The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (40 page)

“I…what? No, that’s--”

“They were your own words, Dad.
Right before you passed out cold. And while you were asleep, I watched the
wedding DVD. I arranged for a hypnotist to work with mom. That’s why she’s not
obeying your every word anymore.”

Walter took a step back. He was
looking at Jill like she had a gun in her hands and was about to shoot.

“You insolent little brat,” he
whispered.

“I have emails,” Jill snapped.
“Between you, Merv, and Galen—I could turn all three of you in for treason
right now if I wanted.”

“You petulant, spoiled,
arrogant--”

“Call me all the names you want,
Dad. It doesn’t change the simple fact that Mom isn’t your slave anymore.”

“I will call Melissa,” he
whispered, speaking more to himself now than to Jill. “I will get your mother
fixed.”

“Melissa Mayhew is dead!”

Walter’s eyes opened wide. He
took another step back.

“You and I are going to go
downstairs,” Jill said. “Mom has work she wants to do.
Her own work
.
What say you and me go pour ourselves a couple more martinis and figure out
where things go from here?”

Walter was thinking about
lashing out one more time. Jill could see it in his eyes.

But he controlled himself, and
turned to go downstairs. A few minutes later, he and Jill were seated in the
parlor again, a martini in Walter’s hand.

Jill never told her him about
the Network. Or about the Marsh Hawk Protocol.

But as Walter gulped down one
martini after another, Jill told him plenty.

She recounted an entire chain of
emails for him. “You, Merv, and Galen,” she said. “Thick as thieves while you
bought slaves from Melissa. Galen bought employees, Merv bought people to hunt,
and you bought a wife.”

She told him all the code words
and secret numbers they used, proving that she had seen it all.

“Whenever you talked to Melissa,
Galen was number 2, Merv was number 3, you were number 11,” she said.

Walter looked at her with
disbelief.

“It would be easy for me and Mom
to disappear,” Jill said. “We could leave the country, and from a safe distance,
I could send the clan all sorts of interesting info about you, Merv, and
Galen.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Walter
whispered.

“Try me, Dad.”

He took a big gulp of his drink.

“Fortunately for you,” Jill
said, “I really want to solve the final Rose Ransom clue and win Coronation for
Nicky. So as long as you behave, I’m content to stay here and live like a big
happy family.”

“What do you want?” Walter said.

“I want you to leave Mom alone.
I want you to recognize she’s no longer your slave.”

“But Jill…I’ve spent months in
Seattle sealing up an arrangement with a new client. It isn’t even one of the
immortals. It’s work your mother might enjoy doing.”

“Then you can present it to her
respectfully as something she might like to do and she can decide when and if
she’s going to work on it.”

“We have a schedule we must meet.
The first deliverable is tomorrow.”

“Then change the schedule! Right
now, Mom is doing what she wants to do. You will let her do it, because if I
hear you two fighting like that again, I’m putting her on the first plane out
of here and you’ll never see her again!”

“What is it that your mother is
working on?”

“That’s the next thing I want,”
Jill said. “You will not ask me or Mom what we’re up to, ever. You won’t ask
because you don’t want to know. Do you understand?”

Walter closed his eyes and
poured the remains of his glass down his throat.

“Yes,” he muttered. “Anything
else?”

“Sometime, when she seems ready,
I want you to talk to Mom about what you did,” Jill said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“She’s not right, Dad! She’s
been your slave since the day you got married. Can you imagine how that might
mess her up?”

“But what am I supposed to say?”

“Saying you’re sorry would be a
good start.”

“Now she’s found the second
rose! I can’t believe this!”

Kim was in her daddy’s office,
pacing the floor while he sat calmly behind the desk.

“Why are you so calm?” Kim
snapped. “Why does it seem like you don’t care one way or the other?”

“I’m reading this clue,” Galen
said. “I think the game ends now. This clue is the most obtuse of all of them.”

