After Image, page 23
“Yeah.” He rocks back in his chair. “Let me tell you something, girl—Allie was good people. The real deal.”
“Why do you say that?”
This is the Jairo I remember from Greg’s parties, the storyteller, the one who loved to be the center of attention.
“I mean, I barely know the girl, right? We’d hung out, like, a couple of times, had a couple of laughs. But one day, I tell her, some asshole landlord is threatening to evict my abuela unless she pays her back rent. I was just bitching, you know, blowing off steam. But the next time I see Allie, she hands me this stack of cash. Like, a stack. Enough to make sure my abuela doesn’t have to worry about this dude for months.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “At first, I’m like, ‘I can’t take this.’ But then she tells me—get this—she says, ‘Consider it a gift from Isabel.’ She’d jacked a pair of her mom’s earrings and sold them at some pawn shop. She said Isabel wouldn’t even miss them.”
The pearl earrings.
“Allie was a crazy girl. But she had a big heart.” He’s got one knee propped up against the desk, and he’s holding his pen in his mouth like he wishes it were a cigarette.
“She did,” I say. Then, slowly, I ask, “So . . . is that why you hired her? To work here?”
Silence. Jairo’s eyebrows draw together. He’s wary now. “What’re you talking about?”
I reach toward him with the camera again, clicking forward to the photograph I took this morning. “I found this yesterday. In one of Allie’s old books. Can you tell me what this is?”
Jairo leans forward. When he sees the photo, his expression shifts, just slightly. “You know what it is, girl. It’s a business card.” Suddenly, I’m aware that behind the genial smile, there’s another Jairo. A Jairo who shouldn’t be messed with.
“One of your business cards,” I say.
He shrugs, sitting back in his chair. “Sure. But I don’t see Allie’s name anywhere on it.”
“Mia Rossi—that’s a name Allie used sometimes. It was the one on her fake ID.”
Jairo’s face settles into a stony expression. “Don’t know anything about that.”
“Jairo, this an official card from your business. With Allie’s alias on it.”
He lifts his hands up. “I don’t know what to tell you. You know as much as I do.” He folds his hands across his chest. Conversation done.
That’s it. That’s going to be his line. Jairo knows he doesn’t have to tell me anything. The less he reveals, the safer he stays. I shift in my seat, feeling the weight of my phone against my chest.
I know I shouldn’t push, shouldn’t take any more risks than I already have. But if I stop now, I’ll have come all the way up here for nothing. I’ll lose out on my one chance of getting real answers. I have to think of what Allie would do. Allie wouldn’t let herself get brushed off with a line like You know as much as I do.
“That’s too bad,” I say lightly, setting my camera in my lap. “Now I don’t know what to do.” I let my shoulders slump. “I thought maybe you could help me. But if you can’t, I guess I’ll have to take this to the cops. They’re always asking me to get in touch if I come across any new information.”
Jairo’s eyes narrow. Any pretense of good humor has vanished from his face. “I don’t think you want to do that.”
“Why not?” I know I’ve just crossed a line. Made myself a threat.
“Because I don’t like cops. And I don’t want them here, crawling around my shop.” He leans forward and rests his forearms on the desk. The veins under his skin bulge like raised wires.
My shirt is sticking to my back now, sweat collecting at the base of my spine. “And I guess they would come by, wouldn’t they? If they thought this card had anything to do with Allie’s disappearance.” I take in a deep breath. The office seems very cramped, very close. But I force myself to look him straight in the eye. “I guess you could save yourself a lot of trouble if you just told me what the hell this card is. Why Allie had it.”
He scowls, and for a moment, I think I’m in real trouble. Then, suddenly, he breaks into a gleaming smile. “I guess you really are Allie’s sister, huh? Never saw the resemblance until now.”
“Just tell me what she was doing with you,” I say. “At this place. And I’ll leave you alone, I promise. You’ll never see me again.”
Jairo’s smile evaporates. “How about I just take that camera from you?” he says pleasantly. “And you give me that business card.”
