If Parker hadn’t been caught. If.
But once the loop was discovered on the Fairchild monitors at Allied, the police would lower the boom. They would ask Warren if he’d experienced any kind of intrusion or theft. Warren would check his stash, just to be sure. Everything would happen quickly after that. We needed to be as hard to find as possible—and as far away.
I lost track of time as we sped north. By the time we exited the freeway, I was starting to feel drowsy, lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the car, the heat blasting through the vents, the loss of adrenaline now that we were out of immediate danger. I sat up straighter, trying to pay attention. It was too soon to be tired. We weren’t out of the woods yet, and Parker was still in danger.
We dropped the car at a seedy outdoor lot, and I followed my dad through the rows of parked cars to a gray Honda Civic. It was older, but clean, and we headed out of the Valley, back to the freeway.
We merged into traffic and headed south on the freeway. I looked at Cormac with surprise when we made the turnoff for Long Beach.
“Isn’t that a little close to home?” I asked. Long Beach was only forty-five minutes from Playa Hermosa. We’d just spend two hours driving north to pick up the dummy car only to double back to within an hour of where we started.
“It is,” he admitted. “But we’ve taken every precaution, and Long Beach has both an airport and a seaport.”
I nodded, understanding. If we couldn’t get out by air, we had other options by sea, especially if there were cargo ships and cruise lines.
Almost three hours after we left Playa Hermosa we pulled into a derelict parking lot, a sign reading SEA VI_W MOTEL blinking forlornly over a faded one-story structure. Weeds pushed their way through cracks in the asphalt, and a swimming pool filled with a few feet of dirty sludge stood beyond a rusting chain-link fence.
Cormac stopped the car in front of an Office sign. “Be right back.”
I listened to the soft tick of the engine, wondering how long it would be before we could sleep. More than the rest, I needed the darkness, the blankness that would come with it. My head was too full of worry—about Parker and my mom and Logan. I was approaching shutdown.
The driver’s side door opened. “The exchange must have been easy,” my dad said, starting up the car. “Your mom’s already picked up her key.”
I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
We parked in front of room 213. There were only two other cars in the parking lot, a beat-up old Impala and a Town Car that looked too nice for the Sea Vi_w Motel.
Cormac used the key to unlock the door, and we stepped inside. It smelled like every other motel room I’d ever been in—like moldy carpet and pine-scented cleaning product with an undercurrent of cigarette smoke. An AC unit rasped noisily in the window.
A light was on in the bathroom. My dad headed for it. “Renee? That was quick,” he said, moving through the room.
I looked around, taking in the full-size beds covered in tacky polyester bedspreads, the generic artwork on the walls, the old-model TV. My eye caught something on the table near the window, and I walked over to it and set down my bag. For a minute all I could do was stare, my mind drawing a blank, unwilling to comprehend what I was seeing.
A single gold bar sat on the table. Next to it was a key attached to a plastic tag marked 213. Against the bar of gold was a handwritten note.
I’m sorry.
Fifty-Eight
“This can’t be right. There must be some kind of explanation.”
I was sitting on the bed, still in shock. Cormac’s face was white as he paced the room, muttering to himself and running his hands through his hair. He’d greeted the sight of the gold bar as I had—with shock that had quickly turned to denial. Now he doubled back toward the table, sweeping its contents onto the floor with a roar of anger.
I jumped as the gold bar fell onto the carpet with a thud. My bag landed between the table and the bed. “Dad . . .”
He stood up, straightening his jacket like that would somehow put things right. When he looked at me, his eyes were clear for the first time since we’d found my mom’s note.
“It’s exactly what it looks like, Grace,” he said. “She’s gone.”
“She wouldn’t . . . she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t leave us. Wouldn’t leave me.”
His laugh was bitter. “And yet that’s precisely what she’s done, isn’t it?”
I stood, wanting to reason with him, to stem the tide of words eating away at the life I’d known—the life I’d sacrificed for—like waves eroding sand on a beach.
“She’ll be back,” I said. “I know she will. We just have to wait.”
“Stop being so fucking naive!” Cormac shouted, his face red. “This isn’t something you do at the last minute. She planned this all along.” He sighed, trying to compose himself. “She’s gone, Grace. And we can’t sit around here waiting. We have to go.”
I shook my head. “We can’t leave. Parker—”
“Parker’s fucking gone, too.” He threw his phone onto the bed. “I got the local news alert on my phone twenty minutes ago.”
I picked up his phone and clicked on the alert, still open on his screen.
