The Leaving Part 61

"'It was only supposed to be for a few hours,'" she said, like reciting a line, in a trance.

"What?" He paused the video.

Again: "'It was only supposed to be for a few hours.'"

"What does that mean?" He felt irritation at not understanding.

"He's still alive." Her eyes lit like fireflies.

"But-" How could she have figured that out just now? How could she know? "Max? How do you-?"

"Not Max." She pointed at the screen, tapped twice. "The princ.i.p.al."

AVERY.

Only the whole world coming together and cracking open.

"He's been calling the tip line." Avery got up and paced. "Saying all these cryptic things. Except that maybe they're not that cryptic once you know who he is?"

"We need to call Chambers," Lucas said. "He needs to review the calls."

She reached for her phone, then remembered. "I don't have his number in here."

They buried the body in his backyard.

Was that what he'd said?

"I left mine in Ryan's car," Lucas said. "I got out in a hurry. Come on."

Avery followed Lucas and they peered into the backseat of the car with cupped hands at their eyes, but it wasn't there. As they walked up toward the house, Chambers's car appeared, rolling loudly over gravel.

How on earth-?

How could he have-?

"What are you doing here?" Lucas asked Chambers when he got out of his car.

"Your brother called me," Chambers said. "Said it was urgent."

"We were just going to call you," Avery said. "We've been watching old news reports and-"

Ryan opened the front door of the house.

Scarlett appeared beside him.

"What's going on? What are you doing here?" Lucas asked Scarlett.

"You have to find Miranda," Ryan said to Chambers.

"She was with us," Scarlett said. "She's been here watching us."

"And she took off," Ryan said.

"The princ.i.p.al is still alive," Avery said, and even though she felt like she was screaming, no one seemed to hear.

"Everybody inside," Chambers said. "Now."

In the living room he said, "One thing at a time. What's this about Miranda?"

Scarlett showed everyone Sarah's sketch, and Chambers turned to Ryan. "Anything at all that seemed off about her? Anything at all she may have said that might be a lead? She ever say anything about her family?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary," Ryan said. "She said her childhood was boring. That her parents were control freaks. She said they want ed her to get a real job. That kind of stuff, the stuff everyone says. I never met them."

"Any suspicious phone calls?" Chambers asked. "Habits?"

Ryan looked bewildered. "No," with a sad emphasis that made Avery want to throttle him.

"I need her address," Chambers said. "Her friends' names."

"I don't actually know any of her friends."

"What is wrong with you?" Avery screamed. "How could you not have seen?" She rushed at him, pushed him on the chest.

"Avery, please," Chambers said, touching her arm. "I've got this."

She clenched her teeth so hard that her jawbones shifted.

Chambers let go of her arm and turned back to Ryan. "What did she do for work? Did she go to school?"

Avery couldn't stand to listen-some Etsy/eBay nonsense. If they'd figured this out sooner, maybe they could have found and rescued them all months ago. They could have known the truth about Max and been done with it.

"So I'll look into it," Chambers was saying. "And we'll have a team come here to dust for prints." Then he turned to Scarlett. "You said there was another sketch?"

Scarlett nodded-"A house"-and held her phone out to Chambers again. "Maybe it's near Anchor Beach."

"I need you to send me both of those," Chambers said.

"Can I talk now?" Avery said, not hiding her impatience well and not caring.

"Yes," Chambers said. "Of course."

"The person calling the tip line that everyone wrote off as crazy is actually the princ.i.p.al. I recognized his voice." She was running out of air, slowed down. "He said they were blackmailing him, burying a body in his yard. And how it was only supposed to be for a few hours that they were gone. How the place where you found that body wasn't the right place. He sounds terrified. He said they're watching him."

Miranda had been watching, too? How did she even fit in?

Chambers said he needed the transcripts or recordings immediately and offered to drive her home. When they got up to leave, she caught Lucas's eye and he walked them out, followed her to the squad car.

"Good work," he said.

"Thanks," she said. "You, too."

Chambers had already started the car, was calling ahead to her house.

She watched out the window as they pa.s.sed the psychic's storefront, a candle flickering beneath the neon sign: Know Your Future.

As if.

Dad was waiting at the door.

Scarlett

"Do I look like him?" Scarlett asked her mother. "My father?"

Chambers had dropped off her clothes and photographs earlier that day, while she'd been at Anchor Beach. Now she sat at the dining room table in pajamas-her hair wet from a long bath-studying her younger self. She held a photo out to her mother and said, "I really don't think I look like you, so . . ."

"He's not the answer you need," Tammy said, taking the photo.

"Answer?" Scarlett said.

"I know you feel like you don't belong here . . . with me." Her voice shaky.

"It's not that . . ." Scarlett ran out of steam.

"No, it's okay." Her mother waved a hand. "When you were little I was like, where did this kid come from? 'Cause you were so smart-smarter than me, and I didn't know what to do with that." She put the photo down. "So I'll give you his name and address, even, and sure, you have his eyes and something around the chin that's similar, but I'm tellin' ya. He ain't what you're looking for." Looking up, finally, she said, "It's late. I'm turning in." She got up and came over and kissed Scarlett on the forehead.

The warm, damp spot on her head became so distracting.

The whole day such a jumble.

Miranda's betrayal.

The princ.i.p.al's role in the whole thing.

The revelation that she'd witnessed the shooting.

"Why didn't you tell me about the shooting?" Scarlett said. "That I was there."

Tammy shrugged one shoulder. "Didn't seem like a happy thing to remind you of if you didn't remember it yourself. And the truth is, I don't really remember it, either."

"You must." This time it was Scarlett who Comet came to visit. Scarlett reached out to pet her, for the first time.

"I remember I got blood on me, and you asked me if I was going to die, and I said, no, of course not, but you said, 'But everybody dies, right?' And you started to cry and said, 'Promise me you won't die.'" She ran a hand over Scarlett's hair. "That's when I realized we were stuck with each other, you and me. Maybe that was the first time I got terrified-that you needed me so bad-and then, you know the rest, the drinking got real bad after that. I remember it the way you remember a dream, and that's fine for me."

Scarlett nodded and Tammy smiled and padded down the hall. "He brought that weird jacket, by the way. It's in the closet."

Scarlett got up and went to the closet and gently pulled it off a hanger. She turned it around in her hands, inhaled it-some familiar perfume-and then was about to put it on when her eye caught on some st.i.tching on the inner lining.

Rectangles, like the ones she'd sewn absentmindedly a few times now.

Only here they had little circles of st.i.tches on top of them.

So not rectangles.

Cylinders.

Four of them.

Smokestacks, to be precise.

She laid the jacket flat on the table, best she could.

Her fingers tingled as she ran them over the b.u.mps of thread.

Near the smokestacks, spotted st.i.tches that took the shape of a . . . pier?

The entire inner lining was st.i.tched with lines, maybe indicating streets?

And up by an armhole . . .

St.i.tched thicker than all the rest.

Thread upon thread to form:

Lucas