Deadly Little Lessons (25 page)

A
S SOON AS
Ben, Sasha, and I emerge from the root cellar, Ben runs off to get help. Meanwhile, Sasha can barely stand up straight. Her gait is slow, as if she’s just learning to walk. She gazes around at where she is, her eyes struggling to take everything in. The sky must seem far too bright.

“Do you want to sit?” I ask, looking around for someplace comfortable.

She shakes her head. “It feels like I’ve been sitting forever.”

“Your mom’s really missed you,” I tell her. “She loves you more than anything—both of your parents do.”

She nods like she already knows—like maybe it took being locked away to figure it out. Tears fill her eyes and she lets out a tiny cry. It takes me a moment to realize that the sound is outside my head.

After only a couple of seconds of standing, she moves to sit down anyway. I join her on the grass; it’s still wet from the rain. If she notices, she doesn’t seem to care. Instead she scoots a bit closer, as if eager for someone to hold her. I wrap my arm around her shoulder, and she rests her head against my chest.

About fifteen minutes later, sirens sound in the distance, and Sasha huddles closer against me.

“It’s going to be okay,” I assure her, but her cries deepen and intensify.

It isn’t long before an ambulance and two police cars pull onto the long dirt road that leads to the farm. They drive right up, over the crabgrass.

“Sasha,” I whisper, trying to get her to sit up. But her body’s gone limp against me. Her lips are chalky white and her eyes have rolled back in their sockets.

The medics go right into action, lifting her onto a stretcher, bringing her into the ambulance, and hooking her up with a bag of fluids. A syringe is jabbed into her arm.

A male and a female police officer linger at the rear ambulance doors.

I move closer, too, anxious to see if Sasha’s okay.

“She’s coming around,” I hear one of the medics say.

Her head’s propped up on a pillow now, and her eyes flutter open; she’s not looking at anything in particular.

“Your parents will meet you at the hospital,” the male officer tells her. “We’ve already contacted them.”

“Thank you,” she says, but she’s staring straight at me now.

“I’ll come visit you,” I promise her.

One of the medics closes the doors and gets behind the wheel. Once the ambulance leaves, with a police car following close behind, I turn to look for Ben, spotting him talking to the female officer. I join them, listening as Ben tells the officer that when he first went down to the root cellar, Tommy hit him over the head from behind. “It knocked me out, but only for a bit,” he explains. “When I came to, Tommy was gone.”

“Where did he go?” the officer asks.

Ben shrugs. “I’m assuming he went back to the house—probably to look for a weapon or some rope to secure me. That’s when I ran out to find something that would break the lock.”

“And you didn’t see Tommy again after that?” she asks.

“No.” Ben shakes his head.

Tommy’s girlfriend must’ve found him instead. The thought of that gives me chills.

After Ben answers a couple more questions, the officer moves on to me. I give her my complete point of view, including how I knew where to look for Sasha, but she insists that Ben and I come down to the station.

“Need a lift?” Ben asks, once the officer gets inside her car.

I turn to him, still overwhelmed that he’s actually here. “I thought I lost you.” I press my forehead against his chest.

Ben lifts my chin to look into my eyes. “You’ll never lose me—not if I can help it. I think it’s fairly safe to say we’re pretty much connected on every level.”

“Did you have any idea that we were working on the same case?”

He shakes his head. “Don’t you think that if I had, we’d have reconnected a whole lot sooner? I’d do anything to protect you.”

“I think you’ve proven that once or twice.” I encircle his waist with my arms and breathe into his chest.

“The day I bumped into that Tommy guy at the park… It was totally by chance. I was on my way back to Freetown from D.C. I’d stopped in Connecticut, and then I needed to stop again in Rhode Island.”

“You were headed back?” I ask, hoping that I might’ve been the inspiration.

“Being away helped me figure things out,” he explains. “But I also felt like I was missing something.”

“I can definitely relate.”

