The Third Twin (30 page)

“No. But who else would have pulled into an empty parking lot in the middle of the night?”

“All you have is a partial license plate and your word that this truck was in the parking lot that night,” I say, anticipating Ms. Alvarez’s reaction. “Unless you have a picture of him actually killing Casey, this isn’t going to do us much good.” Rubi looks at the piece of paper again, the confident look slipping from her face.

“All we know is that the killer is someone who owns a hoodie and a black truck.” I squeeze my eyes shut. “Not exactly narrowing the suspect pool.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Zane says, taking another look at the paper. “I mean, at least we could get Ms. Alvarez to run the plate against black trucks in the area. It’s a start.”

“It’s a shitty start,” I say. “All it proves is that there was someone in the parking lot around the same time.” I want what Rubi is saying to be true, but I just don’t know how to prove it.

“Why should we believe anything you say?” Ava says to Rubi. “This is … this is insane!”

“Do you have any better suggestions?” Rubi asks. It’s almost a taunt. She makes a sweeping motion with her arm. “Anything else that would explain what I’m doing here?”

I don’t say a word. It feels like the world is closing in on me, fast.

“I’ll go,” Ava says, grabbing the paper from Rubi. “I’ll take it to the lawyer.”

I take a step toward her, already feeling guilty for suspecting her. “No, let me. This is my mess.”

“You can’t go in there,” Ava says. “Every cop within fifty miles is looking for you. What if someone sees you? Or worse, what if Ms. Alvarez is under some kind of obligation to turn you in?”

“You look just like me,” I remind her. “What’s to stop them from arresting you instead?”

Ava waves her hands at me. “My fingerprints are different, and they fingerprinted me last night,” she says. “If they do take me in, it won’t take them long to figure out it’s me and not you. But I don’t think it’ll get that far.”

I’m starting to say something more, when I catch Zane’s eye and the almost imperceptible shake of his head. I take a deep breath and let it go. “I’ll wait out here, but the minute I see one flashing light on a cop car, I’m coming in to get you.”

“I’m coming too,” Rubi says, taking a few steps toward the building. “It’s my evidence.”

Ava whirls on her, more in command of the situation than I’ve ever seen her. “And she’s
my
sister. You stay.”

Zane puts a hand out to stop Rubi. “Let her go. No sense muddying up the water right now. Giving you up to the lawyer is only going to put a bigger target on everyone’s head.” Rubi hesitates, and I can see her thinking about it. “Zane’s right. Instead of just being after me, they’ll want all of us,” I tell her.

“Okay,” Rubi says. “But you’ve got to make her believe you. Tell her that they need to find this guy.” She looks down at her hands. “I should have done this a long time ago. I just … I just didn’t think this many people would get hurt.”

“I got this,” Ava says, straightening her back and walking toward the steps.

“I don’t like being out here,” I say, looking around at the open parking lot. “Can we wait for Ava in the van?”

“Let’s go,” Zane says, putting one hand protectively around my waist. Once we reach the van, he slides the door open, but I put a hand out to stop Rubi. “No way.” I turn to Zane. “I don’t want her in there.”

Zane pauses. “Your suspect list gets longer by the minute. Why would she come here if she had something to do with the killings?”

Rubi smiles at Zane but says nothing.

I look away from her—there’s something disturbing about seeing my face on someone who isn’t Ava. “You’ve already admitted that you’re a stalker. So now I’m supposed to invite you into a conveniently enclosed space?”

Rubi drops her bag to the ground and holds her arms out wide. “Frisk me,” she says. “Go ahead, pat me down. Check my bag—whatever you want.”

I know she’s bluffing, so I call her on it and quickly run my hands over her pockets while Zane picks the white bag up off the ground.

“There’s nothing in here,” Zane says, handing it to me.

“Okay,” I say, pointing to the open door. “But I’m watching you.”

“If this is the way you treat family …” She peers into the van and then jumps back. “Holy shit! What is that?”

