Deckard gave me a steady look. Then he said to my mother, “Mrs. Beaugrand, would you mind stepping out of the room for two minutes? I think Tori might find it easier to answer my questions if you weren’t here.”
Mom looked troubled, but she didn’t protest. She touched my shoulder reassuringly and walked out, shutting the French doors behind her.
Deckard waited until she was gone. Then he said in his soft, measured voice, “Tori, it’s important that you answer me honestly. Because if you tell the truth, I may be able to help you. But if you lie, there could be serious consequences. Not just for you but for your family as well.”
No doubt that was supposed to encourage me to do the right thing, but to me it sounded more like a threat. I licked my dry lips and nodded.
“Did Sebastian Faraday threaten to hurt you or your parents or your friends, if you talked about him?”
My heartbeat quickened, but I didn’t hesitate. “No,” I said.
“Are you afraid that you’ll get in trouble for making a false statement to the police?”
An unfair question by any standard. I made my expression puzzled and slightly hurt, though inside I was seething. “No.”
“So you stand by your original statement? You still claim to have no recollection of who abducted you or where you were taken?”
I could see the trap coming, but it was too late to escape it now. “Yes.”
“That’s interesting,” said Deckard, leaning forward and taking a notebook out of his pocket. “Because I happen to know that when you visited Alison Jeffries at Pine Hills Psychiatric Hospital two weeks ago, you told her psychiatrist a different story.”
Stupid, stupid, stupid. I’d assumed my interview with Dr. Minta would be confidential, but I should have known better. Especially since I’d left him with the impression that the police already knew everything. “Oh?” I said, stalling for time. “What story?”
Deckard flipped the notebook open. “According to Dr. Minta, you told him that you and Alison were arguing outside your high school when a team of masked men drove up in an unmarked van. You claimed that these men injected Alison with an unknown substance, then left her lying on the ground while they dragged you into their vehicle. You were subsequently driven to a secret facility where you were held captive, beaten, and used in scientific experiments against your will…”
“Enough,” I said sharply. I didn’t want to hear all that again. “All right, yes, I lied. Alison’s a good person, and what happened to me wasn’t her fault. I wanted him to let her go.”
“I see.” He put the notebook away. “So when you told Dr. Minta that Sebastian Faraday had played a part in your escape, where did you get that idea from? Since you’ve never seen or met Mr. Faraday yourself.”
It was bad enough falling into the trap without finding spikes at the bottom of it too. “Alison told me a few things,” I said. “And I knew she liked him, so I thought…”
“Ms. Beaugrand,” interrupted Deckard, “you were assaulted. You were abducted. For nearly four months you were missing, and your family and friends believed you to be dead. When you came back, your nose had been broken and reset, there was severe bruising around both your eyes, and your clothes were covered in dried blood—the same clothes you’d been wearing when you disappeared. You had obviously been through an extremely traumatic experience. Don’t you think that whoever did this to you should be punished?”
His tone was level, even reasonable. But his jaw was set, and his eyes bored into mine without the slightest trace of pity. And that was when I realized that my mother, who taught me to read people, had been wrong about this man. It wasn’t concern for my safety or sympathy for my parents that had made Deckard so determined to solve my case.
It was obsession.
Not with me personally, but with the mystery I represented. The sheer divide-by-zero impossibility of how I’d vanished into nothingness and reappeared out of nowhere, a case unlike anything he’d ever seen. He’d done everything he could to solve the puzzle, but the pieces refused to match up. So he’d come here today to intimidate me into telling him what had really happened.
I stood up. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t help you.” I turned to leave—
Deckard’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. Not hard enough to hurt me, just enough to let me know who was in charge. “I’m not finished,” he said.
I’d been wary before, but not really frightened. After all, Deckard couldn’t prove that I was lying. And if he tried to lay charges against a sixteen-year-old kidnapping victim just because she didn’t want to talk about what she’d been through, he’d have a hard time getting the courts to back him up.
But I was scared now. Because I could see the pent-up emotion sizzling behind every line of that square face, the muscles twitching beneath his sun-roughened skin. This wasn’t just a policeman doing his job anymore. This was personal.
“Let go,” I said hoarsely. “Or I’ll scream.”
He must have realized his mistake, because he released me and sat back. “If that’s how you want it,” he said. “But you don’t seem to understand the seriousness of what you’re doing. You’re protecting someone who doesn’t deserve to be protected. And as long as you keep lying to the people who care about you, you’re going to be on your own.”
The French doors rattled and Mom stormed into the room. “I saw that,” she snapped at Deckard. “How dare you touch her! Get out.”
For a moment Deckard didn’t move. Then with casual calm he picked up his hat and put it back on his head. “You’ve misunderstood the situation, ma’am,” he said as he rose. “I’m just looking out for your daughter’s best interests.”
He delivered the cliche so blandly that it made me want to spit. I backed away, fists clenched, as he strode past me and into the front hall. He went to the door, opened it—then paused and turned back.
“One more thing you might want to consider,” he said to my mother. “I’ve had a call from one of the senior scientists at our genetic testing facility. She’s concerned you’re not answering her messages. I’d suggest you get in touch with her before you leave town, just to keep things simple. It’d be a shame if you had to bring Tori all the way back here from Vancouver.” With an ironic smile he tipped his hat to us and left.
