Unforsaken (4 page)

But somehow they’d found Kaz. And they were smart
enough to know that Anna and Kaz would never admit to being in contact with us. So they’d followed Kaz instead. Followed him to his job, pretending to be exterminators, biding their time, guessing that eventually he would lead them to us. And they had been right.

“Stupid,” I muttered.

And then I snapped out of my trance.

I raced into the apartment, phone clutched in my hand, and grabbed my purse. Then I left, not even bothering to lock up. As I ran down the hallway, I dialed Prairie; when I got to the elevator, her phone was ringing.

I was alone in the elevator, and I paced the tiny space. The two-floor descent felt like it took an eternity as I waited for Prairie to pick up. The phone rang four times before going to her voice mail; I heard the familiar greeting I’d reached many times before.

“This is Holly Garrett. I’m currently away from my desk.… ”

Stupid, stupid
. I dug my nails into the soft flesh of my palm, furious with myself. But beating myself up wasn’t going to fix things. I’d gotten us into this mess, and now I had to find a way to get us out.

Taxis weren’t hard to come by at our apartment building. The complex was built on a strip of land that once formed the barrier between downtown Milwaukee and the grand old mansions of the East Side, and despite what Jess’s parents thought, many young, rich professionals and families called it home, and cabbies often cruised by looking for fares.

Today was no exception. A man in expensive sunglasses and the kind of golf shirt that nobody plays golf in took the first cab I spotted, barely pausing in the conversation he was having on his earpiece to open the door.

I got the next one.

I’d become pretty good at it, stepping into the street a couple of paces and raising my hand high, looking like I meant business. I’d found that you had to look like you expected them to stop or they drove right by. If you had told me six months earlier that I would ever hail a cab, I would have thought you were crazy. In the entire time I lived in Gypsum, the only cabs I saw were on TV.

I reeled off the address of Chub’s preschool, which Prairie had made me memorize the minute she signed Chub up. The ride took only ten minutes, but it seemed endless. I had to resist urging the cabbie to go faster. When we pulled up in front of the school, I threw some bills onto the front seat and bolted out of the cab.

I’d come only once before, with Prairie, back when Chub had been the newest kid there, and this time I took a wrong turn before finding the desk separating the reception area from the classrooms and play spaces. I could hear children shouting happily, but I couldn’t see any of them. A young woman with a long braid down her back came through a frosted glass door, pulling it shut behind her. She held a stack of construction paper in one hand, and when she noticed me waiting, she gave me a tired smile.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, I’m, um, I’m here to pick up my little brother. Charlie Garrett?”

“Charlie? Is something wrong?”

“No, no, I just … my aunt wanted me to pick him up for her. Holly. Holly Garrett.”

Now the young woman frowned. “Holly hasn’t called in.”

“That’s right. She hasn’t had a chance to. She’s tied up at work. She said I should just come get him. I can show you my ID if you want.” One of the benefits of paying for a fake ID was that even though I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, I had a state ID card and a social security card that were guaranteed to be one hundred percent indistinguishable from real ones.

“Please give me a second,” the woman said, but I saw the change on her face, the way her eyes turned opaque and suspicious. She went to a computer at the reception desk and typed for a moment with a small frown on her face. When she looked up at me, the suspicion had deepened. “I’m sorry, but your aunt is the only person authorized to pick Charlie up.”

“But I’m his
sister
,” I protested, even though I wasn’t, not really. “Please, you have to let me take him. Maybe you can call her at work—”

I hadn’t been able to get her to pick up, though, and I knew that calling her would be pointless. The woman shook her head, and her hand hovered above the keyboard, as though she was trying to make a decision. “If you come in with your aunt, and she signs a release form—”

“But there’s no time for that!” I said. “I have to—it’s an
emergency—look, I met the other teacher. When Chub—I mean, when Charlie first came here. The blond one. Maybe you can go get her?”

“I’m sorry,” the woman repeated, but now she didn’t sound sorry at all. “Charlie is fine, and he will stay here until your aunt returns to pick him up. There are no exceptions to the release policy.”

I stared at her for a moment, trying to think of some way to prove to her that I was safe, that I wasn’t crazy. But anything I said would just make me sound insane.

Finally I turned and left. Arguing further wouldn’t help. I would simply have to find Prairie first.

It was a four-block walk from the preschool to the building where Prairie worked, and while I jogged down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians, I checked my watch and tried to figure out how fast they could get here. I figured half an hour to trace the call. Once they found my number registered to Holly Garrett, they’d have to search employment records, and even then there was no way they would be able to find out where Chub went to preschool. Was there?

On the other hand, they could just torture the information out of Kaz. I knew there was nothing they wouldn’t try if they needed to.

I ran faster.

When I got to Prairie’s building, I burst through the doors and the receptionist glanced up from her magazine, startled. I was already digging through my purse. I found my ID card and slapped it on the counter.

“I’m Amber Garrett,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “I’m here to see Holly Garrett. She works in the High Magnetic Field laboratory on the second floor. It’s really, really important.”

The receptionist, a spindly woman with thin gray hair and a blouse that hung on her frail frame, peered over reading glasses at me.

“You can go on up there, if you want,” she said. “They got their own security.”

I ran past her, muttering a quick thanks. I hit the up button at the elevator bank, then saw a door marked “Exit” and took the stairs instead, two at a time. The stairwell echoed with my pounding feet. The door to the second floor stuck before I forced it open onto a carpeted hall.

There was a pair of glass doors with a small square plaque identifying what was inside as the G. Laurence High Magnetic Field Laboratory. But the doors were locked.

