What We Bury, page 22
part #4 of Call of the Crow Quartet Series
Once on the train, Roya pulled out a small notebook that she had brought, the one where she had transcribed Katerina and the Little Strangers. She wanted to look occupied, like she was completely at ease, so that people didn’t catch a whiff of her nervousness and know that something wasn’t quite right.
As they got closer to SeaTac station, she unfolded the directions she’d written down and went through the route again in her head.
Finally, the robotic train voice announced, “Now arriving at SeaTac/Airport station. Doors to my left.” Roya shouldered her backpack and followed her “mom” out onto to the station platform. Soon she had to veer off, though, because the lady was wheeling her bag along with everyone else toward the airport terminals, and that wasn’t where Roya wanted to go.
Instead, she followed the signs to a sky bridge, and slowly descended a long stairwell to the sidewalk of a very busy street. At first, there were still people around her, walking to their hotels or the giant parking lots that were all over the place, but soon the crowd thinned out and she was alone. She kept walking. No one stopped her, but all the cars made her nervous, especially when they slowed near her, like they were going to roll down their windows and ask her to get in, which of course she wouldn’t do. She always felt silly when she saw they were just stopping at stoplights.
After a while she started to wonder whether she’d made a wrong turn somewhere, because the names of the streets weren’t the same as the ones on her map, and now she was passing a bunch of houses that looked like they’d been abandoned; they were all boarded up and covered in graffiti. As she walked, she kept hearing footsteps behind her, but every time she looked around she didn’t see anyone.
Someone was watching her, though. She could feel it.
She tried to shake it off. Tried to get the map to make sense. Thought about turning back around to retrace her steps, but decided to go one more block to see what the next cross-street was called.
A mocking voice called out from behind her. “Hey, little girl. Where you going?”
Roya ignored this. She folded up the map again, concealing it inside her damp palm, and sped up. The faster she walked, though, the worse her limp became.
Her heart jumped in her chest like it was skipping rope. The footsteps behind her grew louder. She shifted her backpack onto one shoulder and fumbled inside the front pocket. This street was so quiet, these small houses with peeling paint and barren yards, no people anywhere, no one to save her, no one in the whole world to protect her except herself.
Roya tried to walk faster, but her leg was really aching now. She couldn’t escape.
In one swift movement, the person who’d been following her grabbed her shoulder. She tried to jerk away, but his strong grip made her lose her balance, and once again she was falling, trying not to land on her bad knee but coming down on it anyway, and she was lost and alone, and she couldn’t move, and a stranger was standing over her, smiling a terrible smile.
33
Andi
Wednesday, June 1
AN EPIC BATTLE WAS RAGING in the next room over. At least, that was how it sounded to Andi. Tinny groans and clanging swords punctuated the silence.
It was a fitting soundtrack for the grisly hellscape playing out inside her head this morning. As Andi had left the trial yesterday, Barb had leveled up, adding a dizzy vertigo on top of a murderous headache. Andi had literally fallen over on the way back to her dad’s car. Of course, he had insisted on getting everything checked out, which led to a night in the ER while they did a bunch of tests but couldn’t find anything wrong. They chalked it up to anxiety and sent her on her way with a fresh bottle of painkillers.
Two good things had come out of the horrible evening, though. Andi’s mom had been ready to book her a plane ticket back to Berkeley as soon as she found out about Tara Snyder’s escape, but the doctors agreed that Andi needed to take it easy. Travel, they told Andi’s mom at her request, was out of the question right now. Also, her dad had grudgingly allowed them to stay with Cyrus at a condo downtown instead of crashing with one of his bandmates. So now here she was, sprawled out on an extraordinarily comfortable king bed, listening to the battle next door and realizing that Barb, thankfully, was in retreat. For now, anyway.
She sat up and reached for her phone on the bedside table. She hadn’t only wanted to stay with Cyrus so she could have a friend nearby, though of course she was grateful for that, even if she wished he’d turn down the volume on whatever video game he was playing. They needed to be together so they could figure out what happened to Roya.
