Shelter

“I wish. You have to find the app button and click it and then hit Record… There was no time. I was just reacting.”

My cell phone buzzed again. I took a quick glance. It was from Ema again: where r u??! IMPORTANT.

No time to respond now. I nodded at Rachel to continue.

“Anyway, the big man finally turned toward me. Ashley used that. She kicked out, and the guy stumbled back. She broke free and ran. The guy was going to go after her, but he saw me with the phone and I guess he decided to cut his losses. He jumped back in the car. Before they peeled out, the driver called out in the spookiest voice, ‘You can’t hide forever, Ash, you know I’ll find you.’ And then they were gone.”

“Did you get the license plate number?”

Rachel nodded. “I memorized it and then I ran over to make sure Ashley was okay. I started to dial nine-one- one for real now when Ashley put her hand on mine and whispered, ‘You can’t call the cops.’ She sounded so scared.”

Rachel had her hands in her lap. She started nervously twirling a ring on her right index finger. My phone buzzed again. Then another time. I didn’t even look.

“Why didn’t she want you to call the police?”

“She said it would make it worse. She begged me not to, so, I mean, what was I going to do? We went back here, to my house. At first, Ashley didn’t want to talk about it. She just kept crying and blaming herself. I told her it wasn’t her fault, but she wouldn’t listen. I got on the computer and Googled the Kents’ phone number. I said, ‘Let’s call your parents,’ but again she stopped me. She told me that her real last name wasn’t Kent. What she did was, she found a Kasselton resident without any kids in the school system. Then she just pretended to be their child so she could enroll in the school.”

“You can just do that?”

Rachel shrugged. “I guess.”

“So the Kents didn’t know about her?”

“I don’t think so. She said she worked at a horrible nightclub and that everyone there thought that some creepy guy kidnapped her and sold her overseas into white slavery. But really she escaped.”

White slavery, I thought, feeling a chill slip down my spine. Candy had talked about Antoine making girls disappear into “White Death.” White death, white slavery-they had to be the same thing.

“So,” Rachel said, “here she was, in Kasselton, hiding from her past until she got sent to the final place.”

“The final place?”

“That was what she said. Like staying here in Kasselton was only temporary. But she liked being here. She said… she said she’d never been this happy before. She wanted to find a way to make Kasselton her final place, but they found her. That, she said, was her mistake.”

Another buzz. I risked a quick look. Yep, it was Ema: I need to show you something. promise me you won’t get mad.

“The guy in the car,” I said to Rachel. “Did he have a tattoo on his face?”

“No. He was tall-your height maybe-but twice your size. And he was black.”

I thought about Derrick the bouncer at the Plan B Go-Go Lounge. “How did they find her?”

“Ashley didn’t know, but I think I figured it out,” Rachel said.

“How?”

“Both of you were new students, right?”

“Right.”

“So you participated in Ms. Owens’s weird bonding orientation.”

I remembered. Man, how dumb had that been? “So?”

“We get the Star-Ledger delivered every day. They did a story on it. One of the pictures was some kind of relay race. And there, pretty clear to see, was Ashley.”

The Star-Ledger was the state’s biggest newspaper and it covered Newark. It made sense.

“Okay,” I said, “so you’re back here at your house. What did you guys do next?”

“Ashley needed to hide and figure that out. I told her she could stay here with me.” She saw me opening my mouth, so she held up her hand to stop me. “To answer your next question, my parents are divorced. My mother lives in Florida. My father is on his third trophy wife. They travel a lot.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“One older brother. He’s in college. We do have full-time help, but they only go into the pool house on Thursdays.”

“So you put her up out there?”

“Yes. Ashley worried that the guys who tried to grab her would keep searching. She said they’d be relentless- that they might go after her only friend here.”

“That,” I said, “would be me.”

She nodded. “I went into her locker to get out her notebook and clothes. She’d written your name and number down there. You’d shared notes. If those guys found them, they’d know that you two were close. But even then, she still wasn’t positive that they hadn’t approached you.”

“So that’s why she asked you to keep an eye on me.”

“Yes.”

“Which you did. You even got me to be your history partner.”

Rachel glanced around the ridiculously formal living room as though she had never seen it before. It looked like something out of a European palace. We sat on a couch with very little padding.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?”

“You barely knew Ashley. She wasn’t your friend.”

“True.”

“And it was dangerous. They’d seen your face. They could have tracked you down.”

“I guess.”

“So why did you help her?”

Rachel thought about it a minute. “Because she was in trouble. Because I didn’t help her at the cheerleading audition. I don’t know. I wanted to help. It just felt like the right thing to do. I don’t want to make it sound like more than it is, but I get that way. I felt somehow obligated.”

I said nothing. I knew what she meant. My father and mother lived lives of obligation. If you asked them why, they would have given an answer like Rachel’s.

The phone buzzed again. I sighed and grabbed it. No surprise-it was yet another message from Ema: wanted to show you in person but will send image now. it’s been here for months.

There was a photographic attachment. I clicked on it and the photograph came up. For a moment, I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was a close-up of some sort, and blurry. I saw skin. I turned my head a little, focused my eyes, and then I felt my blood run cold.

It was a blue-and-green tattoo. I could see that now. And it was a tattoo of that same emblem-the blurry butterfly with the animal-eye wings.

With shaking hands, I typed: Whose tattoo is that??

There was a delay. Rachel looked over at me. I waited for the next text. It took longer than it should. Finally, a full minute later, almost as though the very letters were hesitating, came Ema’s response: it’s mine.

chapter 20

WITH MY FAKE DRIVER’S LICENSE in my wallet, I picked up Ema on the outskirts of