Twenty-Six

I opened the apartment door slowly, but it was quiet. My mom must’ve been working. I shut and locked it behind me. I waited for a beat, half expecting someone might suddenly start pounding on it, but when nothing happened, I bolted to my bedroom. I shut that door too and then fished the burner phone out from under my mattress.

No answer.

I dialed again. Pick up the phone. Pick it up, I chanted inside my head.

Pick.

Up.

The.

Freaking.

Phone.

I hurled it against the wall and then dropped to my knees to make sure I hadn’t broken it. It was the only way I had to reach Paige. I couldn’t go out to the cabin and drag her back by her hair. I didn’t have any idea where to find her anymore.

Was it possible something had happened to her? I ran through possibilities from Ryan to a random wild animal attack, but I kept circling back to the fact that a very select few items had been left behind. And while it wasn’t impossible, the idea that Ryan had followed me out to the cabin to confront Paige seemed unlikely. The entire situation smacked of Paige.

I left school without going to the rest of my classes. Lester told me the police wanted to talk to me personally. He offered to take me, but I wanted to go alone. They were going to ask me if I’d ever been to the park, and I had to figure out whether I should keep lying or tell the truth. I needed privacy to think. I couldn’t decide if each lie was helping me build a bridge to get out of this mess or burying me alive. I sat with my back against the bed and wrapped my arms around my knees.

I had to figure out what to do next. I mentally turned over each moment, trying to look at it from a different perspective, seeing if it would lead me in a new direction.

Paige had planned everything down to the tiniest detail. She did all her research on the library computers so that her laptop wouldn’t have anything weird in the history. She figured out that the airport cameras were down in the long-term lot. She planned her route to make sure she wouldn’t be caught on any traffic cams. She planted her blood, just enough, in the car. She stocked the cabin with what she would need. Both the detectives had talked about how they were sure I hadn’t done anything, because the whole thing was too well organized. Nothing that girl did was by accident.

She’d thought it all through. She loved the mental gymnastics of it.

And when she realized that she would need a partner, someone who could be connected to the outside world while she was gone, there was no way she left that to chance.

She played me.

I slammed my fist down on my thigh. She brought the idea up like it was a lark at first, and somewhere along the way, I went from telling her it was crazy to debating the details. I’d been carefully selected.

How did she know how badly I needed the money? It was possible she assumed anyone who lived where I did could always use some extra cash.

I rubbed my temples. Paige had disappeared. She’d left a diary behind, and that would have been no accident. She wanted those pages found. Whatever was on them was meant to be seen.

Paige had enjoyed putting this all together. She was practically giddy when we talked about it. I could still remember meeting with her at the library a few weeks earlier. She had said we couldn’t meet anymore. There was too much of a chance that people would see us together.

“We’ll go old school. I’ll leave you notes here, and you leave your responses for me in the same place,” Paige whispered to me as she pulled one of the giant encyclopedias off the shelf. “We’ll type all of our correspondence. Use the library printer downstairs so it can’t be traced to us. No handwriting if it can be avoided. We’ll come up with names, aliases.”

I touched the book nervously. “Isn’t this over the top?”

“No. It’s careful. From this point on, you should think of me as Pluto.”

“Pluto?”

“Like the planet—the one that’s not a planet anymore. Get it? It’s missing!”

“It’s still a planet, just a dwarf one,” I said. “And it’s still there. It’s not like it disappeared.”

She rolled her eyes, then burst out laughing. “Whatever, you want to make sure that thinking of me as someone else, as Pluto, comes as second nature. There is Paige, the girl who’s missing, and Pluto, the guy who you’re involved with. You need to mentally see us as two different people. You can pick whatever name you like.”

“I don’t know—”

“It can be whatever. The more random the better. We can change it if you want—it doesn’t have to have some big meaning.” She pulled the encyclopedia closer to her. “Now look, I doubt anyone has opened this book in years. I’ve got some throw-away phones to use when I go missing, but until then we’ll use this for communication. We only use the phones for emergencies once I’m gone—those can be traced. The police can see where calls are made from based on what cell tower was used. The fewer times we use the phone, the better.”

“I’m not agreeing to this,” I said. The “yet” hung in the air between us.

Paige gave me a pageant smile. “All I’m asking is that you think about it. Feel free to leave any questions for me here, and I’ll do my best to answer them, but I think it’s a good idea if you don’t know all the details. You don’t have to worry. This is going to go off without a hitch. If you don’t do it, you’re going to kick yourself for missing the chance.”

I nodded. Intrigued, but scared.

“But you have to make up your mind soon. I’m going to do this, with you or without you.” She tapped me on the nose. “Picture it: when school is over, you’ll have more than twelve grand. That’s a new life.”

I still hadn’t said yes until the afternoon when Drew canceled her dorm plans. But I might have done it anyway. Paige hadn’t been stupid. She picked me because she could smell the desperation.

And now I was more desperate than ever.