Promises I Made (17 page)

I was still shaking when I got to Scotty and Marcus's house. I set my bag on the bench by the front door and followed the sound of Scotty's music playing in the living room. He was lying on the sofa, reading, when I came in.

“You're home! I was wonder—” He stopped talking and sat up, setting his book aside. “What's wrong?”

I dropped onto the other end of the couch. I thought I'd feel safe once I was home, but it was like all the fear I'd bottled up on the street had finally been let loose, and I just started shaking harder. Renee was still fresh in my mind, but I hadn't had time to process seeing her, to figure out what it meant for Parker and me. I started with the other stuff instead.

“There are flyers . . . ,” I tried to explain.

Scotty shook his head. “What are you saying, Grace?”

I swallowed hard, holding my hands together in my lap,
trying to keep them still. “I was walking home from the bus stop and saw flyers with my picture on them.”

“What kind of flyers?” Marcus's voice came from the doorway, and he stepped into the room and sat on one of the chairs opposite the sofa.

“They're calling me a ‘person of interest,'” I said. “Asking people to contact Detective Fletcher if they see me on the peninsula.”

Marcus leaned forward. “What did the pictures look like? When were they taken?”

I described the photographs to him, careful to be honest about the second one, about how much it would look like me without makeup. Glossing over the truth wouldn't do us any favors in the long run.

Marcus and Scotty exchanged a glance. It was only a split second, but the worry was evident in their eyes before they recovered, composing their faces into matching masks of calm.

“This doesn't have to be a big deal,” Marcus said. “You don't leave the house much anyway, and you can always color your hair a different color.”

“Exactly,” Scotty agreed. “But no more walking around the peninsula. I'll drive you. No one will be able to identify you in the passenger seat of a car.”

I stood, pacing the floor, my earlier fear turning to a kind of manic agitation that made me feel like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. “But it means he's close,” I said. “Fletcher knows I'm here, and now he's sniffing me out. It's only a matter of time before he finds me.”

Scotty rose from the couch and put a hand on my shoulder. He looked into my eyes. “That's not true. He's covering his bases, that's all. It's what any cop would do.”

“Castillo didn't do it.”

“That's because Castillo wants to help you. Isn't that what you said?” Marcus asked.

“I guess.”

Marcus nodded. “This isn't even a close call. Not by my standards. Fletcher's looking for you, yes, but right now all he has is a possible sighting by someone on the peninsula. If they knew for sure you were here, they'd be doing a lot more than putting up flyers.”

“Marcus is right,” Scotty said. “And I haven't seen an increase in police presence. They're reaching.”

I knew they were downplaying the danger to keep me calm, but it didn't work. I felt Fletcher out there, a hunter on the trail of his prey. He couldn't see me yet. But he knew he was close. Still, there was nothing else to say about it. I'd just have to find Cormac before Fletcher found me. It was the only thing I could do.

I sighed. “I guess you're right. I'm sorry I freaked out a little.”

Scotty put an arm around me. “It's completely understandable. But try not to worry. We're almost there.”

“And on the plus side,” Marcus said, “Scotty bought some of that ice cream you like, the one with the cherries and the chocolate?”

I tried to smile. “I feel better already.”

I felt a little guilty as we headed to the kitchen. I don't know why I hadn't yet said anything about Renee—common sense dictated that my loyalty lay with Marcus and Scotty now. But protecting Renee was habit, and I was starting to wonder if there would ever be a time when I could be loyal to only myself.

A few days later, I drove with Scotty to pick up pizza from the Town Center. I'd wanted to stay home, afraid to be seen at the one place on the peninsula where everyone congregated, but Scotty had handed me a baseball cap and insisted it would be good for me to get out, even if I did have to stay in the car while he ran in for the pizza.

I knew he was right. However much I tried to seem unaffected, Fletcher was never far from my mind. If a car door slammed outside, I hurried to peer though the curtains, convinced the detective was on his way up the walkway to question Marcus and Scotty. If it was too quiet, I was sure the police were getting ready to raid the house. In my dreams I was always running, chased through woods, on the beach, through the winding streets of Playa Hermosa. I woke up breathing fast and heavy, the feel of Fletcher's hand clamped
around my arm as real as if he was right there in the guest room. I'd even called Detective Castillo, hoping for something concrete to ease my mind, but he'd only been able to tell me what we already suspected: Castillo was taking the sighting of me seriously, canvassing the peninsula and putting the word out that I was wanted by the police.

“If you've got anything up your sleeve, now would be a good time to pull it out,” Detective Castillo had said, as if I was holding back for some kind of dramatic reveal when the truth was, we just didn't have anything on Cormac's whereabouts.

