Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
I raced home from Elyse’s to get there before Dominic showed up. I basically walked into my apartment, spun around, and walked back out the door at the sound of his text.
I climbed into his car and demanded an answer to where we were going. He made sure to put the vehicle in motion, and after a few tugs at his hair, he got into it. “I know the whole trip to Pennsylvania was a bust last time, but—”
“Are you serious?”
“Hear me out,” he pleaded, offering up a greasy brown paper bag.
I yanked it out of his hand. I could eat the entire breakfast sandwich before the light at the end of my street turned green; it didn’t mean I was agreeing to anything.
“I did some more research,” he continued, hurrying to get it all out while my mouth was preoccupied. “The place has a different name than when Marin lived there.”
“Allegedly,” I chimed in, mouth full.
“Fine,” he said, humoring me. “In the period of time that Marin would have hypothetically lived there, the place had a different name.”
“And…?” I swallowed.
“And it was owned by Care Vision, LLC. Not the same company that owns it anymore.”
“Riveting,” I mocked.
“Stick with me. Care Vision, LLC, ran into some major legal drama a while back. They were operating heavily in some gray areas between a school, a detention center, and a psychiatric facility, I don’t know.
Whatever they were calling themselves in whatever moment to manipulate funding and circumvent regulations. ”
“Okay…”
“They sold the facility to some big nationwide treatment center—that’s not important.
Care Vision, LLC, didn’t disband. They got out of the kid business, but they still operate four halfway homes outside Philadelphia.
And more than that, Care Vision, LLC, has an active lease on three storage units in East Buford, Pennsylvania. ”
“How do you know that—about the storage units?”
“I called the number on the website, pretending I was from the city tax office. I said I was calling to confirm they no longer owned or leased any property in East Buford and they quickly corrected me, afraid of more fines.”
“Very savvy.”
“So the files have to be in there, right? I mean, what else would they keep in there?”
“I don’t know, furniture?”
“No one is going to pay rent to store some old furniture for ten years.”
“You still have the same problem—controlled access.” I couldn’t let him know I was nervous, but I sure could let him know I was annoyed and hopefully thwart this before we reached the highway.
“You’re driving me all the way out there again to be reminded of a thing called locks?
There has to be a better way to go about this. ”
“I did have that same problem…” He paused, waiting for me to beg him for further explanation.
“Buuuut?” I obliged.
“I called the storage unit office. It’s a mom-and-pop place, not one of those huge companies—just, like, a guy who’s owned some units forever.
I said I was performing a periodic security test and wanted to make sure the list of people with access to the units was up to date.
The owner faxed me the list, can you believe it?
He didn’t know how to email it. I had to sign up for an online fax number. ”
“With your own name?”
“No, I used a fake email and that’s all I needed. I mean, I’m sure some Mr. Robot cyber police could track my IP or something, but I’m not going to sweat it. We’re not stealing the crown jewels.”
“What are you going to do with the list?”
“I told the man we’d send someone over in the next week because we’re thinking about going digital.
He spouted off a ton of reasons not to go purely digital, mostly about the Chinese blowing up all our satellites, but he seemed very eager to keep Care Vision as happy customers.
So I found the guy on the list who looks the most like me and John made me a fake ID. ”
“Who’s John?”
“You know John. He lives with Jake.”
“Oh, right,” I said, having no idea who John was. All those guys looked the same to me. Not a lot of diversity, a lot of ripped black jeans and faux-faded graphic tees.
I was already in the car and his plan seemed a hell of a lot more solid than Operation Ace Ventura. I couldn’t very well let him get to those files without me, so I said, “Fine.”
“Thank you!” He beamed, adjusting in his seat, expressively getting into long-car-ride mode.
Spending five hours in the car and then five hours back with him, or anyone, was not particularly enticing, but I didn’t really have another option.
So many holes in the dam, but Dominic getting access to those files seemed to be the most problematic at the moment.
I didn’t know if there were files in those storage units, and even if there were, I didn’t know if there would be one for me.
I didn’t want to think about what I would have to do if there was.
Could I trust Dominic to keep my secret?
Was it possible he already knew and this was all a ruse to torture me?
Short of violence, all I could do at this point was wait and find out.
So I sat quietly and thought about all the other problems I was ignoring in favor of this one.
I needed to be with Porter, wherever he was. He hadn’t gone home like I’d told him to and he hadn’t responded to any of my texts. I should have been looking for him, but short of reporting my car missing, I had no place to start.
And Elyse. What was I to even think about her anymore?
She wasn’t the person who’d met Porter at Old Navy.
Was that enough to believe she wasn’t involved?
