Don't You Trust Me? (23 page)

“Good for you,” I said. I shifted my position so as to minimize her view of my face.

A welcome silence followed this maneuver. Then—

“Juh-juh-jah-nell. ‘Janelle'! That's your name, isn't it? See? It's on your boarding pass, right where
my
name is on mine.”

“What?”
I looked down at the little monster. She was holding up my boarding pass, comparing it with her own. “Give me that!” I snatched my pass—which had fallen on the floor—away from her. “Excuse me, ma'am,” I said to the woman with the baby and small boy, “but could you call your daughter off, please?”

“Quit bothering the girl, Cee Cee,” said the woman, without so much as glancing toward us. “Stop it, Jay Cee,” she said, jerking irritably at the boy's suspenders. “Stop that right now. I mean it.”

I gave up hope of deliverance from that direction and began looking around for another seat. The waiting room was filling up as the time to board approached, and there were few left. I did see one almost over into the next gate area. I stood up, happy to give the child the opportunity to torment someone else.

A man in a New York state trooper's uniform walked up to the desk by the gate entrance and began to speak with the agent stationed there.

I sat down again.

I buried my nose in my magazine. Various grinning airbrushed faces stared up at me from its pages. One star had been caught off guard and was grimacing hideously into the camera.
DOES SHE NEED MORE WORK DONE? YOU BE THE JUDGE!
shrieked the headline. Maybe she did need more “work” done, but what she really needed, I realized in a rush of actual, real empathy, was not to be followed around by cameras. I wondered how the photographer would look if somebody shone a bright light in his eyes as he was climbing out of a limo.
Stardom sucks,
I thought, and patted myself on the back for this Mother Teresa–like thought.

The trooper and the gate agent were surveying the crowd, the airline employee shrugging helplessly. She gestured at the entrance to the passenger boarding bridge.

Oho. They
were
looking for somebody, then, and she was suggesting that they'd catch the person as they presented their boarding pass. It was lucky I hadn't smarted off to this woman, like I had to the ticket agent, or she'd have remembered me for sure.

On the other hand, there was no reason to think that I was the person they were looking for. I mean, was I some kind of a bank robber or mass murderer who had to be stopped from fleeing the country? I was not. And who knew I was leaving? Brooke did, as she had seen my suitcase in the car's
trunk, and I suppose that Janelle did, if Brooke had managed to pound that information into her teeny-tiny brain. How was either of those two going to tell anybody, much less guess under what name I'd be traveling? They weren't going to, that's how.

So, it wasn't me they were looking for. Still—

My eye fell upon Cee Cee, who was chewing on her boarding pass. Why were children so horrible?

“You know
my
name,” I said, trying hard to sound amiable. “What's yours?”

“Cee Cee,” she said. “Do you have a dog? I do.”

“No, Cee Cee, I don't. Say, I have an idea.” I bared my teeth at her. “Why don't we trade boarding passes? That would be kind of fun, wouldn't it?”

“No,” she said briefly.

“Why not?”

“Because it's mine. It's got my name on it. Lookut.” She poked at it with a fat finger. “It says ‘Cee Cee' right there. You're not me. You're Janelle.”

My temper, never very reliable when dealing with children, began to get the better of me. “Look, kid—”

“Flight eight two fifty-seven is about to begin boarding. Flight eight two fifty-seven nonstop to Richmond, Virginia. Please wait until your boarding group is called,” the gate attendant said over the loudspeaker.

Should I make a break for it? No, the cop would be watching for that.
How about if I sat tight until the plane boarded? He'd
come and ask me if I was whoever it was that he wanted, and I would say no, I was waiting for a different flight, and then he'd say—

“Would a Miss Janelle Johanssen please come up to the desk at gate twelve C and speak with the agent on duty? Miss Janelle Johanssen.”

Okay, it
was
me they wanted.

A relative silence fell over the crowd, although people were standing up and shuffling toward the gate entryway, pushing their carry-ons ahead of themselves. Cee Cee stared at me intently. She was obviously aware that they were calling me, and she was waiting for me to respond.

