by Lisa Jackson
So, because of Ravinia’s rebelliousness, her experiences beyond the wall, and her ability to sense the evil ones, Catherine had reluctantly sent her on her mission. To save Catherine’s only daughter. The girl known as Elizabeth Gaines who had been adopted out as a baby.
“Let me know she’s all right and keep her safe,” Catherine had said to Ravinia as she’d sent her on her quest.
Keep her safe.
Aunt Catherine had her reasons. Good reasons. Reasons Ravinia understood better than she ever had. One of them was Ravinia’s half brother, one of the boys Mary had dispensed with, who’d returned intent on revenge. That he was currently missing was no reason to feel safe. Aunt Catherine believed he was just lying in wait, planning another attack on her family. That’s why she’d sent Ravinia to find Elizabeth and at least warn her.
Ravinia took another swallow of her coffee, strong but cooling as her gaze wondered around the glass walls of the coffee shop and she thought about how she’d actually come to leave her home.
She’d been thinking of getting out of Siren Song for some time—the walls were too high, Catherine’s world too archaic, the rules too restrictive.
Her aunt gleaned what was on Ravinia’s mind. “When are you leaving?” Aunt Catherine asked as they stood in front of the fire at the lodge. For once they were alone, her sisters in their rooms for the night.
“Leaving? What? For good? I’m not sure I am. What are you saying?” Ravinia responded, slightly alarmed that her half-formed plans to leave Siren Song had been thrown on the table. She intended to get away but hadn’t settled on a date, wasn’t certain when it would be.
“Cassandra’s seen you on the road with a friend. I’m asking you, when are you planning to go?”
Cassandra was Ravinia’s sister who had a knack for seeing into the future—her “gift.” And the hell of it was, as usual, Cassandra wasn’t wrong. Ravinia had met someone. And she really did want to leave the lodge behind her, so she impulsively said, “Tomorrow,” finalizing her plans just that fast.
Aunt Catherine answered in her pragmatic way, “Then you’ll need some money,” and walked to her desk and opened a strongbox within. She returned with a roll of bills that damn near blew Ravinia away. “Be wise and frugal,” Aunt Catherine cautioned, blinking as if tears were forming behind her eyes. “And most of all, be safe.”
“I will,” Ravinia promised and tucked the money into her bra.
She shook her head to clear the memories and touched the money belt around her waist that she’d purchased during those weeks in northern California. The friend Cassandra had seen her with hadn’t caught up with her again, but Ravinia had the sense that he’d gone north when she’d gone south, first to the San Francisco area, finally landing in Santa Monica. She looked at her phone again, realizing that she had burned up the minutes talking to Aunt Catherine who called her on an irregular basis. She wished her aunt would come out of the Dark Ages, for crying out loud, but she supposed she should be happy that Aunt Catherine knew how to drive a car. Ravinia was determined to get her license at the first opportunity, but that would have to be after she found Elizabeth . . . and how was she going to do that without an Internet connection? And how was she supposed to get that when she had no credit history? It was a phrase she’d learned when she’d looked into getting her own phone,
She glanced around the dining area again. Nearly everyone in the chairs was using their smartphones in some capacity. Probably connecting to the Internet.
Cash was great, but to really think about getting a smartphone with a phone number she could definitely use credit history. But before she could get credit history, she needed a credit card or some record of payments, like to utilities. The truth was, no one wanted to help her all that much after they learned she was a blank slate. She needed an address for billing, which she didn’t possess.
She’d learned all this when she was in the San Francisco area and she’d made the mistake of telling SoCal who’d laughed at her and declared that she must have been living under a rock, which kind of pissed her off. He’d also told her that she must have been “living off the grid” her whole life because she was definitely “under the radar.” She’d never heard either of those phrases before, but she’d gleaned that she was an oddity and that she’d already known, if for different reasons from those Mr. SoCal realized.
Good riddance that she’d left him at the train station.
