The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (45 page)

“Hiding always was his great
skill,” Renata said.

“I feel like he’s been hiding
from me for centuries,” said Falkon.

“I’ll let you go so you can
continue your search. I’ve got work I should be doing anyway.”

Renata ended the call and looked
at the paperwork in front of her. She sighed. With all her focus on the Rose
Ransom and the goings on in Italy, she had allowed a pile of mundane chores to
grow. She couldn’t wait to break free from her life in the Samarin clan, not
least because she was tired of running the school. Over the years, Thorndike
Academy, the keystone of the Samarin empire, had turned into a monstrous
generator of paperwork.

She went through a stack of
invoices first, then she read a proposal for a new teacher contract and made
comments in the margins. She looked at minutes from the last three meetings of
the Board, including an amusing section where they all agreed that, “Karmela
Sweet is the ideal candidate to play the princess in this year’s Rose Ransom
and, pending Renata’s approval, the board will initiate contact with her
parents.”

What a bunch of buffoons. How
much better had the Ransom been this year because Renata had shucked all of
them to the side and done it herself? How much smoother and more beautiful was
everything at school now that Daciana was gone and Renata was fully in charge?

She was ready to be done with
all of them. The Regents, the teachers, the students, the Samarin clan. A mob
of humans and vampires that was always up in her business—that’s what Daciana
had created. That was the life Renata needed to blow up so she could start over
again.

She pushed the meeting minutes
aside and dove into the mail. Bills, thank you letters, requests for
recommendations, more bills….one after another she opened the envelopes and tossed
them aside, coming eventually to a large manila envelope with a DC post office
stamp and no return address. She opened it and poured the contents out on the
table in front of her.

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 turned the letter over,
looking for a signature or some other evidence of who sent it.

There was nothing. The mailing
was entirely anonymous.

She laughed. Some enemy of
Shannon’s had been playing spy. Probably a classmate who had her boyfriend
stolen or something equally petty.

She looked at the photograph.
Yep. Clearly it was Shannon. But when was it taken?

She found a time stamp in the
bottom left corner. This photo was only three weeks old.

She dialed Falkon. He didn’t
answer so she had to leave a voicemail.

“Hey, it’s me,” she said. “I got
a very interesting package in the mail. It seems that when Melissa paid a visit
to the Evans family, she left one of them alive.”

*****

Shannon Evans gazed out the
window of her eleventh floor room at the Praia de Sol hotel.

The last few months had been
long and miserable, but life was about to change. Annika was coming.

Shannon wanted to meet Annika at
the airport, but Annika refused.
We’ve worked so hard to keep you hidden
,
Annika told her.
We can’t risk it! That moment when we are together again
will be just as special in our hotel room as it would have been at the airport.

Annika didn’t understand how
maddening it was to be locked in a room all day.

Still, Shannon agreed to stay in
her room, and now she was counting the hours until Annika’s plane landed. While
she waited, she stared at the open air nightclub on the beach.

The Avalon.

The people at the Avalon were
young, wealthy, and beautiful. When she lived in DC, Shannon was one of those
people. Now she was a hermit, frightened to leave her hotel room, entirely
dependent on the money Annika sent her, interacting only with the waiter who
brought her room service and the housekeepers who changed her sheets.

Soon it will be over
, she
thought.
Look out world, because Shannon Evans is coming back. And when she
does, she’s headed to a nightclub just like The Avalon, and is going to party
until the sun comes up.

Bored, she started picking out
the women who were dancing, one at a time, and imaging herself in their place.

She saw a blonde holding her
hands up while men danced on either side of her. Kind of fun, but not really Shannon’s
style.

She saw an older woman leaning
on the railing, talking to a guy who was at least ten years younger than she
was.
You go, girl
, Shannon thought.

She saw a girl with black hair….

“No way,” Shannon whispered.

She leaned closer to the window,
pressing her forehead against the glass.

“No way in hell…oh, you little whore!
You think you can come here! You think you can dance at the nightclub right
underneath my window?”

Shannon put on her shoes. Annika
wouldn’t be here for another hour or so. There was plenty of time for her to go
down to The Avalon and take care of some unfinished business.

*****

Jill sat at her desk, listening
to the conversations between Renata and Falkon, furiously taking notes, trying
to make sense of what she was hearing.

It sounded like they were
sending Nicky and Ryan back to Washington. It sounded like the third Ransom
clue would lead Jill right to them!

But it also appeared that Renata
had designed the third clue so it couldn’t be solved. Reading her notes, Jill underlined
two sentences she had copied down, word for word.

The third clue leads to a
place where no humans have ever been allowed. The clue is impossible for them
to solve.

Jill reached for her phone.
Hours had passed since she sent the first text to Annika with no response.
Where was she?

Jill sent her another message.

Call me as soon as you get
this. Renata knows that Shannon is alive!

She put her phone down and began
tapping her fingers on the desk. She didn’t know what to do next. She had all
this incredible information and no one to tell it to!

“Mom!” she yelled out. “Mom, can
you come in here?”

Her mother, who had finally left
Jill’s bedroom after days camping out in there, didn’t respond. Jill got up
from her desk and went to the hallway. “Mom! I want to talk to you!”

Nothing. Where was she?

Jill went up to the third floor
study. No one was in there. She went downstairs. “Mom? Mom, are you in here?”

Could she be asleep? Could she
be asleep in her own bed? Jill went to the master bedroom and found that it too
was empty.

She decided to dial her mom’s
phone.

“Hello?”

“Mom, where are you?”

“I’m at the airport.”

“The airport? What in the world
are you doing there?”

“We finished our task, Jill. I
have nothing else to do until Tarin comes back.”

“So you went to the airport?”