Scotty and I talked about the security footage as we drove to the Town Center. I'd been reviewing it for a week, and I still hadn't seen Cormac. There was the one close call in the used-car lot, but other than that, nothing. I still had a few tapes Scotty had gotten from businesses in the area where Marcus thought we were most likely to find Cormac. After that, I'd have to move on to the traffic surveillance tapes, and I was a lot less optimistic about finding Cormac on those. I wasn't even sure he had a car, and if he did, spotting him while he was doing fifty miles an hour or stopped for a few seconds at a red light seemed unlikely. Marcus was quietly working his own leads, but so far he had nothing to say about them. I figured that probably meant he didn't have anything solid either.

“Don't worry,” Scotty said, as if he'd read my mind. He pulled into the parking lot at the Town Center. “Marcus keeps things close to the vest until he's sure he has
something. The fact that he hasn't said anything doesn't mean he isn't close.”

“I hope you're right,” I said. We only had a little over two weeks until Parker's trial date, and I was starting to feel the ticking clock under both of us. If we didn't find some kind of information to help him, he'd go to jail and I'd be back on my own.

“I'm always right. Just ask Marcus.” He winked and reached for the door. “You okay here while I go in?”

I nodded. “I'm good.”

He shut the door and hurried toward Joey's Real New York Pizza (Selena had once told me Joey was from New Jersey). I turned around in my seat, scanning the shopping center from the safety of the tinted rear window. It was quiet for a Friday night, and I was turning back around when a black limo eased into the parking lot. I twisted farther in my seat to get a better view. Playa Hermosa was home to some of the wealthiest people in Southern California, but a limo at the Town Center was still an anomaly.

The limo came to a stop in front of Mike's. A second later the driver hopped out and hurried to one of the rear doors. He opened it, and a gown-clad woman stepped out of the back. No, not a woman.

Rachel Mercer.

I hardly recognized her with her hair piled in curls on top of her head, her makeup dark and smoky. She was wearing a long violet gown that hugged every long, lean curve, one slender leg emerging from a slit that went halfway up
her thigh. She turned, laughing at something someone said behind her, and a moment later Logan emerged from the limo.

My breath caught at the sight of him, looking even more handsome than I remembered in a simple black tux. The flower on his lapel was a deep lilac, leaving no doubt who was his date.

And then I understood: it was prom night. Olivia and Harper had tried to get me to join the committee last fall, but the Fairchild job had been nearing its close, the end of my time with Logan sitting like a lead weight on my chest. I didn't think I'd be in Playa Hermosa all these months later for prom night.

And I wasn't, I reminded myself. Not really. I was just a ghost.

I watched the others get out of the car—Selena wearing a dark green dress, David close at her side. Olivia in short red silk. Harper in white. And all the guys in tuxes, looking older than when I'd last seen them. I wondered what they were doing as they headed into Mike's—stopping for cheese fries on their way to the dance? They disappeared into the burger joint and I turned back around in my seat, watching traffic pass on the main road in front of me. Seeing everyone together, having fun and laughing and heading to prom, should have made me sad. Actually, if I was a good person, it should have made me happy. They deserved this night, especially Selena and Logan.

But I didn't feel either of those things. Instead, a surge
of anger rushed my body like the water at high tide. I was unaccountably mad at them. All of them. They were doing a normal thing, having fun, while I hid in Scotty's car, afraid even to go in to get the pizza. My mind knew it was irrational. They hadn't done anything wrong. I was in this position because of the things I had done. But telling myself that didn't help, and I still felt like a little kid, watching everyone else eat ice cream on the swings while I sat alone in the shadows.

I felt the tightening in my chest, the impending panic attack like an incoming missile. I forced myself to breathe slowly like Scotty had taught me, to blot out everything else as I focused only on my breath, making its way in and out of my nose. By the time Scotty came back, the vise around my chest had loosened its grip, my earlier rage dissipating in a more painful swell of melancholy.

“Apparently, sausage is a vegetable in New York,” Scotty said as he handed me the pizza across the center console. “I didn't want to wait for them to make a new one. We can just pick it off.”

I took the pizza. “That's fine.” I was only vaguely aware that my voice was wooden.

He got in the car and shut the door. “What's wrong?”

I shook my head, and just then, something caught Scotty's eye in the rearview mirror. He turned around in his seat. “Oh . . . Oh, Grace. I'm so sorry.”

I chewed my lip as the limo pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. “It's okay,” I said. “It's not like I ever thought I'd be able to go.”

“I know,” he said, “but seeing it is still harder than imagining it.”

I nodded.

He took a deep breath. “You've missed out on a lot, but now you're taking back your life, one step at a time. You can have all of that, honey: dances and boyfriends and college and . . . well, anything. But the first step is getting Cormac.”