Ravinia sipped her coffee and contemplated her next move.
Coffee long gone, she was sitting in the same spot an hour later, still undecided, when a woman somewhere in her forties came hurrying into the coffee shop, bypassing the line.
Frantic, she glanced around the room, zeroed in on the older dude at a table near Ravinia’s. “Thank God.” The woman made a beeline to the table with the guy who, by the looks of him, was old enough to be her father.
He half-rose from his seat to give her a quick kiss, and then she launched in. “Oh, my God, I’m so glad you’re still here. It’s just hell with Kayla right now. I could kill her!”
He sighed and picked up his cup. “What happened?”
“Ran away again. Just like I knew she would. Everybody said the teenage years would be terrible, but I had no idea . . . oh, Jesus! Last weekend she snuck out the window to be with her friends. When I discovered her missing, I tried to connect with the friends I knew about, the ones I had numbers for. I called and called. The kids. Their parents. I went to their houses, but no one had seen her. Or at least that’s what they said. But they lie. They all lie. Thick as thieves those damned teens. Couldn’t they see how frantic I was? I mean, I was out of my mind. Literally out of my mind. I was about to start going to hospitals or the police.” Reliving her ordeal, the woman was talking faster and faster, her voice rising.
The older guy patted the air, silently reminding her to slow down and maybe not talk so loudly.
But the woman was too wound up to put on the brakes. She barreled on, “I had to hire a private investigator to find her. And when he located her, it didn’t matter.” The woman was pulling a face and shaking her head. “Kayla still wouldn’t come home with me.”
The guy looked at her as if she were crazy. “You’re kidding.”
“Oh, no, I’m not.”
“But to hire a private detective?”
“I had to. I couldn’t find her. Jesus, didn’t you hear me?” she accused, then took a deep breath before going on. “This friend of mine, Linda? Her son’s got a real drug problem and was missing for weeks, and she called this guy and he found him. The guy’s an ex-cop and anyway, he did whatever it is those guys do, and found Kayla right away.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” She flipped a hand upward toward the ceiling. “And I don’t care. He specializes in runaways and family problems. Doesn’t matter how he tracked her down. What’s important is that Kayla’s home and I’m trying to get through to her—which is damn near impossible.” Rolling her eyes, she added, “It feels like I don’t know her anymore. It’s like living with a stranger. One with a really bad attitude.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t be moving in right now.”
“Oh, no.” She reached a hand out and grabbed his arm. “That’s just what she’s aiming for. You have to move in or she’ll think she’s won and then it’ll be even worse. We’re moving your stuff at the end of the month and Kayla’s just going to have to get used to it!”
Ravinia realized that the older guy was a romantic interest for the younger woman, which made her give him a second look. He was kind of homely with big ears and thinning hair and glasses that sat on the end of his nose. But his clothes looked expensive. Money, she decided.
The guy didn’t appear all that convinced about the potential move. He took a final swallow from his paper coffee cup, then crushed it, and folded his paper. “Who’d you hire?”
“The private investigator?” Her eyebrows shot up and he nodded. “Rex Kingston of Kingston Investigations.”<
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“Was it expensive?”
She shrugged. Tipped her hand back and forth. Maybe yes. Maybe no. “I guess I should’ve just waited for her to come home,” she said anxiously as if sensing the guy’s disapproval. On the heels of that thought, she said, “But it wouldn’t have worked. She would have never come back. That’s the problem.”
Scooting his chair back a bit, he tossed his empty cup into the trash.
In that moment, Ravinia peered into his heart and saw that he wasn’t really all that much of a winner. Maybe didn’t even have the amount of money he’d led the younger woman to believe.
As if he sensed her perusal, he turned to stare right at her, but Ravinia let her gaze slide away as if she were lost in thought about something else.
Sometimes people sensed something happening when she was checking them out, felt some kind of tingle or had a glimmer of insight, though they generally didn’t get it and certainly didn’t look at her to be the cause.
