Stay With Me: A Brenna Spector Novel of Suspense Page 28

  “We’ll be back with all your headlines at the top of the hour.”

  Sophia stiffened. Maya glanced at her. There was a sheen to her face, beads of sweat at the top of her lip.

  The man said, “How old are you, Robert?”

  Maya stared into the rearview. She cleared her throat. “I’m . . .”

  “He’s thirteen,” Sophia said.

  “I got a son that age. You play baseball, Robert? I notice you got a Yankees hat and—”

  Sophia cut him off. “I thought you said you don’t talk much.”

  Maya glanced at her, then at the man’s eyes, watching them in the rearview. She stared into him, thinking it as hard as she could. Help . . .

  “You okay there, son?” he said, as a car dealership commercial ended, and the announcer said something about the headlines of the hour.

  “He’s fine,” Sophia said. “He’s just tired.”

  “Maybe you ought to answer me yourself, kiddo.”

  “. . . In the New York area, AMBER Alert has been issued for thirteen-year-old Maya Rappaport. She is five-foot-eight-inches, 120 pounds. Blue eyes.”

  Maya gasped. She couldn’t help it.

  The man’s eyes focused on her, his gaze sharpening. “Oh my God.”

  “She is believed to have been abducted by a woman by the name of Sophia Castillo. Mid-forties, considered extremely dangerous.”

  “My God,” said the man, as the gun came away from Maya’s side, Sophia pressing it into the back of his head. “Pull over,” she said.

  He gripped the wheel. “I . . .”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Please.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I’m a father,” he said. “I have three kids. A wife.”

  “Pull over,” she said. “I’m not going to ask again.”

  Maya’s stomach knotted. A tear spilled down her cheek. She reached into her pocket and gripped the banana peel, same way she used to hold her stuffed dog Patches when she was a little kid, when she used to have nightmares. She’d hold him tight to her chest and she’d imagine him talking to her, telling her she was his best friend and that he had magic powers to help her fight any monsters. It had been so long since she’d thought of Patches. She couldn’t have been more than three years old. She’d still lived on Fourteenth Street back then. Her parents had still been married to each other . . .

  The man drew a shaky breath, slowed down, and pulled over to the side of the road. He put his hazard lights on.

  “Give me your phone,” Sophia said.

  “I don’t have a phone,” he said. “I . . . I mean I have one, but I . . . I left it at the office . . .”

  “Get out of the car.”

  “Why don’t you leave the kid with me? You can go on ahead. I won’t tell anyone, and you can escape. You can take my car.”

  “Get out. Now.”

  The man opened the door. He raised both hands over his head. “I have three young children,” he said.

  Maya couldn’t move. Her pulse thrummed in her ears and tears formed in her eyes and she dug her fingernails into the banana peel. She didn’t know what to do. She wished someone would tell her, help her . . .

  Mom . . .

  Sophia grabbed her by the wrist. She opened the back door and yanked her out of the car, Maya’s legs giving out from under her, her knees crashing on the pavement at the man’s feet, as Sophia dragged her around, next to her.

  Maya gazed up at him, his hands in the air, his eyes so sad and kind. “You poor kid,” he said.

  And then Sophia put the gun to his head and fired.

  Brenna ran up the stairs to her apartment, opened the door to find Trent on his computer, looking up at her with sharp, excited eyes. “I’m in the Families of the Missing room now,” he said. “They’re talking to me.”

  “And?”

  “NYCJulie hasn’t been in the chat room since Sunday.”

  “Last night.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She talked to me last night,” Brenna said. “Maya was already gone then, so I’m not sure what that proves.”

  “I know, Brenna, but she had only been on for a short time. They told me. She could have hopped onto a laptop last night. Public computer. Anywhere—just to look like business-as-usual. The people in the room say she’s a major regular. This is the longest she’s been off since she first started going there.”

