“Let’s clarify the facts, then.” I went into logic mode. “Here’s what we know: Justin gave Blocked Sender enough dirt on anyone who’s ever done anything bad at Marbella High to set up some sort of drug empire. He’s been making money through Raj and whoever else, using what Alex taught him to hide the money. He brought in the rest of us as a backup plan when Raj bailed. And he must have another source of information, if Justin didn’t tell him about Alex.”
“Not holding my breath to find out who that is,” Alex said under her breath.
“What else?” I asked. “Is there anything else we can put together? Anything else we know?”
“There’s one more thing,” Isabel said, holding out her phone. “I got a text message on the way over here. We know where I’m supposed to drop off the pills.”
21.
“You could have brought that up a little earlier,” I said.
“Maybe I was a little more interested in hearing what Justin had to say,” she said. “Kind of seemed like the most important thing.”
I could see her point, I supposed. “Well, where are we supposed to bring them?”
“A mailbox,” she said. “The address is 1744 Ridgewood Drive.”
“That complicates the surveillance operation,” Alex said.
“You sound like a seventies movie,” Justin said. “Didn’t we all watch The Conversation at Raj’s house? During our Coppola weekend?”
“Oh, you remember?” Alex wasn’t letting Justin off the hook anytime soon. I’d realized that our movie night at Raj’s wasn’t the first time Alex had been there, but I hadn’t known that the three of them watched movies together. The list of things I didn’t know was getting longer all the time.
“It just means it will be harder to set up a camera than it was at the library,” Raj said.
“It’s a cheap camera,” Alex said. “It won’t work that well in the dark. We’re better off just following Isabel and watching her ourselves.”
“No way,” she said. “We don’t know what will happen if I get caught. And I’ll be the only one out in the open.”
“We can take Kara’s Prius,” Raj said. “It’s perfect for this sort of thing—so quiet.”
“It’ll be kind of tight with all of us, though,” I said.
“I don’t want any part of this,” Isabel said. “You guys do what you want, but once I drop those pills, I’m out.”
“Well, that solves the car problem,” I said. “And we can make sure to stay far away until you’re gone. It’s not like Blocked Sender will come get the pills immediately. He won’t want you to see him.”
“What makes you think the person who picks up the pills will even be Blocked Sender?” Alex asked. “So far he’s been making other people do his dirty work.”
“Then at least we’ll know one more person who’s involved. We’ll be one step closer.” I hoped that was true, anyway. “Isabel, when are you supposed to drop the pills?”
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Alex said. “I get the impulse to follow people around, but maybe we should do some investigation first. We have an address, so let’s do some research.”
“Do you think the address is actually Blocked Sender’s house?” Raj asked.
“Nope,” she said. “Given how careful he’s been to keep everyone isolated, there’s no way he’s going to make himself that easy to find. But there’s a chance there’s some connection between whoever lives there and Blocked Sender, even if that connection won’t be obvious right away. It would help to know a little something before we stake the place out.”
“And then what?” Justin asked. “We watch the drop-off and confront whoever does the pickup?”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Alex asked. “We’ve got it from here.” She wasn’t even trying to hide her anger at him.
“No way,” he said. “We’re all in this together now.”
“Fine, whatever. We’ll pick you up tomorrow. Isabel, what time’s the drop-off?”
“Nine. Look, I’m fine with you doing this whole following me thing, but do me a favor and make sure you don’t get caught, okay? I don’t want this to get any worse than it already is.”
“None of us do,” I said. “We’ll be careful. I swear.”
“Just tell me what happened after, okay?”
I promised I would.
“That’s everything, right?” Justin asked. “Can we get out of here now?”
“Soon,” I said. “But don’t we need to think about what we’re going to do when we find out who’s picking up the pills?”
“That will depend on who it is, don’t you think?” Raj asked. “It’s not like we’re going to just ambush the person on sight.”
“I know you always like to have a plan, Kara. Sometimes we have to wing it,” Alex said.
“I guess.” I wasn’t so sure, though. But I could tell everyone was ready to be done talking. Alex and Raj had already paid for the pizza, and between them and Justin it was nearly gone. Time to go home. It had been a long day.
I knew Alex was planning to do as much research as she could before I had to pick everyone up, so at school the next day I asked if I could come over and help. We hadn’t had a lot of time to hang out alone, and I wanted to make sure she was okay. She’d gotten so furious with Justin, and I still didn’t understand why. Especially if he hadn’t told Blocked Sender her secret, which I really did believe he hadn’t.
We got to her house and settled in at her desk. Alex started pulling up websites and databases and typing faster than I could keep up with her. “I got a head start last night,” she admitted. “I’m not just doing this off the top of my head. Normally I’d just enter the address and follow it wherever it led, but I thought I’d try to be more like you. You know, methodical. When I got home last night, I researched the best way to find out information from an address, so I bookmarked a whole bunch of stuff to get ready.”
