Catacomb (14 page)

Dan nodded, but the pit in his stomach only worsened. He couldn’t shake that woman’s voice in his head.

They’ll find you, too.

He let himself be led back to the house, silent. He didn’t have the heart to point out that Jordan was only half-right: they had found Oliver and Sabrina, yes, but neither of them had been the mysterious photographer. Someone else was still out there, following them. And Dan still had a lead to check.

“W
hat is it, man? I’m exhausted.” And he was. Dan couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so bone-tired. Sleeping in a real bed had brought to light all the bumps and discomforts caused by sleeping in a tent so many nights in a row. Now that he had an honest-to-God mattress under his back, he’d let himself succumb to it, sleeping hard, deep, and dreamlessly.

But now Jordan was sitting on the end of Dan’s futon, his weight strangely light, hardly making an impression on the duvet.

“What is it?” Dan repeated, groggy.

Jordan sat staring at his hands, then twisted slightly, looking at Dan and grinding his lip piercing against his lower teeth, an anxious gesture Dan had noticed getting worse over the last few days. Jordan didn’t say anything; he just watched Dan, unblinking, the little black dot in his lip going around and around.

“Jordan, you—”

He fell abruptly silent, pushing back against his pillow as the piercing in Jordan’s lip began to move, then wriggle, then ooze out of his lip, growing into a long, black worm that spilled from Jordan’s mouth like a piece of slime. If Dan pulled the covers over his head, this would stop, but his hands refused to obey. Jordan
closed his eyes and yawned, his head rolling back as his tongue dissolved into a hundred black worms that dripped down onto the bed. When he opened his eyes again there was nothing there, just two black voids that glittered, trickling down his cheeks in dark rivers, as if his skull was filled with a thick, living oil.

Jordan’s pale jaw loosened as if coming unhinged, and that was when Dan regained enough control of his faculties to throw the covers over his head and scream.

The sound woke him out of the nightmare and into another one. Jordan was still there, sitting on the end of his futon. Dan swallowed, shivering as he slid the duvet down and leaned forward, then poked Jordan in the arm.

His friend swayed and woke up, murmuring something incoherent before glancing around and finding Dan there, staring at him wide-eyed and shaky.

“What the hell?” Jordan croaked.

“My thoughts exactly.” Dan watched him, suspicious that this too would turn into a hallucination. “Are you . . . Why are you sitting there?”

“Dunno.” Jordan squinted down at his hands, then at the empty futon he had vacated. “Must have sleepwalked. Probably in a bed, my body was like: mattress? Comfort? What is this new devilry?” He chuckled to himself, then tilted his head to glance at Dan. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I just had a bad dream. That’s all.”

“Sorry to wake you up.” Jordan stretched and stood, shuffling back over to his futon. Clearly, neither one of them wanted to acknowledge that this had happened before, to both of them. In both cases, the unexplained nighttime vigils belonged to people
who had lost it afterwards. It seemed like a bad omen now.

“No more late-night-Houdini antics,” Jordan added, crawling into bed. “I promise.”

But sleep was now the furthest thing from Dan’s mind. He rolled over, waiting until he was reasonably sure Jordan had fallen back to sleep before turning on his phone. Checking the time, he winced. If he couldn’t get back to sleep now, he would have a very long day ahead of him.

Oh well.

He crept from the futon to the desk. Nightmare aside, it felt weirdly refreshing to be awake while everyone else in the house was asleep. He really had missed his alone time over the past few days in the car. He never felt fully charged without it.

Dan muted the sound on the laptop, navigating to Jordan’s email and the exchange he’d been having with Maisie Moore. Dan reread her last message, then copied her address into his phone. Closing the email and the laptop, he went back to the futon and typed out a message on his phone, asking when she would have time to meet up for lunch. She might think he was weird for sending an email at three in the morning, but at this point, he was way past caring what other people thought was weird.

Before he’d even put his phone to sleep and made a go at falling asleep himself, his phone flashed with a new email.

It was from Maisie Moore.

How about tomorrow at noon?
it read.
Or today, I guess it would be. Here are directions to a sub shop I know. Should be easy to find. I was happy to get your message. Haven’t been sleeping myself. Not since your friend brought up Evie and Marc. See you soon.

Jordan and Abby tagged along as far as the shop itself, pausing outside while Dan stared up at the sign, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet.

“Are you sure you don’t want us to come with?” Abby asked. She rubbed his arm, but it did little to comfort him.

“It seems kind of personal, Abs,” Jordan said. That morning, Dan had gone through the motions of asking Jordan for Maisie’s email address and pretending to message her. This was supposed to be the trip when they stopped keeping secrets, but it seemed some habits were hard to kill. “Dan, it’s cool if you don’t want us to come.”

“Thanks, Jordan. And yeah, I think I’d like to talk to her alone. I’ll let you know what she says,” he answered, leaning toward the door. “I promise.”

It was almost noon and the city baked, pockets of hot haze rising up from the sidewalks. Pedestrians took cover under the shop awnings, but there was no escaping the moisture filling the air. Jordan and Abby lingered on the curb for a second, and then Jordan took her by the wrist, tugging her away. “It’s broad daylight, Abs, he’ll be fine. And anyway, we won’t stray far. He can always call if something comes up.”

“Exactly,” Dan said, giving them a wave. “I won’t take long.”

He wasn’t actually sure about that. If Maisie had known his parents well, then he might want to grill her for hours. Dan dodged into the small, brightly painted shop, going to the expansive deli counter and ordering half a sandwich and a soda. There were only two other people there to eat, a couple cozying up to each
other in the corner. Dan took his sub and got a table—the one farthest away from the couple. He forced himself to eat and avoided the temptation of checking his phone every ten seconds. Was she running late or ditching him altogether?

