Dear Daughter (27 page)

I spun on my heel and walked away.

The Running (Wo)man

Celebrity News

November 7, 2013 at 12:14 AM

By Us Weekly Staff

Recent information has come to light regarding the whereabouts of the nation’s most glamorous ex-con, Janie Jenkins. Trace Kessler, who runs the blog “Without a Trace” and is offering a substantial cash reward for information that leads directly to the discovery of her location, speculated yesterday that Jenkins could likely be tracked from one of the towns along Amtrak’s California Zephyr line.

Today our reporters contacted rental car agencies and taxi dispatchers in these areas. While they found no sign of anyone fitting Jenkins’s description, when they called to check at hotels within walking distance of the train stations in question, they came across a small motel in McCook, Nebraska. The same night Jenkins was seen on the California Zephyr, a single guest by the name of Coralie Jones checked into this motel just forty minutes after the train came through.

Security footage shows only a figure in a heavy coat and a bulky hat, but according to the desk clerk on duty at the time, the guest had dark brown hair and glasses. If Jenkins was indeed the woman who checked into this motel, the search for her whereabouts may soon be coming to an end.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

By the time I emerged from the bathroom, Rue was already on her way out, waving at her friends across the room with a secretive little smile designed to make them wonder where she could possibly be going. It made me wonder, too.

I had to hurry to catch up with her, and I was outside and halfway down the block before I’d even pulled my arms through my coat sleeves. I could see Rue up ahead, walking briskly. The urgency of her movements suggested she had somewhere more important to be than a party, like maybe she was a presidential aide who had to deliver a last-minute edit of the State of the Union. I ran up to her.

“Rue! Wait!” She stuttered midstep, then pivoted prettily toward me on the ball of one foot. Cora must have made her take dance lessons too.

“What?”

“I left my room key at the front desk.” I held out my hands, shaking them a little, as if to say,
nothing up my sleeves!

Her head tipped back, her arms fell limp at her sides, and she let loose an agonized groan. “Seriously?”

“Sorry.”

She huffed. “Fine, whatever, let’s go,” she said.

She turned and headed toward the inn. I tagged after.

“Are you on your way somewhere fun?” I asked. “Like a party or something?”

She laughed. “Why, you want to come along?”

I fell silent. As we walked, I found myself admiring Rue. She had the posture of a debutante and the gait of a supermodel, all innocent shoulders and knowing hips. It was a neat trick.

Rue unlocked the door to the inn and pushed me inside. She went immediately to the front desk, surefooted even in the dark. “What room are you in again?”

“Eight.” I wiped off my glasses with the sleeve of my jacket and positioned myself in the archway between the foyer and the reception desk—or, rather, between Rue and the front door.

I heard a muttered curse, and the desk lamp came on. Rue’s expression was twisting with increasing annoyance. “It’s gotta be here somewhere,” she muttered.

“Oh, I’m in no hurry.”

She gave me a look that could have melted tungsten. I let her search for another minute or two just for that.

Then I pulled out my key and shook it. Rue looked up. “Oops,” I said. “Guess I had it all along.”

“What the hell?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m sort of making this up as I go along.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I just need a quick moment of your time.” I took a step forward. “I want
Jane Eyre
.”

“If you’re that desperate for a reread, the library opens at nine.”

“No, I want
your
copy, please. The one you took from your father’s house in Adeline.”

Rue’s eyes narrowed. “That was you?”

I shrugged and said the word that always came far too easily. “Guilty.”

“Look, I don’t—no, you know what? I’m calling my mother.” She pulled out her phone and headed for the door, but I stepped in front of her before she could get too far. “What do you think you’re—”

“How long have you been fucking Mitch Percy?”

Her fingers stilled.

“He’s very handsome,” I prompted.

She slid her phone back into her pocket. “If you like that sort of thing.”

“The good-looking sort of thing?”

