Dreamland (10 page)

“What do you mean,
Agent
Connelly's
department
?” Dea said. Her voice sounded distant, foreign, like it was being piped back to her through a cave. She turned to Connelly. “You're not a cop?”

Connelly shook his head. “I'm with the Feds,” he said simply.

Dea closed her eyes. Opened them again. But the two men were still there—both of them watching her with twin expressions of pity.

“She's always skipped town before we could make anything stick,” Connelly said. Dea hated the way he said
she
, avoiding Miriam's name, as if she wasn't a real person. “Looks like she's done it again.” He was still standing, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed. Still dripping on the carpet.

Dea's thoughts were disjointed. She was seeing everything in short flashes, as if the reel in her brain kept getting cut.

Connelly's boots were crusted with mud. Her mom would be mad about that—about the mud. Then she remembered her mom was gone.

“You're wrong,” Dea managed to say. “That doesn't make any sense.”

But even as she said it, she remembered all the times her mother had woken her in the grayness of a new dawn, whispering “It's time to go, Dea”; packing up the car before the sun wrestled free of the horizon; long hours, towns melting blurrily by the windows, her mother silent, anxious. And the other stuff: fake names, jobs that never went anywhere, money that came from nowhere, money stuffed in cardboard shoeboxes and hidden in the dashboard.

She wondered if the cops knew about the money.

“It took us a long time to pin anything on her,” Connelly said. “But this time we're sure.”

“I'm sorry,” Briggs said again, as if that helped. As if it
mattered
.

Dea thought of the brochures spread across the kitchen table, and the urgent way her mom had woken her the day before.
We're leaving
. She must have known the police were closing in. Dea's mouth tasted like bile. Her thoughts ricocheted back and forth between anger and denial. It wasn't possible. It made sense. She wouldn't have. She must have.

All these years, when Miriam had filled Dea's head with stories about monsters and mirrors and locks on the door, she was just full of shit. She was running from the law, plain and simple.

And yet . . .

The mirrors had shattered upstairs. Small, scrappy evidence, but
something
. And her mom couldn't have gone far without a car, unless she'd ditched it in favor of the bus. But even if what the cops said was true—her mom had been stealing, using identities
that weren't hers—Dea couldn't, wouldn't, believe that Miriam would have left Dea behind.

Dea pictured her mother turning to her, winking, as they barreled down another nameless highway.
Thick as thieves.

“I know this is asking a lot,” Briggs was saying, in a soothing voice, like he was trying to coax Dea back onto a bike after she'd fallen down. Dea wondered whether Connelly was supposed to be the bad cop. Or the bad
Fed
. Or whatever. Neither of them looked the part. Both of them looked like tired dads. She still hated them. “But if there's anything you can think of at all that might help us find your mom—any detail, anything she mentioned in the past few days—any place she particularly likes to go . . . ?”

“No,” Dea said abruptly.

She stood up, and then, feeling dizzy and realizing she had nowhere to go, sat down again. What would happen to her now?

“Think really hard, Odea.” Briggs leaned forward. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Dea said. She was seventeen. She had no family. Would they force her into some group home? Or put her up for adoption? No one adopted seventeen-year-olds. She needed to find her mom before the cops did. She had to. “No,” she said suddenly. “I mean, I'm not sure. She mentioned something about Cleveland.” She swallowed, licked her lips. She'd never been a great liar. “She said—she said there was something she needed to pick up. Before we left town.” She held her breath. The lie sounded stupid, even to her.

But Connelly and Briggs shared another one of those looks.

“There's a bus leaves downtown every other hour, drops you
right in downtown Cleveland,” Briggs said.

“We'll call it in,” Connelly said. “See if any of the bus drivers remember someone boarding.” He turned back to Dea, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “How old are you, Dea?”

“Eighteen,” she lied quickly, figuring they'd be too busy to check right away. She wasn't sure, but she thought Briggs looked relieved.