After composing a few reassuring messages to her mom, who had sent about a billion texts asking how she was feeling, Andi scanned her other unread texts. Nothing important. She didn’t feel like getting dressed or even putting a bra on, so she wrapped a throw blanket around her shoulders before sending a text to Cyrus. Hey can you come in here for a minute?
He appeared a few moments later, smiling in the doorway, eating oatmeal out of a paper cup. “Hey, A! How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” Surprisingly, she could still hear swishing swords. In fact, they were even louder now that the door was open. “Wait. Who’s playing the video game? Oh—are your friends over?”
Cyrus blinked. “Uh, no, it’s like 7:30 on a weekday, and besides we’re not allowed to have visitors at our top-secret undisclosed location. Believe it or not, our dads are totally obsessed with Renaissance Slayer VII. Baba wanted to drive around looking for Roya last night, but the cops said we all need to stay put for now, so I suggested we play some video games. Even though I was recommending games that were a little more… intellectual… I guess they just wanted to kill some shit.”
“Makes sense.” She patted the bed next to her. “So—did I miss anything? Have they found Roya yet?”
“Can I have your phone?” Cyrus asked.
“Uh… okay.” She handed it over.
Cyrus powered it down, then left her room. Through the open doorway, Andi saw him burying her phone, along with the one he pulled from his pocket, under a stack of throw pillows on the couch. Then he re-entered her room, closed the door, and sat cross-legged beside her on the enormous bed. “You can never be too careful.” He scooped up another bite of oatmeal. “So. Let’s talk Roya. No news yet. But the cops are operating under the assumption that… that Tara… yeah. I can’t even say it out loud.”
“That’s okay. I know.” Andi didn’t want to go there, either, but if they were going to figure this out, it couldn’t be avoided. “Here’s what I’m thinking: she took Roya because she’s trying to draw the rest of us out. Lure us into some sort of trap. So she can get her revenge or whatever.”
“I mean, it makes sense, but how stupid does she think we are? Like we’re just going to head out on our own, roaming around the city searching for Roya until we fall into her evil clutches.”
“It’s not the two of us I’m worried about.” Andi pulled her throw blanket tighter around her shoulders.
Cyrus scraped the bottom of his oatmeal cup with his spoon. “Yeah. Naveed was giving off definite loose cannon vibes yesterday. He’s been texting with Baba, says he’s staying inside the cabin, but still. You never know with him.”
“The good thing is—well, it’s not good, but you know what I mean—he had that panic attack at the courthouse. Usually, when they’re that bad, they’ll knock him out for a day or two. So even if he wants to go looking for Roya, he won’t physically be able to, at least not right away. Which buys us some time to figure out where she is. Then we can tell the police and let them handle things.”
“All right. Let’s do this.” He stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
He reappeared a minute later with two laptops. Andi told him she’d brought her own, but he insisted she use one of his since they were already set up for secure browsing. After he logged her on, he left again and returned with his hands behind his back.
“So this is embarrassing,” he said. “We need some snacks—it wouldn’t be a proper hackfest without snacks—but all I found were these.” He held out two small bags of Blazin Bitz. “This place is a vacation rental, so I guess they keep it stocked with all the necessities.”
“No thanks.” Just looking at the bags got Andi’s blood pressure boiling. “I helped start that Bitz boycott a few months ago, remember? Plus, I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”
“Oh, right! Let me make you an oatmeal cup. And I’ll go throw these in the garbage, where they belong.” He left the room holding the bags at arm’s length, as if they were filled with rotten fish heads or something.
Andi turned her attention to the screen. Where to even start? Her intuition was telling her to look at the photo again, but her phone was still hiding under the couch cushions, so she had to reconstruct it from memory. Four men, standing against that polished wood backdrop, glasses of champagne raised: Raymond Whitaker; the blond dude Cyrus said he’d seen at the courthouse; Alastor Yarrow; Ah-gong.