LOCAL BOY ARRESTED IN POSSIBLE PLAYA HERMOSA ROBBERY
An eighteen-year-old boy was arrested Friday night after vandalizing a local security company in the affluent community of Playa Hermosa. A spokesperson from Allied Security alleges the boy has engaged in a months-long campaign of vandalism against the company. A source inside the local police department told WBHC News that the FBI had been dispatched to investigate the possibility that the vandalism was a cover for a robbery that occurred last night on the peninsula. Stay tuned for updates as they become available.
I put the phone down and stared at the carpet. So they knew. Logan and his family knew they’d been robbed, and they knew we’d been responsible for it.
“We have to go.” Cormac picked up my bag, gathering the other stuff in the room, including the gold bar.
“We can’t leave Parker. Not now! He needs us!”
“What do you propose we do, Grace? Walk into the Playa Hermosa police department, past the FBI, and tell them it was all a misunderstanding?”
I scrambled to come up with an answer. “We can hire a lawyer, post bail . . .”
“He hasn’t even been arraigned yet,” Cormac said. “And it’s not as easy as you make it sound. They know something happened at the Fairchild estate. Which means they probably know we were part of it. We can’t do anything until we get out of here. Find some cover. Then we can hire an attorney to help Parker.”
He was still moving around the room, wiping doorknobs and light switches, erasing his prints from anything he might have touched to give us a little more time if someone were to trace our steps.
My mind clamored for some kind of answer, something that would refute what he’d said, that would give us a way to help Parker without leaving him behind. But I had nothing. I was hollowed out, empty of all my usual reason.
I was only delaying the inevitable, avoiding the moment when I’d have to admit that he was right: We were no help to Parker if we were picked up, too. To help him, we had to escape and regroup.
“Where will we go?” I asked. Obviously our plan to flee the country was out. If the FBI was involved, we couldn’t risk it. Our window of escape had closed faster than we’d expected because of Parker’s arrest.
Cormac walked to the door, put his hand on the knob. “North, probably. I’m not sure. We just need to get in the car, keep moving.”
“And we’ll come back for Parker?” I asked.
“We’ll help him however we can once we’re safe.”
“Promise?” The question sounded childish even to me. What good were promises when you couldn’t count on the only woman who’d ever been a mother to you?
He sighed. “I promise. Now can we go? Before the police show up and we’re thrown in jail?”
Resignation settled over me like a shroud as I stood and walked to the door. “Thank you,” I said, taking my bag from Cormac’s outstretched hand.
He nodded, holding open the door. A shaft of sunlight eclipsed him, and for a moment it was like he’d disappeared, like he’d never been there at all. Then, all at once, he was back, his face grim.
We hurried to the car, and Cormac backed up, heading out into traffic. I looked out the window, tears stinging my eyes. I couldn’t even begin to process my mother’s abandonment, but the loss of Parker thrummed through me like an instrument out of tune. I heard his voice in that final, frantic phone call.
It’s you and me. No matter what.
Parker wouldn’t leave me. I knew he wouldn’t. But here I was, speeding away from Los Angeles like the coward I was. Would he forgive me when I came back for him? Would he understand? And what would I say to justify my defection? What could I say?
I saw him as he had looked that day in the early-morning fog, the day we’d stared out over the water, trying to find a way back to each other even as our loyalties in Playa Hermosa had ripped us apart. He’d been so sure we were someone else. Sure that we weren’t liars and thieves and cowards. That we’d only become those things because of the way we were raised.
And even though I’d tried to deny it, there had been a tiny part of me that hoped he was right. That might have believed.
But I had been wrong, and so had Parker.
As Cormac got back on the freeway, I finally accepted the truth: it was too late for me. I was done looking for a better part of myself that didn’t exist. Parker and I were family, partners. I would go back for him, but there would be no more delusions about who and what I was.
I leaned my forehead against the window, my breath fogging up the glass as the city passed by on the other side. It wasn’t complicated. I was a thief. I was a con artist. I was a coward.
Believing anything else was just another lie.
Acknowledgments
Thanks always go first to my agent, Steven Malk, without whom I would not still be writing full-time. I don’t know what I did to deserve such a tireless and insightful advocate, but I’ve lost track of the number of times your guidance and support have kept me going—in more ways than one. I hope you like me, because you’re stuck with me for life!
Thank you to everyone else at Writers House, all of whom go above and beyond for their authors on a daily basis. Everything is a little easier knowing you have my back. You are the best of the best.
Heartfelt thanks go to Jennifer Klonsky, who believed in me when I was beginning to wonder if anyone still did. It’s tough to articulate what that belief has meant—both personally and for my little family—but there aren’t enough words in the world to thank you properly. That you are an extraordinarily talented editor and a joy to work with has been an added bonus. It is not an exaggeration to say that you have restored my faith in publishing.
