Are you all alone?
I was. More alone than I’d ever been, and that was saying something.
I finally turned off the TV and fell into a dream-filled sleep.
Logan floated in the ocean next to me, our bodies rising and falling with the swell of the tide. We held hands, our entwined fingers buoyant on the briny water. I felt his hand slip from mine, but when I looked over at him, his face morphed into Parker’s. He sank slowly below the surface, still on his back, the pale flash of his skin growing dimmer as I reached for him. I ducked under the water and opened my eyes, but instead of Parker, I saw a flash of gold underneath me: the gold bars we’d stolen from Warren Fairchild, stacked on the sandy ocean floor. I looked frantically around, but Parker was nowhere to be found. I was starting to swim for the surface, my breath swelling in my lungs, clamoring for release, when something grabbed me. I looked down, a cry of protest arising in a stream of bubbles from my mouth as I saw a dark-haired woman, her face gray and bloated, her fingers wrapped tightly around my arm.
It was after ten o’clock in the morning when I woke up sweating, clutching my throat and gasping for air like I’d been holding my breath. I took a shower and brushed my teeth, still shaken from the nightmare. After I got dressed, I opened the curtains. I was hoping the California sun would banish the residual dread in my veins, but I was greeted with a bank of gunmetal clouds that almost completely blotted out the light. Rain beaded the window, the ocean lost to fog in the distance. I wondered if Logan and the others had been surfing. He always said some of the best swells came in just before a storm.
The thought brought forward a flash of memory: Logan emerging from the water with his surfboard as the sun hung over the horizon. I was sitting on a blanket, trying to focus on my book when all I really wanted to do was look at him. He’d shaken his wet hair over me, causing me to shriek in protest, and he’d laughed as he peeled off his wet suit. After that, we’d huddled under a blanket, kissing and touching and talking, until the sun went down on the deserted beach. His skin had been cold and smooth. He’d smelled like the sea.
I took a shower and spent an hour in front of the mirror using makeup to sculpt a different face. I made my eyes look smaller by rimming them with black liner all the way around, then swept dark blush into the hollows of my cheekbones to make my face appear even gaunter than it already was. Subtle shading along either side of my nose made it look longer and more narrow, and nude gloss took the attention off my lips. By the time I was finished, I didn’t look at all like Grace Fontaine. I didn’t look like Julie Montrose either. I stared at the stranger in the mirror and felt completely unattached to the reflection.
I paid for another day at the hotel on my way out. If I didn’t find a solution soon, I’d have to move. Budget hotels were havens for transients: businesspeople, travelers on their way someplace else, families stopping for the night during a road trip. I’d already been there four days. I was going to draw attention to myself if I didn’t move soon.
I stopped at Denny’s for breakfast, then walked to the corner of Hawthorne and Pacific Coast Highway and caught the bus. My pulse quickened as we made our way up the winding hills of the peninsula, the bus’s engine straining against the incline. The light was already dim and gray, but once we hit Cove Road, it grew even darker, the thick net of foliage overhead blocking out what little light made it through the clouds.
I remembered the first time I’d seen Playa Hermosa, the way it had felt like a tropical jungle, like I was leaving reality behind for someplace warm and magical, removed from all of life’s ugly realities. Maybe it was just the weather, but this time felt different, like I was swimming into an underwater cave, hoping for an exit on the other side but knowing deep down I would be met with a wall of rock.
The bus slowly emptied out as we climbed the winding roads. By the time we stopped at the Town Center, the bus’s last stop before heading back to Torrance, I was the only one left. I wasn’t surprised. Who took the bus to Playa Hermosa? The people who lived here had multiple vehicles in their driveways, usually expensive European sports cars, luxury sedans, and high-end SUVs, plenty to go around for the parents and their kids, gifted with brand-new models on their sixteenth birthdays.