Alastor had started the herbal supplement company Metafolia. Ah-gong had provided the green tea extract ingredient. Raymond Whitaker had probably funded the operation, but Andi didn’t know that for sure. She decided to start her search with him. It still bothered her that she’d heard his name somewhere but couldn’t recall what the context was.
Cyrus brought in her oatmeal, and she ate it while they browsed. It tasted like sweet glue.
“Not sure if this helps any,” Cyrus said after a time. “But the logo on the badge your grandpa was wearing in the photo is from an herbal and vitamin supplement expo.”
“Makes sense. Ah-gong used to go to things like that all the time. So I guess that’s where they met, and… started Metafolia or something?” For a second, Andi felt incredibly stupid. What if this whole thing was a wild goose chase, and Ah-ma’s Mystery Box had just contained some boring vitamins?
But, if that were true, why had Ah-ma treated the whole thing like a forbidden mystery? And why had the blond man showed up at the trial? No, this was all leading somewhere. It had to be.
Andi turned back to her Raymond Whitaker search, but everything she found focused on his role at Blanchet Capital. So she tried searching raymond whitaker alastor yarrow, but nothing came up for those two together. Then she tried raymond whitaker nutrexo and found an article talking about how he’d guided the imploding company into selling off its brands. Which wasn’t surprising, since he was on the Nutrexo board and also ran the parent company of Hannigan Foods. He’d found a way to profit from Nutrexo’s downfall, but there was nothing particularly scandalous about that.
It wasn’t until she searched raymond whitaker metafolia that she finally hit gold. This led her to a Wall Street Journal article about the acquisition of Bountiful Earth Markets, which had happened shortly after Brennan Walsh’s death. The acquisition of the natural foods chain by Blanchet Capital has some critics questioning the judgment of the company’s CEO, Raymond Whitaker. It comes on the heels of a risky venture that ultimately failed: Mr. Whitaker was a majority shareholder in the supplement company Metafolia, Inc., which was shut down by federal investigators just before its planned IPO.
It felt like she’d just stumbled on the answer, but, annoyingly, she couldn’t quite put her finger on why it mattered. “Hey Cy, listen to this.” She read the snippet to him.
“Whoa. Blanchet owns Bountiful Earth now? Brennan would’ve hated that. Remember when we went to his place for dinner that one night, and he was grousing about not wanting to sell out to Wall Street or whatever?”
“The vultures,” Andi said. “The vultures! Cy, that’s it!”
Cyrus tilted his head. “That’s what?”
“That’s where I’ve heard his name before. I even met him once! Well, sort of. At the Walsh Foundation fundraiser right after Brennan died. I wanted to talk to Senator Bittner, and she was in the middle of a conversation with him, and when he left she offhandedly said something about vultures swooping in. That’s what she meant, that Raymond, or Blanchet or whatever, had their eyes on Bountiful Earth. But—oh no.” Andi had to close her eyes as a wave of dizziness swept over her.
“You okay?” Cyrus asked.
“Raymond and Alastor were standing together in that photo,” Andi said. “Alastor killed Brennan, who didn’t want to sell his company. What if…?”
Even though her eyes were still closed, she could feel Cyrus scoffing. “So, like, Raymond wanted Bountiful Earth so bad that he had his buddy Alastor kill off Brennan? And, not to get too self-centered here, but he tried to kill me, too. Why would Raymond want me dead?”
“I don’t know,” Andi said. The more she thought about it, the unlikelier it sounded, and the more overwhelming it all seemed. “I’m just saying. That photo’s trying to tell us something, and I have a feeling the blond guy is the key to all of this. We need to figure out who he is.”
“I’m with you there. I told the police about him yesterday, but they didn’t seem to think anything of it. Have you asked your grandpa about him?”
“No. But he’s really cagey about anything to do with Metafolia. He wouldn’t tell me anyway.”
“Even if my little sister’s life depends on it?”
Andi opened her eyes. “Okay. You’re right. I’ll text him. But I still doubt he’s going to give us anything useful.”