I feel a little dizzy. “You could do that,” I acknowledge. “But I don’t have the card with me. And the photos are in the cloud now. Taking my camera won’t change that.”
Jairo looks at me for a long moment, as if thinking through his options. Then he sighs and kicks his chair back a few inches from the desk. “Look—it was nothing, okay? Nothing to get worked up about. Allie needed some cash, so I got her a gig here.”
“Doing what exactly?”
He rocks back in his chair. “Well, we fix up cars here, right? Nice cars, sometimes. And we sell them. But sometimes people get a little nervous about buying from my guys. Some people see my crew, see brown skin, a few tats, and start thinking, ‘Maybe this sale’s not on the up-and-up.’” He adjusts the watch on his wrist. “So, we needed someone who looked a little more . . . customer friendly.”
“Allie.”
He shrugs. “Customers took a shine to her. Didn’t think twice about handing over their money. So. It was a win-win. My uncle moved more cars. Allie got a little spending cash.”
I look down at my camera, at the image of the business card on the screen. The name MIA ROSSI is printed next to the phone number I don’t recognize. The one that was out of service when I called this morning. But once upon a time, it had worked. Once upon a time, Allie had a phone number associated with this business. I think of Allie sitting at the table in Barclay’s, clutching an unfamiliar phone in her hands. “She had a separate phone,” I say slowly. “A phone she used to talk to you.”
Jairo doesn’t say anything, just stretches and flexes his fingers a few times.
My skin prickles. “It was you. You’re the one Allie was talking to that night.” Jairo was the one she’d gone to meet. “What did you do?” I say, standing up. My voice echoes against the office walls, high and sharp.
Jairo stands up quickly, raising his hands, palms toward me. “Hey, hey. Calm down now. I never did anything to Allie.”
I back up, my legs knocking against the chair. “She called you. Why was she calling you?”
For the first time since I arrived, Jairo looks spooked. “Look—don’t—you’ve got the wrong idea, okay? Allie was my friend.” As I make a move toward the door, he reaches for my arm, then backs off when I lurch away. “Yeah, okay, okay. Just hold up, all right?” He doesn’t want me to walk out that door. “She called me that night, okay?” he says. “But that’s all. She wanted a favor. And after what she’d done for me, for my grandma, I thought, ‘Sure. Why not?’”
I should get out of here now. But my feet feel frozen to the floor. I slide my camera back into my bag. If I needed to run, could I get out of here without Jairo stopping me? “What did she want?”
Jairo pauses, thinking. What will it cost him to tell me? What will it cost to stay silent? “All right, I’ll tell you, but you gotta promise to keep the cops out of this. You gotta promise that. I didn’t kill Allie, and I’m sure as hell not going to let them pin it on me.”
I swallow. When I look down, I can see my phone where it’s fallen forward in my pocket, the lit-up screen glowing through the jacket material. Shit. Someone is calling me. “Okay,” I say to Jairo. “No cops. I promise.”
He steps closer, carefully, like I’m a wild animal that might bolt at any minute. “Look, it was simple. That night, she wanted a car. Something low key. She asks me, can she trade in Greg’s Porsche for something a little less noticeable, a Toyota Corolla or something like that.” He laughs. “Well, that Porsche was worth, like, ninety grand. That worked just fine for me.”
“Why did she need a car?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask. She said she was going to this place up in the mountains. Some kind of hideout. That’s all she said, I swear to God. She drove up here, we exchanged cars, and then she left. That’s all I know.”
His face flushes. “And I tell you what—Allie really screwed me over with that deal. I thought I was going to sell off that Porsche, make a bundle. But the next thing I know, her name’s all over the news, and every cop in the city is trying to find out what happened to her. And I’m sitting here with Greg Novak’s Porsche in my garage. Like a fucking time bomb. I had to get rid of it. Broke my heart, breaking that beauty down into parts.” He holds out his hand. “Now. I told you what you want to know.” His face changes, becomes grim. “So you can give me that phone you’ve been recording me on.”
