She took the pendant but didn’t feel the usual chill. Knowing she was going home and Nick was going with her overpowered any negative feelings the pendant could inflict. In her bedroom, she clipped it back around her neck and curled up in a blanket. Imagining a future of comfort, warmth, and no reason to run lulled her to sleep. In a dream, she walked up the flower-lined walkway to Rochelle’s house and knocked on the door. But before anyone could answer, a loud clap of thunder startled her awake. She sat up in bed and listened to the roar of a downpour pelting the roof.
Disappointed that their travel plans would be disrupted by the weather again, Lareina trudged to the bathroom. She washed her face and brushed her hair, wishing she could make herself look so different that Galloway’s wanted posters would be useless.
In the living room, Nick and Aaron sat across from each other at the coffee table playing a game of checkers. She picked up her jacket from the back of the couch, slipped it on, and sat down.
Aaron skipped a checker across the board. “You can’t be cold?” The bruises on his face stood out in deep purple splotches.
“A little.” She glanced at raindrops streaming down the window. “Do you think it’ll rain all day?”
Nick stared at the board in front of him, clearly running out of moves. “I predict it’ll stop by lunch time.”
Aaron laughed. “I hope weatherman Nick is right. Our food isn’t going to last much longer than a day or two.”
Leaning back against the couch, Nick scooped up a piece of paper half hidden under the coffee table. “What’s this?” he asked curiously as he unfolded it.
Lareina froze in place, unable to move, blink, breathe. She felt in her coat pockets—empty.
The color drained from Nick’s face.
“What’s this?” He turned to her and dropped the paper onto the coffee table for Aaron to see. She was aware of Aaron looking at the poster, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the angry betrayal in Nick’s eyes. “Rochelle, what is this?” He sounded out of breath as if he had just run five miles.
Aaron turned to her, anticipating a response to Nick’s question. She tried to answer, but words became a jumble of webs in her brain never making it to her tongue. Nick stood and for the first time she noticed how much he towered over her.
“Maybe you’ll answer my question if I call you Lareina,” he suggested. “What is this?” His voice was low and soft. Anger? Betrayal? Both?
She swallowed, but it didn’t help. Her throat felt like sandpaper baking in the sun, and she knew there wasn’t an excuse or a lie that could explain away the facts on that creased, white background. She should have destroyed the poster, but she hadn’t.
“It’s the truth,” she confessed in the loudest whisper she could manage.
“You lied about your name.” Nick stood frozen in place, watching her through betrayed eyes.
Aaron stood and took a few steps toward Lareina. “Nick, give her a minute to explain.”
“Fine, explain.”
She stood, tired of feeling as if she were under interrogation. “I lied about my name. That’s the truth. My real name is Lareina, not Rochelle Aumont. I don’t have a last name because I was an orphan found wandering around by myself and no one has ever cared about me enough to give me a last name.”
Nick didn’t sway. “Why is your face on a wanted poster?”
“I already explained that to you. I don’t know what makes the pendant so valuable but Galloway wants it.”
“I don’t believe you.” His voice broke. “The things you’ve been telling me don’t add up. What else are you lying about?”
She took a step toward him, and he backed away. “Nick, please. You know more about me than any other person on Earth; my name was the only lie. When I told you my name was Rochelle, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, but then I did, and you always hated dishonesty, so I didn’t know how to tell you. It’s just a name.” She took another step toward Nick and held a hand out to him, but he backed away.
Shaking his head slowly back and forth, he looked at the window. “Who is Rochelle Aumont anyway? Another criminal? Some name you read in a newspaper?”
“My friend from Nebraska.”
Nick’s scowl deepened. “All of this time, I’ve watched you con every person you met, and for some reason I let myself believe I was somehow immune, but I’ve been just as stupid as all of them.”
Shoving her hands into her pockets, she stretched to stand as tall as her body would allow. “I guess I was stupid for letting you slow me down. I thought maybe I cared about you, but you’re just like everyone else.”
Nick turned on his heel and left the room. Lareina sank, slowly melting into the couch cushions as if she didn’t have the strength to combat gravity. Aaron sat down next to her and for a long time they stared at a dark square where a painting once hung on the wall in front of them.
“It might take a while for me to remember your name,” Aaron finally said.
She leaned forward and rested her chin in her hand. “It doesn’t matter. For all I know, my name isn’t even Lareina. I’d rather not be—I’ve been Lareina for two minutes and look how everything unraveled.” She gestured toward the hallway where Nick had gone.
Aaron put a hand on her shoulder. “He’ll come around.”
“Why are you still talking to me? I lied to you too.”
“So you told me a different name.” Aaron shrugged. “You’re just trying to protect yourself. I believe everything else you told me. Especially the part about the pendants. Not even you could make that up.”
Sighing, she squeezed her eyes shut. “I wish I would have just stayed in bed. Everything was fine ten minutes ago.”
“I’ll talk to Nick. He’s probably already feeling stupid about overreacting.”