I got off the bus and immediately started walking, making a point to avoid Mike’s. Other than the Cove, it was the most likely spot for Logan and the others to hang out. School didn’t let out for an hour, but it was the end of senior year for most of them, and I couldn’t be sure they were all on a normal schedule. I imagined them there, clustered around the big red booth in the back, laughing and eating cheese fries. Rachel would be playing tic-tac-toe on the back of a menu with Harper while Liam entertained everyone with his latest exploits in the water. Would Logan be there, too? Or did his carefree days with the group end the night we took his father’s gold?
I pushed the thought away. I couldn’t do anything about that. I was here for Parker. He was the one I could still help, the one who was counting on me. I didn’t know if I could live with the damage I’d done to Logan and his family, but for now I would live for Parker. I would put one foot in front of the other to right the only wrong I had any control over. I would have to figure out what I could and couldn’t live with later, after Parker was free.
I turned off the main road as soon as I could. Playa Hermosa’s residential neighborhoods were connected to the rest of the South Bay by one main artery, and I didn’t want to be seen by anyone who might be driving by. I knew I looked different on the outside, but it was hard to believe my crime wasn’t emblazoned on my face, visible to everyone.
Above the Town Center, Playa Hermosa was nothing but a series of twisty, steeply inclined roads. My legs burned as I climbed, and I was suddenly grateful for the cloud cover that kept the sun from burning too hot on my head. I felt the tug of melancholy as I walked, the breeze salty and familiar, the smell of wild jasmine permeating the air. Bougainvillea climbed across stone walls and trellises, over fences and up the sides of houses. Somewhere in the trees I heard the caw of the wild parrots that made their home here. It made me think of the man who had lived next door on Camino Jardin, the old music he liked to hum, his voice calling out to the birds in the trees.
I wondered how the peacocks were faring, if the residents of Playa Hermosa had won their battle to have them removed because of the noise and their penchant for standing in the middle of the road. I thought with a pang of sadness of the one Cormac had run over after the Fairchild con. Another casualty of all our lies.
It took me twenty minutes to reach Selena’s neighborhood and another fifteen to find a good place to hide. The street was fronted by houses on both sides, the road clear except for an empty blue Range Rover at the curb. Not exactly overflowing with possibilities. I finally tucked myself into the nook created by a small arbor in front of the house across the street from Selena’s. It didn’t have a garage—a lot of the older houses in Playa Hermosa didn’t—and there were no cars in the driveway. I guessed it was empty, and I felt relatively certain the bougainvillea growing up the sides of the arbor would conceal me from a casual observer.
I’d been there about a half hour when a fine mist started to fall from the sky. I pulled the hood up on my jacket and tucked myself farther back into the arbor, keeping my eyes on the small stucco house that belonged to Selena and the father who’d raised her. I flashed back to my dream, to the woman underwater. I had somehow known she was Selena’s mother even though she’d been long gone by the time we came to Playa Hermosa. I was contemplating the subconscious meaning of her appearance in my nightmare when I saw a flash of red on the sidewalk across the street.
I squinted, trying to focus through the water netting the air. A lone figure walked down the sidewalk. The person was almost completely obscured by a red raincoat, but I would have known it was Selena even without the strand of curly dark hair that escaped from the hood. It was something in the way she walked, body leaning forward like she always had somewhere importan
t to be, gaze focused like she was so far inside her own head that she wasn’t aware of the world around her. Until she looked at you. Then there was never any doubt that she was really there.
I watched her hurry toward the walkway leading to the house across the street. She was alone, and I wondered what had happened to Nina, the girl who’d walked home with Selena before I’d pulled her into Logan’s crowd. Selena hadn’t had a lot of friends, but the ones she had were consistent, people she could eat lunch with every day or walk home from school with. Had they turned on her because of her association with me? I could hardly stand to think about it.
I took a step forward as she turned onto the landscaped path leading to her house. I needed to talk to her. We’d been friends first, before I’d been accepted into Logan’s group. I don’t know why that made me think she might give me a chance to make things right. Maybe because it was the only hope I had.
