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Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Acknowledgments
Back Cover
To Julie and Christina, for chocolate-chip pancakes (in better times)
and lots of FaceTime and group chats. Thanks for keeping me sane
(and on track).
My name is Andrea McNulty. I play center forward on the girl’s field
hockey team at Pioneer High School, where I’m a senior, and
everyone calls me Andi. I turned eighteen yesterday. I have long,
curly brown hair and brown eyes and a nine-year-old brother named
Joshua, and I didn’t kill my parents.
One
I yanked the blankets off the bed, looking for my purse, my phone,
anything that would give me some kind of clue as to what happened
—how I got here.
I found my jeans in a heap half-shoved under the bed, and when I
wrapped my hands around the fabric, the dampness burned at the
palm of my hand. “Oh God.” I pulled it away as if stung, and my
palm bore a faint red stain.
There was blood on the hem of my jeans. Spattered up toward the
left knee.
Gingerly, I rifled through my pockets. My cell phone went skittering
across the floor, its face shattered but still working, the battery
flashing an eighth of an inch of solid red: almost dead.
I scrolled through my call log, through my photos and text
messages. There was something—a message from Josh, something
from my father—but the phone gave an agonizing series of beeps
until it died in my hand.
“Shit.”
I would call the police. I would call the police and tell them where I
was and that I didn’t know what happened—
“While the police won’t say outright that daughter Andrea is a
suspect, it’s only a matter of time. Calling her a ‘person of interest’ is
just, in a sense, covering them legally.”
My head snapped back toward the TV where a man in a suit was in
a split screen with the anchorwoman. I squinted at the television
and read the headline underneath him: STANFORD UNIVERSITY
CRIMINOLOGY PROFESSOR ANTHONY THOMAS.
My heart slammed against my rib cage. Stanford. My dream
school. The reason I took SAT prep courses starting as a freshman in
high school.
And now a professor there was commenting on me?
“The police did acknowledge that the McNultys’ Lexus SUV is
currently missing, presumed taken by the suspect or suspects
involved in the murder.”
I shook my head. I had my own car. A used Honda Civic that I paid
for out of my babysitting and mall job money. My parents paid the
insurance. I never drove the—
A key chain slid out of the back pocket of my jeans.
The Lexus emblem caught the light.
I slumped against the bed, the whole ugly motel room spinning in
front of me. This was a dream. This had to be a dream. There was
no other explanation. I thought of doing something stupid like
pinching myself, hoping against hope that I would be snapped back
to my cozy bed, but I was paralyzed. My blood turned to hot lead in
my body.
My brother, Josh, was still out there. He was still out there, and I
had to find him. A new round of sobs stuck in my chest.
How can I find Josh when I don’t even know where I am?
The chain lock was hanging open on the motel door, but the bolt
was latched. I opened the door and poked my head outside, certain
I would see some weird dystopian world, that I had been hit on the
head and delivered to another dimension, but outside was this
world, albeit a sad one: cracked motel parking lot bookended by a
drugstore and a boarded-up cafe. Two cars that looked like they
needed one-way tickets to the dump. A dry pool surrounded by a
dented cyclone fence. My mother’s shiny SUV, parked directly in front
of the door to my room. I pulled my shirt down over my thighs and
paused on the threshold of room 6. I waited for someone to spot
me, for a herd of police to come in with guns blazing, but no one
did. The traffic kept humming past on the interstate; the breeze kept
lifting the half-dead weeds sprouting through cracks in the concrete.
A waft of heat kicked up from the blacktop, and I picked my way to
the car, clicking open the front door and peering into the driver’s
seat. There was blood on the floor mat, stained into the seat.
My Chuck Taylors were lying on the floor like I had kicked them off
in haste, and I turned away, unable to stomach the still-wet-looking
blood they were drenched in. The only thing I could look at was my
field hockey bag on the floor of the back seat. Since I wasn’t
eighteen during the season, and field hockey was a school-
sponsored activity, I had to have a guardian drive me to away
games, and Mom was always the one. My mom.
Mom. My real mom, even if she didn’t give birth to me. She was at
every game. Head thrown back, cheering. Black-brown hair falling
over her shoulders. A voice that carried so that no matter how loudly
the crowd roared, I could always hear her, like she was talking just
to me.
I was terrified that I’d never hear that voice again.