“You’ve been saying that since
the beginning,” said Kim. “You’ve been so sure that no one is solving the
Ransom this year, but now Jill has solved two out of three clues!”

“She doesn’t have any time left
to solve this last one.”

“Does she need time? She has an
immortal helping her! But we don’t know who it is or why she’s getting help
because you’re too chicken to say anything.”

“Our hands are tied, Kim. We’ve
discussed this.”

“We haven’t discussed anything.
You’ve given me excuses, and I’ve listened! Maybe I shouldn’t listen anymore!”

Galen turned his gaze back to
the paper on his desk.

“An expression of mortal
frailty,” he said, reading the newest clue. “Death and new life made manifest.
You know, this really sounds like it was written to be unsolvable. I can’t even
make sense of the lines.”

“You’re so passive about all
this,” Kim said. “We should be doing something!”

“In the throes of agony
eternal,” Galen read, “within and without the square. What a strange little
poem.”

“I want to send our evidence to
Renata.”

“Our evidence?” Galen said. “What
are you talking about?”

“We have a picture of Shannon
Evans sitting at the front desk of the Praia de Sol hotel in Rio de Janeiro. We
have financial records proving that Annika Fleming is in touch with her. We
know that Nicky Bloom couldn’t have gotten into Thorndike unless Shannon
disappeared first! We have all the proof we need to end this!”

“And end ourselves in the
process,” said Galen. “I don’t think you understand how serious our situation
is. I bought slaves from Melissa for twenty years. I have more than fifty of
them working for me right now.”

“We can do it anonymously.”

“There is no anonymous, Kim. Not
anymore. Everyone knows our agenda. If you send your evidence to Renata, the
first thing she’ll do is go and quiz Annika Fleming. And thanks to Jill
Wentworth, Annika knows the truth about us.”

“Then let’s leave Annika out of
it! Let’s send Renata the picture of Shannon in an unmarked envelope. Let her
go find Shannon Evans, get inside her brain, and learn about the conspiracy to
put Nicky Bloom in Thorndike.”

“We can talk about a strategy
like that after the year-end party,” Galen said. “For now, it is much safer to
be patient.”

“I’m tired of playing it safe.
You always make me play it safe! The immortals never play it safe!”

“And you’re not immortal yet.
Your best chance to become an immortal doesn’t involve any anonymous letters to
Renata. If you can just calm yourself down for a few more weeks, we can see if
anyone solves the final clue. I don’t think they will. I think the most likely
outcome is that we reach the year-end party with the final clue unsolved and
Nicky gets killed in front of the entire class. When that happens, all your
problems with Nicky, Jill, and anyone else go away.”

Kim left her daddy’s office that
night in a foul mood. He was so soft. So timid. Sure, he could weave together a
few sentences that justified his desire to play it safe, but in the end, it was
just his own cowardice.

And all of this was his fault.
If he hadn’t been illegally buying slaves, none of this would have happened. It
made Kim furious to think about. She was paying for her daddy’s mistakes. It
wasn’t fair.

I’ve done nothing wrong
,
she told herself.
We’re sitting on valuable gossip in order to protect
Daddy, not to protect me.

As the week went on, and Kim
overheard everyone at school working on the third clue, she became convinced
that her Daddy’s strategy was wrong. He had been wrong on just about everything
up until now. Why should she listen to him on this?

Early on a Saturday morning,
while her parents were still asleep, Kim took matters into her own hands. She
sat down at her computer and typed out an anonymous letter to Renata Sullivan.

Dear Ms. Sullivan,

Enclosed you will find proof
positive that Shannon Evans, who was pronounced dead last summer following a
boating accident, is still alive. This photo was taken at the Praia de Sol
hotel.

She didn’t sign the letter.
After she printed it, she handled the paper and the photograph with cotton
gloves. She left the gloves on when she went to the post office in downtown DC,
where the letter would be stamped with a zip code far removed from her own.

You’ve been looking out for
yourself first since this all began, Daddy. It’s time that somebody looked out
for me.

