The Follower Read online

  Confident she had them all, she picked them up and quickly shoved them into her bag.

  She wanted to walk away as if nothing had happened, but she was having trouble breathing and her face felt hot. She needed air. She had to get out of there, had to go straight to the exit. The library would survive without its ten cents per copy.

  As she headed for the elevator, it seemed as though a woman with short graying brown hair and smudged lipstick was walking purposely toward her. Surely not. She looked vaguely familiar. Perhaps she was mistaking her for someone else. God willing.

  No, she was coming toward her, waving some papers at Cora to get her attention.

  Cora froze. Even from a few feet away she could see they were copies of Julie’s picture.

  ‘Here you go,’ the woman said quietly, her arm extended toward Cora, offering them up. ‘These got mixed in with my documents.’

  Cora took them without thinking, instantly wishing she’d denied they were hers. The woman looked right at them, studying the girl’s face. It would be weird to yank them away at that point. She was stuck there.

  ‘Pretty girl.’ She smiled at Cora, clearly waiting to be told all about her.

  Cora nodded, trying to force a smile.

  She couldn’t turn this into a big production, couldn’t look flustered. Better to come out with something ordinary.

  ‘My niece,’ she stammered. ‘She lives in California.’

  ‘Ah.’ This seemed to satisfy the woman. ‘Well, you must be so proud. You know how sometimes you can just tell from a picture that someone is a lovely person? She seems like that.’

  Cora’s stomach turned. She hoped she was nodding her head as she watched the woman pat her on the shoulder and walk away. As if nothing momentous had happened.

  All Cora could do was hope for the best. Hope that she’d managed to make her lie sound plausible and forgettable. Hope that she’d never see that woman again.

  She deserved this fright. She deserved to be punished. She should never have disobeyed James. He knew best and this experience only proved what she already understood at a deeper level. She resolved then and there to set herself back on the Path of Righteousness. She would follow his guidance and his rules to the letter. From now on, she would listen to James.

  As soon as she got home, Cora went behind the barn and smashed the computer to bits.

  CHAPTER 8

  Cora worked herself to the bone on that farm, but it was what she wanted. Her goal was to throw every fiber of her being into it, to end each day so exhausted that sleep would take over before her thoughts did. The trouble was that her daily life consisted of a series of mindless repetitions: weeding the garden, slicing up onions, folding the laundry, feeding the animals, taking food to the girl. Efforts that could only occupy her body. Her mind still strayed.

  She wanted more than anything to take her own advice, to remember that the past was dead. She said it to herself over and over, but it wouldn’t stick. Especially now that she felt so mixed up. That stupid girl and those stupid pictures of her fairy-tale life had unleashed a tidal wave of memories. She couldn’t help but compare and contrast.

  James had warned her not to indulge in this weakness.

  ‘Your memories are unclean,’ he’d said. ‘Remembering is a fall from grace.’

  She truly wanted to obey him, but these thoughts were too powerful now. They kept flaring up like a sickness, dwarfing every other reality, making it hard to get her work done, hard to follow the rules.

  No matter how she tried she couldn’t forget that poor mousy girl she’d been, sitting shotgun in a half-rusted-out, beat-up pickup truck bouncing along the dusty roads, crisscrossing the whole United States of America who knows how many times over.

  She and her father would drive through deserts, wheat fields, miles and miles of strip malls, every lowdown, dirty piece of America. Later, she figured out why they were on the run, but as a child, all she thought about was the way the sun would glint in the rearview mirror as she cupped her hand to catch the breeze outside the window, singing softly to herself so he wouldn’t hear. She tried not to draw his attention. She was just a little twig of a nothing running after him at pit stops, keeping her eyes on the ground, making herself small.

  Her most prized possession back then was the Rand McNally Deluxe Atlas of the United States, its oversized pages withered and hardened, the evidence of a dried spill that had earned her a slap across the face at the time. Grid page after grid page, the long thin lines traced out the routes to some truck stop, some dead-end road where they would park for the night, or some gritty construction site where her father could work for a day or two.

  That atlas gave her life its structure with graphic specificity: E4 on page 97, H5 on page 134, R5 on 176. She would circle their destinations with a red marker she’d found buried deep in the crack of the seat, the lines scratchy from the dried-out ink, the barrel of the pen covered with a sticky substance she could never entirely wash off.

  At night, Cora would look out of the grimy camper window at the glittering stars, the leaves dipping down from the trees, the flashing neon lights of a strip club, whatever was out there, and she’d feel her heart clench.

  Even then, she understood that to survive she couldn’t let herself be vulnerable. She had to push all those feelings away. But at some level, some horrible deep level, she knew what she was losing.

  Her father never knew where they’d go next. He was driven by some inner demon that wouldn’t let him rest and every day depended on how much he could keep that demon under control, and for how long.

  For Cora that meant new schools at least three times a year. Sometimes they didn’t stay in one place long enough to enroll, and he’d drop her off at the public library instead while he went looking for work. She’d spend those days in between the stacks evading the librarians, who were quick to call the authorities on a truant child. She learned to stay quiet for hours, lying on the cold floor silently turning the pages of the Children’s World Atlas or Jane Eyre or Knights of the Round Table, keeping watch out of the corner of her eye. That’s where she got her real education.

