He’s silent after that.
I don’t look at his face as I slip my hands into his pockets, front and back, then pat down his legs and around his ankles. I check the rest of his clothing too, but I find nothing except the wallet I came across earlier.
He tugs his hoodie back into place when I’m done. “You’re right, it’s not a game. I’m happy to be out of my trunk, though, and now I’d like to be very far away from this motel.”
So would I, except I have no idea where to go or how to get there. And I’m tired. So tired that I could almost forget how scared I am.
“Where did your friend go?”
Malcolm’s swollen eye twitches and I feel a flicker of pity, but I quickly shake it off.
“Okay, that’s the first thing we need to get straight. That guy back there?” He points over his shoulder. “We don’t work together. The first time I saw him was when he came busting down my door and proceeded to kick the crap out of me and toss me into the trunk of my own car when I wouldn’t answer his questions fast enough.”
“Any why would he do that if you’re so innocent?”
Malcolm leans back against the wall and slowly sits. “I never said I was innocent, but I’m just the computer guy. I never hurt anybody, and I took this job with the understanding that no one else would get hurt.”
I scowled. “Except me and my mom, you mean.”
“No.” He straightens so suddenly that he winces. “Look, no one even knewyouexisted until a few days ago. The cops have been looking for your mom for nearly two decades. Most people thought she was dead until she showed up at Derek’s grave.”
My entire body threatens to go limp with relief. “Then you’ve got the wrong person. You don’t know her, but she barely lets me out of her sight, even to go to school. I always know where she is, and the only grave she’s ever visited is the one we’ve been to together: my dad’s. You’ve got the wrong person.”
Malcolm doesn’t try to argue; if anything, he looks sorry for me. “Two months ago, your mom didn’t take a little road trip to Pennsylvania? Maybe you went with her but she slipped away for an hour or two?”
I open my mouth to deny it, but the words get stuck. We did go to Pennsylvania after our hiking trip at the end of summer. Mom’s in love with this pie stand in Perkasie, a little town about thirty miles north of Philadelphia, whose name literally means “where hickory nuts were cracked.” We make the drive every few months, staying the weekend in various B&Bs, and it’s about the only time that Mom lets me go off on my own without first giving her a detailed itinerary of where I’ll be at every moment of the day. I get a few hours to myself to do a little shopping, soak up the sun if the weather is nice, or even go ice-skating if it’s during the winter. But Mom is always in our room with a book, waiting for me, when I get back. She would have told me if she went somewhere. I would have known.
My mouth closes.
“The police had a theory. They said Derek’s death was a crime of passion, and because of that, his killer might feel safe enough to visit his grave after several years,” Malcolm says. “They monitored the cemetery at first but eventually moved on. Then this year, Mrs. Abbott hired a private investigator, and he interviewed the staff. They confirmed that no one apart from family ever visits Derek’s grave, but that a woman has been visiting the grave beside his every few months for a decade.”
A decade. My brain scrambles to try and remember how long we’d been going to Perkasie. Can it have been ten years? Is that why all our frequent moves have never taken us away from the East Coast? So Mom could stay within driving distance of Derek’s grave?
Malcolm continues, softer this time, and his words feel like spiders on my skin.
“The investigator set up a motion-activated camera near the grave, and he got a hit two months ago when the woman visited. She stayed for an hour, and right before she left, she reached out her hand to brush Derek’s tombstone. He got a picture of her face when she left, and I was hired to try and match it with a photo online to locate her. I set up my facial-recognition program and eventually got a hit when the picture of the two of you was uploaded to the dating site. It was the same woman from the cemetery. Your momisTiffany Jablonski.”
I’m sitting down. I don’t remember when my legs refused to hold me up anymore, but I’m on the ground and the chill of the earth is seeping through my jeans and causing goose bumps to break out all over my skin.
It’s just the cold,I tell myself.Not anything else. Not these lies that can’t possibly be true.
I think about my mom: the way she traps daddy longlegs under glasses to set them free outside, the way she leaves notes in my lunch every morning and cries over commercials with puppies in them. She could never kill someone. Maybe she did know Derek Abbott, and if she’s been secretly visiting his grave for years, then she obviously cared about him. Maybe she was a witness and was too scared to come forward. That would be the kind of mistake that could haunt a person. Or maybe her mistake was something else entirely.
Nothing that Malcolm has said proves she played a role in his death.
“I can’t believe she killed someone. I just can’t.” I lift my gaze to his. “If you were me, you wouldn’t believe it either.” I’m chewing my lip, considering my options, when, out of the corner of my eye, I see Malcolm gingerly pushing to his feet. In less time than it takes to blink, I have my knife in my hand. His light-brown eyes slowly bounce from the weapon to my face and back again.
“Really?” he says, taking a careful step toward me. “My lightning-quick leap to my feet prompted you to get all stabby?”
I tighten my grip, but he doesn’t seem intimidated at all.
Holding his side, Malcolm limps closer, until he can see into the parking lot, where the manager is still struggling to wrestle the door to my old room back into place. “Think that’ll take him another five minutes?”
“Why?”
“Because I need that reward money, and the only way I’m going to find your mom again is if you help me, which you’re not going to do unless I can prove I’m telling the truth. So I’m going to get you to someone you can believe.”
I’m playing lookout.
