KDBookOnline
Share Us
She continues and decodes the first word of the note: find.
There’s what appears to be only four more words, but it still will take a little time. She moves on to the next word when she hears Ryan’s voice from the phone:
“Oh my god.”
“What is it, Ryan? What—”
Before the line drops, she hears him say, “Ali’s alive.”
55
Poppy finishes decoding the note and she’s even more confused. The message has only five words: “Find me in the clouds.”
What in the hell kind of nonsense? But the note means something to Ryan. Poppy didn’t tell Ryan what she knows about that night—what Dash told her—that Ali is alive, but he knows somehow anyway from the coded message. For Poppy, the puzzle pieces don’t fit yet, but she’s thinking the story goes something like this: Ali moved to Leavenworth when she was starting high school. She knew someone might come after her. She wrote a coded note that only Ryan could read if anyone ever found it. But why’d she’d go to such trouble is unclear. Was she concerned that someone would take her and find the note?
Poppy reflects on how Ali didn’t use social media. Her three high-school friends saying that she was almost phobic about not having her picture taken. Maybe she was in hiding. But from who?
Poppy suddenly thinks about the FBI agent, Fincher, who knows more than she’s willing to share. Maybe Ali and her father were in witness protection. That would explain why no one knows much about their background before Kansas. And who better to help you hide in a new town than the head of law enforcement there, Alison’s father’s old war buddy Sheriff Walton? Poppy thinks back to the press conference. The sheriff told the reporters that he’d spoken to Alison’s father, stalled giving Poppy the father’s address or number. She pulls on the thread…
So she’s in hiding. Keeping a low profile. Then suddenly writes a coded note that says: “If something happens to me” for her boyfriend. Why?
Then it hits Poppy: the viral video.
It went viral two weeks before Ali was taken. Maybe Ali feared whoever she was hiding from would see the video and come to Leavenworth. But she didn’t know that would happen, hoped it would blow over as viral videos do and they wouldn’t see it.
But they did.
Who are they?
Poppy’s biggest clues are the men from the bottom of the lake. She picks up her phone, finds the name in her contacts, and calls. “Chantelle, hey, it’s Poppy.” She flushes a moment but doesn’t know why. “You have a minute to help me run down something?”
She smiles when she hears the reply: “Hell, yes.”
56
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Chaz stands in the greenest grass he’s ever seen. Shane O’Leary’s lawn is expansive—with complex irrigation systems and a gardening team that must spend hours a day making sure every blade is in place, every line from the mower perfectly symmetrical. The golden sunlight makes it look like one of those infomercials for retirement communities.
O’Leary makes the long walk from the house to the middle of the lawn. “How’d you find them?” O’Leary asks.
“I don’t think you want to know,” Chaz says. O’Leary, like his father before him, preferred to be insulated from the dirty work whenever possible.
O’Leary looks around as if assessing whether anyone could pick up the conversation. Chaz knows that O’Leary has the property swept twice a day, so there’s no way anyone’s getting within the three-hundred-yard range of those handheld listening contraptions. Still, freedom favors the cautious.
“I wanna know everything about this one, my friend.”
Chaz tells them about O abducting the sheriff from Kansas. Dragging him all the way to Philly in the trunk of his car. Then the interrogation.
“Why bring him to our backyard?”
Chaz shrugs. “Easier to get rid of him. A missing lawman is better than a dead body. The cops protect their own.”
“Don’t we all,” O’Leary says, with a weariness in his voice. “You broke him?”
Chaz shakes his head. “Tough old bastard.”
“I can understand O not breaking him, he’s still learning the ropes. But you couldn’t get him to talk?” O’Leary chuckles. “‘Tough old bastard’ is right. A damn shame. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”