  School was a different matter. All the adults – even the nicest teachers, the bedraggled school counselors, the plastic-capped lunch ladies behind the steamed glass – ignored her for the most part. It might have been better had the kids done the same. They were cruel sometimes – so cruel – but she couldn’t exactly blame them. She was dirty and uncommunicative, a feral child who’d landed among them from out of nowhere. She didn’t try to make friends.

  In truth, she kept quiet because it was safer to say nothing than to say the wrong thing. After that first time in a police station, she’d learned her lesson. Her father would kill her if it happened again.

  They’d kept them apart for hours that day, questioning her in that dull gray interview room with the single bright light. Those officers loomed over her, just mildly threatening, as if they knew they couldn’t push a child too far.

  She wouldn’t have blamed her father if he had left her behind that time. It was her fault, she’d thought then, crying quietly with her cheek pressed against the cold metal table, refusing to speak.

  Eventually they sent in someone without a uniform, one Ms. Martinez, a nice enough lady in a proper suit with smooth soft brown hair swirled into a low bun at the back. Her lipstick was a shocking shade of coral that edged out just past the line of her lip – the only flaw in her otherwise solid perfection. Cora focused on that tiny bit of wayward color, fascinated by it. It was that crack in the woman’s armor that led her to believe she could wriggle her way out of this situation after all.

  Ms. Martinez sat down beside her with her clipboard in hand, smiling her best warm smile. She obviously didn’t realize that Cora wouldn’t be taken in by something as unreliable as kindness. She knew full well that the niceties never lasted long.

  She had to give credit to this one though, she tried.

  She reached out her hand
to Cora, who steadily ignored it, letting the woman’s long slender fingers with their bright pink polish hang in the air between them. Luckily she gave up quickly.

  ‘First,’ Ms. Martinez began somewhat timidly, ‘let me apologize for the others. I don’t think they’re used to being around children.’

  She scooted her chair closer to Cora’s. For a second, Cora thought she might actually touch her, but she had the good sense to have second thoughts and instead she turned her attention to her files.

  Cora, on the other hand, stared at the wall, her elbows propped up on the table, her face leaning against her balled-up fists. Her own nails were dirty and bitten to the quick.

  ‘You said something in there that we need to talk about. I know they were a little harsh, but we just need to know the truth. We want to help you.’

  Cora didn’t move, didn’t even look at her.

  ‘They’re lying,’ she finally said. ‘I never said anything. Don’t you dare say that I said anything.’

  That last part came out with more force than she’d intended. She needed to save her fire.

  ‘I know you must be frightened about what will happen if you talk about it, but—’

  ‘There is no “it”. There’s nothing. They’re lying. People lie, you know.’ Cora folded her arms, leaned back in her chair, and studied the frayed edge of her sweater as if it were the most intriguing thing in the world.

  The beleaguered social worker nodded, checked the file once more, and cleared her throat, preparing to go in again.

  Cora continued to gaze blankly at the table, blinking slowly. She was counting it out, waiting for the woman to break the silence.

  ‘Okay.’ Ms. Martinez glanced back down at some scribbled notes in her file. ‘How long have you been on the road with … your father?’

  Still Cora stared, her face empty. Her heart pounded in her ears but she was determined to hide her fear at any cost.

  The woman tried another angle.

  ‘Okay, then, let’s start with school. You are currently attending . . .?’

  No harm in that one, but Cora couldn’t remember the name of the place. Thornhill, Thornton, Thornville?

  She took a guess. ‘Thornton.’

  The woman nodded and made a little check on one of her precious documents.

  ‘And before that?’

  Cora saw where this was going and sensed this line of inquiry would end up getting her in some big-time trouble. She had to put a stop to it right now. By whatever means necessary.

  She burst out of her chair, sending it crashing to the floor, and ran to the most shadowy corner of the room. She slid her back down the wall. Since actual tears wouldn’t come, she shook her shoulders deliberately and faked it as best she could, clandestinely pinching her cheeks to draw out a convincing crimson flush.

  ‘I just want my father,’ she said, peeking one eye out from under her arm to see how this was going down. ‘I want my daddy. Why are you keeping me from him?’ She was no fool. They’d never make her tell them.

  ‘But you said—’ the woman began.

  ‘No, I never said anything.’ Cora kept her small body tucked in that crevice, sniffling. ‘I want to go now. Can I go?’

  Then the woman surprised Cora. She left her papers behind and got down on her hands and knees to be at Cora’s eye level. She disregarded her fine wool skirt and her delicate stockings and crawled slowly across the filthy floor over to Cora, approaching her as if she were a starved cat abandoned in a dark alley.

  This was a new one.

  When she reached the corner, she twisted around to sit next to Cora, leaning against the same wall. She tipped her head back and closed her eyes for a moment, as if she were considering what in the world to do next. It frightened Cora to think she might not know. Adults were supposed to know.

  Finally, she opened her eyes. Their faces were inches apart. Ms. Martinez was studying Cora with – was it curiosity? Contempt? Cora couldn’t tell.