She flipped her hair. “The past-his-peak sort of thing. I guess he was a big deal back in the day or whatever, but he’s not exactly a badge of honor now. Just another ex–prom king who still hangs out with all his buddies from high school. Now he has hair in his ears and only uses the law degree Stanton bought him as a way to pick up girls.”

“Seemed to work on you well enough.”

“I picked
him
up, not the other way around.”

“You sure about that?”

Silence.

“Is it for his money?” I asked. “Because I have to tell you, that doesn’t usually work out so well.”

“I’m Cora Kanty’s daughter. I don’t need money.”

My smile was sure and slow. “Oh, never mind—I know. Either your mother wants him or your father hates him.”

“I don’t have to listen to this—”

“But if that’s the case, why are you still keeping things under wraps? Wouldn’t you
want
Mommy and Daddy to find out? What’s your plan, Rue?”

“He has nothing to do with my plan. I’m just killing time until I can get the fuck out of here.”

“So go. What’s keeping you?”

“I can’t just run away—I’m seventeen.”

“You’re scared, is what you’re saying.”

“I am not. I just can’t do
shit
without permission.”

As soon as I heard the hint of panic in her voice I knew it was time.
Go big or go home, Jane
. I took a breath.

“That didn’t stop your aunt,” I said.

“Yeah, but she was eight—” She cut herself off. “How do you know about my aunt?”

“Give me the book, Rue.”

“Who
are
you?”

I ran the back of my thumbnail over my eyebrow. Thinking. Then I shrugged off my coat, folded it over my arm, and held my hands out for hers. “Might as well get comfortable,” I said. “This might take awhile.”

She followed me upstairs without another word.

•   •   •

When we got to my room I went to the window and pulled the curtains closed. I poked my head in the bathroom, peeked behind the shower curtain, and shut the door. Next I hesitated, not wanting to look silly in front of Rue, but then—
fuck it
—I checked under the bed anyway.

Then I patted the bed’s woven coverlet and gestured for her to sit beside me. She perched as close to the edge as she could without falling off.

“I’m not sure how to put this,” I began.

“You’re not some sort of psycho killer here to chop me up and eat my fingers, are you?”

“Not quite.”

This didn’t seem to comfort her. But then, it wasn’t meant to.

“You asked who I was,” I said, “and I think you deserve to know: I’m Tessa’s daughter.”

She shot to her feet. “Bullshit. You look nothing like her.”

I sighed. “No,” I said. “I never did.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“You really think I’m here for the
festival
?”

Her shoulders fell. She was the last person who could fault that logic. “So where is she now?”

Forest Lawn Memorial, probably, but Rue didn’t need to know that. “I’m not sure—that’s one of the reasons I’m here. To find her.”

Her mouth fell open. “You don’t know where she is?”

My mouth fell open, too. We must have looked like those carnival clowns you target with water guns.

“Don’t tell me
that
was your plan? You were going to go
find
her? What the fuck did you think would happen? That she’d take you in? Be your new mommy? You don’t know anything about her.”

She lunged for her bag and withdrew
Jane Eyre
, brandishing it in my face. “I know plenty.” I grabbed for the book, but that doe-eyed whippersnapper was quicker than I would have thought—and taller. She held me off with one arm and kept the book out of my reach with her other.

“Okay, so—look,” she said. “I’ll give this to you, but only if you promise to tell me about her.” I must have appeared unconvinced, because she rushed on, going for the sympathy vote. “Please. My dad won’t tell me anything. I just want to know what she’s like.”

I had a sudden image of her lying in my mother’s dusty old bed, dressed up in the “fashionable” clothes she stored in my mother’s old closet, reading my mother’s old diary like it was a copy of
In Style
, dreaming of the glamorous life she’d soon be sharing in.

Role models. At least that’s one crime I’m innocent of.

“I’m going to regret this,” I said, shifting onto my back. “What do you want to know?”