I pounded on them, bruising my knuckles. After a few moments, the door swung open—just as I noticed a doorbell set in the wall.

“What’s going on?” demanded a tall white-haired man in a cheap sports shirt with sweat stains under the arms. “What do you want?”

“I’m here to see Pr—to see Holly Garrett. Is she here?”

He blinked at me, looking more confused than annoyed.

“Are you her niece?”

“Yes, but—”

“You look like the pictures. She has pictures of you and
your little brother all over her cube. We work together. I’m Don Borelli.”

I was surprised that Prairie would take such a risk. She was always so careful, so cautious. But then I remembered that it wasn’t supposed to be a risk anymore. We didn’t have secrets, other than the big one: that we used to be completely different people.

I forced a smile. “Yep, that’s me. Can you help me find her? I—It’s about Charlie. He’s sick and I need her to come with me to the preschool because they won’t release him to me.”

I added a little earnest concern to my smile. See? I tried to telegraph. I’m only worried, not crazy.
Help me find my aunt
.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure we can help you find her,” the man said, holding the door wide for me. “So hard when the little ones are sick, isn’t it?”

I nodded my agreement. Borelli didn’t strike me as father material. But then again, what did I know? I’d only recently learned that my dad was a crazed killer.

Borelli led me through a maze of cubicles, stopping in front of one, which I knew instantly was Prairie’s. It wasn’t just the pictures of me and Chub—several were pinned to the cubicle walls, just as Borelli had said—it was the tailored black jacket hung neatly on a wooden hanger, the orderly stacks of papers, the expensive pen resting on the blotter.

“Well, she’s not at her desk,” Borelli said unnecessarily, and winked at me. I wanted to throttle him, but I resisted.

“Maybe she’s in the lab?” I suggested, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “Can we try there?”

“I suppose so. Seeing as it’s a bit of an emergency.”

But when we got to the long rectangular room and peered through the large windows at the enormous machines, there was no sign of Prairie. I felt the panic gaining strength and rising in my chest.

Two men walked by, laughing at some shared joke. Borelli stopped them.

“Hey, have you guys seen Holly? Her niece is looking for her.”

They glanced at me with mild interest.

“Yeah, you just missed her,” one of them said. “She went out to lunch with a couple of friends.”

“Who?” I demanded.

“Two guys—you know, around her age.”

“What were they wearing? What did they look like?” I asked.

“Uh, shirts, plain shirts—one of them had a jacket, black, maybe, or blue? Short hair. They had short hair.”

“Did they look like cops?”

Borelli was staring at me, eyebrows raised. But I couldn’t think of a better way to describe the men who’d tried to kidnap us the last time, the ones who’d broken into Gram’s house and started shooting.

The men glanced at each other, then back at me.

“Yeah, I guess so,” the second one said. “They could have been cops. Why, is Holly in trouble with the law?”

The way he said it, I knew he thought he was joking.

But Prairie was in way more trouble than he could imagine.

They had her. They
had
her, and it was all my fault. After several weeks had passed, we’d convinced ourselves they’d given up, but we should have known better.

Men like that never gave up. And when they couldn’t get to us, they’d gone after Kaz instead.

And now—because of my slowness, because of my stupidity—they’d found us after all.

“Thank you,” I whispered, my throat dry with terror. I walked away from the group of confused men who thought they had been working with a nice lady named Holly Garrett.

When I got to the lobby, I ran.

I
’D RUN HARD
on the way to Prairie’s building, but I ran twice as hard now, back the way I’d come, toward the preschool. When I was only halfway there, I heard the sirens.

When I got within a block, my lungs screamed from the effort and I had to stop, holding on to a tree trunk for support. I couldn’t risk getting any closer anyway, not after what I had done.

Three police cars had been parked hastily in front of the building. A cop stood next to one, leaning on the open door and talking into his pager. Another cop stood in the door of the preschool, holding the arm of an agitated woman—the young woman I’d talked to. She was trying to break away from him, crying and pointing down the street in my direction.

I slipped behind the tree, heart thudding.

She was telling them about me, the crazy girl who had come in half an hour earlier. She was telling them that
I
had taken Chub.

If only she knew. If I could get Chub back, I’d walk right up to the cops with my hands up. They could throw me in jail and I’d go gladly if only I could save Chub.

If there was anything in the world I could trade for Chub’s and Prairie’s safety, I would give it.

But I had nothing. And now I had to save myself before I could help them.

I slipped back down the street, trying to blend into the early lunchtime crowd, groups of people out enjoying the sunshine. When a bus pulled to the curb in front of me, I got on and picked an empty seat near the back.

I slumped down in my seat and tried to be invisible, and as the bus pulled away from the curb, I closed my eyes and pretended that if I couldn’t see anyone else, then they couldn’t see me, either. It was a game from when I was a little girl, a time that seemed so far away it might as well have happened to somebody else.

The bus made its slow, exhaust-emitting way downtown, toward the heart of the city, where Prairie and I often went to shop or try new restaurants. I eventually opened my eyes, half expecting to find a gun pointed at my face. But there were only a dozen or so bored-looking passengers, staring at the ads that ringed the bus, or at the floor, or at folded newspapers.

No one was looking at me.

I was trying to calm down and figure out what to do next when my phone rang. Not my cell phone, but the
other
one, the one that had never rung before.

I scrambled to fold back the hidden pocket at the bottom of my purse, my shaking fingers making it difficult. I dropped the phone on the floor and it skittered forward under the seats, and a heavyset woman with a lined face picked it up and handed it to me with a look of distaste.