I was flattered that she thought I was methodical. Which I knew would not be something other people might consider a compliment. Pages were still flying by; all the movement was on the main screen, but every so often Alex would move something over to one of the side screens. “What’s happening? What are you finding?”
“I started with the address itself, and everything I could find about the house I’m putting over here on the left. It’s been owned by the same person for years: Nora Sinclair. Everything I learn about her I’m putting on the right.”
“That is very methodical,” I said.
“I do my best. Nora Sinclair’s owned the house for years and years, long enough that the previous owner probably doesn’t matter much. Given how long she’s owned the house, I’m guessing she’s in her seventies or eighties. She has basically no internet presence at all that I can find, which makes sense if she’s that old.”
“What about the house?”
Alex was typing and talking at the same time. How did she do that? “The house is actually more interesting than she is. It’s been on the market for a really long time, which is unusual for Marbella, since houses usually sell quick here. But the house is listed for an enormous amount of money, and from Google maps it looks like it’s just a crappy little place. I’m pulling up property records to see if there’s anything else we can find out.”
“Can I do anything? I brought my laptop, just in case.” I reached into my bag and took it out, moving aside some papers to make room on the desk.
“That would be great. Can you get on social media and do some digging for Nora Sinclair? I don’t think she’ll be on there herself, but maybe someone else might reference her?”
“Sounds good.”
We both sat typing and clicking away, companionable in silence for a while. It was nice to have someone I felt so comfortable with, and all the frenzy of the last few days, and the group activity that accompanied it, had made me miss her.
“I found something,” Alex said. “This house has a really weir
d history. Those first listings are way out of date—there’s some sort of lawsuit happening. It looks like someone got Nora Sinclair’s power of attorney and tried to sell the house, and someone else is trying to block the sale.”
“Any names?”
“None that look familiar. You having any luck?”
“Nothing when I search people, like you thought. I’m going through photos now.” I kept clicking through the list, hoping to find someone old. Finally, I saw a picture of a woman who could be the right age. There was a middle-aged woman standing next to her, and the caption read, “Getting my mother-in-law ready for the nursing home,” with a sad face emoticon. “This could be it.” I showed Alex.
“Whose page is it?”
“Barbara Sinclair.”
“That’s a bummer. Doesn’t match any of the names in the lawsuit.” She spun around in her desk chair and groaned. “We’re not getting anywhere.”
I looked at the picture again and saw a location tag for Palo Alto. “I think it’s her,” I told Alex. “How many Nora Sinclairs are headed for Bay Area nursing homes?”
“Okay, so let’s say it’s her,” Alex said. “Now we know she doesn’t live in the house anymore. It’s nothing we can use.”
“We still might find something later tonight,” I said. “We can’t give up hope yet.”
“I know. This is just all so depressing, though.”
Depressing? I couldn’t help but think that if Alex was right about having set up her whole financial empire in a way that would keep her from getting caught, then most of us had it way worse than she did. And “depressing” wasn’t really the word I’d use to describe what was happening here. She seemed more upset and angry than scared, which didn’t quite make sense. I wondered what was really going on. Maybe it was time to find out. “Listen, I know you said you didn’t want to talk about this yet, but I’d assumed that you and Justin weren’t super close. But as soon as you found out he was involved—”
“I flipped out?” She grinned. “Yeah, I know it must have seemed extreme.”
“Well, not entirely. I mean, he is the one who sold most of us out. But it did seem like more than that.”
“I’m not even a little bit convinced that he didn’t sell me out too,” she said. “But you’re right that there’s more to it. I’ve known Justin since preschool. We’ve been friends my whole life. We were inseparable—that whole thing I told you about me not having many girl friends? That’s because Justin was pretty much my only friend growing up. I didn’t think I needed anyone else. And I thought he didn’t either—even when we started high school and we both got into guys, we were more in it to have fun. We had a great time, but we always had each other, and that was more important. Things shifted a little when Raj moved here—they had some classes together and Justin’s always been into soccer, so they bonded right away, and for a little while we were a threesome.”
I thought about triangle friendships, and seesaw friendships, and I wondered whether Justin felt like he’d been in the middle, like Becca had. But Alex and Raj seemed to have their own friendship, so maybe there was more balance. “Was that okay? Was it hard having things not just be the two of you?”
“That’s the thing—it wasn’t bad at all. It made me wonder why we’d been so against hanging out with other people. Raj is really great, and we’d have movie nights at his house, and go to parties together, and it was fun. But then Justin met this Mark person, though of course I had no idea who it was at the time, and he basically disappeared. It was like he’d made friends with Raj so I’d have someone to hang out with when he bailed on me.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t like that,” I said, though I understood why she might have thought so.
“I know. That’s just how it felt.”
“Did you talk to him about it?”