I look in and see Bettina in the corner. I’d forgotten
about her. “She’s good at keeping secrets,” I say. “And she doesn’t track people like they’re the wounded antelope on the Serengeti.”

Rubi sighs and climbs in. “It wasn’t like that,” she says, settling against the back wall of the van.

“So what was it like, then?” I say, leaning against the back of the front seat. It’s not that I don’t want to sit near Rubi but that I want to get up the courage to look at her. I stare at her face and try to pick out the differences. They’re there, just like there are differences between me and Ava, but it’s almost impossible to put into words. We must have remembered Rubi deep down somewhere in our baby brains—even six-month-old babies must have some sense of the world—and made up Alicia not out of our imaginations but out of our half-formed memories.

Rubi shrugs. “I’d heard them talk about Raquel and Robin before, but I didn’t know who they meant, and they always stopped talking when I came into the room.”

“Raquel and Robin?” Zane asks from the driver’s seat.

“Raquel and Robin. Alexa and Ava.”

Robin. I roll the name around in my mind. I know without asking that my name was Robin.

“Mama’s going to be pissed that the secret’s out now. But I think she knew you’d find out someday.”

“So, what—they just told you all about us?”

“No,” Rubi says. “Like I said, I followed Cecilia to work one day. You weren’t home, but there were pictures on the walls and stuff. They had to tell me then.”

“Did you get that from my room?” I ask, pointing to the diamond
A
pendant around her neck. The same one I thought I’d lost and Dad replaced.

She lifts it up as if seeing it for the first time. “Yeah. I told myself I was just borrowing it. I was going to put it back, I swear. I just wondered what it would feel like to be one of the chosen twins.”

Dad always said that we were chosen just for him, but until now I never really thought about it much. I can’t imagine growing up alone and then finding out I had two sisters somewhere else. I almost feel sorry for her.

Rubi reaches behind her neck. “You can have it back.”

“I don’t want it,” I say quickly, remembering the feeling that I got dropping mine out Zane’s car window. “Alicia’s gone.”

Rubi nods knowingly. “I knew she would be sometime. She was fun, though.”

“So you really pretended to be Alicia?” Zane asks.

Rubi hesitates. “A few times. Some guy at a party thought I was Alicia, and I figured it might be fun to play along, so I did.” She looks down at her fingernails. “Made me feel like I was one of you. At least for a little while.”

“So you just
became
Alicia? Told people that was your name?” I look at her hard. “Made appointments as her?”

Rubi looks surprised I figured that out. “Not all the time. But it was nice when people would call me Alicia. Made it feel more real.”

“How long have you been following them around?” Zane
asks. I’ve been so involved in the conversation, I almost forgot he was there.

“I don’t know. A while, I guess. To get it right I watched how Alicia acted and dressed—”

“The sunflower seeds!” I say suddenly. “That’s why the DNA on them came back as mine. Ours. You were sitting outside Ava’s room watching us, weren’t you?”

Rubi bites the inside of her cheek, something I’ve seen Ava do a million times. “Look, I know it sounds creepy, but … I just really wanted to be part of it, you know?”

I’m relieved and sad at the same time. “I thought some guy was stalking us. You scared the crap out of me.”

“Good,” she says, suddenly serious. “Because someone is stalking you. Whoever’s in that black truck killed Casey, Dylan, and Eli, I’m sure of it.”

I look out the window at the office door, but there’s no movement. Each second that ticks by makes my nerves feel tighter. “But why? I mean, Casey was an ass and Dylan cheated on Ava, but Eli didn’t do anything.” If anything, I lied to him—it should have been me who ended up dead.

“I don’t know,” she says. “All I know is that anyone either of you goes out with ends up dead.”

Zane’s phone suddenly buzzes, breaking the tension that’s settled over us. “It’s Ava,” he says, flipping it to speaker. “Hello?”

