Erased (Altered)

by Jennifer Rush

  “You have any proof that Sam did it?” Nick asked.

  Will spread out his hands. “Nothing on me. I had heard from one of my old contacts that the events of that night were detailed in Sam’s Branch files. I haven’t seen them, though.”

  Trev had given us all the files and information he could find about us back when we escaped from Branch headquarters. I had only skimmed through Sam’s files. It was possible I hadn’t found the appropriate one yet.

  Had Sam read that file and not told us? Did he remember?

  The piece of paper I’d found in his bedside table, right before we left the cabin. The note with all of the names written in Sam’s handwriting.

  My parents had been on that list.

  Was it possible he was documenting the names of the people he’d killed as he remembered them?

  If that was true, he’d known about my parents for a while now.

  I leapt to my feet. “I have to go.”

  Nick stood behind me. Will stood, too. “Anna. Wait,” Will said. “Please don’t rush out of here like this. I’ve only just found you again. Stay here. You and Nick both. You can have a home-cooked meal and a good night’s sleep.”

  “We’re not staying here,” Nick said.

  Will took a step toward me. “At least tell me where you’re going. Or give me your number. I don’t want to lose you a second time.” Tears again, clouding his eyes. “You and Dani are all I have left of my brother.”

  Nick slipped between Will and me. “Give us your number, and we’ll call you.”

  Will pursed his lips but nodded. He tore off a piece of the newspaper sitting on the end table and scribbled down a number on the margin. “That’s my cell. I’ll be sure to keep it on.”

  I folded the paper and slid it into my pocket. “Thank you.”

  He nodded and walked us to the door. “Be careful around Sam,” he said as I stepped through the doorway. “I don’t know if you’re in touch with him or what. But he’s dangerous and reckless and stronger than any normal man should be.”

  I knew that. I knew how strong Sam was. It was one of the things I loved about him.

  But now, instead of it being an asset, it was something to fear.

  22

  AS SOON AS WE WERE ON THE ROAD again, I told Nick about the list I’d found in Sam’s bedside table.

  “You have it on you?” Nick asked.

  I did. I’d folded it into a tiny square and tucked it into a pair of socks in my bag. I retrieved it, and Nick pulled off the road to read.

  “Has he said anything to you about this?” I asked.

  Nick shook his head.

  “So what do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Look at this. He was organizing them into groups. The asterisks are confirmed missions. I recognize a few of the names. Joseph Badgley, for one. We were on that mission together.”

  “It’s a kill sheet, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  “So the question marks…”

  “Mean he’s not sure if he killed them or not.”

  My parents’ names had question marks next to them. But the simple fact that they were on the list was enough. He had remembered something about that night, something to make him question his role in their deaths, and he hadn’t told me.

  “I just wish I could remember,” I muttered. “That’d solve everything.”

  “Yeah, but shit’s never that easy.”

  I sank into the bucket seat as Nick pulled onto the road, headed in the opposite direction. “Where are we going?”

  “I’m taking you to Sam.”

  I straightened. “What? You know where they are?”

  Nick nodded. “Sam’s been keeping me in the loop.”

  I blew out a breath. “So it’s okay for you to know where they are but not me? What, he doesn’t trust me?”

  Nick scowled. “It was to protect you.”

  I grumbled to myself. “How long before we get there?”

  “About three hours.”

  “Great,” I said, but I knew three hours wasn’t enough time to prepare myself. What was I going to say to Sam once I saw him? How did I even broach the subject?

  I didn’t want it to be true. Hating Sam seemed worse than losing him. And I couldn’t stand the thought of either.

  Nick took us to Grand Rapids, where Sam, Cas, and Dani were apparently squatting in a condominium complex that was in foreclosure.

  The condo they had picked out was so palatial, my anger instantly doubled.

  Nick and I had been on the road for nearly twenty-four hours straight, and we’d broken into a cottage that was coated in dust and smelled like a musty basement. And here Sam was in a penthouse condo with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, granite countertops, and indoor pool access. The pool was probably not in working order, but still.

  What made everything worse was that Dani looked even more gorgeous than when I’d last seen her. Like she’d morphed into a goddess overnight. She wore a pair of skinny jeans and a sweater that hugged her tiny waist. Her hair was clean and shiny, while mine was greasy and snarled. There was still blood on my clothes and dirt beneath my fingernails.

  And the whole situation just felt wrong.

  They all stared at me, and the room grew quiet and awkward.

  Nick stood shoulder to shoulder with me, and ironically, his presence made me more confident, bolder, and I didn’t hold anything back.

  “Having fun, are you?” I said. “If I’d known you guys were taking a vacation, I would have stuffed myself in one of your suitcases.”

  Sam sighed. “Is that really necessary?”

  I stalked across the open space to where he stood at the kitchen island and slapped the list down on the countertop. “I found this in our room at the cabin.”

  He looked at the piece of paper with a blank expression. “What is it?”

  “You tell me.”

  He grabbed the list and my hand and steered me down the hallway. Nick came with us, maybe because he wanted to hear the explanation with his own ears. Or maybe because he was afraid of what might happen between me and Sam if Sam admitted the truth, whatever it was.

