“He wanted me there, Rachel. Whatever it was, he needed me there.”
“So when do we leave?” Macey said again, fresh emphasis on every word.
“That’s the thing, Macey.” Zach stood and walked to the bookshelves. “We don’t.”
Liz looked at him as if he were crazy. “But it’s a clue. It’s a piece of the puzzle, a—”
“Risk,” I finished for her. “It’s a big risk.” I looked down at the envelope with its frayed edges. “I’m a big risk.”
“But…” Liz sounded utterly confused. “We went to the cabin and we found this. It has to matter. It has to mean something.”
“We went to the cabin, and the Circle found me.” I took a deep breath. “And then I killed someone.”
“But…” Liz started, and then realized that even she didn’t know how that sentence was supposed to end.
“They sent someone to kill her, Liz,” Zach said. “And they’ll keep sending people until they succeed.”
I watched Bex, saw her weighing the risks and rewards in her mind, but my mother was the only one who spoke.
“We’re going to have to think about this.” She stood, gently cradling in her hands the small packet I’d given her.
“But—” Liz started.
“But they don’t need me alive anymore.” I started for the door. “Everything is different now that they don’t need me alive.”
No one told me I was wrong.
“Go to class,” Abby said. “We’ve got a lot to think about.”
Chapter Twenty
We left the package in my mother’s office, but the memory of it followed us everywhere we went for the rest of the day.
I doodled the postmark all over the back of a pop quiz from Madame Dabney. In Advanced Languages, I kept writing and rewriting the address (but that worked out okay because I was writing it in Swahili).
By the time the day was almost over, there was one thing that I couldn’t shake from my mind.
“Who is Zeke Rozell?” I asked, remembering the words on the label.
The classroom was totally empty—just my friends and Zach and me.
“It’s one of Joe’s aliases,” Zach said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Technically, the cabin belongs to Mr. Rozell. He pays taxes and has a valid local driver’s license and makes an annual donation to the volunteer fire department, but he works in offshore drilling, so he doesn’t get into town very much.”
Bex smiled slowly. “Mr. Solomon is awesome.”
“Mr. Solomon is in a coma,” I said numbly, sliding into my seat in the almost empty room.
“We know,” Macey said, as if the last thing any of us needed was a reminder.
“No. I mean Mr. Solomon is in a coma—and I knew that. I would have known he wasn’t there. Why would I send something to an empty cabin?”
“Because you’d planned on being there to get it.” When Bex spoke, it was as though the girl who had shouted at me in the forest was a million miles away, shattered by a sniper’s bullet, washed away like the black of my hair down the drain. “You were coming back,” she said again, emphasizing every word.
“I was coming back,” I repeated as, one by one, the rest of the senior class filtered through the door and took their places all around me.
I barely noticed a thing, though, until I heard Professor Buckingham say, “Good afternoon, ladies. Mr. Goode.”
She didn’t look like a woman who’d had a clandestine, predawn rendezvous. But then again, I think clandestine rendezvous are probably what Professor Buckingham does best.