“I called your father. He
thought--”

“Wait a minute. When did you
call Dad? It’s like three in the morning where he is.”

“He was happy to take my call,”
Carolyn said. “I told him I was available if he had work for me. He asked me to
catch the first flight to Seattle so I could meet his clients and discuss the
job in person.”

“No, you can’t go to Seattle!
Mom, why would you do that? You don’t have to do a thing for dad anymore,
remember?”

“But I have nothing to do,
Jill.”

“There’s plenty to do! You’ve
left me all alone in here when everything’s blowing up! I just overheard
another phone call from Renata to Falkon. They’re bringing Nicky and Ryan back
to Washington. We need to solve the third Ransom clue.”

“Those little riddles are not my
strong suit,” Carolyn said. “You know that.”

“But it’s important! I’m
just….God, Mom, it’s so…”

Lonely
. She didn’t finish
the sentence because she knew her mother wouldn’t understand. Carolyn Wentworth
didn’t know what it was like to be lonely. Maybe she never would.

“If Tarin comes back, have him
call me,” Carolyn said.

“He doesn’t really call people,”
said Jill. She almost added,
and I don’t know if he’s ever coming back.

“Well he is welcome to call me,”
said Carolyn. “But I won’t wait around and do nothing. Now, if you’ll excuse
me, I’m next in line at the ticket counter.”

Jill ended the call with her mom
and plopped down on the living room couch. Within minutes, she was asleep.

She dreamed about the night she
and Zack went to the carnival in Marlboro. In the dream, they walked into
The
House of A Thousand Frights
together, holding hands, but in the darkness,
they got separated. Jill called out for him, but he didn’t answer, and she was
alone.

I don’t want to be alone
anymore!
she screamed.

And then she saw a small light
ahead of her. It was shaped like a rectangle. The screen from Zack’s phone! She
followed it. It was moving fast, but she was able to keep up. She followed it
down rickety stairs, through a hallway of mirrors, and onto a twisty slide.

At the bottom of the slide, Zack
was waiting for her with a big smile on his face.

“That was fun, wasn’t it?” he
said.

Jill punched him in the chest,
playfully. “It was awful!” she said. “You left me all alone.”

“But you used my phone to track
me,” he said. “That was really smart.”

He looked at her with love in
his eyes, and kissed her.

Jill woke up with a start.

“The phone,” she whispered. “I
could use the phone to track her.”

She ran upstairs and got in
front of the laptop, which was still showing a live stream from Renata’s phone.
Jill brought up the system log to see what processes were running.

No apps were open. No user
inputs were happening. The phone was sitting idle, occasionally sending and
receiving packets of data to keep itself updated.

Sending and receiving packets
of data to satellites, all of those packets stamped with her current GPS
location.

“Oh, you bastard, I’ve got you,”
Jill said. “I’ve got you!”

Jill pulled her own phone from
her pocket and flipped through the screens until she saw a thumbnail picture of
Karmela Sweet, with the words
Karmela? Where Are You?
written
underneath.

She pressed on Karmela’s
picture, and Alvin’s tracking app opened up. A map of the world, with a
blinking red dot flying down the eastern seaboard, Alvin’s app was tracking the
replica of Karmela’s ring, which Annika was taking to Rio to give to Shannon.

Annika’s plane was in the air
and already an hour out of Washington. With this app, Jill would be able to
track Annika everywhere she went.

Adding Renata’s location to the
same map would be simple, since Renata’s phone gave away its GPS coordinates
every time it sent or received a packet of data.

It took Jill less than an hour
to modify the tracking app so that it followed both Karmela’s ring and Renata’s
phone. Jill connected the app to her widescreen monitor and brought up the map.
Now she had two blinking dots on the screen. The red dot was Annika, just off
the Virginia coast, heading out into the Atlantic. The blue dot was Renata.

The blue dot was already over the
Gulf of Mexico.

Jill opened up a new text to
Annika.

Did you get my messages? Call
Shannon immediately and tell her to get out of that hotel and find someplace to
hide!

*****

“I’m standing in the empty villa
where the Evans family once lived,” said Renata. “Can you hear how my voice is
echoing in here?”

“Not really,” said Falkon.

“Well it is! My voice is
bouncing all over the place because there is no art on the walls, no furniture
on the floor—there aren’t even any carpets!”

“Huh?”

“The place has been cleaned out,
Falkon! Someone’s been here and took everything! All that’s left are some old
magazines, a few stacks of paper, and lots of trash.”

“What? Who would have done
something like that?”

“Burglars you old fool!”

“But the necklace we need would
have been in the safe,” said Falkon.

“The safe has been pulled down
and cracked open.”

“Can’t be. That would mean--”

“That we’re screwed? Yes, that’s
exactly what it means. Our necklace might be for sale on some street market in
the slums for all we know.”

“Are you sure it’s not there?
You’ve checked the entire house? We’re looking for a silver pendant with a
black onyx in the center.”

“I remember what it looks like,
and yes, I’ve checked everywhere. It’s not in this house.”

“Oh my. I don’t know what to do
with this news. I don’t know that I can even hear it right now.”

Renata shook her head.
Sometimes, her partnership with Falkon felt like she had taken a job with her
grandfather. Strong, smart, and worthy of her respect, but also old and tired.
Falkon was even more weary of life than she was.”

“Did you get my voicemail
earlier?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, it just so happens that
on the plane ride over I opened a piece of mail from an anonymous source who
wished to report that Shannon Evans faked her own death and is alive and well
in Rio.”

“Well, that was true for a time,
but Melissa found them--”

“Melissa found them and killed
Shannon’s parents. As I think back on that final conversation I had with
Melissa, I don’t recall that she ever said a thing about killing Shannon.”

“So you think it’s possible
Shannon is still out there somewhere?”