“Good, because now that I think about it, it kind of makes sense that we were working on the same case. There was a reason I felt compelled to follow that guy.”

“And a reason you felt compelled to write it all down and post it online?”

“Wait,
what
?” he asks. His face is a giant question mark.

“I saw the blog,” I explain. “I read the entries. So, who’s Neal Moche? And why are you using his name?”

Ben looks at me, his mouth hanging open, as if completely dumbfounded by the question. And that’s when I suddenly realize that there’s no way he could’ve possibly known that I’d found his blog, never mind that I’d figured out his identity.

“Neal Moche
is
you,
right
?” I say.

Ben proceeds to tell me that he’s always kept a journal or blog of some sort, but it was only recently that he decided to keep some of the entries open. “And that was because of you,” he explains. “Because of what you said before…how reading about other people’s experiences with psychometry helped you with your own. I thought that keeping a blog might in some way—someday—help someone.”

“Well, you were right,” I say, wondering about the coincidence of it all—me finding the blog and Ben just happening to bump into Tommy that day in the park.

Or maybe nothing is a coincidence at all. Maybe it was all meant to be—all a part of what we created and made happen. I chose to help Sasha. And, at the same time, Ben chose to follow his instincts—instincts that brought him to me.

“And Neal Moche?” I ask.

“It’s
Chameleon
,” he says. “Scrambled up.”

“Chameleon,” I repeat, taking a moment to mentally unscramble the letters.

“It’s you,” he says, pulling me close, his hands at the small of my back. “It’s always been you. Even before I met you—when you were just a hope inside my head.”

I kiss him, hearing more sirens in the distance.

“So, how about that lift?” he asks, his gaze lingering on my lips.

“As long as you don’t mind if we make a pit stop. I need to go save Wes’s car. I also need to call him and Kimmie. They’re probably freaking right about now.”

We head away from the fire, through the dead cornstalks—what once must’ve been lush land—finally reaching Ben’s motorcycle, parked on the road that the police and ambulance used.

“Shall we?” he asks, handing me his helmet.

I hop right on behind him, holding on tight, and we ride off into the sunset.

I
T’S SATURDAY MORNING
a week later, and Kimmie and Wes are sitting in my dorm room eating bagels and helping me pack. Kimmie went back to New York for the week, but then took the bus here last night.

“Thanks again for coming all this way,” I tell her.

“You’re paying me back, remember?”

“Right, and agreeing to walk in your fashion show ranks right up there with abandoning New York City two weekends in a row and breaking into an abandoned sewing factory to search for a missing girl.”

“You’re going to have to wear leather spikes and carry a whip,” Wes reminds me.

“Okay, so maybe we
are
even,” I joke.

Wes and I have agreed to be part of the fashion show that Kimmie is organizing as part of her internship.

“For your information”—she glares at him—“it’s not a whip; it’s a frilly cane.”

“Silly me.” He fakes a smile.

“Of course, breaking into that old sewing building
did
have its merits,” Kimmie says. “I got to see the layout of what used to be one of the most productive sewing factories in the country. Plus, I snatched myself a swanky souvenir.” She pulls a thimble from around her neck; it’s attached to a leather rope. “I found this gem whilst trying to get into a locked closet. Wes had me convinced that Sasha Beckerman was tied up and gagged in there.”

“What can I say?” He shrugs. “It was a kidnapper’s dream: a padlocked room on the basement floor of an abandoned building, hidden behind an old soda machine.…”

“It was a closet,” Kimmie reminds him. “And, FYI, Detective Tanner was less than impressed.”

“Sorry we snagged her from you.” Wes gives me a sheepish grin. “I mean, you were
supposed
to be getting some rest. Who knew you’d wind up at a burning house where the captor was being flame-broiled, and then down in a root cellar where you had to fend off his jealous girlfriend?”

“No worries. It wasn’t like Tanner was willing to help me, anyway.”