Maybe Aaron was just trying to make her feel better, but she knew Nick. He could forgive her for calling him a wimp and breaking into empty houses, but he could never forgive her for a breach of trust that started the moment they met. She couldn’t blame him; after all, she’d had plenty of opportunities to tell him the truth. When she met him for a second time, she lied to both him and Aaron, and then at Oak Creek, through all of those conversations at the barracks, the truth about her name never came out.
She leaned back into the couch and held her hands over her face. Somehow she handled breaking the news about Ava, the worst news of Nick’s life, but couldn’t manage to throw in a “By the way, I lied about my name.” Letting her hands drop from her face, she realized Aaron had also disappeared from the room. Outside the rain slowed to a steady drip, drip, drip.
“She could be a murderer for all we know.” Nick’s muffled voice sliced through the wall.
Moving quietly across the room, Lareina stopped in the hallway.
“We know better than that. We’ve never seen her hurt anyone,” Aaron reasoned.
“She always has a gun.”
“The one time she used it, it saved your life. Come on, Nick, just talk to her.”
“No. If you still trust her, fine. But I’m not fleeing the state with a wanted criminal who can’t even trust me with her real name.”
Chapter 32
Sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, Lareina divided the last granola bars and crackers between two bags. Nick wouldn’t talk to her but he had told Aaron he planned to leave at the first break in the rain. Through the patio doors, she could see that it was still cloudy, but the rain had stopped and the outside world appeared a little brighter.
She pictured Nick sitting outside on a patio chair watching the sunset with her. They had devised the perfect plan and for the twelve hours it had been in place, she believed that she could escape Galloway for good and leave all of her problems behind. She had the assurance that Nick would be by her side for more than a few weeks. He could have been part of the family she wanted, but now she would never see him again. The truth had made both of them miserable. She figured lies made people miserable too, but t
hey also bought time. Regrets, however, wouldn’t change anything, so she did her best to push such thoughts out of her mind.
“Do you need any help?” Aaron stood over her.
“No.” She tossed two granola bars and a sleeve of crackers into Nick’s bag. “Does he know this food won’t last him more than a day? What is he going to do when he runs out?”
Aaron leaned back against the wall. “I told him the food won’t last. I told him I’m staying with you. I told him he’s being childish. Nothing is changing his mind.”
“He’s made his choice then.” She rolled a t-shirt into a tube and shoved it into the bag. “I guess we can’t help him anymore.”
“I guess you’re right.” He sauntered to the patio doors and stepped outside.
Lareina stuffed her extra clothes into the bag she would share with Aaron, tried to zip it, rearranged, tried again. She remembered when she first met Nick how she wanted to keep moving, and he tried to stall her. Now he couldn’t wait to walk out that door. But he wasn’t any less defenseless than he had been back then.
The zipper caught on a shirt and she pulled it backward. How could he stay alive, even a week, on his own? Reaching down to the bottom of her bag, she grasped the heaviest item and pulled it out. For a second, she balanced the gun on her hand then looked at the backpack she had filled for Nick. In a final effort to protect him, she buried the gun under extra clothes and the little food that made up his third of what they had left. She tossed one extra granola bar into his bag and zipped it shut.
I never should have met him in the first place, she reminded herself. It was only by a serendipitous turn of events that she’d gotten to know him at all.
A door creaked and she listened to Nick’s footsteps approach until he stood in front of her. She pushed herself to her feet and picked up his bag.
“Here.” She didn’t look at his eyes. She didn’t want to cry.
Nick took the bag, unzipped it, glanced inside, closed it, and swung it over his shoulder. He nodded then turned away and walked out onto the patio. She followed, but lingered in the doorway.
Aaron turned when he heard Nick approaching. The boys shook hands.
“It’s been great knowing you, Nick. Take care of yourself out there.”
“I’ll be fine. You never know, we might run into each other again someday.” There was a slight catch in his voice. Sadness? Regret?
Aaron turned toward Lareina. “Maybe we will. It has happened before.”
Nick nodded, but kept his eyes diverted from hers.
Taking only a few steps forward, she stopped as if a wall stood between them. “Bye Nick.” She turned away so he wouldn’t see the misery she couldn’t disguise.
“Bye Lareina,” he replied in a flat, emotionless voice.
For a moment he looked at the place where the sun had set behind the fence and she wondered if he was thinking of their plan. He shook his head and took a step and then another. Standing with Aaron, she watched Nick move farther and farther down the road that would take him to Dallas. She wanted to shout at him for being arrogant and stubborn, but instead told herself she couldn’t wait for him to fade into memory like all of the others who had been so quick to abandon her.
Trudging back into the house, she leaned against the wall, and let the imagined weight of her pendant pull her down to the dining room floor. There had been a time when she believed she could escape Galloway, but she realized now that hope had evaporated. Too many times he had found her when she thought it was impossible. There wasn’t anywhere he wouldn’t follow her to get his hands on the pendant. If he knew Nick had one too, would he want it just as much? How many more pendants were out there? The questions haunted her, but she didn’t have any answers.
The patio door scraped shut and Aaron sat down next to her. “I guess it’s time for us to get going to Dallas.”