“I tried. He just said I needed to grow up, which really pissed me off. We had a huge fight and didn’t talk for a while, and eventually we got to where we could be civil and hang out in groups, but it’s not the same. I really miss him.” I could hear the anger in her voice fading to sadness.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “It’s not the same thing, but I told you I used to hang out with Isabel and Becca. Becca was my best friend, but she was best friends with Isabel too—the three of us were kind of a trio, but it was more that Isabel and I were friendly because we both wanted to be around Becca.”
“What happened? I remember you said there was a blowup.”
“It was my fault,” I said. “I screwed it up. I wasn’t a very good friend, and I wasn’t honest. They finally decided they’d had enough of me.” That was pretty much it, really. The details didn’t matter. I felt a pang of embarrassment remembering our argument out on the lawn in front of that party, and another remembering Isabel telling me that they’d known about the monster, had known all along. It made me look back at everything differently.
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, you’ve never been like that with me.”
Except that of course I had. “I’m trying to be better.”
“I wish Justin would. I’m sure this Mark person is all magic and unicorns and hotness, but that’s no reason to give up a friendship. Or to ruin my life.”
“He sounded so convincing when he said he hadn’t told Blocked Sender about you, though.”
“That’s what he said. But he is literally the only person in the world who knew how much drama there was in my family when my uncle got arrested. It was awful, and I was completely miserable. He’s the only one who knows I still talk to my uncle and that I’m terrified of my parents finding out about that and all the poker stuff, and he’s the only one who knows what I think will happen if they do.”
“I know that too,” I said.
“But you didn’t, not when Blocked Sender started texting me. That information could only have come from Justin. The fact that he used our history to save his relationship is unforgiveable. Once this is all over, he and I are done.”
She’d reached her limit, just like Becca and Isabel had reached theirs with me. I understood, but I wondered whether that would really make her feel better. Even though Isabel and I had never been independently close, just being back on speaking terms with her was making me happy.
Despite the circumstances, of course.
22.
I picked everyone up at eight thirty that night, and by a quarter to nine we were headed over to Ridgewood Drive. No need to sit around too long, I’d figured, and we wouldn’t need that much time to get there. “I don’t see why you put the tall people in the back,” Justin whined. “Alex is tiny. She doesn’t need so much legroom.”
I didn’t tell him that Alex had insisted on sitting in front. “If we’re in the backseat together I can’t make any promises about his survival,” she’d said. “I don’t want to look at his stupid face.”
So she had shotgun. Justin was sitting right behind her, and though the very long-legged Raj had been the last person to sit in front, she hadn’t moved the seat up at all. Small victories, I supposed. I’d moved mine up as far as I could stand it to accommodate Raj, but I was sure he was uncomfortable too. I didn’t feel all that bad for him; he’d been the one to suggest taking my car, after all.
We rode over to a neighborhood I’d rarely been in before, one with houses that were older and more run-down than the ones we all lived in, houses that hadn’t been renovated in any of the real estate booms that had hit the Bay Area in the last however many years. The neighborhood was between the freeway and the train, and we could hear noises coming from either side of us as we snaked through back streets to find the house.
Finally we located it, a small, one-level bungalow covered in chipped stucco, in the middle of a street that ended in a cul-de-sac. It was dark outside and some of the streetlights were broken, so I couldn’t tell what color the house was, but it might have been pink. Hard to see how it could ever have been attractive; now it just looked shabby. Poor sweet Nora Sinclair, p
resumably now settled into her nursing home, had really let the place go. I wondered how she linked up to all of this.
We parked a couple of houses away, next to a house that appeared to be under construction, just far away enough to see Isabel as she drove up and got out of her car. She was wearing a trench coat and sunglasses even though it was completely dark out, hair wrapped in a scarf. She looked like a spy from some old movie—unrecognizable but completely glamorous.
Alex could barely hold back a laugh. “Really?”
“Always the drama queen,” I said. “I’m surprised she kept things so low-key when she went to get the pills.” It made me smile, though. I liked the idea that Isabel was the same person I’d always known, even though time had passed and things had gotten complicated.
Isabel dropped off the pills in the mailbox in front of the house, looked around quickly to see if anyone was there, and then got back in her car and drove away. It happened so fast, it was almost like it hadn’t happened at all.
“And now?” Justin asked.
“Now we wait,” Raj said.
“And what then?”
“Then we follow.”
We sat and watched for cars, but the only one we’d seen was Isabel’s. We could hear the sound of the train, and traffic on the freeway, but no one drove by. As I watched, though, I could see someone walking down the street, heading toward the house.
“Someone’s coming,” I said.
“A car?” Alex asked. “I don’t see anything.”
“A person,” I said. Which was weird enough—no one really walked in Marbella. The more likely option was that the person had parked somewhere else. Maybe so they wouldn’t be spotted going up to that mailbox.
We watched as the person kept walking down the street, inching closer to the mailbox. The person was wearing dark clothes and a baseball hat, like Isabel had on the video, like I had at Walmart. Apparently we had our own uniform. I couldn’t even tell if it was a boy or a girl.
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