  We grouped in an empty bedroom and Sam closed the door behind us.

  “Did you kill my parents?” I blurted.

  “Anna—” he started.

  “Did you?”

  His shoulders sank. “I don’t know.”

  “Have you had flashbacks to that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you see?”

  A vein in his forehead rose beneath the skin. “You, mostly.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Crying.”

  “Is there blood on my hands?”

  “Yes.”

  I inhaled through my nose as I saw a flash of twelve-year-old me looking down at my mother, blood covering the front of her. Was the blood on my hands hers? Was the memory real?

  “Did you see who killed them?” I asked again.

  Sam didn’t look away as he said, “No. I haven’t been able to remember that part yet.”

  “It’s supposedly in your files,” Nick said.

  Sam shook his head. “I’ve read my files over and over again. There’s no mention of that night.”

  “Where’s the flash drive and the laptop?”

  “Wait here,” he said and disappeared to the front of the condo. He came back a second later and handed them over. “If you find something, let me know.” I grabbed for the laptop, but he held on tight. “Please?”

  “I will.”

  “We’ll move to another condo in the meantime,” he said. “Just to be safe.”

  The way he looked at me, like he was more lost than I was, made me soften. I wanted to reach out to him. I wanted to touch him. I wanted none of this to be true. “I’ll call you if I find something,” I said, right before he walked out the door.

  23

  WITH THE OTHERS GONE, I GOT COMFORTABLE in the s
maller bedroom with a view that overlooked the street. I propped myself in a corner, laptop in my lap, and started reading.

  I skimmed through all the files I’d already read. There were a lot of medical files and logs like the ones we’d used at the farmhouse lab. Seeing them with Sam’s name scrawled across the top stirred old memories.

  I used to love doing the logs at home. So much so that I’d gone down there to do the dailies on my last birthday because there was nowhere else I’d have rather been.

  Of course, the boys had other ideas. They’d planned me a surprise party, which was an incredible feat, considering they weren’t allowed out of their cells. They’d put it together with my dad, picking which decorations to get, what kind of food to have. They’d even put in personal requests for my gifts.

  It was the first time I could remember anyone doing anything special for me.

  When I got down there, the lights were off. My dad had gone ahead of me an hour before, so I knew it was odd. “Dad?” I’d called.

  The lights flickered on. “Surprise!” they yelled, though Nick’s was more of a disgruntled murmur.

  Green streamers had been taped to the front of the boys’ cells. There were balloons everywhere, even inside the boys’ rooms. A cake sat on a folding table in the center of the lab and read in scrolling pink gel, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANNA.

  At first I was speechless, afraid that if I said anything, I’d burst into tears.

  When I finally had control of myself, I asked, “Whose idea was this?”

  Sam, at the front of his room, a thin sheet of Plexiglas between us, answered, “It was a mutual decision,” while Cas and Trev shook their heads.

  “It was Sam’s idea,” Cas said, grinning, and Sam shifted his gaze to the floor, hiding his eyes.

  I went to his room first. My stomach filled with butterflies. “It was?”

  He looked up, his expression warmer, brighter than I’d ever seen it. “You do a lot for us. It was the least we could do.”

  Later, after cake and ice cream, after my dad went upstairs complaining of exhaustion, the boys gave me their gifts.

  Cas got me a paranormal romance novel. “They’re making it into a movie,” he said. “So it must be good, right?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d already read it and its sequel.

  Trev got me a new set of colored pencils, ones he knew I’d been coveting. Nick got me a scarf and muttered something about being careful not to choke myself with it.

  At Sam’s request, I’d gone to his room last. He put something in the hatch, and I opened it on my side. It wasn’t wrapped, but then, gift-wrapping didn’t seem like his kind of thing anyway. I felt the texture of the hardcover first, and when I pulled it out, I realized it was a blank journal.

  He hadn’t known about my mother’s journal yet, or at least not the details. I’d brought it down to the lab every now and then to sketch, or scribble notes, but there was no way he could have known how important it was to me.

  “Someday,” he said, “you’ll run out of pages in your notebook, and I wanted to be sure you had something new to start with.”

  It was a simple book. The cover was black cloth with no writing on it. I opened it up to smooth, hand-pressed pages that were creamy and thick between my fingers.

  I was about to flip it shut when I caught sight of writing on the front page.

  To Anna, it read.

  Because you are happiest when you are sketching.

  —Sam

  It was the first time I saw myself through someone else’s eyes. The first time I realized Sam watched me when I wasn’t paying attention and regarded me as someone other than just my dad’s lab assistant.

  It was the first time I felt truly justified in liking him, or even loving him, the way I did.

  And if I’d been thinking about it when we left the farmhouse, I would have grabbed Sam’s gift along with my mother’s journal. I’d regretted leaving it behind.

  How could that Sam, the one who I’d fallen in love with in the lab, be the same person who’d killed my parents?

  I didn’t want to believe it. I came up with excuse after excuse to explain it away.

  Maybe he was confused. Maybe it was self-defense.