After Sasha was taken away in the ambulance, Ben and I went down to the police station to give a formal statement. I found out that most of what I’d assumed to be true had been. Ben had followed Tommy that day, and watched him at the farm. When Tommy stepped away from the cellar, leaving the trapdoor wide open, Ben went down to investigate, never having imagined that there would be someone held captive inside.

Tommy returned to the cellar after only a few minutes, most likely shocked to find Ben. He struck him from behind, knocking him unconscious, and then went back to the house for some rope.

That’s when Tommy’s girlfriend (Darcy, for the record) decided to get her revenge on Tommy. She’d been suspecting that Tommy was cheating on her. And apparently, when he came back to the house for the rope, he was muttering about how someone had found his secret place and how they wanted to steal his girl.

Enraged, she drugged him—just enough so that he’d be semiconscious—and then burned the house down with him inside.

“So, the
t
on Darcy’s neck stood for ‘Tommy’?” Wes asks.

I nod. “Because she belonged to him. Just like there was a
t
on Sasha’s wrist, because Sasha was his as well—or at least, that’s what he thought.”

“And the
W
on Tommy’s wrist?” Kimmie asks.

“It stood for Wendy, his stepmom,” I explain. “Because, apparently, growing up, she treated him like a possession.”

“Issues,”
Wes sings.

And unfortunately, the issues don’t exactly end there. After talking to Sasha, the police again questioned Misery, who turned out to be Mailbox Girl. Misery knew Tommy. They’d first met at the Blue Raven and had been acquaintances ever since.

Misery confessed that Tommy had paid her a thousand dollars to set him up with someone who could be described as “lost,” someone who didn’t get along with her parents and could have used some time on her own.

According to Misery, Sasha had seemed to be the perfect candidate, always bragging about running away. “I didn’t think he’d go all abductor,” Misery argued to the police. “I mean, yeah, he was a little off, but I never imagined he’d just keep her like that—for two whole months.”

“The weird part,” I say, “is that Misery didn’t seem too surprised that Tommy took Sasha, only that he took her for
so long
.”

“Translation: Misery knew what she was getting into,” Wes says, “but then she freaked out at the thought of being named an accomplice.”

“Because she
was
an accomplice,” I say, thinking about the doodling I found in Sasha’s bedroom—how Sasha had written Tommy’s name. According to Sasha’s statement, Misery had originally told Sasha that there was a good-looking guy named Tommy that she’d wanted her to meet. But then, once Misery had collected her money from Tommy and arranged for both Tommy and Sasha to be at that party, she’d started having second thoughts about the arrangement, which was why she told Sasha to keep a distance from him.

But that only made Sasha want to meet him more.

“My vote is that Misery, postpayment, somehow developed a conscience,” Wes says, taking a big bite of bagel.

“How did Misery even know about you?” Kimmie asks me. “I mean, if Mrs. Beckerman supposedly didn’t fill her in…”

“She’d been watching the Beckerman house,” I say, “feeling guilty for her part in Sasha’s disappearance…or so she recently confessed to the police. She saw me leave the Beckerman house that first day and decided to follow me. When I pulled over, I thought that was it—that she was gone—but she’d merely turned on to a side road, waiting for me to drive past, so that she could continue following. At Sumner campus, she asked people about me—who I was, where I was from, which dorm I was staying in. Once she got all that information, it wasn’t hard for her to get my phone number.”

“What’s going to happen to her now?” Wes asks. “Or to Pyro Darcy, for that matter?”

“The verdict is still out on those two. And unfortunately, Tommy isn’t around to testify.”

“But happily, Sasha is,” Kimmie chirps. “And how’s she doing?”

“It’s going to take some time,” I say, disappointed that I haven’t been able to see her yet. “Aside from talking to the police, she hasn’t really been up for chatting with anyone outside her immediate circle. I’ve been keeping in touch with her parents, though. Her mom calls me daily with updates and to thank me. But in some way, I feel like I should be thanking her, too. I mean, I know it sounds all corny, but she helped me understand my own parents better. I’ve been talking to them more, and I’m going to see my aunt in a couple days. It’s, like, I finally feel ready to go home.”