My mom locked the door behind him, then put an arm around me and pulled me close. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should never have left you alone with him. Did he hurt you?”
I shook my head mutely, but I couldn’t stop shaking. Because I understood now who had given Dr. Gervais our unlisted phone number. Who had told Lara I’d visited Alison in the hospital and warned her that I’d lie to her the same way I’d lied to everyone else. Deckard was determined to get the truth out of me by any means necessary, and he wasn’t going to give up on this investigation without a fight.
“Call Dad,” I said. “Tell him we can’t wait until next Saturday. Tell him we need to get out of here as fast as we can.”
PART ONE: Demand Load
(The power required by all equipment in a receiver or transmitter facility to ensure full continuity of communications)
0 0 0 0 1 1
“Hey, Niki, do you know the code for juniper berries? I can’t find it on my spinner.”
I didn’t even pause to think about it. “4922,” I called back, stacking cans into my customer’s bag and swinging it onto the counter. “That’ll be $257.29,” I said brightly to the harried-looking woman before me, who appeared to be shopping for a family of eight or possibly just a couple of teenaged boys. “Do you have a Points Club card?”
She didn’t have one, and she didn’t want one either, though I had to mention it anyway because that was part of my job. Like always remembering to check the bottom of the cart for large items and watching out for broken eggs or leaky milk. After a month of working the cash register for twenty-five hours a week, it had become automatic.
Remembering produce codes was part of the job too, tho
ugh nobody expected me to know all of them. But numbers had a way of sticking in my head. So I didn’t realize I’d done anything unusual until the woman moved on, and I saw Jon Van Beek goggling at me from the next register.
“How’d you know that?” he asked. “I don’t even know what juniper berries are.”
“My mom bought some last week,” I said with a shrug. It was a tiny slip and probably not worth the trouble of lying about. But even after five months in this town, I wasn’t taking any chances. There was still a chance that someone from my old life might be searching for me, and anything that made me exceptional, or memorable, could be dangerous.
“Oh,” Jon said. “Huh.” He turned to greet his next customer, and the tension eased out of my muscles. No reputation as Amazing Memory Girl: mission accomplished. Now if only I could get Jon to stop quizzing me about my plans for the weekend.
It wasn’t that he was bad-looking. It wasn’t even that he was a jerk or at least not that I’d noticed. But his blond hair and farm-boy good looks reminded me of my ex-boyfriend, and I had enough memories of Brendan groping me and slobbering down my neck to last a lifetime.
I glanced at the clock. Five minutes left and only two more shoppers in sight, neither of whom looked ready to hit the checkout right away. I propped the “Next Register Please” sign at the end of the conveyor, switched off the overhead sign, and started spraying and wiping down my lane.
I’d finished tidying the coupon drawer and was stepping back to let Shandra close out my till, when Jon waved to me. “Hey, I’m done in a couple minutes too. Want a ride home?”
The offer was tempting, especially since it was freezing rain outside. But I wasn’t the type to waver once I’d made up my mind, and I’d already decided not to encourage Jon if I could help it.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m good.”
0 0 0 1 0 0
I was heading across the parking lot with hands deep in the pockets of my thrift-store coat, collar turned up against the March sleet, when one of the stock boys came sprinting out to join me. “The Regina bus?” he panted, skidding to my side. “Has it come yet?”
He had feathery black hair, cat’s eyes behind rectangular glasses, and a pair of earbuds tucked into the collar of his jacket. Like Jon and most of the other part-timers he was around my age, and I was pretty sure he’d been at the store at least as long as I had. But our breaks were at different times, so I didn’t know much about him beyond his name: Milo Hwang.
“Yeah,” I said. “It went by a couple of minutes ago.”
“Do you know when the next one is?”
“At this hour? Forty-five minutes.”
He swore softly and turned to head back inside. I called after him, “But the bus I take runs parallel to yours, and they overlap in a couple of places. You could take that one, if you don’t mind walking a couple of blocks.”
“Oh. Okay.” He reversed direction and fell into step with me again. “Thanks.”
When we reached the bus shelter, there was a trio of girls huddled together inside, passing a cigarette around and giggling. Milo and I stood beneath the glare of the streetlight, icy rain needling our faces.
“Well, this sucks,” he said after a moment. “You take the bus all the time?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “We’ve only got one car, and I don’t have my license yet. ”
“I used to ride with my mom,” he said, “but then she switched over to the night shift—oh, finally.” The bus had eased itself around the corner and was trundling toward us. It squeaked to a stop and the door rotated open, letting out a blast of warmth.
“Go ahead,” Milo told me, rummaging in his pocket for change. I took the steps two at a time, flashed my pass at the stoic-looking driver, and dropped into a seat, shaking ice from the bangs of my pixie cut.
Milo was still standing by the fare box when the three girls squeezed past him, caromed off each other, and landed en masse on the bench seat along the left side, whooping with hilarity. I could see the driver’s grimace in the mirror, but he didn’t speak. He closed the doors, and as the bus pulled out from the curb, Milo stumbled down the aisle to me.