The man stood, grabbed his newspaper, and tucked it under his arm.
“You leaving?” the woman asked.
“I’ve got to get to work.” He glanced away a second and cleared his throat. “Have you thought about sending Kayla to her father?” he suggested as she reluctantly stood up as well.
“God, no.” She gazed at him as if he were from another planet. “You know that would be a disaster!” Then, after a pause, she said, “Wait a second. What are you saying?”
The man slid a look toward Ravinia, clearly uncomfortable having her close enough to hear every word. Tucking his hand around the woman’s elbow he led her purposefully toward the door.
As inconspicuously as possible, Ravinia followed, wandering through the tables, even going so far as to pretend interest in the various mugs, carafes, and bags of coffee on display tables when she was really hoping to hear more about Kingston Investigations. It didn’t work. The man was too aware that she was eavesdropping. He opened the door for his companion who was running on about Kayla and her father, who was an asshole, an asshole, and there was no way she could trust him to be any kind of father.
As the glass door started to close, Ravinia slipped outside and watched the couple walk across the parking area to separate vehicles. She didn’t give their continuing relationship much hope, unless the rebellious teen Kayla was actually out of the house.
Ravinia had been a runaway herself, for very different reasons. She knew that once anybody thought their living situation was untenable, they weren’t going to stick around.
The man drove off in an older Cadillac, the woman in a compact.
Ravinia turned her attention away from them and back to the crowd of coffee-drinking Internet surfers lounging inside and at a few exterior umbrella tables positioned near the building. It was slightly warmer, the temperature rising a little, the clouds lightening a bit. On a bench near the door, her forgotten drink at her feet, a teenaged girl was texting like mad. Next to her, a boy about the same age was into his phone, too, probably playing some game.
God, she wanted one of those phones, just for a few minutes.
If only I had Google, she thought, taking a recently vacated chair.
Cooing loudly enough to be heard over the morning rush of traffic, a pigeon pecked its way near her table and she absently brushed off crumbs from a previous customer.
She wanted to look up Kingston Investigations immediately and see if the office was anywhere near Santa Monica. She needed help in her mission, and it seemed providential that she’d overheard the people at the next table talking about a private investigator. From the two channels the television at Siren Song had picked up by antenna, she knew what a private investigator was, at least the TV kind. The fact that Rex Kingston had been a policeman first sounded good, like he would know his stuff.
The trouble was, it also sounded as if he might be kind of expensive.
Then again, maybe he was the kind of guy who might negotiate with her a little.
She pulled out her disposable phone to find that it was completely dead. She lifted her head and thought about asking one of the other customers if she could borrow their phone, but a quick look around at the serious expressions convinced her that was unlikely. If she were one of them and someone like her asked for the phone, she’d turn them down flat.
Time to move on.
She lifted her backpack to her shoulder and got to her feet, all the while gazing across the parking lot to the street, thinking there had to be a telephone book in a telephone booth somewhere. Maybe she could go to the library and find some kind of directory. If she—
From the corner of her eye, she spied a black convertible race into the parking lot. The driver gassed it toward a space where a young mother pushing a baby stroller was about to cross.
Ravinia sucked in a sharp breath.
The mother shrieked.
The driver slammed on his brakes.
His car shuddered to a stop.
“For the love of God,” a woman at the next table said as the mother hurriedly pushed her child to safety.
“You should watch where you’re going!” she cried, clearly upset.
The driver just glared at her as if the situation was her fault.
Shaking her head, she pushed the stroller onto the sidewalk, then checked on her baby.
Grimacing, the jerk hit the gas again, his tires chirping and most of the customers went back to their conversations or electronic equipment. Ravinia stared hard at him and as he jumped out of the car, he caught her intent gaze. As he shouldered his way into the shop, she lowered her eyes and turned toward the coffee shop. A few steps behind him, she caught the door that was swinging closed, then slipped inside.