“Families with small children and infants, and passengers with disabilities, will be boarded first. All families with small children, and passengers with disabilities, please come to the gate entrance.”

Well, thank goodness for small mercies. “Good-bye, Cee Cee,” I said, smiling through gritted teeth. Her mother began collecting their various belongings. The baby began to scream again, and the line of passengers flinched, as though she was aiming an automatic weapon in their direction.

The cop was walking through the crowd, looking from face to face.

“Miss Janelle Johanssen,” he said as he walked along. “Miss Janelle Johanssen, please.”

“Hey, mister,”
piped up my wicked fairy godmother in piercing tones, reaching out to grab his sleeve. “Here she is. This is Janelle here.”

She pointed her magic wand right at me.

“A KANGAROO FARM? YOU'RE JOKING,
right?” I demanded, staring from Brooke to Janelle and back again.

“We were just little kids,” said Janelle. She and Brooke looked at each other and snickered.

When they'd first walked into the day room of the juvenile detention center (they
said
it was a shelter, but they wouldn't let us leave, so let's call a spade a spade, shall we?) the two of them had been all hushed and big-eyed, like they'd expected to witness the listless inhabitants assaulting one another with chainsaws, or injecting themselves with heroin in the stairwells. After a few minutes of non-drama they'd relaxed and started acting more normally.

The “shelter”
was a house in the country a few miles from Albany, a tiny bit scruffy, surrounded by fields and low fences. It looked kind of like a horse farm, only without any horses.
Much
nicer than any accommodations I would have been offered in the same situation in LA, and I'd barely squeaked in by a hair. They offered short-term housing for kids under sixteen who'd run into not-too-serious trouble with the law. Janelle was sixteen, and so everybody was used to thinking of
me
as sixteen, which meant I wouldn't have been eligible. They figured out who I was without much difficulty, though, because my folks had reported me as missing. Even though the authorities had been looking in the wrong part of the country for me, it didn't take long before the descriptions matched up.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Brooke, you're telling me that as a seven-year-old child,
you
wanted to raise kangaroos and slaughter them for meat?”

“No! Not for meat! Eew!” She stared at me like I was some kind of monster. Well, why else would you raise kangaroos? She seemed to realize this, as she gave a little shamefaced laugh. “I don't know. We wanted a farm with lots of kangaroos hopping around, and we swore a blood pact that when we were grown up, we'd really do it. Like Janelle said, we were just little kids. But you remember it, don't you, Janelle?”

“Like yesterday,” she said, holding up her index finger
and smiling at her cousin. “Blood and spit together, they bind you for all eternity.” Brooke smiled back at her and linked her index finger with Janelle's.

I rolled my eyes. A kanga
roo
farm had been my undoing.
That
was why she had gotten so suspicious and decided that I was not who I said I was.
That
was why she had come back home ahead of her parents, snooping around where she had no business.
And
told the new boyfriend, whose father was . . . you guessed it—the state trooper who picked me up at the airport.

Would you believe that those two girls found a sledgehammer and managed to break a tiny little window in the basement and then crawl out of it? It was Brooke's doing, naturally. If it'd been Janelle on her own, she wouldn't have been discovered until the Luttrells went down there for their holiday decorations and found her skeleton propped in the corner festooned with spiderwebs like a sinister Christmas tree. However, unfortunately Brooke
had been
there, and when I had gone to look for the suitcase, I could have seen the smashed glass all over the place if only I had used my eyes. By the time I was back at the airport looking at the departure board, the cops were already there, making inquiries about me.

When they caught up to me, all I had on my person was the ten thousand dollars in my money belt and a few hundred in my wallet. The immediate assumption was,
of course,
that I had stolen the money from somewhere, even though I
told
the trooper that I'd won it fair and square.

