The Retribution of Mara Dyer (21 page)

“And knows that we’re here.”

“Which means we have to leave,” Stella said. “Like, yesterday.”

“But whoever it was, whoever left it, they told you to believe me. And they were right.”

“But this person knows what’s wrong with us, and why wouldn’t they just say something if they wanted to help?”

My mind seized on the image of the man I knew as Abel Lukumi. If Noah had been there, he would have said that I was grasping at coincidences and trying to force them into facts. But Noah wasn’t there. It was just me, and Stella, and Jamie, and a trail of breadcrumbs that led to no one and nothing but the priest.

So I told them. About the botanica in Little Havana, where he had seen me, recognized me, and tried to kick me out before giving me some weird concoction to drink that had made me finally remember what I had done to Rachel and Claire. I told them about trying to find him again, after I’d killed everything in the insect house at the Miami zoo. I explained how it had been his face I’d seen in the hospital after Jude had slit my wrists, him on the platform as the train had pulled out of DC. By the time I’d finished, Jamie had backed up onto the bed, his head in his hands.

“So, what you’re telling me is”—he held out his hand—“some Santeria voodoo guy from south Florida followed you—followed
us
—all the way to DC, and he knows we’re in New York, and he knows where we are, but won’t show himself?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why, though? What would he stand to gain?”

I remembered words that had once belonged to Noah, but that now belonged to me. “You never know what a person stands to gain or lose by anything.”

“I don’t get it, though,” Stella said. “Why would he just leave the bag? If he wants to help us, then he should just fucking help us.”

“Maybe he can’t,” Jamie said.

“Or maybe he doesn’t want to,” I said, the thought forming as the words left my mouth. “Maybe he’s . . . responsible for it.”

“Responsible how?” Jamie asked.

“Responsible like, maybe he’s the one behind it. All of it,” I said. “If this—if
we’re
some kind of experiment or whatever, him following us could be part of it. Watching what we do, how we react, what happens to us when we
do
react.” I thought of the things we had seen in Horizons, the things Kells had said to us. “Maybe he’s the one—maybe he’s the one who funded Dr. Kells.”

“But then why bring us the bag? Why would he want to help get those—whatever they were—out of you?” Stella asked.

“Maybe she put them in without permission,” Jamie suggested. “Speaking of which.” He looked at me. “Do you think the rest of us have them too?”

“I don’t feel any different,” Stella said. “You?”

Jamie swallowed. “I don’t really know what ‘different’ means anymore. I woke up one day on the island and couldn’t walk, just like you,” he said, staring at me. “But then why aren’t I sick?”

“You are sick,” Stella said carefully. “But you’re a year younger than us. Maybe you’re just in the first stage of whatever’s happening . . .”

I remembered the words written on the whiteboard when I’d first woken up in Horizons.

J. Roth, manifesting.

“Manifestation,” I said out loud. “That list, remember it? It said Stella and Noah, they’ve manifested already. Kells wrote that, in her notes.”

“What does that even mean, though?” Jamie asked.

“It means that you’re going to get sicker,” Stella said. “When it was happening to me—I got worse before I got better.”

“What, you mean when you were—”

“Manifesting, or whatever. The voices, they weren’t always loud. In the beginning I could kind of ignore them. Sometimes I even listened to them,” she said quietly. “I heard things I shouldn’t have, and sometimes I—did things,” she said. “I
used what I knew, even though part of me knew it was wrong. I cheated on a test. This girl who was bullying me, I exposed her secrets to everyone. And each time I did something, the voices got louder. Stronger. There were more of them. It got so I couldn’t tell which thoughts were mine and which belonged to someone else. I felt like I was going crazy. I
was
going crazy.” She rounded on Jamie. “Using your ability—it’s not free, even if it seems that way now. It’s working pretty nicely for you right now, and for that you’re lucky—but it’s going to eventually bite you in the ass.”

Jamie seemingly had no reaction to this.

“And if there is something inside of you,” Stella went on, “like whatever was inside Mara? It’s going to activate at some point, just like it did with her, and you’re going to go through the same shit.”

Jamie rolled his eyes, but he was unsettled. I could tell. “So fine,” he said. “What do we do now?”

