Chapter Nine Boise, ID Present Day
Chapter Nine
Boise, ID
Present Day
The knock at the motel door came around four o’clock in the morning.
Chrissie, who’d only fallen asleep a few hours before, was startled into heart-pounding wakefulness, her every sense on alert as she leaped out of bed and reached for the nearest weapon.
Since this was the bedside lamp, and the heavy metal base was screwed down to prevent theft, she didn’t make it very far.
Not that it mattered when she found that Scarlett had already beaten her to the peephole. Scarlett was fully dressed and didn’t seem at all disoriented as she glanced over her shoulder at Chrissie.
“It’s your protégé,” she said as she unlatched the chain and swung the door open. “River! What are you doing here at this hour?”
By this time, Chrissie had managed to orient herself to her surroundings. She also oriented herself to the fact that the girl’s heavily studded face was streaked with tears, her hair dripping down her back as she stood clutching a faded yellow suitcase in the rain.
“Did you mean what you said before?” she asked, looking first at Scarlett and then at Chrissie, oddly hesitant to cross the threshold into the room. “About wanting to help me?”
It was a good thing the lamp had all four screws because Chrissie managed to rip out two of them in her second reach for a weapon.
“What did he do to you?” she demanded. “Tell me where you live. Get me my pepper spray. Scarlett, call the police and warn them there’s about to be a murder.”
Instead of doing any of those things, River and Scarlett shared a knowing look.
“I’m serious.” Chrissie shoved her feet into her Crocs and started reaching for her coat. The weather outside didn’t look pleasant, but then, in this state of mind, neither was she. “Where are the car keys?”
“It’s not my ex,” River said. “I promise. Not in the way you’re thinking.”
River still stood on the other side of the door, so in the absence of a major felony to take the edge off, Chrissie drew the girl into the room and patted her down in an effort to examine her for injuries. Other than being soaked to the skin and trembling all over, she appeared to be okay.
“You’ll have to excuse Chrissie for foaming at the mouth,” Scarlett said as she shut the door behind them. “Her mama bear instincts are so deeply ingrained that if she took up residence in a zoo, people would come from around the world to catch a glimpse of her.”
“My instincts aren’t that bad,” Chrissie said as she sank to the edge of the bed. When the adrenaline drained like that, ebbing out like the ocean at low tide, her knees were always the first to go. “People would only come from the next state, at most.”
This earned her a watery chuckle from River, though the girl had her arms wrapped around her midsection and a look of increasing anxiety on her pinched face.
“Are you sure this is okay? I meant to come talk to you as soon as my shift got over, but I figured you were only being nice and—”
“It’s okay,” Scarlett said for both of them. “And I think I know what this is about. I’m sorry. I should’ve asked before I tagged the location.”
“Wait.” Chrissie looked back and forth between them. “What do you mean?”
Scarlett winced and handed Chrissie her phone. “You were right about posting that video. It’s, uh, getting a lot more views than I was expecting.”
Chrissie had to put on her glasses before she could look at the screen—without her contact lenses, she was basically a mole rat—but the sounds of piano music and River’s raspy voice told her more than enough.
“Two hundred thousand likes?” Chrissie frowned down at the screen. “Is that a lot?”
“Is that…?” Scarlett’s voice trailed off in disbelief. “In less than twelve hours? Are you serious?”
“It’s a lot,” River said quietly. She pushed her wet hair out of her face.
“My stepmom—that is, my stepsisters—saw the video right away. They, uh… That is, I didn’t exactly…
” She cast a look of such painful entreaty at Chrissie that it was all she could do not to pull the poor drowned child into her arms. “I didn’t leave home on good terms. They’ve been looking for me for a while now. ”
Chrissie could have torn the lamp off the table for real this time—and for no reason other than to lob it at Scarlett’s head. It was just like her friend to ignore all the warning signs and make a very public announcement of River’s location without her permission.
Since brute force wasn’t an option, and River was starting to look sick to her stomach, Chrissie did the only thing she could think of: She went to work.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do. First of all, Scarlett will take down that video—”
“What’s the point? This thing is a viral sensation. There’s no un-ringing that bell.”
“Scarlett,” Chrissie warned.
“Chrissie,” Scarlett warned right back.