Thank you to Catherine Wallace, Cara Petrus, Lillian Sun, Bethany Reis, and everyone at HarperTeen who has given my work a home and has worked so hard on this project. You are all incredibly talented and you make everything so easy for me. That is no small task.
Thanks to dear friends and colleagues M. J. Rose, Tonya Hurley, and Jennifer Draeger for being there.
Thank you to my mother, Claudia Baker, who always believes in me, and to my father, Mike St. James, for gifting me with words through our strange and mysterious writing DNA.
Lastly, I can never let an opportunity pass to thank Kenneth, Rebekah, Andrew, and Caroline. We’re in this together. I wouldn’t want to do any of it without you.
Excerpt from Promises I Made
When I think about what happened in Playa Hermosa, it’s not the gold that gets me. Gold is like money. Something tangible that can be obtained, lost, regained.
But trust, faith, love . . . Well, those things are a lot more tricky. Where do you find trust once it’s lost? How do you make someone believe in you when you’ve given them every reason not to? And how can someone love you when you’ve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that doing so is dangerous to them and to everything and everyone they love?
Those are the kinds of things I thought about after Cormac and I arrived in Seattle. I was too numb to do much thinking before then, too focused on the growing distance between Parker and me, too busy imagining him in jail for a crime we’d all committed.
And then there was my mother. Renee. All the times she’d called me Gracie. All the times she’d pushed the hair out of my eyes, called me her daughter. It had been a lie. I’d known Cormac and Renee weren’t my biological parents. That Parker and I had been adopted by them to run cons with wealthy suburbanites as our victims. But somehow I’d believed that Renee loved me. That she was my mother in every sense of the word. I’d believed it even when Parker had called me out on my näivety, even when it set me against him, the one person who’d proved over and over again that he’d do anything for me.
Knowing that Renee had taken the gold, leaving us to clean up the mess, left me hollowed out, like all the little bits of love and security and hope I’d been accumulating had been sucked out of me all at once. I thought it would get better with time, that I’d adjust to the reality of the situation like I’d always done before. But this time was different. The emptiness was palpable, a black hole that seemed to gather more power with each passing day. Sometimes I thought I would disappear inside it completely.
We’d all sacrificed in the name of the Playa Hermosa con. Cormac was on the run, forced to be cautious even with the underground network of contacts we usually relied on. There was twenty million dollars in gold at stake; there had to be at least a few fellow grifters who would use information about our whereabouts as a get-out-of-jail-free card. In the meantime, that was where Parker was: in jail. I hadn’t seen or talked to him since the night of the Fairchild con. I didn’t even dare send him a letter, and the loss of him sat like a lead weight on my chest.
My sacrifices might seem insignificant in comparison, but they didn’t feel that way. I’d come to love Selena, the only real friend I’d ever had. And I loved Logan Fairchild and his parents, too. Stealing from them—especially with the knowledge of Warren Fairchild’s mental illness—had blown out the tiny light I’d kept burning in the darkest corners of my heart. The light that told me I was better than a life on the grift, that I was only doing it because I had to, because after a string of lousy foster homes and no contact with my real parents, Cormac, Renee, and Parker were the only family I had.
Parker had tried to show me the better parts of myself, to keep those parts alive, and I’d abandoned him in Los Angeles when I’d chosen to run with Cormac. Now I knew the truth about who I was, and I didn’t waste any more time trying to fight it. I spent the time in Seattle settling into the role of Cormac’s daughter as he worked to con a rich divorcée, hoping to get us flush enough to go after Renee and our share of the Playa Hermosa take. In the meantime, I waited for Cormac to follow through on his promise to get help for Parker, to go back for him or find him a lawyer, to do something to get him out of jail. I waited for five months, until I couldn’t wait any longer. Until the thought of Parker locked up started to unravel me.
Then I used everything Cormac and Renee had taught me and I did it myself.
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About the Author
PHOTO BY CAROLINE ZINK
MICHELLE ZINK lives in New York with her four children. Her first novel, Prophecy of the Sisters, was chosen as one of Booklist’s Top Ten Novels for Youth of 2009 and as one of the Chicago Public Librar
y’s Best Books for Young Readers. It has also been listed on the New York Public Library’s Stuff for the Teen Age and the Lone Star Reading List. You can visit her at www.michellezink.com.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Books by Michelle Zink
PROPHECY OF THE SISTERS TRILOGY
Prophecy of the Sisters
Guardian of the Gate
Circle of Fire
A Temptation of Angels
This Wicked Game
Credits
Cover Art © 2015 Plainpicture/Donkeysoho
Hand Lettering and Cover Design by Jessie Sayward Bright
Copyright
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
LIES I TOLD. Copyright © 2015 by Michelle Zink. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zink, Michelle.
Lies I Told Page 23