CHAPTER 28
Four Girls
I read Victoria’s note again. I glance around—Lucio’s nowhere in sight.
Fading footsteps. I spot Victoria at the far end of the corridor, the one that leads to the gym—the new gym, which was completed last fall and is almost the size of the rest of the school combined.
Just before rounding the corner Victoria peers over her shoulder at me. She crooks her finger again.
I feel a little bit like Alice, following the white rabbit down the hole.
She starts down a set of stairs in the back of the building, then ignores the entrance to the gym and instead opens a set of double doors with an ominous red sign: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. DO NOT USE.
I cringe and wait for a zillion alarms to go off. But nothing happens.
Whew.
Victoria heads outside, and I trail after her. It’s started to rain—a damp, misty, cling-to-your-skin Washington rain. I can feel my hair reacting, puffing out, becoming enormous; the frizzball does not care for humidity. I’ve never been to this part of the schoolyard. There’s a parking lot that’s deserted except for a large brown dumpster piled high with cardboard boxes and one lone sneaker. Weeds sprout out of cracks in the asphalt, and the paint delineating the parking spots have faded to ghostly white flecks. In the far distance the cross-country team is doing laps around the track, small as ants from my vantage point.
Some instinct makes me pause and spin around. Behind us the lit-up windows of the school building glow eerily in the mist. In the northwest corner of the second floor a face appears in a window, then vanishes. It looked like a blond girl, but I’m not totally sure. Was it Ashley? Or some random student?
“Sunshine, please! We must be on our way,” Victoria calls out.
“I’m coming!”
Beyond the parking lot is a patch of overgrown grass and fuzzy milkweed. Beyond that are dense woods, mostly pine trees but also some maple and birch too as well as a thick undergrowth of motley shrubs and ferns.
Victoria heads straight for the woods, doubling her pace, and I half run so I don’t lose her. Here, what little sunlight there was to begin with is immediately snuffed out by the dark canopy of branches overhead. My Chuck Taylors squish and slosh on the muddy path. The air smells like dead leaves.
Something stirs in a shrub. Something big. I jump.
“What was that?” I shout-whisper to Victoria.
Just then Lucio steps out from behind the shrub. “Good, you’re here.”
“Wah! Lucio, you scared me. Why are you being all cloak-and-daggerish?”
“Because I didn’t want anyone to see us. Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” He turns to Victoria. “Thank you for finding her. Where’s Nolan?”
“I’ll go back and retrieve him, dear. He was just finishing up a makeup algebra test, and I didn’t think I should disturb him. I believe teachers—real teachers anyway—get annoyed about that sort of thing.”
Victoria takes off her chunky black glasses and blows on the fogged-up lenses. Then she slips them back on and quietly disappears through a stand of trees.
Even as a pretend eighties rocker, she seems mysterious.
The rain intensifies. Lucio frowns up at the invisible sky.
“I think I passed a lean-to around here somewhere.”
“A lean what?”
“A lean-to. People build them near hiking trails and campsites to keep themselves and their stuff out of bad weather. We’re maybe fifty yards away from one of the trailheads for Ridge Mountain.”
“And you know this how, Mr. I’ve-never-been-away-from-Mexico?”
“Nolan gave me a ton of maps. Street maps, hiking maps, geological survey maps. Plus I’m a quick study. Come on!”
He grabs my hand and leads me deeper into the woods. There’s something comforting and familiar about Lucio’s warm, strong hand grasping mine; he used to lead me around the jungles of Llevar la Luz this way. Of course, that was before things got confusing between us. I don’t feel confused anymore, though. I wonder if he does?
After a few minutes he takes me off-trail to a small, scraggly wooden hut—or rather, half a small, scraggly wooden hut; it’s completely open on one side. Twigs, pine needles, and leaves litter the makeshift roof.
“Ta-da! Lean-to,” Lucio announces grandly. “After you.”
“Allrighty.”
I enter awkwardly, head bowed, and manage to trip on a mushroomy log.
“Ow!”
“Easy!”
There’s very little room inside, which forces the two of us to stand close together. I comb my fingers through my puffy wet hair. “Sorry I’m such a mess.”
“You’re not a mess. You look—” Lucio stops and crosses his arms over his chest. “Yeah, so… um…”
Awkward, awkward, awkward.
“I have a lot to tell you,” I say. “But you go first. Victoria said you had something urgent to share? By the way, how did you get down to Llevar la Luz and back so fast?”
“Aidan chartered a private jet. He needed a bunch of files, and besides, he was worried because we left the place in such a rush. He wanted to make sure it was totally locked up, that there hadn’t been any attempted break-ins.”
“Were there? Any attempted break-ins?”
“No.” Lucio reaches inside his jacket pocket and extracts a large manila envelope. “This is the urgent thing I wanted to share with you. Nolan too when he gets here. I came across the contents in Aidan’s lab. I don’t think I was supposed to see them.”
He opens the envelope and pulls out several black-and-white photographs.
“Brace yourself,” he warns.
“Um, okay.” I bite my lip nervously.
He hands me a photograph, then a second and a third and a fourth.
I blink and stare at each one. Then I begin to shake, and not because of the rain or the cold or my soaking-wet clothes and hair.
I clamp my hand over my mouth.
There’s a dead girl in each photo—a different dead girl. All four girls appear to be lying on morgue tables, partially covered with white sheets.
“Who are they?” I whisper, horrified.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out. What’s Aidan doing with these photographs? Obviously, he never shared them with me. And he has no idea I have them now.”
“Oh my gosh! This is so—”
“I know, I know.” Lucio wraps his arm around my shoulder, and I nestle closer. Dreadful thoughts are swirling around in my head.
What is my father doing with pictures of dead girls?
Outside the lean-to the rain continues to fall. I study the photos again, more carefully, one by one. The images are grainy and somewhat blurry, so it’s hard to make out all the details.
When I get to the fourth one I do a double-take… and gasp.
“Lucio, I know her!”