Run to You Part Three: Third Charm

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 guy?” Tristan said, pointing to the younger man. “He was Kellan’s brother-in-law, but they were more like real brothers. I guess Kellan didn’t want to just apprehend your parents. He wanted revenge.” Hands curling into fists, he muttered, “So he took it out on you. Defenseless you.”

My despair, and the fog, lifted as I realized I didn’t recognize either of those men. I’d never seen them before.

“Ha!” I cried. “I would have remembered three men coming to my house that day. But there was just one. Your father.” I shoved the binder off my lap and onto his, as if it was contaminated.

He licked his lips. “My dad was purposely distracting you.”

Narrowing my eyes at him, I slid the binder back onto my legs and resumed flipping the pages. It didn’t matter what Tristan said; I had absolutely no memory of three men in my yard. I remembered only one: the man who’d tried to kidnap me. The man who’d sliced me open.

I vaguely recognized a few of the people in the photos—was that the man who’d sold us our getaway car when we left Montana? The binder said he’d died when he cracked his head open after slipping on motor oil. And the hook-nosed waitress from a Georgia diner a few years ago. She’d died of a heart attack.

I had to stop this. I had to stop looking at these photos. There were too many, and they weren’t helping me prove Tristan was lying. I thumbed through the rest of them as quickly as I could, barely glancing at them—

Wait.

Was that...

Yes. That last photo. The date in the corner showed it had been added to the binder this past Thursday night.

Dr. Fielding. The college professor.

I stared at his picture, the same portrait from his website. Even the words “In Memoriam” were printed on top. But it was the words printed on the bottom that made my breath catch.

I ripped the page from the file. Shoved the binder to the floor. Jumped to my feet and waved the page over my head like a trophy. “I knew it!” I said, my voice screechy and frantic. “You’re lying. And I can prove it.”

Chapter Forty-One

“I’m not lying,” Tristan said.

“Yes you are! This,” I said, waving the photo in his face, “is Dr. Fielding.”

“The college professor?”

I stabbed the words under his portrait with my finger. “He died in Hebron, Iowa, on November twenty-third. My family moved to Twelve Lakes, Illinois, in August. We never went further than ten minutes away from our house. And Iowa was at least two hundred miles away. There’s no way my mom could have killed him. She’s not that powerful.”

Tristan’s face went white.

“I knew you were lying.” I ran my finger down the professor’s portrait. Dr. Fielding had rescued my family after all.

Tristan scrambled to gather the papers that had scattered on the floor and began to read them again. Elated, I held Dr. Fielding’s photo in front of me. I could have kissed it. A hysterical giggle escaped from behind my lips.

They were innocent.

My parents were innocent.

They had never blackmailed anyone.

They’d never killed anyone.

They’d never lied to me.

I turned to Tristan with my hands on my hips and snarled. “Now let my parents go, you disgusting, pathetic liar.”

But instead of being intimidated, he just gave me another one of his sad, sympathetic looks. “You didn’t read the notes on the next page. It says here Dr. Fielding was in Twelve Lakes on November twenty-second.”

“That can’t be true. He didn’t know who we were. We left all of our personal information out of that email, and Logan made it untraceable. How would he know to come to Twelve Lakes?”

He referenced the notes again. “Because your parents called him and told him to come.”

“But...how would my parents know about him back then?”

He shrugged. “Maybe when Jillian was piggybacking he was able to see inside her mind. Or maybe your parents didn’t trust her, so your father still watched her.”

If that was true, then my parents had mistrusted the wrong daughter.

“It says here your mother arranged to meet him at the coffee shop in the town square,” Tristan said. “The security cameras show him getting there at 10:54 a.m. He waited for two hours, and when no one showed up, he left.”

“See? My parents never met him. So they couldn’t have killed him.”

He read the notes. “Your mom came in at 11:06, bought a cup of coffee to go, then went home. She never spoke to him, but she was close enough to plant an aneurysm in his brain. Aneurysms don’t necessarily kill right away. She probably chose that method so he wouldn’t die until he got home.”

I stared at him for a long moment. “Don’t talk about my mother that way.”

