Earthbound (15 page)

The possibility horrifies me.

“I just didn’t want to go back,” I finally say, “and be so much less of a person than I was before.”

Benson’s thumbs rub against the backs of my hands. “You’re not less. Different? Maybe. I didn’t know you before. But you couldn’t be less.”

I nod glumly. He’s brought me back from the edge of tears, but only just. Because I do feel less.
Everything
is just … less.

“So,” Benson says, distracting me again. “Let’s say Reese and Jay aren’t who they say they are—and they might be. How would they have even gotten you? You were still seventeen. Child Services isn’t going to just hand you over to someone claiming to be your next of kin.”

“They got custody through my parents’ will, I think. Would it be all that hard to make a fake ID?”

“I think you’d need more than that,” Benson presses.

“I don’t know. You can pull off just about anything with enough cash. And if they’re involved in some kind of organized crime, I guarantee they have resources.”

“Okay, let’s say that’s the case.” He spreads his hands to the side. “Where are the real Reese and Jay?”

I suck in a breath. I hadn’t thought about that.
No.
I force myself to be honest.
I didn’t
want
to think about that.
“Is it all that far-fetched to believe they killed them?”

“I guess not. Or,” Benson continues before I can go too far down that morbid path, “they might be living on a farm in Kansas with a fake death certificate and no idea you’re alive at all.”

“How pathetic is it that I find that idea remarkably plausible?”

“Well, one way or another, we’re going to figure this out. Together,” he adds, his eyes boring deeper into mine. “I’m not backing out now. Whatever you want to do next, I’m right there.”

“Well,” I say, leaning forward, trying to amp up my bravery. “Maybe we should take advantage of Reese being gone.”

“How so?”

I swallow hard, and it’s that moment when I realize how serious this next step is.

And how committed I am to it.

“I have an idea.”

Benson just rolls his eyes. “Why do I have the feeling I’m not going to
like
this idea?”

“Well, that depends,” I say in a faux casual tone. “How do you feel about breaking and entering?”

I
’ve tried every key twice, and the door to Reese’s office remains stubbornly locked. Filled with frustration, I lean my head against the door, a total failure. Benson stands behind me, his arms crossed over his chest, saying nothing.

“I’m sorry,” I say, feeling utterly dismal. “I thought for sure one of these keys would do it.”

“It’s understandable,” Benson says with just a hint of humor. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many keys in one place.”

“I know, right?” I say wryly, holding up the weighty ring.

“Maybe you should just make a big hammer? Or, like, a chain saw or something.”

“And destroy the door?” I sigh. “Talk about massive evidence.”

“Touché.” Benson glares at the doorknob, his jaw muscles standing out. Then, making some kind of decision, he drops into a crouch and pulls his wallet out of his back pocket. “May I?”

“May you what?”

He removes what look like two slim sticks from his wallet and, after a little fiddling, unfolds them and snaps them into place.

“Are those
lock picks
?” I ask, completely shocked.

“Maybe,” he says, inserting one carefully into the doorknob.

“
Wallet-size
lock picks?” I press.

“First rule of Fight Club,” he mutters, focused on his task.

“Fight Club my ass,” I whisper, watching as he expertly works at the dead bolt.

After some fiddling, Benson cranks one of his sticks around—and the knob turns with it. The door glides open on well-oiled hinges. “There you go,” he announces, folding his little lock picks back down and dropping them into the bottom of his wallet.

“Where did you learn that?” I stare at him in shock. And possibly awe.

But he just shrugs, and I suspect that’s all the answer I’m going to get.

Reese’s office looks … normal.

It’s not as though I haven’t been in here before. Reese often leaves her door open while she’s working. I even asked her one day when I first moved in why she kept it locked, and she smiled and patted my shoulder. “I have a lot of trade secrets in there.” Then she sighed, looked away, and said, “But truth be told, it’s mostly just habit.”

Habit. Right.

Drawing a deep breath, I cross the threshold into the office. Everything is super-organized, with perfect stacks of papers on the desk, a file cabinet with a potted flower on top in one corner, and a corkboard mounted on the wall, covered with pins and Post-its.