I turned to him. “What if Fletcher finds me first?” I asked. “What if I . . . go to jail?” I had to beat back my panic at the thought.

“We won't let that happen,” Scotty said. “We're going to get Cormac, and we're going to get the best deal we can for you and Parker so you can get the clean slate you deserve. But right now, you have to focus on what's in front of you. Tune out everything else, and just focus on the next thing.”

“Trying to find Cormac.”

“Exactly,” he said.

I nodded, my anger and sadness hardening into resolve. “I can do that.”

He turned on the car. “Of course you can. But not on an empty stomach.”

Two days later I was sitting in the hammock out back with my laptop, looking at the last of the security footage from Seattle. It was a little awkward, getting settled into the swinging contraption while holding my computer, but my brain was fuzzy from all the grainy images I'd reviewed over the past week or so. I'd started to get lazy, tuning out the footage for seconds at a time while I thought about Parker, Logan, Renee. A change of scenery had made all the difference.

I pressed Pause on the video file Scotty had sent me and looked up into the trees, scanning for the parrots. A new one had shown up a couple of days ago. Unlike the regulars, this one was almost entirely blue, with just a little bit of orange under its neck and on its breast. The others didn't know what to do with it. Scotty's yellow-eyed enemy flew around the newcomer squawking, trying to keep it from the
bird feeders, but the others seemed more curious than anything else. I couldn't help wondering if it would stick it out and stay or get fed up and leave. There were lots of trees in Playa Hermosa. Lots of places it could go.

A couple of minutes later I saw it approaching the feeder nearest the deck. It landed on a nearby tree first, looking around like it was trying to see if the coast was clear. The other birds were nowhere in sight, and it cautiously flew to the feeder and took some seed before flying quickly to another branch. A second later, something flashed red in the trees surrounding the feeder, and I saw that the other parrots
were
there—well, two of them, at least. The yellow-eyed bird was missing, but the other two just watched as the newcomer ate his stolen seed. I wondered if it was a betrayal of some kind of bird code, letting the blue bird eat unaccosted from the feeders while their obvious leader was away.

Scotty stepped out onto the deck, and the parrots disappeared in a flutter of wings and displaced branches. “You ready for lunch, Grace?” he called across the lawn.

“Sure. Be right in!”

The back door closed and I hit Play on the video, using my impending lunch break as an incentive to get through five more minutes of footage. The video was from a gas station in Tacoma, a city just south of Seattle. I'd been surprised when Scotty had sent it to me, but he just said that Marcus knew what he was doing, and if he was looking in Tacoma, there was a reason.

I'd already looked at the outdoor footage. It hadn't been
much help: cars pulled up to the pump; people got out, got their gas, and left. The gas station had seen better days. Its pavement was rutted with potholes, and two of the pumps had signs on them that must have meant they were out of order, because no one used them. Every now and then someone paid with a credit card and then punched angrily at the keypad before stalking toward the minimart that was part of the station. I figured receipts were hit-and-miss at the pump, which meant going inside to get one.

Now I was reviewing the indoor footage, which was trained outward from the register. I'd watched as a parade of customers had paid for gas, engaged in both angry and pleasant conversation with the small man behind the counter, bought packs of gum, Slim Jims, soda, Twinkies. It was funny the things you noticed without sound as a backdrop. More than one woman started to pay for her gas and then added a pack of Skittles or a packaged muffin, her posture guilty, sheepish, even on the security footage. People agonized over which lottery tickets to buy, sometimes leaving the store only to return a few minutes later for more, and lots of customers dug for exact change, seemingly oblivious to the person behind them, impatiently rolling their eyes.

I was getting ready to hit Pause again when an older man approached the register. He was balding, his hair entirely gone on top, a small fringe surrounding it like trees around a clearing. He had glasses, but they didn't seem to fit his face, and his nose looked a little too large for the rest of his features. He was wearing a stretched out T-shirt instead of
the oversize suit, but I was sure it was the man from the used-car lot. He said something to the cashier, and the man pulled a carton of cigarettes from a rack behind him. While he pushed buttons on the register, the balding man reached up and touched the back of his head. For a split second, his scalp seemed to tilt, the hair ringing his bald spot slightly off center in the moment before he made another adjustment and set everything right.

It
was
a prosthetic. And maybe the nose, too.

I hit Pause and expanded the window, bringing the computer closer to my face.

But I already knew. I knew it from the determined set of the man's jaw, the arrogant line of his spine. He was trying to look down and out, like a lot of the people who stopped at the run-down little gas station. But he couldn't hide his sense of superiority. I felt it even through my computer, just like I'd felt it when I first saw him on the security footage from the used-car lot in Seattle. In spite of the lengths he'd gone to disguise himself, there was no doubt in my mind that my instincts had been right the first time.

It was Cormac.