  Brenna looked at him. “This is the only reason why Julie is . . .” The thought faded, bent . . . Julie. For a few seconds, Brenna flashed on Mrs. Dinnerstein outside her apartment this morning, handing her the note, the name on the paper, Mrs. Dinnerstein’s concerned voice . . . Her name is Miss Barnes.

  “Julie Barnes,” Brenna said.

  Trent stared at her. “Huh?”

  “Julie Barnes. That was the name of the girl on The Mod Squad. I just remembered, when I was a little kid, we used to watch reruns . . .”

  Trent squinted at her. “Ookaay . . .”

  She blinked a few times, snapped out of it. “Lack of sleep,” she said. “Stress.”

  “Right. Well anyway, that’s not the reason why I think Julie is Sophia.” He tapped at his keyboard. “Come here. Look at this.”

  On Trent’s computer screen was NYCJulie’s extensive profile.

  “Look at all her answers.” He got up from his chair, and Brenna sat in front of his computer, read the first response.

  Missing loved one: My son. He’s been gone for seven years.

  Age of loved one at time of disappearance: thirteen.

  She glanced at Trent. “Well, the first two answers fit. But a lot of people—”

  “You need to look at all of them, Bren . . . Well, actually, scroll past all the favorite song and movie questions and go to the last few.”

  Brenna started to scroll down, then stopped. No. That can’t be. A coincidence. That’s all.

  “It’s like you told me,” Trent was saying. “You can change your identity but you can’t change who you are.”

  Brenna whispered, “You still like the same things . . .”

  “Need. You still need the same things is what you said. Hey why are you stopped there? Scroll down to the last few questions. The second to the last answer, Sophia Castillo actually said to me over the phone. She used those exact same words.”

  Just a coincidence.

  “Brenna. Are you listening to me?”

  Brenna took a breath, snapped out of it, scrolled down. “Same words exactly?” she said as she read Julie’s response.

  “Yes,” he said, “except she said, ‘Robert’ to me, instead of ‘my son.’ ”

  “That’s . . . It makes sense . . .” she said, it all dawning on her. “Sophia befriended Maya so that she could find out more about her schedule.”

  “Exactly.”

  “In the private chats, Maya confides in her about the sleepover at Lindsay’s. ‘The popular girl,’ NYCJulie says. Tells Maya to go for it. The same night, Sophia’s car turns up near Lindsay’s apartment.”

  “Right,” said Trent. “She’d probably been waiting outside. She’d planned it. She knew.”

  “She knew everything about her,” Brenna said. “Not just her schedule.” It was true. Maya’s closest confidante, her best-kept secret for months, NYCJulie knew about Maya’s hopes and fears and deep, painful, wracking insecurities. She knew of her problems with her parents and the first kiss she ever had and Maya’s aunt, her long-missing aunt who took up so much of Brenna’s world that Maya hated her, hated the smiling teenager in her mother’s dresser drawer enough to draw a bullet hole in her head . . .

  The smiling teenager, who, on weekdays after she came back from school, would curl up with her baby sister on the couch and watch The Mod Squad.

  Who was this grown woman,
who could elicit such trust in a girl she’d never met, who had told Maya during one of their chats, I’m a lot like you? Who was this woman who, on her profile, had listed her favorite album as Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True?

  Julie Barnes. Clea’s favorite Mod Squad character. Don’t you think I look like her? Clea would say.

  A coincidence, Brenna thought. After all these years, it can’t be more than that. And then her buzzer was going off, Trent jumping up to answer it, to hear her mother’s voice, shouting into the speaker. “It’s an emergency. I need to talk to Brenna now.”

  The doctor’s office on 125th Street—the one where Sophia could get her pills—that doctor’s office was closed. Sophia said that it was just as well, what with Maya sniveling and crying like a little baby, how could she take her anywhere, acting like this? Maya was trying to follow the rules, trying hard as she could. But it was hard to follow rules when they kept changing like Sophia’s did.