“OK if I sit here?” he asked.
Usually I kept my eyes closed all the way home, building prototypes in my head. But I supposed a bit of company wouldn’t hurt. “Sure,” I said.
He swung himself in beside me, stretching out his legs and unzipping his jacket to reveal the green store polo beneath. “Nicola, right?” he said. “I’m Milo.”
“Niki,” I said. “And I know.” Remembering people’s names was an old habit my mother had drilled into me—her number one tip for making a good impression. “So are you going to take the bus from now on?”
Milo took off his sleet-speckled glasses and wiped them on the hem of his shirt. “Probably bike it, once the weather uncraps itself. I thought about getting a car, but that’d put a major dent in my university fund.”
There was a rhythm to small talk, once you got into it. It had taken me a few years to master, but now I barely had to think about it. “Which university?”
“Haven’t decided yet.” He pushed his glasses back onto his nose. “You?”
“I’ve got another year of high school first,” I said.
“Oh yeah? I thought you were older.”
I felt older. Actually, watching the girls across from us gleefully snapping duck-faced pictures of each other with their cell phones, I just felt old. I gave a faint smile and left it at that.
“So,” said Milo after a moment, “what school are you at, then? Cartier?”
“I’m not,” I replied. “I’m taking my courses online.”
He nodded, as though it made sense. But he shot me a sidelong glance from behind his lenses, and I knew he was trying to figure me out. Nothing about me screamed shy or bullied, and I didn’t look like I came from a super-religious family. None of the usual reasons that a girl of sixteen—no, seventeen—might be finishing up high school on the Internet seemed to apply.
“And how do you like that?” he asked.
I liked it a lot, actually. Before I went missing I’d been one of the most popular girls at my high school, but all that social stuff had taken a lot of energy. Now I didn’t have to worry about anyone else’s expectations, I could take as many math and science courses as I wanted and get top marks in all of them.
“It’s not bad,” I said.
“So what made you do it?” he asked.
This was why I didn’t go out of my way to talk to people anymore. Because they got curious, and they asked questions. I was debating how to answer when a horn blared suddenly from the darkness, and I heard the screech of spinning tires.
Black ice, I thought numbly, as headlights swept the front of the bus. Somebody’s lost control, there’s going to be an accident—
And then I realized that the driver had slumped onto the wheel, his foot still on the accelerator, and that the bus was drifting into the oncoming lane.
The girls screamed and clung to each other. Milo started to his feet, but it was obvious he’d never make it in time. Caution vanished and instinct took over: I leaped to the front of the bus, shoved the unconscious driver aside, and grabbed the steering wheel.
The road was slick, and I could feel the back end skidding sideways even as I wrestled the front back on course. If I didn’t do this right, we’d spin out across all four lanes of traffic. But even as my heart hammered against my rib cage, my mind sharpened to a crystal point. The bus was a machine. I knew machines. I could do this. I made myself turn back into the skid, feeling the tires like an extension of my own body, until the bus stopped fishtailing and we were on the right side of the road again.
I barely registered Milo hauling the driver out from behind me, but at least those big feet weren’t blocking the pedals anymore. Was that the brake? No, it was the accelerator (another scream from the girls in the back). Okay, that was the brake. I practically had to stand to reach it, the seat was cranked
up so high. But a slow, steady pressure did the trick, and in a few more seconds I’d lined us up beside the curb. I killed the engine, yanked out the key, and turned to Milo.
“How is he?” I asked.
Milo crouched beside the man, feeling for a pulse. “There’s no heartbeat,” he said.
My dad had had a heart attack four years ago. He’d nearly died. “Do you know CPR?” I asked, and when Milo hesitated, I tilted the driver’s chin up and blew a couple of breaths into his mouth. “Start with that,” I said. Then I grabbed Milo’s hands and put them on the man’s chest, laying mine over them. “Now do this,” I said, showing him how far to press down. “Keep doing it for a count of thirty. Then do the breaths again.”
I was afraid he’d ask why I wasn’t doing it, but he didn’t. His head was down, his whole concentration on the man. Reassured that he’d got it, I was pulling myself to my feet when I heard a tiny click. One of the girls had raised her pink, glittery cell phone and snapped a picture of me.
Blind fury took over. I marched down the aisle, snatched the phone from the girl’s hand, and erased the pic with a few savage swipes of my finger. “Don’t you dare,” I snapped, and her two friends hastily shoved their own phones back into their pockets.
I dialed 911 and thrust the pink cell back at its owner. “Tell them we’re on the 25 bus just past the corner of Huntington and Caledonia,” I ordered. “Tell them to send an ambulance.” She clutched the phone with both hands and began to gabble into it, while I went back to Milo and the driver.
“I have to go,” I said quietly. “Right away.”
“What?” His head snapped up. “You can’t leave now! The police’ll want to know what happened, they’ll need to talk to us—”
“I know,” I said. “But I can’t stay.” Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I was starting to shake. I’d just done exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do—something extraordinary, something that would get people’s attention. I crouched beside Milo, bringing myself down to his level, and put a hand on his shoulder.