I reach for the filing cabinet first.

Locked.

Of course.

Benson is bent over, looking under the neat stacks on Reese’s desk. “Maybe a drawer,” he mutters, opening the shallow pencil drawer at the front of the mahogany desk. “Bingo,” he says with a grin as he holds up a small key chain with one key dangling from it.

“What’s that?”

In answer, he walks over to the gray filing cabinet and inserts the key into the spring-loaded lock. His body is so near I catch a hint of his deodorant. I breathe deeply.

He turns the key.

The lock pops with a
click
.

“Excellent,” Benson says, drumming his fingertips together.

“Library nerd,” I mutter, mostly to cover the disappointment I feel when he steps back and gives me some space.

The drawer is full of files labeled at the top, mostly in Reese’s neat print, but some are in another handwriting. It looks male, but not Jay’s, and I wonder who she’s been working with. I’ve never seen anyone else around the house. Or, at least, not anywhere near the office. The labels are all names. I look at the front of the drawers and they show what letters are in each one.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” I say dryly, and begin sifting through the
A
s. “Reese told Elizabeth she’d check her files for Quinn. I guess these are the files.”
A-r, A-t, A-u, A-v, A-w.
“Nope. No Avery at all,” I say, checking through several files on either side of where it should have been, just in case it wasn’t alphabetized
exactly
right. I pause, my fingertips keeping my place among the files. “So I guess the possibility exists that he doesn’t have anything to do with this.” It’s a wish more than a logical conclusion, but I’m not above wishing.

“Or that he gave you a fake name,” Benson says, looking weirdly broody leaning against Reese’s desk.

I ignore him—not to mention the butterflies in my stomach—and take a shuddering breath as I close the
A–F
drawer and move on to my real task.
My
file.

M–T.

Michaels.

The third one down.

The drawer seems to glow like a neon light, and I’m simultaneously desperate and terrified to open it.

Benson draws near and raps a knuckle softly against the label when I continue to stall. “It’s what you came in here for,” he murmurs. A soft hand touches my shoulder, and I try to draw strength from him like an emotional osmosis.

After a long moment I nod and reach for the handle, carefully pressing the latch that lets it slide free, revealing dozens upon dozens of cream-colored files. I feel my world melting around me when I see it.

Tavia Michaels.

I knew it would be there—it’s the reason we broke into Reese’s office in the first place. For answers! But confirmation is a bitch.

I pull it out and stare at it in horror and fascination.

It’s pretty nondescript. A cream-colored folder with a small graphic on the upper right-hand corner of a feather floating above a flame. I peek back into the files; the others have the image too. But I don’t know what it means and don’t have the time to theorize.

I need to look at
my
file.

It’s pretty thick—I don’t know whether to be encouraged or discouraged by that. I flip the top and look down at a picture of myself as a sophomore.

And, um, it’s
not
a great picture. Sophomore year was kinda awkward.

“Awww, look at you,” Benson says with a grin, his arm resting around my back. “You’re so cuuuuute.”

“Shut up, jerk,” I say, but he’s managed to break the tension. I lean very slightly into his arm and flip to the next page.

A birth certificate. My Social Security card. High school transcripts. A copy of my parents’ will. Exactly the kind of stuff you’d expect to find in a filing cabinet in the office of someone who had received surprise custody of an injured teenager.

But past all that—pictures of my art. And not just any pictures. I recognize these photos—
I
took them.

“How did she get these?” I ask aloud, holding up several.

“Hey, did
you
paint that?” Benson asks, pointing to an oil on canvas of my mother sitting by a window, slicing strawberries.

“Yeah,” I manage to choke out. It’s one of my best pieces. Somehow I managed to capture the …
essence
of who my mother really is. Was.

I can’t think about my mother right now. I swallow down the grief—push it away—then flip the photo, blocking her face from my eyes.

But there’s still another photo of a painting. And another, and another.

“You’re really good,” Benson says, taking one from me to get a closer look.

