“Is it safe?” Cate asked. “If this guy is following us, are we just leading him to people’s doorsteps? We shouldn’t drag the others into it.”
“Apparently the Clarksons are still fine,” Tom argued. “This guy, whoever he is, seems to be following his own logic.”
“But maybe not. And if he’s hunting us down, that’s a big gamble to take with people’s lives, Thomas,” Cate said. “Though we already know you like to take big risks if it’ll scratch your ego.”
Tom swallowed, gave a tight shrug.
“Maybe we stay here and set a trap for him,” Isabelle said, her voice brightening.
“A trap?” Cate repeated, trying to understand. “Like … let him catch us here?”
Isabelle started to nod, but I wasn’t in the mood for her wide-eyed eccentricity, my nerves sharpened to points. “Whatever you’ve learned from your homeschooling, Isabelle, it’s not going to work that way in the real world,” I said. Seeing her expression, I softened a little: “Sorry. Sorry, but we need to take real action. There are only two women left that we haven’t visited. Angela Grassi and Barbara Kim.”
“Barbara would know about the photograph of Lily-Anne,” Isabelle said quietly. She shut her eyes. Her eyelashes were still pale, giving her a ghostly look, framed by the severity of that black dye. “She’s the only one who knows for sure. She’s right there.”
The photograph. I’d nearly forgotten. Lily-Anne pregnant, a second time, not part of Bellanger’s original and documented experiment. I was at once curious and nervous: The idea that something this big and this integral could’ve been concealed. What it might mean for everything.
“I guess we could try.” Cate dropped her hand from her hair. An energy moved into the motel room, clear as a beam of light, disrupting the fog of our fear and uncertainty.
“Barbara Kim’s in North Carolina,” Tom said. “A town called Sweetland. I don’t have her home address, but she runs a business there. A flower shop. She runs it with her family.”
35
“Isabelle?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
A blocky TV set hung precariously in the corner of the gas station. Isabelle was standing right in front of it, head tilted upward. The lines of her body were so compact and unmoving that I had the uncanny sensation of seeing a paused movie.
We’d left the motel that night and entered North Carolina in the dreamy gray of the predawn hours, stopping at a gas station to refuel. Isabelle and I had come inside the convenience store to stock up on our diet of chips, Twinkies, watery coffee. The place was nearly deserted this early, just one employee.
The drive between Pennsylvania and North Carolina—nine hours—had been tense and jumpy, all of us feeling stripped-down. I couldn’t shake the sensation of being chased. By the Bellangers; by the men of Kithira. Who knew who else? I’d set out to find my mother and had instead picked up a trail of strangers in my wake, none of them the person I wanted.
“Izzy,” I said, still at the counter, wallet out. I didn’t want to draw undue attention to ourselves right now. “Are you okay?”
“Don’t call me Izzy,” she snapped. “Only my mother called me that.”
Isabelle’s face was on the screen, staring back down at the actual Isabelle. Staring right at me. But of course it wasn’t Girl Two. It was an old photo of Patricia, muted brown hair swept over one shoulder. The photo vanished, replaced by a carefully somber newscaster.
“She’s dead.” Isabelle was poker-faced, voice not shifting register. “They killed her.” Behind the counter, the woman froze, eyes darting toward us. “The men from Kithira. They were going after me but they got to her first.”
My whole body went numb. Patricia: gone. The woman who’d brought the Homestead to life along with my mother, the one who’d been a secret part of my origin story, a signed initial at the bottom of secret love letters. Gone. They’d hunted her down. How much worse would they do to us? I’d thought I’d avenged the Strouds, but maybe I’d only introduced more harm to the world, opened the door to more violence against the Homesteaders.
I tried to speak in a gentle voice. “Let’s get back to the car. We can talk about this when we’re alone.”
Isabelle turned and came to the counter, moving too quickly. She grabbed the woman’s wrist, and the cashier yelped, trying to pull away. “They shot her in the back while she was trying to get away,” Isabelle said, still with that eerie calm. “My mother’s dead.”