What you do?
You theft?”

“
Theft
?” she murmured, then felt a laugh rise in her throat. “Why would I need to steal? I’m her daughter, you know.”

“I tell Jana.”

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I came here looking for…this.” Margo thrust out a wooden cube she’d forgotten to drop. “It’s a…puzzle.”

It looked like one, anyway—one of those fold-out deals you played like a Rubik’s Cube.

“I gave it to her,” Margo blurted, realizing a beat too late that everyone here must know she and Cindy had only just met.

The housekeeper nodded, her dark eyes never leaving Margo’s own.

“Never again, you come up here.” She held her right hand up, thumb and pointer finger coming together.

“Yeah—okay.”

“You
visit
here. Then go home. This,” she said, arm sweeping at the massive room, “not yours.”
 

*

When she reached the first floor, Margo didn’t feel particularly upset. She didn’t really feel anything. So when she pushed through the foyer door and found herself bolting through the slushy lawn, toward the hangar, she felt surprised.
And good.
Oh so good to be running away from here. Here where she didn’t belong. Here where no one wanted her.

She’d run track in Napa, and as she moved now, she felt her legs and feet slipping into position.
Heel down, follow through, spring up, lunge forward,
now
push from the thighs, girls…
She could hear her old coach’s coarse, alto cheers. She could see herself running alongside childhood
friends,
see them popping Starbursts into their mouths as they practiced on the hot, green track.
Sugar high!
She could hear their
laughter,
see her father on the bleachers in his khaki shorts and neat white polo. Her father had come to every meet.
Every one.
Even during campaign season.

That particular memory made her feel like she couldn’t get a good breath, and in the midst of her stupid little breakdown she remembered some lines from a scene in that old movie
Forrest Gump
.

Dear God, make me a bird, so I can fly far, far, far away from here.

Except what did she want to fly away from?
Oooh
, mommy didn’t love her. She heard a classmate’s whisper—Harriet Sampson, who attended Kerrigan on scholarship.
I don’t know why she acts so put-out all the time. Maybe got her mommy’s money shoved too far up her flat little ass.

So that’s what she was thinking about as she plunged into the dripping pine grove:
My ass isn’t flat. It’s not really little either.

Then a hand shot out and grabbed her upper arm, the shock of it stalling her momentum so she spun in place. Something hard and cold struck her temple.

“
Aaaaaa
!”
It was a straight-up shriek. She flinched away and mimed a jumping bean, the way she usually did when a bug got too close for comfort.
“
Aaah
!”
She should be FLEEING!

Before she could, two hands grabbed her shoulders, squeezing tight enough to bruise. Her eyes adjusted, showing her a tall man holding a HUGE GUN. Margo shrieked, and her self-defense training kicked in.

If you kick him there, you better not miss…

She didn’t. She made her mark, and the man sank down to one knee, moaning so painfully she wanted to cheer. Instead, she turned to run. No, wait! She spun
around,
lunging for the machine gun—
MACHINE GUN?!?
—in the mud.
She grabbed the heavy thing, hoisting it awkwardly and pointing it at…

LOGAN?

“
Aaugh
.”
He cursed and curled his broad shoulders inward.

“Logan?”
Logan was a terrorist?
“What the hell?”

“Right back at
ya
…” He croaked.

She tottered back a step. “What the shit are you doing
here!
”

He had straightened a little, and he was holding his arm out in a stance that might be used to approach a skittish horse.