“Get out of here,” she says, her voice panicked and her breathing heavy. “Get in the van and get out of the parking lot as fast as you can. There’s a warrant out for me now too, and I’m pretty sure the cops are on the way.”

“Ms. Alvarez would never turn you in!” I say. “She’s my lawyer.”

“She didn’t,” Ava says. I can hear a door shut behind her. “But she got a call while I was in the office. Lexi—they found traces of Dylan’s blood on your backpack. There isn’t anything she can do.”

As she speaks, I can hear the shrill wail of a siren in the distance. I look out the window and see her on the steps of the building. There’s no time even to process this information. “Get in your car!” I tell her. “You have time.”

“They’ll follow me.”

“Wait there,” Zane says, revving the engine. She’s only thirty feet away, but she’s not moving fast enough. He swings the van out of the parking space and barely slows enough for her to jump in the open side door.

“Get down on the floor, all of you,” he says.

“Once I shut the door, Zane slows down to the speed limit as he pulls onto the street. Ava curls into a ball, and I wrap my arm around her, feeling the pounding of her heart against my body, while Rubi sits on the other side of the van, watching us intently.

We’re already camouflaged in traffic and waiting in a long line of cars at the stoplight by the time the parade of police cars pass us, lights and sirens wailing.

“I didn’t mean for you to find out this way,” Elena says. She glances worriedly at her sister across the table. Cecilia has had tears in her eyes since we showed up at the door in Oceanside. It doesn’t feel like the right time for this, but we had nowhere else safe to go. “Please don’t be mad at Cecilia. She was my connection in the first place. She worshipped your dad and knew he’d make a great father for you girls once I decided I had to give you up. After his wife left, she got the job with your dad even though I didn’t want her to. Part of me wanted a clean break, but over the years, it’s been nice to have someone there behind the scenes, making sure you were okay, letting me know what’s going on with the two of you.” I’ve thought about this moment my entire life, but looking at Elena just makes me feel numb—all this information is bouncing off me like hail on a sidewalk. I don’t feel like this woman is my mother; there’s no instant moment of
recognition like I always imagined would happen. I figured our birth mother would pass me on the street one day or get in line behind me at the grocery store and I’d know in a second, from somewhere deep down and long-buried, that it was her. Elena’s just a stranger dressed in a pink sweatshirt sitting in a kitchen in Oceanside.

Ava, however, is openly hostile. “I’m not okay with this. Any of this!” She’s standing against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. Her fierce loyalty to Dad doesn’t surprise me.

I give her a look, because I don’t want Elena to stop talking. I figured I’d find my birth parents someday. I just didn’t think it would be today, and it feels like a million questions are floating through the air waiting to be plucked. I focus on the wedding ring on Elena’s finger, how the diamond sparkles in the light from the kitchen windows. “You’re married, right? Is he … is he our birth father?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I was very young when I had you—I didn’t marry the boy. He doesn’t even know. Leo came along a few years later, and he’s been a good father to all the girls.” She glances at Ava, whose expression hasn’t changed.

All the girls except us. I know I’m staring at Elena, but I can’t help it. As hard as I try, I can’t see much of a resemblance. She has dark hair and green eyes like we do, but that’s about it. I imagined our birth mother would look exactly like us. Older, but otherwise the same.

“We should call your dad,” Cecilia says suddenly. “He’s been sick with worry about you.”

“We can’t,” I say quickly, turning to look at Zane. He’s on
the couch in the living room, giving us as much distance as he can. “I tried. The phones are tapped.… He basically told me to stay away.”

“But we have to let him know that you’re okay.”

“No!” I say. “If I get arrested, then I won’t have the chance to fix this. If it weren’t for Alicia, three boys would be alive right now.”

“But they’ll know you didn’t do these things,” Elena says. “They can’t put you in jail if you’re innocent.”

“Doubtful,” I say, thinking about everything that’s stacked against me. “And in the time it takes to clear my name, more people might die.”

“What can you possibly do?” Cecilia asks. “If there is a madman out there, how can you stop him?”