In loose shorts and a T-shirt with some surf shop logo on the front and back, he seemed to have already forgotten her as he surveyed the menu mounted high over the barista station. She hung back from him for a bit, surveying him and noticed the tip of his phone peeking from his pocket.
An idea began to form as she pretended interest in the refrigerator case of yogurt and water. As the other people in line were served, he jiggled his leg impatiently, then when it was his turn to order, he leaned forward and started talking intimately to the girl behind the counter.
It was her chance. As if jostled from the crowd behind, Ravinia bumped him slightly and deftly slipped his phone from his pocket. He threw her a dark look, but the girl serving him was cute and he was in the middle of some heavy flirting.
“Sorry,” Ravinia muttered, but he didn’t notice.
Strolling casually back outside, she immediately tried to access the phone. She hoped to high heaven he didn’t have an automatic lock on the thing, which, fortunately he didn’t. She knew enough to work the phone and had no trouble pulling up an Internet search for Kingston Investigations in Santa Monica. No luck. But there was an office in Los Angeles. That had to be the right guy. She memorized the address and phone number just as the dude with the sports car came bursting back outside.
Frantic, the drink he was carrying sloshing onto the pavement, he raced past her to his convertible and started searching the interior. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered in a panic as he set his drink on the hood and it fell over, the warm contents oozing over the car’s shiny finish. “Son of a goddamned bitch!”
Suppressing a smile, Ravinia nonchalantly walked over to him and held out the phone. For a moment, he ignored her as he was so angry about his drink and intent on searching his car.
“This what you’re looking for?” she asked.
He glanced over at her and his jaw dropped. “You goddamned thief!” He snagged his phone from her fingers.
“If I were a thief, I’d keep it. You’re lucky I didn’t call nine-one-one and report you, since you almost ran over that woman with the stroller.”
“She was standing in the middle of the fuckin’ parking lot!” he sputtered.
“You were driving too fast.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to steal my
phone, you little bitch. I should call nine-one-one on you!”
“Go right ahead,” Ravinia challenged. She was bluffing. She had no intention of sticking around and trying to explain herself to the authorities, but this asshole didn’t have to know that.
“Look what you made me do, you little freak.” He motioned to the mess of mocha-whatever glopped and running in sticky rivulets down the convertible’s once-shiny hood. “Just get the fuck out of my way.” Red-faced, veins throbbing in his neck, he seemed about to take a swing at her but at the last minute thought better of it. “You’re a bitch, you know that?” he declared, his gaze raking over her as if for the first time. “A fuckin’ goddamned hippie bitch!” Phone held in a death-grip, he shouldered past Ravinia and slammed back into the coffee shop, presumably for a fresh drink.
“Yeah, whatever,” Ravinia said as she rounded a corner and slipped off her backpack. After locating a pen and notepad she kept in the front pocket, she wrote down the address and phone number for Kingston Investigations before she forgot it. Then she hooked the strap of her backpack over her shoulder and went in search of one of Santa Monica’s Big Blue Buses.
Chapter 7
Get moving! A voice inside Elizabeth’s head urged her to quit staring at the ceiling and get out of bed. Make that a nagging, irritating voice.
She glanced out the window. Through half-closed blinds she saw the gray day beyond. She’d been up already and had gotten Chloe a banana, then climbed back into her bed, feeling chilled to the bone. She’d slept poorly and already her pulse was rocketing along at an increased pace. She’d thought, hoped, that after Court’s funeral she would start to feel normal again, but that hadn’t happened. Barbara’s admonition about pretending that she cared more kept rolling around Elizabeth’s mind. And she was worried about Detective Thronson, about what was going on in the investigation. Elizabeth had the impression that Thronson didn’t trust her and thought she might be lying or covering up something. She couldn’t help wonder if the detective thought she’d had something to do with Court’s death.