so that we’re practically flat. “Um. So.” I reach across Luis’s lap for the button, and can’t keep from laughing as the seat starts slowly rising while we’re still tangled up together. “This is the recline function,” I say, smoothing my hair.
“Good to know.” Luis kisses my neck, his palm warm against my waist. “Thanks for the demonstration.”
“No problem. I do this for everybody. It’s important to know how a vehicle operates.” Reluctantly, I slide off Luis’s lap and behind the wheel. Then I squeeze his hand, feeling giddy that apparently I can do that now. “To be continued?”
He smiles and squeezes back. “Definitely.”
“Well!” Phoebe opens the rear door and crawls across the seat. The hood of Knox’s sweatshirt is still up, the laces pulled tight around her face. Knox follows and closes the door behind him. He seems preoccupied with his binoculars. I’m pretty sure Phoebe ran interference quickly enough that he didn’t see anything with Luis and me. “I have officially never seen that guy before in my life. I have absolutely no idea who he is.”
“So now what?” I ask. “Should we—”
“Shit, here he comes!” Knox pulls Phoebe toward him, pressing her into his shoulder as she lets out a strangled yelp. I duck down automatically in my seat, but Luis—of course—stays where he is. He really is terrible at this. “Sorry,” Knox says in a calmer voice as he releases Phoebe. “But he just drove past us. Don’t worry, he didn’t look our way.”
Phoebe leans forward and peers between the front seats. “The blue car?” she asks. When Knox grunts in agreement, she taps my shoulder. “Follow him. Let’s see what this weirdo does when he isn’t stalking girls he’s never met.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Knox
Thursday, March 26
A couple of hours after we leave the park, we have a license plate number, an address, and a name. Sort of.
“The car is registered to David Jackson,” Maeve reports, her eyes on her laptop screen. “So maybe David Jackson is Intense Guy?” We’re sitting at my kitchen table after dropping off Luis and Phoebe. My parents are out to dinner with the neighbors, so we’re eating buttered noodles and carrot sticks because that’s the extent of my culinary repertoire. Luis, I am not. In more ways than one.
Yeah, I saw. I’m trying to be happy for them. It’s not like I’m jealous. It’s just—for once in my life, I’d like somebody to have that kind of reaction to me. Maybe that only happens to guys like Luis, though. “Great,” I say, unlocking my phone to open Instagram. “That’s a super uncommon name. If I search it I get…too many to count.”
Maeve frowns. “I’m Googling his name and the town and—hmm. Nothing interesting.” We tailed the blue car to a tiny ranch home in a rundown section of Rolando Village, which the city’s assessor database tells us belongs to a couple named Paul and Lisa Curtin. Maeve thinks it must be a rental. “There’s a local dentist with the name David Jackson. He has terrible Yelp reviews.”
“Well, Intense Guy does seem like he’d have a bad bedside manner. Or chairside, I guess,” I say. “But he’s a little young to have made it through dental school.”
Maeve bites into a carrot stick and Fritz, who’s sitting between us, snaps his head toward her with a hopeful look. “You wouldn’t like carrots,” she assures him, petting the graying patch of fur between his ears. Fritz looks unconvinced. I lean across him so I can see Maeve’s screen better, and she angles it toward me. “This David Jackson is in his fifties,” she says. “This one just retired from a gas company…” Maeve clicks to the second page of results, then sighs and leans back in her chair. “They’re all old.”
“Maybe David Jackson is Intense Guy’s father,” I say. “Dad owns the car, and his kid is driving it?”
“Could be. That doesn’t help us much, though.” Maeve catches her lower lip between her teeth, looking pensive. “I wish Phoebe would talk to her mom about what’s going on.”
On the ride home from Rolando Village, all of us tried to convince Phoebe to tell Mrs. Lawton about Intense Guy and the note. But Phoebe wouldn’t go for it. “My mom has enough to worry about,” she insisted. “Plus, this is obviously a case of mistaken identity. He’s looking for a different Phoebe.”
I can understand wanting to think that. And I hope it’s true. Although I feel sorry for Different Phoebe if it is.