“Sorry, Tessa. For a minute there, I really thought the APR might be wrong about your parents.”

I sat down hard on the cot. “This file is fake. It has to be.” I grabbed it from him and flipped through the pages, almost tearing them from the binder.

“My parents donated to charities,” I said. “They gave money to anyone who needed it. Once when we were on the run, driving through Massachusetts, we were at a motel and the manager was kicking out a woman and her two little kids because she couldn’t afford to pay. My parents gave her enough cash to stay in a different motel, a better motel, for a month. If they were killers, they wouldn’t have done that. They wouldn’t.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Tristan said.

I tried again. “What about the police detective and the FBI agent we asked for help?” I said. “My dad watched your father kill them, he watched your father slice them right down the middle, and each time, I watched my dad. He could not have faked the horror in his eyes. My mother could not have faked her tears. She was hysterical, Tristan.”

He only shook his head with a sorrowful sigh.

Memories. All I had were my memories of my parents’ altruism and my father’s horrified expression as he witnessed those murders. Those memories were enough evidence for me, but they wouldn’t be enough evidence for Tristan.

I was no longer happy that Jillian and Logan had escaped. Selfishly, I wanted them here, with me. They’d help me prove our parents were innocent.

But Jillian and Logan were gone. I’d have to find the proof myself.

* * *

Shaking off my despair, I studied the notes in the binder again. Kellan wrote how he could not use his telepathy to read our minds in case one of us could sense his intrusion. He recorded his plans, from hiding a tiny camera under our front windowsill to record our comings and goings—it must have been Kellan’s handprint on our window—to pulling the wires in our getaway car in an effort to provoke my mom or brother into using psionics to fix it. But with my mother standing watch and clearly ready to attack, and still not fully informed on all of our powers, he had decided not to move in.

The bulk of his strategy involved Tristan prying information from me. It was those notes that made my stomach churn.

A note written by Tristan, on the day we met for the first time: Followed targets 4 and 5 as they left the house and went running in park. Made first contact with target 4. She resisted conversation. —T. Connelly

A note written by Kellan, from the night of Ethan’s party: Instructed agent to tell target 4 he has fallen in love with her to prompt her to confess her own secrets. Partial success. —J. Kellan

“Our whole relationship was set up,” I said, my voice small. “You manipulated every moment of it.”

“Tessa—” He took my hand.

I jerked it away. “I think you mean ‘Target 4.’”

He grabbed my hand back. “No. I mean Tessa. I love you. That is not a lie. I wanted to tell you, but not because Kellan said to. I wanted to wait until you knew the real me.”

I knew the real Tristan now, and he was a liar.

“Tell me, Tristan.” I narrowed my eyes. “Was the tree almost falling on me part of the plan too?”

“God, no. We’d never purposely put you in danger like that.”

“And what would you call this?” I waved my arms around the cell.

“This,” he said as he copied my movements, “is the first time in your entire life you haven’t been in danger.”

I rolled my eyes.

He roared then, a frustrated, furious growl, and jumped up. “It terrified me when you told me some man was hunting you, Tessa! The first thing I did was call Kellan to demand an army of guards to protect your family until we found him. But before Kellan answered, I saw the name you wrote in my notebook. Dennis Connelly. My father.”

He slapped the wall. “So I hung up on Kellan and called my dad. All missions are supposed to be confidential, but I told him everything. That’s when he realized which case I was on, that I was on a criminal case, his old case. Kellan was lying to us all along, and your parents were lying to you.”

His anger scared me a little, and I shrank back. He sank to the cot and raked his hands through his hair. His next words were gentle. “When I was ten, my dad went out of town with his team on a simple recruitment mission. That afternoon, some guards came and brought my mom and sister and me to the APR. They told us my dad had a heart attack and his partners had been killed. We were never told any details except they were interviewing a potential psionic subject, and something went wrong and the subject and his wife attacked them. They stabbed his partners to death, and they suspected they actually gave my dad that heart attack. The healers healed my dad, but he was weaker than before. He spent the rest of his career here trying to find your family and bring you and your siblings to safety, until my mom finally convinced him to retire so he could rest his heart.”

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