I step backward, turning toward the door, but Jairo is too fast. He grabs my arm and pulls me toward him, yanking my phone out of my pocket. He stops the recording and deletes it, then throws my phone on the floor and stomps on it with his heavy work boot.
“Now get the fuck out of my shop,” he whispers in my ear. “And I better not be hearing from the cops, you hear me? When you get home—you burn that business card and forget you ever saw it.”
CHAPTER 49
I sit in my car, clutching my phone in my hands. The screen is a map of fine cracks, and there’s a thumb-size chunk of plastic missing from the bottom corner. Tentatively, I press the Home button. The screen flickers once, twice, and I see at the top of the screen that the battery is almost dead. Ruiz has called me; it was his call that came through in Jairo’s office. I hit the button to play his voicemail, but the screen only shivers, and then the phone goes dark.
“Shit.” Heat builds in the space behind my eyes. “Shit, shit, shit.”
The recording, the only thing I have linking Jairo and Allie on the night she went missing—I’ve lost it. And it’s my fault. How could I have been stupid enough to think I could come up here and—what? Find out the truth when the police couldn’t? Now, when Ruiz and his partner arrive to talk to Jairo, they’ll find him prepared. And God knows what will happen when Jairo realizes I’ve turned the card over to them.
I let out a shaky breath. This is not good. This is very, very bad. Frustrated, I wipe at my eyes, fighting back tears. Then I lean my head against the steering wheel and let defeat wash over me. Where have all my reckless decisions gotten me? Even if I do know now who Allie was calling that night, and what happened to Greg’s car, I have no way to prove it to the cops. And Jairo will deny it until the day he dies.
I run through the conversation in my head. Trying to solidify the words in my memory, a kind of mental recording that I can keep for Ruiz. She said she was going to this place up in the mountains. Some kind of hideout.
Blinking, I lift my head from the steering wheel and brush my hair away from my face. The mountains. Which mountains? And why would Allie choose that location as an escape?
Something nags at the back of my mind, a snippet of conversation that flits away every time I try to grasp it. This place in the mountains, Jairo said. Some kind of hideout.
Hideout. I’ve heard that word before. At the party at Isabel’s house, when Giles and Matthew were talking about Matthew’s cabin in Crestline. The Hideout, Giles had called it. The cabin on Lake Gregory where a young Allie had gone fishing with Matthew.
I feel lightheaded, like I’m floating a few inches above my body. Because I know. I know now where Allie went.
CHAPTER 50
I park outside the Van Nuys library and hurry inside. With my phone dead, I need some other way to access the internet, and this was the closest place I could find. Walking over to the bank of computers on a long wooden table, I scoot a chair up to a monitor and google the San Bernadino County clerk’s office. Once I’m on the site, I find the Search function and enter in Matthew’s name. The address of the property in Crestline pops up on the bright-white screen. I scrounge an old receipt out of my bag and scribble the address down in its margins. Then I look up directions to the cabin. It’s an hour’s drive away, and I’ll have to take several major highways to get there.
I pause, tapping my fingers on the worn mouse pad. I know it’s stupid to take the risk, but I have to go. I have to see it for myself—the last place Allie went before she disappeared.
I tell myself: I was fine on the drive over here, wasn’t I? I’ll be okay as long as I stay calm.
Quickly, I jot down the directions to the cabin on the back of the receipt. Then I jog back to my car and slide into the driver’s seat. After pulling out of the parking lot, I take Victory Boulevard toward the freeway entrance, and then I’m on the 170, nudging the Civic faster. The car groans as it accelerates, and I pray it’s in good enough shape to get me to Crestline.
As I drive, adrenaline begins to spike in my veins. Marisol thought Allie had committed suicide. But given what I know now, that can’t be true. Allie had Greg’s money with her that night. She had a new car from Jairo’s shop. She was headed to Matthew’s place in the mountains. Clearly, she had a plan. But what happened next? Was she planning a whole new life? Or just a temporary escape? If she’d only planned to leave for a little while, was she intercepted before she could come back?
I feel my heart rate start to rise, so I take a few long, deep breaths. I have to stay calm. I can’t risk having an episode.