  ‘I have a lot of cases, you know,’ she said, her frustration showing through, but only a little.

  Cora nodded, sniffling again.

  ‘A lot,’ she repeated as if Cora might not understand such a sophisticated term. Cora blinked.

  They sat in silence for a full minute.

  ‘You know, I could force the issue here. Order up more records, tests, get other divisions involved. I could really make a push for you, but if you aren’t going to cooperate – if you’re just going to tell endless lies and then run away at the first chance when I put you somewhere safe – I wish you’d just . . .’ She seemed at a loss for words for a moment. ‘I wish you’d just tell me that now and save us both a lot of heartache. Because honestly, I’ve been through this plenty of times. I can’t help you if you don’t want help.’

  Cora sat there stunned. She licked her chapped lips, thinking.

  ‘And then I can go?’ she said finally.

  Ms. Martinez sighed.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. If that’s how it is.’

  Cora wasn’t sure what to say. She figured social workers were like this. Overworked, pushed to the brink. She’d drawn a lucky card here.

  Or had she?

  Something in Cora knew this was her do-or-die moment. For a fleeting second she thought, what if everything was different? What if her life changed entirely, just like that?

  Cora couldn’t quite formulate the words her brain was trying to force her to say. She simply couldn’t speak. No one had put it to her so starkly before.

  Eventually, the woman took her silence as an answer.

  ‘Fine, then. Go.’

  Ms. Martinez shook her head in defeat, her eyes sad and withdrawn. She slowly got to her feet and left the room, her heels clicking in the void she left behind.

  Cora stayed there a few minutes. She wasn’t sure, she just didn’t know. Should she follow her back down the hall, crying out for her to wait, to save her, to take her someplace else?

  She was paralyzed with indecision. It was too much. Too confusing.

  After a moment, an officer came in and told her he would walk her out. She got up and followed him, pulling at the string hanging off her sweater, unraveling it nervously as they went down the hall under the fluorescent lights. Apparently she’d let the choice be made for her.

  Reunited with her father again in the hallway, Cora felt a rush of complicated emotions. He stood there, flanked by uniformed officers, but he wasn’t cuffed. Happiness and relief flooded over her. They were free. They could go.

  Then came the fear rising rapidly up inside her. She’d seen her father’s clenched fist and the way his eyes had gone black and impenetrable. Couldn’t anyone else see it? Nausea rose up in her throat at the thought of what was coming.

  Cora knew then, as she knew now, that she could never get anything right.

  CHAPTER 9

  Adam sat at the tiny veneer-covered desk in his motel room, listening to the cars whizzing by on the highway just outside the dirt-caked window. The slight rain on the asphalt swished under their tires tonight, making them louder than ever. Their lights swept across the back wall over the bed every few seconds, just before the sound hit his ears. It didn’t bother Adam. The regular noise helped keep his thoughts in rhythm.

  His cell phone rang, buzzing and half spinning on its back on the corner of the bureau. He got up, glanced at the number, and sat back down. His mother. Again. He couldn’t talk to her about this tonight. He didn’t have the energy.

  He sighed as he picked it up.

  ‘Mom.’

  ‘Adam, where are you?’

  ‘In Stillwater, but I’m leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you coming home?’ She couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  ‘I’ve told you a thousand times. There’s no reason for me to go back to St. Paul. That’s a wasted plane ticket that I can’t afford.’

  ‘Adam, you’re burning through your savings on this … this obsession. It isn’t healthy. And for what? You aren’t a
police officer anymore. You don’t have the right to go around pretending to be one. You could end up in jail.’

  He didn’t answer. Her worry spread across the airwaves and seeped into his chest. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Do you hear what I’m saying?’ she asked with a hint of irritation.

  He sighed.

  ‘I’ve told you, I’m not coming back until it’s over.’ This would get her going, but it had to be said.

  ‘Over? It’s already over. It’s been over for years. You will never be able to solve this, not on your own. Adam, I know why you’re doing it. And it isn’t worth it. That’s over too. She isn’t coming back.’

  ‘Mom, I can’t talk about this right now. I’m so close. Closer than I’ve ever been.’

  ‘You’ve been saying that for years. Exactly those words.’ ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Call me tomorrow. Okay? Adam? Adam?’

  He pressed end without saying good-bye. She couldn’t understand, but she would once he achieved his goal. Then she’d see.

  He walked back over to the other side of the desk and squatted down. There, lined up against the wall on the faded brown carpet were four cardboard boxes of tabbed files, each labeled with a different name: ‘Elsa Sanders’, ‘Phoebe Ranson’, ‘Isabel Davis’ … Fourteen names in all, but only one thread.

  He was working his way through them again, still hoping to find something new. His mother’s words echoed in his head, but he had to brush them aside. He pulled out one file and put it on the corner of the desk, sat back down, and continued with his work. He ran his pencil under the line of text in front of him to stay focused. The words were so familiar they wouldn’t sink in anymore. He knew them by heart, but he kept hoping to trip some new wire in his brain.

  Three years. Three years he’d been on this hunt. And he was closing in. He could feel it.