But I couldn’t make my feet move, and I stood helplessly by as she stepped onto the stone porch. She put a hand into her bag, then reached for the door. It swung open, and a minute later she disappeared behind it, as lost to me as I’d been to her when we left Playa Hermosa the night everything had gone so wrong.
Seven
I walked back to the Town Center, the rain falling harder and more insistently. The sky had turned a darker shade of gray, and somewhere in the distance I thought I heard the low rumble of thunder. I felt closed in and cut off by the rain, by the hood pulled up around my face, by my isolation.
I stood back in the Plexiglas shelter while I waited for the bus. I knew I was hardly visible from the street, but I still felt exposed, and I was relieved when the bus finally pulled up in a cloud of exhaust and a screech of brakes.
I looked out the window, thinking about Selena as we wound our way down the peninsula. I should have approached her. Asking her for help was the only option I had. Waiting wasn’t going to change that, and it wasn’t going to make talking to her easier, either. Nothing would do that. I didn’t want to talk to her, not just because it was a risk to my freedom—and by extension Parker’s—but because she didn’t deserve it. Didn’t deserve to be pulled back into the mess I’d made. It was just another way of victimizing her, of punishing her for caring about me.
I ran through all the other possibilities, returning to Detective Castillo. I didn’t think Selena would call the cops, but I couldn’t be sure. Detective Castillo could tell me if turning myself in would help Parker. If it would, I’d do it today, and I wouldn’t need to approach Selena at all. If it wouldn’t, I’d be back at square one. But it was worth a shot.
I rode the bus past my stop, all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway into Lomita, a mean-looking city close to the San Pedro waterfront. It was hard to believe Playa Hermosa was less than twenty minutes away; Lomita was paved and sidewalked to within an inch of its life, the lush greenery of the peninsula nothing but a memory in the shadow of countless crumbling stucco apartment buildings. I would have preferred the opposite direction and the beach, but I didn’t want the sound of the water to give away my location.
I got off the bus at a fast-food stand on the corner. My stomach was scooped out with hunger, but there was no way I could think about food until I did what I had to do.
I walked around back, pulling Detective Castillo’s number from my pocket. I stared down at the numbers, racking my brain for another way. There wasn’t one, and I took out my cell phone and dialed before I could talk myself into postponing the inevitable.
I waited for the automated greeting, then punched in Detective Castillo’s extension. It only rang twice before I heard his voice on the other end of the phone.
“Detective Castillo.”
I didn’t bother with a greeting. The clock was already ticking. “It’s Grace Fontaine.”
“Grace.” He breathed my name into the phone, and I wondered if I was imagining the relief in his voice. Had he been waiting for me to call? “Are you all right?”
It took me by surprise. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked me that question. “I’m . . . I’m fine,” I said. “I want to talk about Parker.”
“Okay,” he said.
“What happened isn’t his fault. He didn’t kill that guard.”
“I know that, Grace. The evidence doesn’t match up. But he was part of the Fairchild theft, and I’m guessing you were too.”
I hesitated, trying to think of a way to impart as much information as possible in the short amount of time before I would have to disconnect the call. “We didn’t plan any of it. We were both kids. We did what we were told by the people taking care of us.”
“I hear you, Grace, but Parker’s eighteen.” I heard a note of regret in his voice. “He’s considered responsible for his actions, and so are you. Unless . . .”
I seized on the word. “Unless?”
“If you could get us information about the people who were really behind it, you might be able to cut a deal with the prosecutor.”
“What kind of information?”
There was silence on the other end of the line before he finally spoke again. “That’s a complicated question. Why don’t we meet and talk about it? Just you and me.”
I looked at the call time on my phone. One minute thirty-one seconds.
“I . . . I don’t know,” I said, running possible scenarios through my mind. Would he bring backup to a meeting with me? Was it a trick so he could throw me in jail with Parker?
“I want to help you, Grace. I do. But listen . . .” I heard the squeak of his desk chair followed by footsteps. When he spoke again, his voice was muffled, like he was trying to be quiet. “Things are happening here that will impact the case. I might not be able to help you much longer.”
“What kind of things?”