  Or maybe Uncle Will was wrong.

  I continued through the files. There were pages and pages of transcripts from Sam’s initial tests. His IQ test scores. His physical exams. There was even a log of his sleeping patterns.

  I kept going, digging deeper and deeper, checking the files I’d ignored in the beginning because of their nondescript titles. Names like TEMPLATES and MAINTENANCE. Finally, something caught my eye: a file marked O’BRIEN in the REFERENCE folder. I clicked through and found another file called O’BRIEN INCIDENT.

  How had I missed this before?

  I opened the document. There were dates, times of debriefing. A lot of pieces were missing because whoever had written the document hadn’t actually been at the house that night.

  But there was a “reliable eyewitness,” so I scrolled until I found the witness’s info.

  He or she hadn’t been named, but there was a transcript of the meeting with a Branch agent.

  Witness: Sam made everyone go into the foyer. He had a gun. Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien tried shielding their daughter, but Sam dragged her away, toward the front door.

  “No one move,” Sam had said.

  Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien held up their hands. Sam pointed the gun at them.

  Agent: What was Dani doing at this point?

  Witness: Crying. She kept asking Sam to put the gun down.

  I paused. Dani had said she wasn’t there that night. Was she lying? Or maybe she didn’t remember? Had the Branch stolen that memory from her, too?

  I kept reading.

  When Sam wasn’t looking, Mr. O’Brien made a grab for the gun. When Sam realized what was happening, he shot. Mr. O’Brien went down. Mrs. O’Brien started screaming, so Sam shot her, too.

  Agent: And then what?

  Witness: Dani attacked him. She was yelling at him and hitting him. That’s when the Branch agents showed up and Dani ran out the back door.

  I set down the laptop, as the urge to vomit rose in my throat. Sam had killed my parents. He was the whole reason we were here now, why we’d been in the program at the farmhouse lab. He had ruined my life. He’d taken everything I’d loved away from me.

  “Anna?” Dani called, startling me. I hadn’t heard her come in. “Cas and I were just talking about getting something to eat and—”

  I hurried over to her and shoved the laptop in her face. “Read this.”

  “Um. Okay?” She took the computer, holding it up as she read. I knew when she reached the part about Sam by the way she looked at me, the pain in her eyes. “Oh no. I don’t… I don’t remember this at all.…”

  “He did it. Sam killed them.”

  “Maybe there’s an explanation.”

  “No. It’s there in the files, and Uncle Will said he did it, and…”

  She set the laptop on the floor and took my face in her hands. “If this is true…”

  I swallowed the wedge in my throat.

  “Where’s Nick?” she asked, pulling away.

  “He’s sleeping in one of the bedrooms last I knew—”

  “You have to go.”

  “What, now?”

  “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is? Who knows what else he’s capable of? Oh, God. I can’t believe he did it.”

  “Where am I going to go?” I whispered.

  “Do you have anyone you trust?”

  “No… I mean… my dad, I guess.”

  “Then call him.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  She unplugged the flash drive from the laptop and slid it in the pocket of my jeans. “You want my advice, trust no one. Maybe not even me.”

  “You’re my sister,” I said, and for the first time, it felt true.

  “And as your sister, I’m telling you to go. I’ll fe
el better once you’re somewhere safe. Here.” She handed me a set of car keys. “It’s the blue SUV in the parking lot.”

  “Where did you—”

  “Shh.” She glanced toward the bedrooms. “Come on.” She led me to the door and scanned the hallway beyond before waving me through.

  I grabbed my bag and followed her out.

  In the hallway, she gave me a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. “Be safe,” she said and urged me into the stairwell, shutting the door behind her before I could respond.

  With my heart hammering in my ears, I took the stairs down two at a time and slipped out the rear exit, near the parking lot. I hesitated just outside the door, looking back toward the lobby, wondering if I should tell Nick or Cas, or even Sam, what Dani and I had read.

  I didn’t want to be alone.

  I didn’t want to leave.

  I’ll take my chances, I thought. There had to be an explanation, right?

  But then the rational side of my brain kicked in and said that I needed to be strong, that I needed to go.

  Inside the SUV, I jammed the key into the ignition. Snow started to fall in fat, lazy flakes that melted when they hit the windshield.

  I tugged the car into drive and pulled out of the parking lot.

  24

  SINCE I’D LEFT THE CELL PHONE BACK at the condo, I had to go looking for a pay phone. I finally found one after nearly an hour of driving. And then it took me another ten minutes to find enough quarters in the car to make a call.

  Dad answered on the second ring.

  “Hello?” he said, his tone guarded.

  “Dad. It’s me. I don’t have a lot of time. I’m on a pay phone.”

  He breathed out. “If you’re calling me from a pay phone,” he said, “I can only assume you’re in trouble.”

  I clutched the phone harder and looked out on the gas station parking lot. The sun was beginning to rise, and morning commuters were pulling into the parking lot to fill up on gas, coffee, and doughnuts. This station had a bakery in back, and I could smell the fried dough from all the way out here.

  My stomach growled.

  “I need to come stay with you for a few days,” I said.