It’s strange to realize that he’s never seen my work. Art was my life for so many years. And now Benson is such a big part of my life. And art isn’t.

It feels wrong.

“I took these pictures and sent them to the art school that wanted me,” I explain, as much to distract myself as anything. “How did Reese get them?”

“Um, Huntington?” Benson asks in a wary voice.

“Yeah, how …” But my words fade away as I look down at the first piece of paper beneath the stack of photos.

It’s the letter I first got from Huntington.

No. A
draft
of the letter.

With notes in the margins in Reese’s handwriting.

“What the hell?” I grasp at the corner of the letter and lift it up only to find a finished copy beneath it. And the pamphlet they sent with it.

And copies of the photos
in
the pamphlet.

“But … but I didn’t send my stuff to New Hampshire—it went to upstate New York.”

“How hard is it to have mail forwarded?”

“But there was a website. And a phone number. I
called
them!” I’m almost shrieking. Huntington was the
reason
we got on the plane in the first place. If it’s fake …

“Here,” Benson says, pulling his cell out of his pocket. “What was the website?” He brings up the Internet on his phone and I recite the web address in a near monotone.

“Here we go,” Benson says once it loads. “Huntington Academy of the Arts. The website is still up and there’s a phone number.”

We both look at the screen for a long, silent spell.

“I can call it,” Benson offers.

I’m afraid to say yes. Despite everything we’ve discovered, this feels like a major turning point.

Benson looks down at his screen, and his thinking wrinkle appears between his eyebrows.

Every nerve is on edge as I nod. “Let’s do it.”

He waits a few seconds—giving me a chance to change my mind maybe—then touches his screen and raises the phone to his ear.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Then the phone on Reese’s desk lets out a shrill ring.

My knees collapse and I sink to the floor, drained of the will to support my own weight. “But I talked to them!” I shout, and my voice is so shrill—I hardly recognize it. “There was a woman, and it wasn’t Reese,” I add before Benson can say anything. “She wasn’t like Reese at all. I talked to her like
six times
. There’s no way it was Reese. Or Elizabeth. She was kind of cutesy and peppy, like a cheerleader. Like … like …”
Like Barbie. Like Secretary Barbie
.
Who does her best never to talk to me, who’s hardly ever there even when I have an appointment.

My heart is pounding in my ears.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

“It was all fake,” I say, my voice shallow and strained. “Why … why would they do that?”

I hear Benson breathe in and out slowly a few times. “I’ve been thinking about this.”

“You knew?” I almost shout.

“No, no,” Benson says, his hands coming to my arms, rubbing up and down to calm me. “I didn’t know about the school thing. I mean I’ve been thinking about the whole plane thing, in light of everything else that’s happened.”

“And?” I say after the silence grows heavy.

“I hate to bring this up, I mean, I’m sure it’s still kind of fresh and all, but maybe … maybe you being in a plane wreck isn’t a coincidence.”

“What do you mean? Like someone—” But the words are hardly out of my mouth when I realize what he’s implying. “No,” I whisper. “No way.”

“Tavia, with everything that’s happened, you have to at least consider it.”

Despair rips through me. “No. No! I am
not
important enough for someone to bring down an entire
plane!
Do you know how many people were on that flight?” I’m managing to not yell, but only just.

“Two hundred and fifty-six,” Benson whispers. Of course he looked it up.

“It was an accident.” The words are shaky as they wisp from my mouth.

Benson is quiet, but his eyes don’t leave mine. Just as I’m sure I can’t look at him anymore, he says, “I don’t think it was, Tave.”

I sink to the floor, defeated. It’s one thing to lose my parents in a tragic accident—I’ve learned to deal with that—but murder?

Murder that was intended for
me
?

“Benson?” His name is a croak from my dry throat. “I’m no one.”

“You’re not no one.” He reaches an arm around me, pulling me to his chest, where I bury my face. He strokes my short hair. “Think about it. Someone must have found you when you were living in Michigan. They sabotaged your plane, tried to kill
you
because of what you can do. It all fits.”