***
Little bells tinkled as I pushed the door to the lobby open. I tried to
keep my head down, my hair half covering my face, but there was
no one there to recognize me. There was a TV bolted in one corner,
the volume muted. I turned, looking around, my eyes settling on a
long, low table—some piece of junk office furniture that had been
repurposed as a buffet: old-school coffee maker, Styrofoam cups full
off stirrers, sugar packets, and powdered creamers; toaster, loaf of
supermarket bread still in its plastic bag, single-serve jelly packets; a
fruit basket with a lone apple; and a handful of smashed Danish in
cellophane bags.
I couldn’t remember the last time I ate, but my stomach growled.
“And she goes for the apple.”
I whirled at the voice, my eyes narrowing on the kid behind the
counter as he was settling himself on a stool. He couldn’t have been
any older than I was, but he was lanky, and even sitting down, I
could tell he wasn’t tall. His dark hair was officially unkempt and
disheveled—not one of those hundred-dollar haircuts guys get to
look that way—and he looked like he had slept in his button-down
shirt too. His eyes were a hot chocolate brown, and the way he
looked at me made me stiffen, made me want to shrink into my
soiled clothes. I dropped the apple back into the basket.
“Sorry, I didn’t know. Um, did a little boy come in here? Nine years
old, about this tall.” I held my hand at rib level. “Probably wearing
a…” I couldn’t even remember what Josh was wearing yesterday.
The tears were coming again, and I blinked them away furiously.
“No, no, the apple’s fine. It’s yours. As for little boys, no, haven’t
seen any.” He shrugged, then took a huge bite of his Danish. “Can I
help you?”
I looked at the room key in my hand, and my heartbeat sped up. I
kept my distance from the kid, from the counter he sat behind.
“I was—am—in room six. But, uh, I’m trying to remember what
name I put the room under. Can you check?”
The kid shoved the last of his breakfast into his mouth, and his
fingers flew across an ancient-looking keyboard. My heart thudded,
and I half wanted to jump over the counter and stare at his
computer screen and half wanted to run out the front door with its
stupid tinkling bells and—and do what?
I thought of the news, the talking heads, those terrible static
pictures of my parents and me and Joshy that were meant to hang
on our walls and never meant to be stared at by the world or by
strangers in suits who used words like suspect and murderer.
“Room six, checked in last night, paid through the week.” He pulled
away from the screen, looked me up and down. “Tim Esup paid it. I
guess that could be you.”
My ears burned, and the stench that wafted up from the buffet—
burnt coffee, the stale smell of white bread—was making me
nauseous. I didn’t know anyone named Tim Esup, had never heard
the name before. Had this person… Sweat started to bead at my
hairline. Had he attacked my parents? Taken Josh? Oh God, my skin
started to crawl. Had he done something to me?
“Do you remember him? Did you see”—I forced the name past my
clenched teeth—“Tim when he checked in? I mean, was he young or
old or—”
I thought of Cal, nearly six foot three, and that stupid note. I hope
you’re happy now. Was it an “I got you a rose. I hope you’re happy
now” stupid teenage boy attempt at making amends, or was it some
kind of statement? No, I told myself. The note was on the rose; the
note was from yesterday at school before any of this happened…
wasn’t it?
The kid wagged his head. “I wasn’t working last night. That would
be Joe, proprietor of this fine establishment and, as of 9:00 a.m. this
morning, on vacation in lovely Vacaville.”
My heart was thundering. Do I return to the room? Wait for Tim to
come back? To do what with me? My body started to shake. I
glanced at the key in my hand.
“H—how many keys are there to this room?”
He gestured to the one I was holding. “There’s that one. My
name’s Nate, by the way. Your Midnight Inn chef, cashier, and
concierge. But I don’t carry bags.”
I nodded, feeling like I should introduce myself or acknowledge
Nate in some way. Instead I just stood there, mouth half-open, as
thoughts hammered in my head. I shifted the hockey bag in my
hands. “I don’t really have bags.”
I could see Nate eye my bag, and I hiked it up on my shoulder.
“I’m, uh—”
Nate held up his hand. “You don’t have to introduce yourself. I
know your name.”
My blood thundered in my ears. My heartbeat stopped, and my
stomach turned in on itself.
“It’s been on every newscast from here to Baja.”
Five
Dreizehntes Kapitel.
Kut-el-Amara.