“Especially now that Ben will be going home, too?” Wes snickers.

I feel my face grow warm just thinking about him. Ben will be returning to Freetown and graduating on time, with all of us. He’s been renting a room in downtown Providence, which is where he is right now, packing his things, getting ready to leave.

“I’m so happy that you and Ben are back together.” Kimmie bats her red-coated eyelashes at me.

“And even happier that Adam is now available.” Wes raises a suspicious eyebrow at her.

“Who says I give a frick about Adam?”

“Hmm…” he says, tapping his chin in thought. “Your latest I-heart-Adam-so-hard-that-my-head-hurts angel-inspired minidress might’ve been the tip-off.”

Kimmie flicks a glob of cream cheese at his face. Conveniently, it lands at the corner of his mouth, so he’s able to lick it up. “You’re such a fun-sucker.”

“You named the dress, not me,” he says.

“Do you seriously heart Adam?” I ask, feeling dumb for never knowing, and even dumber for using a shape as a verb.

“Okay, so maybe it’s only half a heart.” She gives me a sheepish grin.

“And maybe that would only be half the truth,” Wes says.

“Would it be okay if I
was
interested?” she asks me. “Or would that be totally weird-incestuous-obnoxious of me? Because the last thing I want is to hurt you, or jeopardize our friendship, or have you feel all freakish at the sight of Adam and me sucking face.…”

“Whoa,” I say. “How long have you felt this way about him?”

“Pretty much since that first time we met,” she says. “After figure drawing class.”

“When you saw him naked,” Wes clarifies, kindly reminding us of Adam’s nude studio modeling days.

“It wasn’t just his nakedness.” She flicks more cream cheese at Wes’s head; this time it lands in his gel-crispy hair. “It was
after
class,” she explains, “when we all went out for pizza, and when I really got to talk to him. He just seemed so incredibly sweet and smart and sensitive and attentive.”

“Adam is
all
of those things,” I assure her.

“But he was also really into you,” she says, “which is why I never said anything. I didn’t want to be the sour cream that came between you and Adam’s spicy hot pepper.”

“For the record, things never got above mild salsa.”

“Well, Ms. Chameleon,” Wes interjects, “I must admit, you never cease to amaze me.” He’s holding up a gray checked shirt. Whether he’s referring to my lack of style or to my alleged lack of spice, I have absolutely no idea.

While the two of them begin to discuss Kimmie’s fashion show, I open the desk drawer and pull out Aunt Alexia’s journal. I flip through the individual entries, grateful to have had such an amazing support system this past year. Aunt Alexia obviously wasn’t as lucky, which explains so much about her, including the reason she decided to give me up at birth.

My parents still think it’s best that I don’t tell her I know the truth. And after reflecting on it, I agree. If and when Aunt Alexia wants me to know about my birth, she’ll tell me on her own.

“So, are we done?” Wes asks.

“I just have a few more things.” I stuff the journal into my bag.

“And then you’ll be ready to abandon me?” He feigns crying.

“I have a sneaking suspicion that you won’t be suffering,” I say, tossing him an empty box of tissues. Wes has decided to extend his stay at Sumner by signing up for Summer Session II.

“Don’t get
too
comfortable here,” Kimmie warns him. “Because in just a few short weeks, there’s that thing called senior year. It runs from September to May.…”

“Fear not, I’ll be back for senior slide, especially now that I know there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Do you think you’ll be okay with going home?” I ask him.

“Better than okay,” he says. “And I have you, Ms. Chameleon, to thank. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for your borderline-psychotic obsession with Sasha Beckerman’s case, not to mention the fact that you’re the love child of a mental-hospital romance gone wrong, from which you needed a serious vacation, I’d have never experienced such bliss.”

“Well, you’re welcome.” I smirk. “I think.”