the dark about what was really happening?”
Her eyes fell closed at the notion before she opened them and pinned her gaze back on mine.
“I believe my mother didn’t tell me things for my own good because knowing would be the catalyst for chaos. About a month into my new situation with my keepers, they flashed me a picture out of the blue. Once I identified the man as my estranged father, they told me he was dead without any type of explanation of how he’d died.”
I didn’t know what to make of Patrena’s story. It was tragic and so unconventional that she very well could have been in protective custody after her mother’s death based on how she’d described her foster mothers.
“Did any of this occur here in Colorado?”
Patrena had been a question mark since I had started keeping an eye on her, but my attraction was a major distraction. Rhi had never found any information on her outside of the state, so her records appeared like she was born at the age of twenty when she enrolled at the local college and started working as a clerk at the registration office.
“We lived in New York and my mother was killed there. A week after her death, I was in North Carolina. Six months later, I was moved to California then Georgia, and finally, Virginia. The last place I ended up before moving to Colorado was Texas,” she stated.
Although her gaze was focused on my face, I could tell she was seeing events playing out in her head.
“Things went a bit haywire when I was sixteen. Our house in Texas was attacked in the middle of the night and my keepers, who I’d been with for ten years, were taken. They fought hard to make sure I got away. They always kept a get-away kit for me on standby like they’d expected trouble. The night of the attack, they hid me in a secret hideaway I didn’t know was in the house. All I’d left that house with that night was a wad of cash, a note telling me to hide in plain sight like I’d been trained to do, and legal paperwork emancipating me.”
“Patrena, that’s a lot to carry,” I whispered.
She nodded, and the far-off glint in her eyes told me the burden had never stopped riding her shoulders.
“Did you get a look at who attacked them? Were they dressed a certain way?” I questioned and hoped I didn’t sound insensitive to what she’d gone through.
She shook her head. “I heard more than I saw. My keepers had me slide into a casket-tight crawlspace hidden in the wall and demanded that I not come out until it was safe. They must have fought for hours before it quieted down. Other than my keepers, there was only the thundering sound of male voices, gunshots, and furniture being tossed and broken. When I slid from my hiding place, the scent of death was so thick in the air that I choked on it. All I wanted was to get out of there.”
She shut her eyes tight enough that I saw them moving rapidly beneath her lids.
“There were no bodies in the house when I wiggled from my hiding place. With the amount of damage and blood left behind, there was no way someone hadn’t died in that room. All I know is that they didn’t leave the dead. There were guns, bloody knives, even sharp pieces of bloody wood spread all over the floor, but no bodies. They even took my keepers, and I don’t know if they were dead or alive when they left. I got the hell out of there and took the route I’d practiced to the bus station. The lady who sold me the ticket picked Telluride, Colorado, because she said it was a place she’d read about and wanted to visit, so that was where I went.”
The mystery surrounding her life made me wonder how she managed to live such a normal life.
“My keepers had taught me all about the best routes out of Fort Worth and how to survive on my own by testing me. Each new city we arrived in, they would make me get out of the car and leave me on the streets to survive for a few weeks before they would pick me up. When it was time to fend for myself, even at sixteen, I didn’t have a problem.”
Slack-jawed, my gaze remained pinned on Patrena’s. Secrets, lies, and danger, it