He was so quiet that I wondered if he’d heard the question. “I’ll fill you in when we meet,” he finally said.
“I don’t know . . .”
“Come on, Grace. You need help here. You know it, and I know it. Let me help you.”
One minute fifty seconds.
“I have to go,” I said. “I’ll call you back in an hour.”
I disconnected the call and leaned against the stained exterior of the building. My chest felt tight, and it was suddenly hard to breathe. I swayed a little, my head buzzing. The last thing I needed was to pass out in public a few miles from Playa Hermosa.
I stood there for a minute, forcing myself to take slow, deep breaths until my head cleared. When I felt almost normal, I went inside and ordered a cheeseburger and fries to go, then waited for the next bus heading back to Torrance.
I took a seat in the back and ate the burger while the city passed by on the other side of the dirty glass. I heard Detective Castillo’s voice in my head: You need help here. You know it, and I know it.
He was right. My money was dwindling fast, something that wouldn’t change as long as I was on the run. I could follow through on my original plan to ask Selena for help, but all roads still led back to Detective Castillo. Regardless of where I slept, I’d need to talk to him eventually, figure out if I could trade information on Cormac and Renee for Parker’s freedom. And what had he meant about things changing? Did they have a break in the case? Something they were going to announce soon?
I looked at my watch. It had been forty-two minutes since I’d hung up with Detective Castillo. I got off the bus at the corner of PCH and Hawthorne and started walking. At the one-hour mark, I called him again.
“Grace.” He picked it up even before I heard it ring. “I’m not tracing this call. You don’t have to hurry off the phone every time we talk.”
“The Reel Inn at the Third Street Promenade, tomorrow at one p.m.,” I said. “And give me your cell phone number.”
I wrote the number in my notebook as he recited it over the phone. “I’ll be there, Grace. And I’ll come alone.”
Eight
The surfers were just climbing out of the water when I reached Santa
Monica early the next morning. I got off the bus and walked toward the promenade, my footsteps heavy and sluggish. I’d slept soundly and without nightmares, but I was dragging, a deep-seated exhaustion taking root in my bones. I’d been on the move almost constantly, taking the bus from one end of town to the other, walking to Selena’s house, to out-of-the-way places to call Detective Castillo. It was wearing on me, and I knew I’d need to find a way to regroup before I lost focus and started making mistakes.
I took a deep breath, sucking in the ocean air, trying to keep myself alert. The sun glinted off the Ferris wheel on the pier, and I had a sudden flash of Logan’s face, inches from mine as we rose over the ocean in one of the tin buckets, his arm securely around my shoulders, the feeling that nothing in the world could come between us as long as we kept climbing into the sky. It hurt to remember, a physical ache in my chest, like my heart had been scraped out, the wound left empty and rotting.
I continued toward the Reel Inn. Logan had taken me there for dinner the night we’d come to the promenade, and while I didn’t plan to use it as a meeting spot for Detective Castillo, it was a good place to start the scavenger hunt that would lead him to me.
The restaurant stood on a corner at the end of the promenade. I walked slowly past it, not wanting to draw attention to myself, casing the surrounding businesses. There was a children’s boutique on one side and a specialty paper store on the other. Across from it stood a bookstore, and next to that a café and coffee shop. I made note of it all and looked up, scanning the rooftops for places the cops might hide to watch my meeting with Detective Castillo.
Once I had a handle on the area around the Reel Inn, I continued along the promenade, looking for places to send Detective Castillo while I watched to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Finally, I chose the place that would be our last stop: a P.F. Chang’s that was close to a parking garage and a bunch of stores that could provide hiding spots if I needed them. I’d been to a P.F. Chang’s in Seattle, and I knew the lighting was dim, the furnishings dark. It was nearly always crowded, and the kitchen would give me an alternate way out if things went bad. Small things might vary from location to location, but chain restaurants were always designed to look and feel the same to the people who frequented them. I was willing to bet this one was almost identical to the one in Seattle. At one p.m., the place would be packed.