“You had no right to post it in the first place.”
“Technically, I had every right. You were performing in a public location.”
They might have stood at this impasse for a while if not for River’s quiet voice sliding into the conversation yet again. “It’s fine. The damage is already done. There’s no sense in deleting the video now.”
Chrissie didn’t like the idea of giving Scarlett a free pass, but if she’d learned one thing as the parent of a strong-willed teenager, it was when to choose her battles.
“Fine, it can stay up. River, is there somewhere safe we can take you? A relative you can stay with, or a friend maybe?”
She thought, but didn’t add, a female friend. The idea of dumping this teenager with yet another man all too willing to take advantage of her situation was one that didn’t sit well with her.
River looked down at her shoes, a clunky pair of boots that Chrissie noted for the first time were so battered that they were being held together with black duct tape.
“Well, I have this aunt—a great-aunt, really—but she lives all the way in Chicago.” She glanced up again, a not-unhopeful gleam in her eyes. “You guys are on a road trip, right? Are you heading that way?”
The Windy City hadn’t been on their list of places to visit, but it wasn’t so far off the beaten path to make it an impossibility.
It was also one of the many places Chrissie had never been before.
Scarlett had lived there for a few years—fallen in love there, naturally—but that could be said of at least a dozen different global destinations.
Something about big cities always put stars in her eyes and glitter in her pants.
“We are now.” Chrissie did a quick mental calculation. “How much time do we have before they come looking for you?”
“I don’t know. An hour? Two hours?” She shrugged in a way that both looked and felt wrong.
“I didn’t take anything valuable when I left, I swear.
Just some stuff that belonged to my mom.
My dad and stepmom don’t even want it. Or me.
They’re just mad because my running away made them look bad in front of their friends. ”
“I’m ready to go whenever you are,” Scarlett said. “Lead the way, oh captain.”
Chrissie shot her friend a harassed look. For someone who had caused all this drama in the first place, she was being surprisingly blasé about it. “You could show a little remorse, you know.”
“Why? This is exactly what you wanted. A chance to leap to the rescue.” Scarlett paused, eyeing her carefully. “Aren’t you even going to ask what River stole? Or why she left home in the first place?”
Chrissie was already shoving her clothes and toiletries into her bag by this point, but she had an answer ready to go.
Not only did she understand what it was like to live with parents who cared only about the appearance of things, but the thought of her own daughter being in a similar situation—alone in the world and terrified half to death, in trouble of any kind, even that of her own making—was enough to make her throw caution off the nearest cliff.
“No,” she said frankly. “None of that matters.”
“Then there you go. What good would my feeling guilty do?”
Aware that River was watching this exchange in silent discomfort—and creeping toward the door in a way that presaged flight—Chrissie did her best to calm the girl.
“It’s fine, River. I don’t care what you did or why you did it. If you say you’re in trouble and that there’s a great-aunt in Chicago willing to help you out of it, that’s enough for me.”
“Th-thank you,” the girl stammered in a subdued tone.
“We should all be so lucky,” Scarlett muttered in an even more subdued one.
That was the end of the line as far as Chrissie was concerned. She wasn’t sure what was coming over her lately, but something about spending all this time with Scarlett was bringing her buried girlhood emotions rushing to the surface.
“Enough, Scarlett,” she snapped. “Have you forgotten what it’s like to be that age? To have the safety net pulled out from under you and be thrust into the world without any kind of preparation?”
Chrissie stared at her friend, daring her to argue. Neither one of them could forget that particular summer of their adolescence, when life and death had become so intertwined that the two were forever linked inside her heart.
“I know you think I’m a pushover, and that I’m just a sitting duck for everyone to take advantage of, but this is what I do,” Chrissie said.
“When a fellow human being asks for my help, I give it. When they say they’re in need, I take them at their word.
I accept what the world gives me and do my best to bear it without complaint.
Maybe that makes me weak or silly, and maybe I sometimes end up doing more harm than good, but it’s the one thing—the only thing—I have. You know that better than anyone.”
The silence in the room suddenly felt so heavy that it seemed she was going to be asked to bear that, as well. But even though Chrissie could feel her muscles thrumming with new energy, Scarlett did what she always did in situations like these.
She smiled.