I interrupted the both of them. “I almost died tonight,” I said. “Tomorrow we’re going to find out who almost killed me.”

35

I
T WAS ELEVEN-ISH WHEN WE
finally dragged ourselves out of bed the next morning. I could walk on my own, but it hurt. A lot. So I was slow. But our only real lead was the tax stuff Stella had taken from Kells’s office with the address of the accountant on them, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Probably.

The cab burped us up in the bowels of Midtown. The three of us stared up at a squat, ugly building sandwiched between a Laundromat and a FedEx, a building that bore the address where Ira Ginsberg, CPA, purportedly filed taxes for evil corporations such as Horizons LLC.

“So, what’s the plan exactly?” Stella asked.

“We’re going to ask him who he works for,” I said.

Stella scratched her nose. “And what if he doesn’t just . . . volunteer that information?”

“Then Jamie will encourage him to volunteer it.” And if that failed, I would encourage him myself. I felt strangely well and strangely confident. Whatever Dr. Kells had tried to do to me, she had failed. I was still here, and those things that had been inside me, whatever they were, were gone. We had the address of the man who’d made it possible for her to do what she’d done. We were getting closer to everything. Closer to Noah. I could feel it.

Jamie cleared his throat. “Shall we?”

We shall. A doorman handed us visitors’  badges, which we slapped on (my chest, Stella’s hip, Jamie’s left ass cheek). Then we rode the elevator up to the stated suite. The waiting area looked like a doctor’s office, complete with a gum-chewing, ponytailed receptionist. Stella looked at Jamie and gestured at Chewy.

“You owe me so much, I can’t even count how much you owe me,” he muttered.

“Names?” the receptionist asked us.

“Jesus,” Jamie answered.

“Mary,” said Stella.

“Satan,” I said as I walked past her and pushed open the door to Ira Ginsberg’s office.

The room was painfully unremarkable, and so was Ira. He
had a slightly doughy face that emerged from the collar of his slightly too tight dress shirt and tie. He rose the instant we walked in, followed by the receptionist.

“It’s all right, Jeanine,” he said. “Tell my client on line one that I’ll have to call him back.”

“Yes, Mr. Ginsberg,” she said, glancing at us on her way out.

“How can I help you?” Mr. Ginsberg said to us.

Jamie slid into a seat opposite his desk. “I’m so glad you asked.” He handed Mr. Ginsberg the tax thing Stella had stolen from Kells’s office. “Who hired you to prepare this?”

“I’m afraid I can’t divulge client information, Mr. . . .”

“Jesus,” Jamie said. I snorted.

“Mr. Jesus,” Ira said, without humor.

Jamie nodded thoughtfully. “I understand. I’ll rephrase. Who hired you to prepare this?” This time when Jamie spoke, his voice was sharp and compelling, and Mr. Ginsberg looked at the paper for only a second before answering. The interrogation had begun.

“Horizons LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary; a representative of its parent company contacted me and asked if I could incorporate them in New York and handle their finances. Why?”

“Do you know what they do?”

“No,” Mr. Ginsberg said cheerfully.

“Someone from the company, Horizons, must have had to sign these, right?”

“I believe there was an appointed agent of record, yes.”

“Who?”

Mr. Ginsberg rubbed his chin. “I don’t recall the name. It was very generic.”

“But it’s on the documents you prepared for them?”

“Indeed.”

“Then give us the documents,” Jamie said, his voice cutting the air like glass.

“Oh, I would, I would, except I don’t have them. Everything that relates to EIC—the parent company—is kept in the archives, not in the office.”

“The archives?”

“A repository of documents relating to the corporation and its subsidiaries. But the files are all coded. You’re going to have a hell of a time finding anything in there without the access key.”

Jamie gave Mr. Ginsberg a hard look with a raised eyebrow. “Then give us the access key.”

Mr. Ginsberg’s eyes looked unfocused. “I can’t. I no longer have it.”

I locked eyes with Stella.

“What did you do with it?” Jamie asked him.

“Those particular documents were requested just a few days ago, along with the key. I was instructed to send the key to a box at New York University.”