I tell myself: No one knew where Allie was going that night. Not even Jairo.
You don’t know that, Allie murmurs to me. You don’t know who else I might have told. Or who might’ve been following me.
I grip the steering wheel. I can’t think about those possibilities, not now.
I force myself to think about practicalities. I’ve never been up to Matthew’s cabin. When was the last time anyone was up there? I struggle to remember the conversation at Matthew’s party. I’d gotten the impression that Matthew hadn’t been up there for a while. Maybe years.
I stare out the windshield at the wide highway ahead of me. This is the route Allie would’ve driven on her way out of the city. It would’ve been close to midnight, the sky speckled with stars. I wonder if she’d felt angry. Or fearful. Or free.
After a long while, the road winds into the mountains, and a chill seeps in through the car windows. I turn up the heat in the car. When I take the next curve of the highway, I see smatterings of snow on the road’s shoulder. My car is struggling with the steep incline, but I keep pressing it forward, hoping to God the engine doesn’t start smoking.
After about twenty minutes, I consult the directions I scribbled on the receipt, trying to decipher my cramped handwriting. Soon, I take a turn onto a narrower road that leads through the forest. I’m almost there. At this realization, I feel myself start to panic. What will I find at the cabin? Evidence that Allie was there? Or . . . what if, after all these years, her body has been up there, abandoned, decaying?
My vision flickers. When the black curtain comes down, it happens quickly, faster than it ever has before. I slam on the brakes, veering off onto the shoulder of the road, hoping my mind’s eye can tell me how far to move over to get out of the path of traffic without running into the trees. I pull the car to the right until I hear the scrape of metal, the Honda’s side dragging against a metal barrier on the side of the road. A horn blares in my left ear as a truck passes, so close that I can feel a rush of air against the car.
My whole body is buzzing. I fold over the steering wheel, trying to remember Dr. Rajmani’s breathing exercises. I’m safe now. No one is hurt. But all I can think of is what could’ve happened those few seconds when I’d been driving blind. I could’ve been killed. I could’ve killed someone else. It takes a few minutes of ragged breathing before I begin to fully realize the full import of my situation. I’m out in the middle of nowhere on my own. Without a working cell phone. In a car I can no longer drive.
I sit there long enough for my vision to slowly start returning. The trees materialize, like ghosts, on either side of a dark road. And then I hear a car drive up behind me. The wheels crunch slowly along the gravel of the shoulder; then the engine shuts off and I hear the slam of a car door. I straighten, twisting my head over my shoulder to get a better look through the back window. But all I can see is a dark, heavy shape. A baseball cap pulled low over a man’s forehead.
I look forward, into the forest that surrounds the car on either side. Then someone raps hard on my driver’s side window, and I startle, whipping my head around.
“Natasha?” Ruiz is standing outside my car, his face flushed in the whipping wind.
CHAPTER 51
I open the car door, dazed. Ruiz seems to have materialized here as if by magic.
His eyes run over my car, the way it’s nuzzled up against the metal barrier. “What the hell happened? Did you get into an accident?”
I stand up and step away from the car, my legs a little unsteady. “I just needed to pull off the road for a second.”
His eyes narrow. “What the hell are you doing up here?” he asks, at the same time that I say, “How did you know I was here?”
He frowns. Then he steps past me and leans into the car, pulling out my bag from the passenger seat. He reaches into the outer pocket and pulls out a gold necklace that is not mine. It takes me a moment to recognize it. The GPS necklace he got for his grandma, the one I saw in his Jeep.
“I had a feeling, after we talked this morning, that you might do something reckless. So I slipped this in your bag.”
I should be furious, but I can’t find the energy for it. I’m just glad he’s here. I’m glad I’m not alone.
Another gust of wind shakes the trees, and Ruiz folds his arms across his chest. “When I got to work, I checked the tracker app and saw you were in Van Nuys.” He shakes his head, frustrated. “What the hell, Natasha. And then I called you about ten times but got no answer. That’s when I got in my car and started following the GPS signal.”