“I want you to sit tight, Odea,” he said. He had to use both arms to shove himself out of the sofa. He was big. Probably six foot five. That was the only thing he had in common with Connor. “If your mother calls, ask her where she is, but don't tell her we came by.”

“What if she comes back?” Dea said.

“That's what we're counting on.” Briggs smiled. When he did, his expression flattened and tightened, and he looked for an instant like someone who would have, could have, cracked his son on the head with a guitar. “We got someone watching from across the road.”

Dea stood up. She was itching for them to get out. “What about me?” she said. “I was supposed to go to the library in Marborough today. For a school project.” More lies. But she needed an excuse to get out of the house, and she was sure the cops would be watching.

“We'd prefer for you to stay here,” Briggs said.

“Prefer it,” she said. “But you can't make me.”

“No.” He looked her up and down, sizing her up, maybe trying to figure out if she was stupid or just stubborn. “No, we can't.”

There was nothing more to say. Briggs told Dea they'd be in
touch very soon, which sounded less like a reassurance than a threat. She walked both cops to the door—Connelly flipped up his hood against the driving rain—and watched to make sure they drove away. There was a service truck parked in Connor's driveway, and Dea saw a man in a yellow slicker moving around a telephone pole. A bad time to be fixing wires. It was raining so hard, the whole world seemed to be dissolving.

Dea closed the door and leaned against it. She was struck again by how still and empty the house felt, like a hollow vessel; she could hear individual drops of rain patter the window. Her chest ached with the effort of trying not to cry. She thought of calling Gollum, or even driving the five hundred feet to her house.

But she needed to stay calm. She needed to focus.

Where could her mom have gone? Was it possible that what the cops had told her was true? Had her mom just . . . left? Gone on the run?

Dea knew she'd already accepted that at least one part of what Briggs and Connelly had told her was true: her mom had been stealing identities, maybe making fraudulent claims, pocketing cash where she could. Weirdly enough, the knowledge was actually a relief. The middle-of-the-night flights, the money stuffed in hidden places, the aliases and identities, jobs attained and rapidly quit—it all made sense to her now.

Struck by a sudden thought, Dea grabbed the car keys and, without bothering to put on a jacket, hurtled out into the rain. The storm was even worse than it had been the night before. The sky was a queasy green color, and the whole world looked unnatural, wrong. She was soaked by the time she made it
fifteen feet to the car. She sat for a moment, shivering, and fumbled with stiff fingers to start the car, thumbing on the heat.

Was she being watched, even now? Would she be followed?

She scanned the yard and the garden. She didn't see anyone. She ducked down and worked a hand under the passenger seat, feeling for the large tear in the fabric, where her mom had slit open the cushion. Reaching upward, pushing her fist past a web of stuffing, she felt it: a thick Christmas stocking, stuffed full of cash. As she expected, it hadn't been moved.

She knew there was over two thousand dollars crammed into that stocking. Her mom had told her so. So why would Miriam go on the run without it? It didn't make sense.

She threw the car into gear and backed slowly out of the driveway, her wheels sloshing water up into the grass. The telephone repair guy was still moving around in the rain, fidgeting at the base of the pole, but he straightened up to watch her as she drove past. Almost immediately, he got in his truck and pulled onto the road behind her.

Of course. Briggs had said someone was keeping an eye on the house. They'd suited up a cop to look like a repairman and sicced him on her. There was probably another cop, too, camping out in Connor's house, reporting everything back to base. Dea felt a sharp pang. That meant Connor knew what was going on. Knew that her mom was a thief, knew that she'd disappeared, knew that Dea was all alone.

At the corner of Main Street she made a left automatically. The service truck turned onto Route 9 behind her. Every time she swiveled her head, it was there. Not too close, not too far. Her palms were sweating. She felt like a criminal, even though
she hadn't done anything wrong.