“By whom?” Jamie asked.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Ginsberg said. “You have to understand, these are the corporation’s operating procedures. One authorized person provides the access
code
to me, and I provide him or her with the access
key
, to facilitate the location of documents in the archives. Very useful for litigation.”

Jamie leaned forward in the chair. “Explain?”

“Without the access key the corporation could provide discovery and bury its opponents in paper, and they would have no clue what any of it meant,” Mr. Ginsberg said with a sly smile. “It would take years to sort it all out, and they’d have to pay their lawyers by the hour while they did.”

I couldn’t accept that we’d come all this way and been through everything we’d been through to face yet another dead end. “Tell us who you sent the documents to, then,” I said, my patience dwindling. “And give us the address for the archives.”

Mr. Ginsberg acted like he hadn’t heard me. Jamie repeated my questions.

Mr. Ginsberg sighed. “There was no name to go with the address at New York University, only a department.

“Which one?” Jamie asked.

“Comparative Literature.”

I was already walking out the door.

36

W
E LEFT THE OFFICE WITH
two addresses in hand—one, the archives; the other, the Comparative Literature Department at New York University.

“So where to?” Jamie asked as we stood outside. “Archives first, right?” he asked, at the same time Stella said, “NYU first.”

She shook her head. “If we figure out who received the access key at the university, that could give us at least a name to go on more quickly than sifting through millions of pages of possibly crap documents.”

“But there’s no name with that address,” Jamie said. “Whoever gave the code to Ginsberg could have just had him mail
the key there to pick it up, and I just want to find out something,
anything
, already, even if all we find are crap documents in a mammoth warehouse somewhere. What say you, M?”

“Actually, I’m with Stella.” I shrugged. “NYU is going to be easier, simpler, than finding our needle in the archives haystack.”

Jamie held up his hands in defeat, and the three of us took a train to the Village. Jamie had to persuade the security guard to let the three of us in without ID. Then we headed to the floor where literatures were compared, and asked the blank-stared intern at the front desk where and how the incoming mail was routed. She pointed us to a milk crate piled high with envelopes.

“I distribute mail to the professors during their office hours. Everything without a professor’s name goes to the head of the department, Peter McCarthy.”

Stella and I raised our eyebrows. “And where is Professor McCarthy’s office?”

“Last door on the left.”

When we reached it, it was locked.

“Of course it’s locked,” Stella said after she’d tried it. “Of course.”

“Wait,” Jamie said, and withdrew something from his pocket. He stuck what looked like a bobby pin into the keyhole and jiggled it around purposefully. We practically held our breath until we heard the mechanism click.

“After you,” he said, pushing the door open. I went in first.

Rows of overflowing bookcases lined the room, littered with papers and notebooks and random objects on every available surface, and many unavailable ones too. A damp-looking plant hung from a planter attached to the ceiling. Jamie ducked beneath it and began exploring.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” he asked.

“The access key, I guess,” Stella said, carefully lifting up some papers on the desk.

Jamie squinted. “You realize that could be a code, not an actual key?”

I made a beeline for a half-buried inbox perched precariously on a shelf, and started looking through his mail. “Ginsberg said he’d sent the access code here, though. Which means he mailed it.” I lifted an armful of envelopes and doled them out to Jamie and Stella. “Happy hunting.”

“I’m pretty sure opening someone else’s mail is a crime,” Stella said.

“I’m pretty sure so is accessory to murder,” Jamie said. “And yet here we are.” He held up a manila envelope and raised his eyebrows. “No return address . . .”

“Open it,” I told him.

He carefully slid a finger beneath the flap and peeked inside, then withdrew a thick, glossy IKEA catalogue.

Next. The three of us worked in silence. I flipped through my pile, looking out for anything with Ginsberg’s name on it, or even just an address. But nothing stood out.

“This can’t be another dead end,” Stella groaned.

I knew how she felt. Frustration and anger bubbled up inside me, and I found myself abandoning the pile of hastily-checked-through mail and dropping to the floor to sort through the papers, notebooks, and file folders stacked up in piles all over the cramped, stuffy office. Any hope I’d originally had was thinning out by the second. The archives would be a thousand times worse than this. How could we find what we were looking for if we didn’t even know where to look?