Finally, the bell chimed over the door, and a short, curly-haired woman bustled in. She wore a crisp blue blazer and a matching skirt. A pair of high heels was tucked into her handbag, swapped out for a pair of simple white tennis shoes. She zeroed in on Dan at once, and he blanched, seeing the look of recognition dawn on her face.

“Dan?” she asked, stepping cautiously up to him and offering her hand. “Or is it Daniel?”

“I prefer Dan. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Yeah. Wow. You—my gosh. There’s definitely a resemblance. One second, sweetie, let me grab a coffee.” She shook his hand firmly and then hopped over to the counter. A moment later, she rejoined him with a steaming cup of black coffee. “Sorry I’m late. I don’t come into the city much.”

“It’s not that far for you, is it?” he asked, his sandwich forgotten. “Isn’t Metairie right next door?”

“It is, but that doesn’t matter.” She shrugged and hung her bag on the chair next to her. “After the
Whistle
went south, I just couldn’t stick around here. I finally settled in at the
Metairie Daily
because they let me work from home. I don’t like to leave the house if I can help it, and this place . . . Well, their car crash really did me in. This city just felt all wrong after that.”

“Car crash?” Dan’s hands curled into trembling fists. “What car crash?”

“Oh, kiddo.” Her shoulders drooped. She didn’t seem the type to mother anyone much, with her impeccable manicure and flashy handbag, but she reached across the table, patting his wrist lightly. “Your parents. That’s how they . . . that’s how they went. It was an accident. Just so, so tragic. I thought things were looking up for them and then that. It was awful.”

Dan nodded, numb. “I see.”

“They were wonderful people, sweetie. It’s a damn shame you didn’t get to know them.” She sighed and sipped her coffee, taking her hand back. “Would you mind showing me those letters you found? I’m not sure I want the memories back, but you went through all this trouble to find me. I might as well take a look.”

He couldn’t feel his hands as he pulled the letters out of his backpack and pushed them across the table. Abby had insisted on putting them in a ziplock bag to reduce the smell. “They were in an abandoned school in Alabama.”

“Arlington,” she said, smoothing her palm over the plastic. “It was a dump, but they were desperate. Trax Corp. had more than an army of lawyers out for blood, and the money to put people on their tail. With the warrant for their arrest, there were bounty hunters sniffing around, too.”

Dan tried to pull back from the shock of knowing, really knowing, that his parents were gone. Now there was nothing left to do but figure out who they had been and why they hadn’t wanted him. Why he hadn’t been in the car with them. “I found a police report from a time when my dad got arrested. What was that all about, anyway? What was this Trax Corp. doing?”

“They were a pharmaceutical company. When your parents first started investigating them, it was for rumors of animal
cruelty, which was bad enough.” Maisie lowered her voice and dipped into her bag, pulling out a stack of papers so thick it took a giant pink rubber band to hold them together. “But that was the tip of the iceberg. They were selling drugs that hadn’t passed the safety trials, and of course it was all done under the table, a kind of modern smuggling ring. Your parents found out about it. That’s when the real trouble started.” She took a long sip of her coffee. “My last year at the
Whistle
, I did one of the most ethically questionable things I’ve ever done in my life. It’s true, your father finally got caught—that must have been the police report you found. I knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, but I also knew Trax Corp. had all the ammo. So, I helped put together the money to post your father’s bail, reuniting him and Evie, knowing full well they intended to go back on the run. Six months later, investigations into Trax Corp. finally got them shut down, and a week after that, your parents were dead.”

She passed him the stack of papers with a sad half smile. “I made copies of everything from that investigation. I know that must seem strange. I honestly didn’t know if I was going to give them to you. But you look so much like Marc. Maybe you’ve got his curiosity, too.”

“Unfortunately,” Dan mumbled. “And my mom? I couldn’t find any trace of her. There’s nothing about Evelyn Crawford online, at least not one that seems like she could be my mom.”

“Evelyn Ash,” Maisie corrected. “Marc and Evie never married. They were a little rebellious like that. Ahead of their time.”

“What else?” Dan asked. “What were they like? I mean, before this whole Trax Corp. thing. I just want to
know
them.”

“They were smart. Your mother was funny. So, so funny. She hated when I edited her articles; I always took out the snarky bits. But she was a better investigator than she was a writer. She could never keep her opinions out of it, not even close. They’d be proud, I’m sure. You seem like a nice kid.”

That’s when her phone buzzed, chirping from inside her purse. She jumped, then reached for it, her mouth twitching at the corner. “I . . . should go.”

“Are you sure? I feel like I have a million questions.” Dan stood with her, watching her snatch up her purse and hurry away from the table. He didn’t understand what the sudden rush was.

“Shit. I shouldn’t have come here. God, you’re an idiot, Maisie.” She shoved her phone in her bag, leaving her coffee on the table as she backed toward the door. “Take that stuff,” she hissed, nodding toward the stack of papers on the table. “Take it, read it if you have to, but don’t tell anyone I gave it to you.”

“Ms. Moore, if you’d just—”

The bell rang and the door slammed shut behind her. Dan glanced back at the table, scooping up the papers and shoving them into his backpack before running out after her. The lunch-hour pedestrian traffic swept along the sidewalks, bumping him side to side as he glanced both ways down the street.

He heard a screech of tires and then a scream, followed by a loud, hollow thunk. Dan pushed against the crowd, finding that everyone on the sidewalk had suddenly stopped. He knew it was her. He knew it, and yet he had to see. Why had she run? What had made her panic like that?

Dan broke through to the curb and then stopped, standing perfectly still as gawking pedestrians huddled around
him, vying to get a look at the woman lying curled and lifeless under a taxi.

The driver of the cab was nowhere in sight.

Neither was her purse.

Only a fool would think these things were a coincidence.