She was halfway to Marborough before she realized she was heading toward the library. Well. Why not? She'd told Officer Briggs that's where she was going, and it was as good a place as any to sit and think. Besides, it shared a parking lot with the post office branch where her mother had kept a PO box—this, too, filled with cash. Dea had a spare key—she'd found a locksmith who had cut her a break and copied it, even though it was clearly marked
Do Not Duplicate
—and once or twice when she was flat broke she'd lifted a twenty-dollar bill from her mom's stash, figuring her mom would never notice.

She would go there and see whether that money, too, was intact.

Then she would know for sure whether her mom had run away, or—or something else.

Something even worse.

The library parking lot was a lake. Her tires created miniature wakes when she pulled in. There were hardly any other cars in the lot. Smart people were staying inside today. Dea shut the engine off and waited, her breath condensing on the windshield. Sure enough, the service truck that wasn't a service truck was still behind her. The cop didn't turn into the library; he parked at the curb on the opposite side of the street, as if that were less obvious.

Dea got out, ducked her head, and ran for the front doors.

The library was quiet and unexpectedly cold, and the smell of must was everywhere. Dea felt like she was walking into a sealed vault. Once the heavy doors swung shut behind her, she couldn't hear the rain anymore. Behind the front counter, a
woman with dyed red hair was doing something at a computer; she barely glanced up at Dea when she passed. A guy wearing a filthy camouflage jacket was napping on one of the research tables, head down on an open book; Dea judged from his clothes that he was homeless. She felt another sharp pang. Was she homeless now? She would rather be homeless than go into foster care—she knew that.

She moved through the stacks toward the back of the library, where beanbag chairs were arranged in a semicircle in a small, sunken area that reminded Dea of an amphitheater. It was technically the children's area, but since moving to Fielding Dea had spent hours parked in a chair here when the library was slow, reading any book that grabbed her attention, imagining being in someone else's body, in someone else's life.

For a moment, seeing the lumpy chairs and a stack of picture books splayed across the worn carpet, where some kid must have left them, she had the overwhelming urge to curl up and go to sleep. But she kept going, toward the back door, which opened out onto a narrow spit of gravel that divided the library from the post office.

She darted through the rain again, hands up, as if she could fend off the assault from above. It wasn't until she tried the door handle and found it locked that she remembered that it was Sunday and the post office was closed. She cupped her face to the glass, blinking rain away. Dark. She banged on the door anyway, and rattled the door handle. Irrationally, she felt she
had
to get in. It was the only way she would know for sure; and if she didn't know, she would die.

She aimed a kick at the door, half hoping the glass would
shatter. It didn't, of course. Suddenly, the urge to cry—which she had been keeping back, swallowing down—became too much. It crystallized in the back of her throat, and became a word.

“Mom,” she called out, into the empty air, into the rain. She had the sudden sense of being watched, an alarm pricking up all over her skin. Goose flesh. “Mom? Mom!”

Calling into the grayness, into the haze of rain, as if the moisture were a curtain and it might suddenly part to reveal her mother, smiling, walking toward her with open arms.

Nothing. Nothing but the rain spitting on the gravel. Dea was crying, now, without realizing it. “Mom!” She took the door handles and rattled them again, desperate, not thinking straight. “Mom. Where are you?”

There was a shift in the darkness behind the post office door. Suddenly a woman materialized behind the glass—big, frowning, her face distorted by the rain. Dea stepped backward, swiping her nose with a wrist, as the woman unlocked the door.

“What in the devil are you doing here?” she said. She was wearing sneakers, jeans, and a sweatshirt printed with the faded graphic of a kitten; still, she managed to look threatening. “We're closed.”

Dea fumbled for an excuse. “Please.” She cleared her throat. She could see the bank of post office boxes behind the woman's bulk, glinting dully. “My mom—my mom was supposed to mail me something. A message.” Her throat was so dry, she could hardly swallow. “I just need to look—just for thirty seconds. A minute, tops. Please.”

The woman gave Odea a long look up and down. Odea
couldn't stop herself from shivering. She had never felt so pathetic.

“Quickly,” the woman said, and stepped backward. “We ain't supposed to be open.”