“It’s worth a try. Just make sure you use encrypted messaging.” Cyrus rubbed the back of his neck. “Um, there’s one other potential option, maybe. I actually have a meeting scheduled with Raymond Whitaker next Monday.”
“You what?” Andi asked.
“I know, I know, you disapprove of me selling out, but—”
“It’s not just that,” Andi interrupted. “What if I’m right? That he was behind Brennan Walsh’s death?”
“It’s an interesting theory,” said Cyrus slowly. “Honestly, though, I think Alastor was just psycho, and it made him mad when me and Brennan exposed Metafolia. It doesn’t seem like something a powerful rich guy like Raymond would bother getting his hands dirty over. But—never mind, it’s not like I can just go into our meeting and say, ‘Hey, so I have this random pic of you, mind telling me who this blond dude is? I think he has something to do with my missing sister.’ Plus, it’s like five days from now. Too long. We need to figure this out now.”
Andi rubbed her forehead. There was one other avenue that had popped into her mind, but it, too, felt like a long shot. “I think you need to talk to your brother.”
“Why? I thought we didn’t want to drag him into this.”
“I know, but remember what I told you about how he got into your mom’s phone? I think she knew something about that photo, and that’s why she didn’t want us investigating. But she might have gone looking into it herself.”
“You think we can convince him to let us have it?”
“He may not care about me anymore, but he cares about Roya,” Andi said. “And this might help us find her. Well, not us us, but if we can get the police a name, some compelling evidence for a link to Tara Snyder, they’ll have a suspect to track down.”
“The problem is… then we have to explain the whole thing to Naveed, rely on him to search the phone, and report back to us without going rogue and trying to find Roya by himself. Or, I guess we could ask the cops to take it from him, but I don’t think he’d hand it over willingly, and they might even charge him for keeping evidence from them… I don’t know. I’m just not sure it’ll work.”
“Then what are we supposed to do?” Without warning, tears prickled her eyes. This was all so incredibly frustrating.
“Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.” Cyrus closed his laptop. “You doing okay, A?”
Andi rested her head against the padded headboard. “I’ve been trying to rank them. The worst days of my life. Yesterday definitely makes the list.”
“Oh, yeah? Did it beat out the old number one?”
“Hard to say. It’s not easy, because do you go by the day when you felt the worst, or the one you can barely remember, but was full of objectively terrible things? Does that even make sense? I don’t think I’m making sense.” She laugh-sobbed, and he reached over to pat her knee. She grabbed onto his hand and held it.
“It makes perfect sense. We’ve all had horrible days—but you know, we’ve also always gotten through them. And there’s always good stuff waiting on the other side,” Cyrus said. “It’ll be okay in the end. I’m sure of it.”
Andi nodded, but she felt like burrowing back under the covers. Their amateur investigation had gone nowhere. Roya was still missing, and they had no idea how to find her, and the longer this went on, the more likely it seemed that everything could only end in disaster.
34
Naveed
Thursday, June 2
TIME WAS BEHAVING STRANGELY. Sometimes there was an eternity between seconds; sometimes hours raced by in a blur. Naveed’s phone had numbers on it that corresponded to some objectively agreed-upon time, but such things were meaningless for him now. His phone was only useful as his tool of deception. How are you Naveed-jaan, Baba would text. I’m doing fine, don’t worry about me, Naveed would reply.
He was growing tired of this meaningless performance. What’s taking you so long? he kept asking Tara Snyder inside his mind. I’m waiting for you. I know I’m next on your list. Come and find me, so we can finally end this.
At some point on Thursday, Frida stopped by. “Aviva just went into labor!” she said. “So we need to head down to Olympia. It might be a few days. We’ve arranged for the interns to take care of the farm chores and feed Astro—but would you like to stay in the main house while we’re gone?”
“No,” Naveed said. “That’s okay. I’ll just stay here.”
“You have everything you need? I’ll bring some groceries from our fridge. The interns won’t be around much. But the police are still here. If you see anything suspicious, call them right away.”