Her voice, when at last she decided to use it, was almost impossibly small. “Is she very beautiful?”

I pressed the heel of my hand into my forehead. “After however many years you’ve been stuck on this planet, you finally,
finally
meet your long-lost cousin, the one person in the world who maybe actually knows anything about this aunt you inexplicably admire, and you have the chance to ask her
anything
—and that’s what you want to know? Is she pretty?”

“I don’t know, it seemed a good place to start.”

“Fuck me.”

She stiffened. “Look, if you don’t want the book, that’s fine—”

“Okay, yes, fine. My mother—when last I saw her, anyway—was very beautiful.”

“What does she do?”

“Not much of anything, really—”

Rue held up the book again, waggling it like a tambourine.

“Charity work,” I said. “She does charity work. She really likes to give back. Like—to the earth.”

She frowned. “I always thought she’d be a model or something.”

“It’s really not that different.”

“Did she ever talk about us?”

I paused, trying to figure out whether to tell her what she wanted to hear or what I wanted her to hear. “No,” I said eventually. “But . . . I’m sure you were always on her mind. That’s why I came. I thought I might find her here.”

“She would never come back. She hated it here.”

In retrospect, it was Rue’s certainty that set me off. I mean, what the fuck did she know about my mother, anyway? What the fuck did
anyone
know about her? My whole life I’ve been hearing shit like this, from stepfathers and staff and prosecutors and character witnesses. “You have to understand about your mother,” they’d say, which really just means “I am absolutely sure you won’t understand anything at all.” I was the last person in the world who needed to be told anything about my mother. The irregularities in my orbit might have been the result of her gravitational pull, but I was the one who was visible to the naked eye. I was the one you had to look at to know she was there.
I
was the proof of
her
existence, not the other way around.

“She hated it everywhere,” I said. “You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she
loved
hating it everywhere. She had a genius for it, really, for mining unpleasantness wherever she went so she could hate something that wasn’t herself. And if she couldn’t, well—that’s where I came in.”

“Jesus, chill, I get it—you’ve got issues. Tell it to your therapist.”

I realized then that I’d risen to my feet and was doing something with my hand that was humiliatingly close to shaking my fist.

“Did she ever get to Switzerland?” Rue asked.

I sat down heavily. “Is that why you have all those posters?”

“You were in my room?”

I waved a hand. “I was looking for the bathroom.”

“She wrote about it,” she said after a moment. “‘Switzerland is a country that knows—’”

“‘—how to keep its secrets.’ Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.” I caught my breath. “So I’m assuming the copy of
Jane Eyre
is her diary?”

She nodded and handed me the book. I opened it and rifled through the pages, not surprised to see strings of unreadable letters written between the lines of printed text.

“It’s in code,” she said.

“Thanks for the insight.”

She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, then reached over and put a finger next to a page number. “That’s how you know the date. Page one is January first, page two is January second, and so on.”

“How’d you figure that out?”

“She mentions her birthday.”

“When’s that?” I asked without thinking.

Rue blinked. “February eighth.”

“Of course. How could I have forgotten?” I cleared my throat. “And how do you know what year it was?”

“She complained about the hundredth anniversary celebration—and
Police Academy 2
. That kind of cinched it.”

“What’s this code she’s writing in?”

“It’s, like, one of those things you find on the back of cereal boxes. It’s really easy. See here—here’s the last entry.” She turned to page 227. “August fifteenth,” she said.

ETBJ SGHR OKZBD

“Count ahead one letter.”

I translated—and let out a bark of laughter. Rue gave me a tentative smile. “She’s funny,” she said, looking to me for confirmation.

My own smile faded. I turned back to the book and pointed at a tiny circle that had been drawn on the top right corner of the page. “What does that mean?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, but there’s one on every page.” She turned a few pages back to show me.

“And here I thought you’d uncovered all her secrets. Maybe it’s time to go back to spy school, huh?”

“God, do you have to be such a bitch about everything?”