She dropped the envelope,
addressed to the Regents Office, attention Renata Sullivan, into the mail slot
and watched it disappear.

Jill knew the invitation was
coming. Still, she panicked when she saw it in her mailbox.

This invitation serves notice
that Jillian Wentworth will be deemed front door access to the mansion of
Renata Sullivan on the night of December 15
for a celebration of the
semester’s end. Doors open at 9:00. Guests will not be allowed inside without
an invitation. Formal dress required.

And there it was. A formal
reminder for Jill and everyone else that the ending loomed. If the third clue
wasn’t solved by the fifteenth of December, Nicky and Ryan were dead.

The year-end party wasn’t the
only social event in the near future. The day after Renata’s invite arrived in
the mail, Jill got an invitation to Annika’s eighteenth birthday party. That
invite was a lot more fun to read.

Handwritten in calligraphy on
expensive card stock, on first look, Annika’s party invitation gave the
impression of an extremely formal and uptight affair. But upon closer
inspection, Jill detected a wonderfully bold bit of sarcasm in the language of
the invite. Written as a four-line poem, the invitation was a not-so-subtle
spoof of the Rose Ransom clues that had occupied the class all semester.

Your presence is requested

At the residence of Miss
Annika Fleming,

Who on the occasion of the
eighteenth anniversary of her birth,

Wishes for her friends to gather
and get shit-faced.

On the back of the invite was a
picture of the National Mall with a giant rose looming over the city in place
of the Washington Monument. The rose had two wide leaves at the bottom, a thick
green shaft, and the flower on top was shaped like a rectangle with rounded
corners. Clearly, it was meant to evoke a giant penis.

Nice one, Annika.

While the rest of the class
would view this invite as a bold, even reckless bit of fun directed at the
immortals, Jill saw a different message. Annika was getting ready to bolt. The
arrival of her eighteenth birthday also meant the transfer of her trust fund.

Looking at the invite, Jill
couldn’t help but feel envious. Just a few more days and Annika was free.

And just a few more hours
until you can crawl under the checkered quilt and tune it all out for a while
,
Jill thought.

With her father back in Seattle
and her mother camped out day and night in Jill’s bedroom, Jill had taken to
sleeping in her parents’ bed. An obscenely large mattress made of some
high-tech foam with a black and white checkered quilt that was the softest fabric
Jill had ever felt, crawling into that bed had become Jill’s favorite part of
each day. It was the one place where she didn’t have to think about Ransom
clues, computer hacks, the Network, or the rest of her miserable life.

It also was a place where, if
she was lucky, she got to see Zack.

He came to her in dreams
sometimes. It was usually in the early hours of the morning when she dreamed
about him, when her body was nearly awake and some part of her remembered the
joy of sleeping next to him. The dreams could be that simple.
Zack is in the
bed, lying next to me
. Sometimes that was all there was to the dream and it
was more than enough. On nights that she dreamed about Zack, she woke up
energized and ready to work. It was as if his presence, even his imaginary
presence, was a reminder that there were things in life worth living for. There
were reasons to get out of bed.

At school, everyone was working
on the third Ransom clue, with results no different than they got on their
attempts to solve the first two. This third clue, with its line about “death
and new life made manifest,” had everyone talking about places where both birth
and death happened. Thorndike students scoured every hospital in town without
any luck. As the afternoons grew shorter and colder, the students grew less
enthused about solving the third clue, probably thinking that it would be Jill
who figured it out anyway.

But Jill wasn’t working on the
clue. She knew no more about
death and new life made manifest
than
anyone else. Besides, Tarin had come through on the first two clues. He’d come
through again. The more pressing work for her was Renata’s phone, and the
encryption code that was hiding most of the phone’s real functions.

“I’ve noticed that only a
limited subset of the alphabet appears in the code,” Carolyn said one
afternoon.

Carolyn handed Jill a piece of
paper. It was covered in a random assortment of numbers and letters.

“I’ve already seen this, Mom.”