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Dea stared. “What . . . what do you mean?” she said. “If nobody sent you, why are you here?”
Briggs and Co
“I’ll call it in,” Co
“Okay, Odea,” Briggs said, forced-cheerful, over-loud. “Can we sit down and chat for a minute?”
“Shouldn’t you be looking for my mom?” Dea blurted out.
“If we’re going to find your mom, I’ll need to ask you a few questions,” he said, in an I-know-best kind of voice. Dea could tell he was trying hard to be nice, probably so she wouldn’t freak out. She tried to imagine him taking a guitar to Will’s head and couldn’t. She tried to find a resemblance to Co
“All right,” she said. She gestured to the living room. Toby jumped off the couch and darted under an armchair. No one had ever been inside the house except for Dea and her mom. Briggs eased himself down onto the sofa, trying to seem casual, smiling like this was a social visit. But Dea wasn’t fooled. She watched his eyes tick over the whole room, taking in everything—the clocks, the bare mantelpiece where the photograph of Dea’s fake dad had been, the mishmash of furniture from different eras.
Dea didn’t feel like sitting down but Officer Briggs looked as though he expected her to, so she did, trying to control the buzzing anxiety crawling through her legs and arms, like a thousand insects.
“All right, let’s start at the begi
“Yesterday.” Dea looked down at her hands. “We had a fight.” She felt the urge to cry and took a deep breath, willing herself to stay calm. She wasn’t going to have a breakdown in front of a stranger.
“Did your mom seem . . . different at all to you? Jumpy? Nervous about something?”
Dea shook her head. “No.” Then she corrected: “She . . . she wanted to move again. That’s what the fight was about. I told her I wouldn’t.” If Dea hadn’t been so stubborn—if she’d agreed to pack up and go, like her mother wanted—her mom might still be home, and okay. It was all her fault.
Briggs was jotting down notes. For a long minute, they sat in silence. Dea felt every second that passed in her chest and teeth and stomach. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “We shouldn’t be sitting here,” she said. “We should be out looking. She could be hurt. She could be in danger. Why are we just sitting here?”
Briggs put away his notebook. “Let’s stay calm, okay?”
But Dea couldn’t stay calm. Fear and frustration clawed up her chest. Her fault. “She could be dead. You’re supposed to be helping. You’re supposed to be finding her.”
The front door slammed again, and Dea jumped. Co
“No,” Dea said. They were acting like her mom had just picked up and left. She dug her nails into the flesh of her hands and pressed, wishing that, like a dream, she could just find a way out.
“Okay, good, good.” Co
“Hideaway?” Dea looked from Co
“Odea”—Briggs leaned forward, putting his hands on his elbows—“I know this must be hard for you. But your mom is in a lot of trouble. That’s why we came here today. Not to find her. To arrest her.”
Silence. Ticking silence. Dea counted her heartbeats. One, two, three. Pause. Fourfivesix. “What . . . what are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry you have to learn about it this way,” Briggs said. He really did sound sorry. She wondered if he’d told Co
“What do you mean, Agent Co
Co
Dea closed her eyes. Opened them again. But the two men were still there—both of them watching her with twin expressions of pity.
“She’s always skipped town before we could make anything stick,” Co
Dea’s thoughts were disjointed. She was seeing everything in short flashes, as if the reel in her brain kept getting cut.
Co
“You’re wrong,” Dea managed to say. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
But even as she said it, she remembered all the times her mother had woken her in the grayness of a new dawn, whispering “It’s time to go, Dea”; packing up the car before the sun wrestled free of the horizon; long hours, towns melting blurrily by the windows, her mother silent, anxious. And the other stuff: fake names, jobs that never went anywhere, money that came from nowhere, money stuffed in cardboard shoeboxes and hidden in the dashboard.
She wondered if the cops knew about the money.
“It took us a long time to pin anything on her,” Co
“I’m sorry,” Briggs said again, as if that helped. As if it mattered.
Dea thought of the brochures spread across the kitchen table, and the urgent way her mom had woken her the day before. We’re leaving. She must have known the police were closing in. Dea’s mouth tasted like bile. Her thoughts ricocheted back and forth between anger and denial. It wasn’t possible. It made sense. She wouldn’t have. She must have.
All these years, when Miriam had filled Dea’s head with stories about monsters and mirrors and locks on the door, she was just full of shit. She was ru
And yet . . .
The mirrors had shattered upstairs. Small, scrappy evidence, but something. And her mom couldn’t have gone far without a car, unless she’d ditched it in favor of the bus. But even if what the cops said was true—her mom had been stealing, using identities that weren’t hers—Dea couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe that Miriam would have left Dea behind.
Dea pictured her mother turning to her, winking, as they barreled down another nameless highway. Thick as thieves.
“I know this is asking a lot,” Briggs was saying, in a soothing voice, like he was trying to coax Dea back onto a bike after she’d fallen down. Dea wondered whether Co