Dead to Me

Copyright © 2015 by Mary McCoy
Cover design by Marci Senders
Cover photos © 2015 by Jill Wachter
Designed by Marci Senders

All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End
Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

ISBN 978-1-4847-1215-3

Visit
www.hyperionteens.com

Contents

1. Title Page
   
2. Copyright
   
3. Dedication
   
4. Chapter 1
   
5. Chapter 2
   
6. Chapter 3
   
7. Chapter 4
   
8. Chapter 5
   
9. Chapter 6
   
10. Chapter 7
    
11. Chapter 8
    
12. Chapter 9
    
13. Chapter 10
    
14. Chapter 11
    
15. Chapter 12
    
16. Chapter 13
    
17. Chapter 14
    
18. Chapter 15
    
19. Chapter 16
    
20. Chapter 17
    
21. Chapter 18
    
22. Chapter 19
    
23. Chapter 20
    
24. Chapter 21
    
25. Chapter 22
    
26. Chapter 23
    
27. Chapter 24
    
28. Chapter 25
    
29. Chapter 26
    
30. Chapter 27
    
31. Chapter 28
    
32. Chapter 29
    
33. Acknowledgments
    
34. About the Author
    

To Brady, my partner in crime

W
hen I saw my sister in that hospital bed, she was different from how I remembered her. She’d changed her hair. Her cheeks were leaner.

And someone had tried to cave in the side of her head with a baseball bat.

The doctors at County Hospital told me how lucky she was. If the person who’d done this had left her somewhere less public than the boat dock at MacArthur Park, if the blow had come down
squarely instead of glancing off her brow, if the maintenance man hadn’t found her so soon—the doctors always trailed off before they finished these sentences.

Instead, someone had broken her back, fractured her skull, crushed the bones around her eye, and left her for dead, and because of that, Annie was lucky.

Her purse was gone, but one of the nurses thought to look in the toe of her Mary Janes, and that was where she found me—an old school picture with my name and number scrawled on the
back.

I didn’t know why Annie would want anyone to call me. I hadn’t seen her since I was twelve.

Since then, a world war had ended, I’d started high school, I’d kissed boys, and I didn’t know what my sister would think about any of it. In all that time, we’d never
exchanged a single letter, not a phone call, not a telegram.

Late at night, when the light in the hospital hallways turned an eerie shade of blue, and the long minutes of quiet were broken up by the sounds of heels clicking on the linoleum, barked orders,
and sobbing, it was hard not to think about that. I was alone with a stranger. So why did I stay? Why didn’t I leave her the way she’d left me?

In the kinder light of morning, I asked different questions:
Who are you, Annie? Where did you go? And how did you end up here?

The doctors said she’d wake up, probably. They said it would take time. They said she needed rest. When they asked if I knew how to get in touch with her family, I said I didn’t.

Annie had stayed gone for almost four years, and I figured she’d had her reasons. And when she woke up, I intended to be around to hear them.

I’m Alice Gates, California girl, Hollywood High, class of 1950. If you go to the movies, you might think I’m one of those sparkling, impossibly blond youths who go
to the beach every day, travel in attractive packs by convertible, and never stop laughing.

If my life were a movie, it wouldn’t look like that one.

When my sister disappeared, I kind of lost my taste for movies about young love and girls on horses and silly misunderstandings that ended with confetti and kisses. My favorite movies had titles
like
Notorious
and
Nightmare Alley
, and I started reading detective novels by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, too. I like them because they don’t lose their heads over
how great California is. They know it’s not all sunshine and oranges and movie stars. In their books, the people who live in the nicest houses have the dirtiest secrets, and those laughing
blond California girls get used up and crushed under someone’s heel like cigarette butts.

I know it’s ugly, but at least it’s not a lie.

When you’re a kid, people lie to you about a lot of things because they think you’re too young to understand the truth. But you’re old enough to know a lie when you hear one,
and in the end, that’s the lesson you learn—not that people are trying to protect you, but that they have something to hide.

I didn’t know why my sister left four years ago, and I wasn’t any closer to knowing when I found her in the hospital, but I’d always known I’d been lied to. It was only
after she turned up again that I realized the lie was a lot bigger than I’d guessed.