“It was the day of the racehorse benefit,” I explained. “I met somebody there—a bookie, I guess he was—and I placed a bet on an outsider at the Breeders' Cup race. Actually, I placed several bets.”

“What were the names of the horses?” the father of Brooke's boyfriend wanted to know.

“I don't remember all of them,” I said, “only the one that paid out really big. Durn Tootin', that was the name of the outsider.”

I was right, of course, and he'd find out soon enough when he checked. I
had
met a bookie that day—or stood next to him, anyway—and I'd heard him talking about the horse, and the upset in the race, resulting in his having to pay out a large sum to a single bettor.

My calm and cheerful manner was beginning to get the trooper down. We stared at each other for a moment in silence. He was actually kind of good-looking, I decided. Maybe Brooke's boyfriend would be too, once he'd gotten some meat on his bones. Of course, it could be that I was more attracted to older men than to adolescent boys. Teenage boys are too self-centered.

“What was the bookie's name?” the nice-looking trooper asked.

I widened my eyes. “I have no idea,” I said. “I'd never made a bet on a horse before. I didn't know how it was
done, but it seemed like it would be fun to try—especially since I'd been so involved in this charity for retired racehorses.”

“So you handed over a wad of money to a strange man at a public event. Precisely how much did you wager, by the way?”

“Seventy-five dollars,” I replied promptly, having heard this piece of information as well. “It wasn't as simple as that, though. I had to pick several horses to win or place—I don't remember exactly. It was complicated. But I was lucky.” I smiled at him with girlish candor. “I'm kind of a risk-taker by nature, I guess, but I'm lucky, too.”

“And where did the seventy-five dollars come from?”

“Oh, it was mine. My parents gave me some traveling cash.”

He went on questioning me, but there was no proof that my story wasn't true. I was banking on my belief that Uncle Karl wouldn't want either Aunt Antonia
or
the IRS to know how much money he'd been betting in his poker games, and he would therefore not demand it back. So far, so good; I hadn't heard a peep out of him about his money.

That
wasn't surprising, but the odd thing was, nobody had said anything about the suitcase full of money, jewelry, and confidential documents. The other odd thing was that Brooke and Janelle had shown up here at the
shelter to see me. They didn't seem that mad either. Oh, Janelle was a bit frosty, but not Brooke. They weren't much banged up, not from the fall down the stairs or from climbing out of the basement window. So I had been right: neither had suffered real damage as a result of my actions. Just a little friendly roughhousing—nothing to make a fuss over.

Brooke gave Janelle a significant look.

“Oh, right,” Janelle said. She stood up. “Well, Morgan, it's been weird. I do want you to know that, whatever Brooke thinks,
I
think you're a real bad seed. So don't bother trying to contact me in the future. I know your name, I know what you look like, I know what your voice on the phone sounds like, and I know where your parents live. No calls, texts, e-mails, or in-person contact, 'kay? So, bye.”

I smiled and inclined my head, graciously acknowledging her request. She was right; there was nothing more to be gained from pursuing
that
acquaintance. She picked up her purse and glared at me, annoyed that I remained cool and in control. A staff member walking through the room mistakenly decided to add a note of chummy cheer to the proceedings.

“Wow,” gushed the female warder, “you three girls could be triplets—blond hair, blue eyes, everything. Are you sisters?”

“No, we're cousins,” Brooke corrected her. Then she blushed. “I mean . . .”

Janelle pointed at Brooke. “
We're
cousins. That one”—she pointed at me—“is our evil twin.”

“Janelle!”

“Hey, you're welcome to your opinion, Brooke. That's mine. I'll see you outside in a minute.”

“Good-bye, Janelle,” I said, my voice pleasant, even though I was a bit annoyed that the staff member had failed to notice that the two real cousins outweighed me by twenty-five pounds apiece,
at least.

I turned to look at Brooke. She was looking thoughtful, with a deep crease forming between her eyebrows. If she didn't watch out, one of these days that crease wasn't going to go away. I waited to hear whatever it was she wanted to say to me in private.