  That man in the car had done nothing wrong. He’d pulled over when she’d said so. He’d put his hands up, surrendered his car, he’d done everything she’d asked for and followed all Sophia’s rules and yet still . . . she’d put the barrel to his forehead and . . . Still. Maya couldn’t think of it. She couldn’t live that moment again, even in her head. Don’t . . .

  “I had to do it, you know,” Sophia had said to Maya, after she’d pushed her back into the dead man’s car, after she’d belted Maya in and started it up, the car pulling away with a pained screech, the body left behind, that man’s body in pieces at the side of Route 9, when he’d followed all the rules. He did everything she said to do.

  Sophia was heading up Broadway now. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, but she was driving slowly. She was in a dead man’s stolen car, and the car was red. She didn’t want to get noticed, Maya knew that much.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Sophia said.

  Reading my mind again.

  “Do you understand why I had to shoot him?”

  Maya said nothing. She didn’t know the right answer. In her mind, she started to count down from a hundred.

  “He had a spot-on description of us. He would have called the police. He was lying about his phone being at the office. We both knew it. We aren’t stupid, are we, Maya?”

  Ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four . . .

  “You want something to eat?”

  Ninety-three, ninety-two, ninety-one, ninety . . .

  “You have to go to the bathroom?”

  Maya stopped counting. Nodded. Some things are needs and you can’t help them.

  “I can only take you to the bathroom if you stop crying like that.”

  Eighty-nine, eighty-eight, eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five . . .

  “Are you going to stop crying?”

  Some things you can’t stop, no matter how hard you try. He had three little kids. A wife. He had a nice smile and now he’s . . .

  Blood, all over the pavement, spattering the tires, the pale blue parka. Blood everywhere.

  With a screech, Sophia jerked the car to the side of the road and threw it into park. They were on Broadway and 145th Street. A woman was pushing a baby carriage up the sidewalk, and she stopped and gaped. Don’t look at her, Sophia. Don’t see her, looking at you. Maya pictured a gun to the woman’s head, blood on the sidewalk, the carriage, the baby’s pink blanket. It made her cry more. She couldn’t breathe. She felt as though she was drowning.

  “Do you hear me, Maya? Am I getting through?”

  Maya took a deep breath. She heard herself say, “Yes,” in a strange little voice. A baby’s voice. “Yes, Sophia.” The first time on Sophia’s adventure that Maya had said her name out loud, but it almost seemed as though someone else was saying it, as though this were all part of some awful dream and Maya would wake up from it soon, wake up a little kid again, holding Patches to her chest, calling for her mom.

  Maya jammed her hands into her pockets, felt the cool slime of the banana peel against her fingers. She saw the man’s sunglasses on the floor of the stolen car and smelled her own sweat, mingling with the scent of the car’s clean carpet. It’s Sophia’s adventure. I’m just a part of it. Tears trickled down her cheeks. She was crying again. Sophia didn’t like it, she could tell. But that was okay. Sometimes, you have to give up the fight. Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes, you have to throw your hands up and surrender and not think about your parents, how hurt they’ll be. Sometimes, you have to think, It will all be over soon.

  Maya said, “Why haven’t you killed me yet?”

  Sophia let out a sigh. She took off Maya’s baseball cap and ran a hand through her short dark hair and looked at her with tired, flat, fed-up eyes. “You’ve been such a disappointment, Maya,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you call me back?” said Brenna’s mother after she took the seat Trent had brought out for her, collapsing into it like she was something old and broken. “I must have left fifteen messages on your voice mail. Both on your cell phone and at work.” She looked at Trent accusingly. “Do you just erase them without even checking?”

  “No, ma’am,” Trent said.

  Brenna said, “You’ve seen the news.”

  “Yes, of course I have.”

  “Well then you’ve got to know why I haven’t called you. I’m trying to find my daughter, Mom. Talking to you about it isn’t my number one priority.”