“W
hat are you doing here?”

It was a low voice, deep, and it didn’t sound very happy to see me.

I must have dozed off in the straight-backed wooden chair next to Annie’s bed sometime during the afternoon. When I opened my eyes, a man in a tan fedora and a rumpled jacket was towering
over me.

“She’s my friend,” I mumbled, feeding him the same line I’d told the doctors and nurses. I didn’t want to say too much before I was fully awake.

He walked over to the window, leaned back against the sill, and folded his arms across his chest, glowering at me with eyes so dark they didn’t seem to have pupils. He looked about my
parents’ age, though not as tidily put together. A shadow of whiskers covered his cheeks, and frayed shirtsleeves poked out from the cuffs of his jacket, too short in the arms. Then again, I
wasn’t surprised he’d have trouble finding a coat to fit him—he was at least six and a half feet tall, and lean except for the beginnings of a potbelly that stretched his
shirtfront tight. He stuck a toothpick into his mouth and chewed on it, looking me over, and looking perturbed while he did it. I could see the muscles in his jaw tighten and pop.

“Cut the crap, Alice.”

That woke me up. I sat up in my chair and peered out into the hallway, where a stream of nurses in long white dresses and caps made their rounds. Whoever this stranger was, he’d left the
door open. Anyone could look in and see us, and that eased my mind a little.

“Who are you?” I asked, massaging the crick out of the back of my neck.

“Jerry Shaffer,” he said, handing me a business card. It was printed on cheap cardstock, but it looked official enough and bore his name, the words
Private Investigator
, and
an address near downtown.

After I’d had a look, he took the card back and tucked it into the breast pocket of his jacket. “Sorry. Only have so many of these things.”

“What are you doing here?”

As I spoke, I got up from the chair and put myself between the private eye and Annie. I knew why I’d stayed then, even through those moments in the middle of the night when my sister
seemed like a stranger to me. I was all there was between Annie and whatever came through that door. I was all she had. When was the last time a doctor had come to check on her? The hospital was
full of women in labor and car crash victims and old people having heart attacks. No one except me had time for Annie now that she wasn’t actively dying.

“Annie’s a friend,” Jerry said. “We work together every now and then.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“This and that. Missing persons. Stolen goods. That kind of thing.”

“She investigates things with you?” I asked, and then a horrible thought crossed my mind. “Did this happen to Annie while she was working for
you
?”

Jerry Shaffer crossed the room and shut the door. I tensed, but then he pulled up another chair and sat down next to the rickety metal bed frame. I’d spent parts of the night picking at
the flaking paint and rust while I tried to block out the sounds of a young widow crying in the hall. The detective took in Annie’s broken face, then his eyes fell to the floor.

“No,” he said, swallowing hard. “Annie was off the clock when this happened.”

The Los Angeles County Hospital was a crowded, busy place, no matter what time of day. You didn’t have to be there long before most of that noise faded to static. But when Jerry closed the
door, the silence washed over me, and the room and Annie and everything that had happened suddenly seemed real to me in a way it hadn’t been before. I felt dizzy, and a clammy sweat broke out
on my forehead.

“Are you okay, kid?” Jerry asked, lurching to his feet and helping me into a chair.

“What happened to her?” I murmured.

He regarded me with some concern. “How long have you been here, anyway?”

“Since yesterday,” I said. “When they called me.”

“And you haven’t been home?”

I shook my head.

“Have you called your parents?”

“No,” I said, my mouth set in a rigid line.

He looked at me with something like respect. “Good. I think that’s what she’d want. For now, anyway.”

“She told you about our parents?” I asked, a little surprised.

“She told me enough to make me think she wouldn’t want them here. Your father especially,” he added, shaking his head. “He’s a piece of work.”

I wondered what he’d meant by that. My mother was the one Annie used to fight with all the time. My father had so little to do with us that I scarcely thought about him at all. The feeling
was probably mutual. Sometimes, when we were younger, he’d be in the middle of telling an off-color story at the dinner table, and my mother would touch his elbow and say, “Little ears,
Nicky. Little ears,” and he’d look at Annie and me as though he’d forgotten we were even there.

“If she wasn’t working for you, how did this happen?” I asked. “And how did you know she was here?”