MY FATHER, MARA, and Sal Hamilton watched in silence as I filled out the required bail forms before leaving the station.
Did I acknowledge that I knew or had a relationship with the person who had posted bail for me? No, not really.
Did I swear that I wasn’t going to leave the state? No, couldn’t really do that.
Did I know where I was going once I left? Nope, not a clue.
I signed all of them anyway.
As soon as we were out of the station, Mara tackled me to the pavement with a running, jumping hug.
“You—fucking—idiot!” she shouted into my shoulder.
Resting her feet back on the ground and pulling away from the hug, her left hand still squeezing my arm, she cocked her hand back and slapped me across the face.
“What the fuck was that?” she said, now completely serious. “For a solid minute there, I was actually terrified. I didn’t know who that guy was. And he scared the shit out of me.”
“I, uh—” I remembered every word of this conversation with Kaitlin, the one we had after I punched the wall. The conversation where she broke up with me. “I’m sorry, I, I don’t know what happened, I just, I got—”
Mara didn’t wait for me to finish my sentence before hugging me again.
“Everyone I know is fucked up, okay?” she whispered into my ear. “Just tell me things.” She pulled back again and I noticed small tears in the corners of her eyes. “Also, thank God you’re white.” She wiped her eyes. “Otherwise you’d be in there for months.”
I nodded to my father and Sal Hamilton waiting in silence behind us.
“Right,” she said, straightening. “This is Sal Hamilton.”
He stepped closer, light from the streetlamp washing over him, and for the first time, I noticed his face. It was badly bruised, a near-purple spot under his right eye that hadn’t been there the day before. There were several cuts on his chin and neck and what looked like dry, caked blood on his lower lip.
“What happened to your face?”
My father leaned in to listen, and Sal looked to Mara. “Jack . . . happened,” she said, clearing her throat.
“What did they do?”
“Look, I owe you an apology,” Sal fumbled. “It was a big misunderstanding. There’s a lotta complexity surrounding your grandpa, and I—uh—I guess I clammed up a bit.” The words got caught in his throat, and when they finally came, they were soft. “You just look so goddamn much like him. Thought you mighta been a ghost or something.” He spoke harshly, with traces of an Italian accent. “And this group of kids—this Jack—they’ve been hassling me for a couple years now, and when you came ’round—I guess I thought you mighta been a part of that.”
“How did you know we weren’t?”
He pointed to Mara. “She’s pretty convincing, ’specially after they . . .” He ran his hand along the wounds on his face. “And it helped that she had that poem.”
“Poem?” I’d forgotten my father was there.
“Yeah, he . . . well.” I nodded to Mara and she pulled the journal from her pocket and handed it over. My father pulled it open and began to read. Back and forth across the page, only his eyes moved, and he concentrated intensely. I could only imagine what was happening behind his eyes, the world as he knew it expanding and contracting and changing in a way that he hated. When he finished, he started again, back up to the top of the page, finally turning to me.
“This, uh—” He coughed. “This is real?” I nodded, and without warning, he hugged me. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay,” and I knew that was all he wanted to say.
“Why would they come, come and find you?” I asked Sal quietly as my father stepped back, folding the journal into his pocket.
“Well, they musta saw you come by early in the day, assumed I knew something.”
Remorse came surging back and I almost doubled over, it hit me so fast. I’d put him in danger. I was responsible for his wounds.
“Well?” We all turned, surprised to hear my father speaking. “Do you know something?”
Sal sighed, the exhale pushing his head back, then forward, in a nod. “I think . . . I was the last person to see him alive.”
I swallowed hard. “Do you know where he went next? Or how he got to Ohio?”
Sal nodded again. “I drove him.”
I stared at Sal in petrified silence.
“The thing is,” Mara interrupted, nodding to Sal’s face. “Now they know where as well, and it’s likely that they’re on their way. Sal has no idea why your grandfather needed to go Ohio, he just knows where he dropped him off. So . . . it might be nothing.” She turned to me, lowering her voice. “Look, Arthur. We have no reason to believe there’s anything there, other than Jack, and a bunch of people who want to hurt you.” My dad’s eyes tripled in size. “So it’s possible that going now would be running fast into a dangerous situation with little hope of finding anything. You’ve done more than anyone could ever have imagined. You’ve got something he wrote for you; no one can take that away.”
They all looked to me for an answer. I looked back, jumping from Mara’s stare to my father’s caution to Sal’s bruises.
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, not good enough,” I said, and I meant it. “There’s gotta be something more than that.”
The edges of Mara’s mouth flickered upward. My father took a deep breath, then nodded. “Tanager,” he mouthed.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Because if you said stop, we could turn around right now and go back on with our lives. No danger, no disappointment, no—”
“Mara,” I interrupted, her face a foot from mine. “We’re wasting time.”
She smiled.
“It’s almost eight,” my dad said, pacing. “Does it have to be tonight?”
“Yes,” the three of us said in unison.
“Why does it matter?”
“Because.” Mara spoke first. “It mattered to him. He had to be in Ohio right away. So do we.”
I turned to my dad. “You’re coming?”
“I mean, if you, if you don’t mind—I, I don’t fly back until—”
“No, that’s great,” I said. “You might notice something.” I turned to Sal. “And you?”
“No chance I’m missing this,” he said. “You forget, I’m the world’s leading expert on Arthur Louis Pullman.” He noticed my father and me staring at him. “Maybe the third leading expert. Besides, you’ll need to borrow my car.”
He motioned to the back of the parking lot, where only one car sat perfectly illuminated under the streetlight.
I felt a surge through my fingers, adrenaline flaring through every vein. He was pointing to a black, 2012, 323-horsepower Chevy Camaro.
I could feel them all looking at me, but I was alone with the car. It was an exact replica of my own; I saw it on the lot the day that I bought it; I saw it in Portola Valley, diving and gripping the road; I saw it in my dream, crashing and burning down the hill; I saw it in my garage, filling with exhaust.
And now it was in front of me.
“I’ll drive,” I volunteered without thinking.
“No offense,” Sal started, “but that’s an expensive—”
“Trust me,” I said. “I have to.”
Sal studied me for a moment, then pulled the keys from his pocket and handed them to me.
“You sure you’re up for it?” Mara asked, letting Sal and my dad crawl into the back seat.
I didn’t say anything, just smiled back as I strapped myself into the cockpit and flipped on the engine.