style="font-size:15px;"> Yeah. We do, I smiled back.
Too bad for him this was the last time.
Chapter Forty
Weasel Face—who no longer seemed so weasely—escorted Tristan and me back through the hallways and down the elevator to the Underground. Tristan gave him a handshake and a promise to go out to watch the Green Bay Packers soon, then suggested it would be awesome if he would disable the surveillance camera over the door. With a conspiratorial grin, Weasel Face wiggled his index finger at it. Tristan quickly steered him out, the door sealing shut behind him.
I took the binder from under my sweatshirt and opened to a random page. A black and white surveillance photo of my parents. Young and serious, they were sitting at an outdoor cafe. Mom was absently fiddling with her wedding ring. Dad was looking at the menu. A completely neutral photo, boring really, but it brought tears to my eyes.
I flipped through the pages. How odd to see our real names in print after all these years.
Andrew Carson.
Gwendolyn Carson.
Jillian. Tessa. Logan.
We’d wiped away our identities with each move, and this binder held the only proof of our existence.
Clips from my father’s newspaper columns when he wrote as Xander Xavier.
A picture of our big red brick house in Virginia, standing majestically over an expansive lawn.
My parents’ old financial records. “See, Tristan? They really did make all that money,” I said. “Paychecks. Stock market investments. It’s all right here. All legal.”
“They wouldn’t mark their blackmail payments as blackmail. They’d mark them as stock market investments.”
I glared at him for a full minute before returning to the binder.
Another photo of our house, this time reduced to rubble and ashes.
Pictures of some of the other houses and apartments we’d lived in.
Testimonies from our old neighbors.
A list of our aliases.
Phone records. My parents were right to get rid of our landline.
A list of websites we’d visited. My parents were right to get rid of our internet access too.
Reports from various precognitives and psychics, including a child’s drawing of twelve blue, misshapen circles with wave symbols. “What’s this?” I asked Tristan.
“Twelve lakes,” he said. “That’s how we knew you would go there.”
In the binder, Dennis Connelly had written notes about where we’d been and where he guessed we might go next. We were always careful not to leave anything personal behind, but he still found a few items. Those items he brought back to the APR for psychometric readings, and he also flew psychics out to the homes we’d fled. Several times he’d noted his frustration that the psychics were never able to get a clear reading on our family through the objects or places we’d left behind.
I read every detail of a receipt from an electronics store near our hideout in Seattle, back when we were the Abbott family. My name was Amanda for about ten months. Jillian was Allison and Logan was Alexander. The receipt showed that we’d paid cash for a DVD player and a stack of Disney movies.
One of the papers was a program from a dance recital. The name Renee Roberts was circled on the program—Jillian’s alias in Oregon. My pseudonym had been Rachel, and Logan’s had been Ryan. I’d wanted the name Rebecca but my father had said no. Jillian didn’t appear in the class picture with the other little ballerinas, but my parents had been upset that her name was in print. We’d fled to our next hideout soon after that.
Logan had left behind one of the music scores he’d written when we lived in Florida. Another page was a scan of a painting I’d made in art class, probably when I was eleven. A single petal lying on the ground, broken off from the rest of the flower. What state were we living in then—maybe Missouri? North Carolina? The image on the page was black and white, but I remembered using shades of blue for the petal. It might have been the last painting I’d ever done. It was too painful to paint anyway, knowing my parents would ooh and ahh over it, tell me I was so talented, and then sometime before our next run they would burn it. The canvases wouldn’t fit in my getaway bag, and we could leave nothing personal behind.
Disney movies, dance recitals, art classes. It was nice to remember that a small part of our childhood had actually been normal. How odd to think that Dennis Connelly was the keeper of my childhood memories.
D. Connelly was written on the bottom of the earlier reports. Toward the back pages, his name was replaced by J. Kellan. Tristan’s name appeared on some of the reports too.
My stomach clenched when I saw recent pictures of me. Jogging with Tristan. Walking happily to school holding his hand. In one photo he was laughing as I whispered in his ear. An intimate, happy moment, captured by a long-range surveillance camera.
Another photo of the two of us sitting on a bench under a leafless tree. Ethan’s backyard. That was the night Tristan had told me he loved me, the night I’d told him my real name. The next photo, taken the same night, showed us talking in the back seat of his car. When I looked closely, Heath was in the background in almost every picture, either standing behind a tree or huddling in a car.
For someone constantly on the lookout for suspicious people, I’d been so blind. Blinded by love—I was a living cliché.
The binder held photos of the rest of my family too. Mom and Jillian shopping for Homecoming dresses. Logan looking under the hood of our getaway car in the pouring rain while our mother paced behind him. Only one picture of my dad—he stood on the driveway with his hands in his pockets. It was the only time he’d stepped outside the house in Twelve Lakes, as he’d waited for me to return home from jogging with Tristan, so he could shake his hand again.
With every turn of the page, my heart hurt a little bit more.
The hardest pages to see were the photos of the alleged victims, the people the APR had accused my parents of blackmailing and murdering. Underneath each photo was their name, along with the location, date, and manner of death. Heart attack. Car accident. Heart attack. Fire. Falling down stairs. Heart attack.
Tristan sipped in a long breath when I turned the page to photos of two men. “My dad’s partners.”
The location listed was Kitteridge, Virginia. My hometown.
The date was the day Dennis Connelly came to our house eight years ago.
Their manner of death: Stabbing.
Those were the only deaths that didn’t match the rest.
A brick grew in my throat. Calling the fog in a bit closer, I dragged my sight from the words to the pictures of the two men. Both photos were simple headshots against a plain backdrop, perhaps taken by the APR for their ID badges. The men stared accusingly back at me, the elder man hefty and wizened, the younger man thin and determined.
“That