“We’ll give Nick a head start. I don’t want to run into him ever again.” She turned to Aaron, who slumped forward with his legs stretched out in front of him. He looked defeated and she realized she’d been so preoccupied with Nick she hadn’t really talked to Aaron about anything else. “Is everything okay?”
“Fine, I’m just tired.”
She wasn’t entirely convinced but didn’t want to push any further. Instead she remained quiet so he would know she was there for him if he decided to share what was on his mind.
He pressed a hand to the bruised side of his face, as if he’d forgotten, then winced and pulled it away quickly. “I’m a little worried, I guess, that I won’t be able to find work at a hospital in Dallas.”
“Of course you’ll find work. You’re great at being a doctor.”
Aaron smiled. “I’m not really a doctor, Lareina. I don’t even know if I have what it takes to get into a training program, and if I do it’ll still take years. What if I can’t make it?”
“You’ve convinced me that you know a lot about being a doctor, so why wouldn’t you be able to prove the same to everyone else?”
He studied her as a rectangle of sunlight materialized across the floor. “How do you manage to do that? Despite everything that happens, you always believe that tomorrow will be better than today.”
She wished that his observation were true, considered pretending that it was, and then decided to be honest. “I do believe that things have to get better,” she admitted. “But ever since I started wearing this pendant, I’ve been afraid that they won’t.” She looked down at it, accentuated against her blue shirt, where it shivered with her every breath.
“It looks harmless to me.” Aaron shrugged.
Lareina tried to find words that could explain the heavy feeling of dread, but as usual she couldn’t. “There are so many unanswered questions and so many things that don’t make sense. It gives me a bad feeling.”
“Because of the detective . . . and how it’s connected to Nick?”
The pendant slid back and forth between her thumb and index finger. “It’s something more than that.”
“Let me see it.”
She held it out into the light and closer to Aaron.
“Do you know what spero means?”
“I don’t even know what language it is,” she admitted.
“It’s Latin—I picked up a little learning medical terminology.” Aaron’s natural confidence returned to his voice. “It means something along the lines of hope or to hope for. How threatening can it really be with a message like that?” Closing her eyes, she pictured Nick’s pendant. “What does optimus mean?”
“Optimus,” Aaron repeated, stressing different syllables than she had. “The best. I don’t think it’s conjugated quite right for them to form a grammatical sentence. But I think the message is hope for the best.”
She stared down at the pendant, but Aaron’s translation didn’t reveal anything new about its meaning. If anything, it only intensified the foreboding mystery. “Or maybe it’s a warning. Maybe it’s dangerous for the two pendants to be near each other. But I guess we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
He nodded in his usual understanding way. “Let’s take an hour to regroup then we’ll get out of this place. We’ll both feel better when we get to Dallas.” He stood, stretched, and walked outside into the sunny backyard.
Hope for the best.
What did that have to do with Galloway, Susan, and Nick? Despite Aaron’s encouraging words, her thoughts circled back to fear that she and Nick carried something far more valuable, more dangerous, than they could ever understand. Nick. She wanted to warn him to toss his pendant into a river and pretend it never existed. But there would be no helping Nick as long as he didn’t want her help. She knew he had never fully trusted her. Why won’t he ever believe me?
Because of Galloway, she decided. Who wouldn’t be suspicious of someone who had to run hundreds of miles to escape a detective? Closing her eyes, she envisioned Galloway plastering her picture all over Dallas. She felt like the entire world knew her name and what she l
ooked like. How could she ever hide with all of those people searching for her, motivated by the promise of money?
Forcing herself to her feet, she trudged into the bathroom. Sun streamed through the window. She searched every drawer and cupboard until she finally found what she looked for in the medicine cabinet. Using her hands, she brushed her long hair over her left shoulder. Gathering all of it in one hand she raised the scissors, then dropped them back to the counter.
“It’s temporary,” she scolded herself. “It’ll grow out long again.”
Twisting her hair into a long rope, she raised the scissors, and sawed through it at the level of her chin. Then she brushed hair forward over her forehead and cut long, jagged bangs that hung down to her eyelashes.
Chapter 33
“The town in Nebraska where you’re going—what’s it like?”
Lareina shielded her eyes from the sun that had slipped so low she felt she walked right into it. “Maibe is a small town like most others.” She shrugged. “Main Street is lined with stores and shops. There’s a bakery right in the middle of downtown where you can buy a huge chocolate chip cookie for a quarter.” She closed her eyes, imagining the delicious aroma of fresh bread and warm cake. “During the summer everything is green wherever you look and as far as you can see . . .”
“And there’s a hospital there?” Aaron interrupted.
“Yeah, a small one.” She could barely visualize the old brick building that she had never been inside. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m just a little worried about you traveling all the way to Nebraska by yourself, and I thought maybe I could go with you, and get some more medical experience in a small town before I start my career in some big city.”
An involuntary smile spread across her face, but she tried not to let Aaron see. “Of course you can come along. But you’re sure that’s what you want? Don’t change your mind because you’re afraid.” Her last sentence came out as a weak plea. She didn’t want to lose him but also didn’t want to hold him back.
Hope for the Best Page 26