She could have hired someone—an aspiring actor.
Or was it Dominic who’d hired someone? Dominic, sitting next to me, taking me on this trip, laughing on the inside about how dumb I must be.
Taking cues from Abel or going rogue to impress Abel or going rogue to try to get the upper hand on Abel.
“Check it out,” Dominic said, pausing my spiral by handing me the fake ID. “John did a great job.”
Or John! Was it John? Whoever John was. I was getting worked up. I counted the buttons around the car radio, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.
“What are you doing?” Dominic asked.
“What?”
“You’re staring at the radio. You can change it if you want.”
“No, nothing. I zoned out. I’m tired.”
“We can get a hotel tonight…so we don’t have to drive all the way back.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I muttered, not really considering it.
“I just need a name,” he said unprompted. “Whatever Marin is going by now. That would be game changing.”
“Sure would,” I said, knowing that if he had his way, we would be spending the next five hours talking about Marin Haggerty. I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes, and welcomed the nap I desperately needed.
- - - - -
It worked. Dominic’s plan worked. I could have called ahead when we stopped for gas, warned the place they were getting scammed, but if there was something about my identity in there, better Dominic find it than the police. At least this way I had a chance to find it first.
The old man in the shoebox office handed over the keys without hesitation. He barely looked at the ID as he griped about the pitfalls of digital recordkeeping. All John’s hard work for nothing.
Dominic hoisted open the door to the first unit, the rattling of the chains echoing across the cracked parking lot.
There they were—stacks of aging bankers boxes.
The door motion triggered a light inside, but the glow seemed almost imaginary, like an aha moment Indiana Jones might experience.
Dominic ran his finger down the boxes in the first row, scanning the labels; they were arranged by birth year, too recent for me.
He moved to the second unit and lifted the door, the sound and the light less symbolic this time. Older boxes ran along the bottom. He glanced over and raised his eyebrows, overjoyed with the possibility of getting something right.
I took a deep breath. Was this it? Was this dingy storage unit about to expose me? What was I even going to do about it? Knock Dominic over the head? Drag his body into the unit and lock it up? He’s flaky. Who would even notice he was gone?
“Help me,” he said as he started to pull boxes out and onto the pavement. “We need 1996.”
A part of me was flattered that he knew such a specific personal detail, as if he had absorbed something I shared with him on a first date, not because he was obsessively trying to hunt me down.
Three layers in, there they were—the 1996 files. He pulled down the box labeled A–H, the one that Haggerty would be in.
“Grab one,” he said. “Her name could be anything.”
I skipped two boxes in favor of S–Z, the one where Tanner would be. Maybe, just maybe, while he was distracted, I could take the file out, slip it under my shirt.
We both started crawling our fingers through the files.
I recognized some of the names. Eddie Slocum, we called him Eddie Scrotum—hilarious.
Something bad had happened to him; something bad had happened to all of us.
Some of the other kids were really mean to him—cruel, cutting insults.
There was no room for sympathy when we were all just trying to survive.
Jillian Simmons—we’d shared a therapy group and she could scream like nobody’s business. She had a really screwed-up ear. Her mother’s boyfriend had cut her with a broken bottle. I think that was her.
I looked for my old roommate, Natalie Shea, but she must have been 1997, because I didn’t see her file.
She reminded me of this boy Declan, who was such a dick to her.
He was a dick to everyone, really—the worst kind of insecure bully.
I had such admiration for my father’s cognitive restraint that impulsive dumbass boys had always tested my resolve.
My fingers reached the spot where Gwen Tanner’s file should be, but there was nothing. It went from Stanley to Thompson. I kept going, but I reached the end of the box with no sign of Tanner. I should have been relieved, but now I was worried it was misfiled in one of Dominic’s boxes.
Dominic’s hands paused. “I don’t see anything,” he said, sighing. “No one that looks like her. You find anything?” He leaned back onto his heels.
I shook my head. He was so trusting. Even if my file had been there, would he have just taken my word for it? “Maybe she was never here,” I tried. “Maybe James Calhoun was having an affair.”
“Let’s double-check each other.” He shoved his box in my direction before reaching for mine. So much for trust.
- - - - -
We looked through a trillion boxes…twice.
He wanted it so badly that he convinced himself I could have been lying about my age and we had to go through years of boxes.
When I moved into that place, I wasn’t much removed from the school pictures Dominic had access to, and he knew that none of those little girls in the files were me.
Despite his desperation, he finally accepted defeat.
Only it didn’t feel like the miracle I was hoping for; its absence was illogical.
Instead, it was much more likely that someone had beaten us to it.
Someone had purposefully removed my file.