  Her mother stared at her. “Wait,” she said. “You think I came all the way here to be comforted over Maya?”

  Brenna frowned. “Well . . . yes.”

  “You don’t think I have any information to give you? Didn’t you even listen to my messages?”

  “Mom. I’ve been busy.”

  Evelyn Spector exhaled hard. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes sunken. It was as though the years had caught up with her overnight. She looked her age. Older. “I’m sorry if you’re offended,” Brenna said.

  “Offended.” Evelyn shook her head. “I need to talk to you.” She looked at Trent. “Privately.”

  “Mother, I’m in the middle of—”

  “I don’t mind,” Trent said. “I need to finish my hair anyway.”

  When he left the room, Brenna said, “I’m at the end of my rope, Mom. I honestly can’t take any more—”

  “I need to talk to you about Bill.”

  Brenna stared at her, the rest of the thought gone. “Bill?”

  “You have Clea’s diary,” she said. “Maya told me you have her diary.”

  “Maya told you.”

  “I talk to my granddaughter,” she said. “Why do you think she accidentally called me at 3 A.M.? Because my number was on her queue.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Brenna,” she said. “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

  She took a breath. “Clea’s Bill.”

  Evelyn nodded. “So I’m right in assuming that Clea mentions Bill in her diary.”

  “Yes . . . Yes, she does.”

  “What does she say about him?”

  “That . . . that she loves him . . . That she got tired of him . . .”

  “That’s what she said? That she got tired of him?”

  “Well, she said he was acting strangely. He gave her a bad feeling.”

  “What did she do,” Evelyn said. “What did she do when she had this feeling?”

  Brenna stood up. She felt strange on her feet. Shaky. She moved over to the window, looked down at the street, at the life outside this room. “Mom, I’m confused,” she said. “You know about Bill but you never told me? How long have you known?”

  “Brenna.” Evelyn was right behind her. Brenna spun around to see her mother close, her eyes boring into her skin as though she were trying cut to the chase, to read her thoughts directly without having to ask her questions. “I need to know what Cle
a says she did.”

  “She . . . she says she left him.” Brenna cleared her throat. “She started hitchhiking. That’s when she met the boy on the road. He turned out to be the man you read about in the news, the one who killed himself in front of me, back in Decem—”

  “Clea left Bill.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what she wrote. In her own diary.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “My God,” she whispered. “She even lies in her diary.”

  “Mother, what are you talking about?”

  “Bill was Bill Edwards,” Evelyn said. “He’s from before your . . . your memory issues. Do you remember that name?”

  Bill Edwards. Brenna strained for it, but it was beyond her grasp. “It sounds familiar.”

  “He taught in Clea’s high school. He was the English teacher. He quit after Clea’s junior year. A nice young man. Probably twenty-three years old. Twenty-five at the most.”

  “He was Clea’s teacher?”

  “Yes. She used to talk about him. Mr. Edwards. He taught them Kerouac. The Beat poets.”

  Brenna shook her head.

  “Anyway, I’m not sure when Clea became involved with him, but he was married. He left his wife for her. No one knew—not his wife. Not you and me. The way she put it, it was her adventure. I suppose the secrecy was part of that.”

  Brenna stared at her. “The way she put it? She told you?”

  “Not before she left, Brenna. When we saw the police, I was as in the dark as you were. I thought she’d been kidnapped, I had no idea . . .”

  “So, when?”

  “A month after Clea left, she called me,” Evelyn said. “She needed my help.”

  Brenna’s head was throbbing. All these years. All these years of wondering, of waiting, and yet . . . “You knew.”

  “Yes.”

  “When you got rid of all her pictures, you knew she was out there.” Brenna’s face grew hot, tears rushing into her eyes. She bit her lip, slowed her breathing. Keep it together, she told herself, though she was ripping at the seams. “She asked you for help and . . . what? What, you were too angry?”

  “It was her,” she said quietly. “It was Clea. Clea was not right.”