God, this was some heavy stuff. I really needed some answers. What I needed was Laylen. He’d help me figure all this out.
Alex stopped the Jeep at a stop sign. “Do you think you saw a vision without a crystal ball?”
“Huh?” How was I supposed to answer?
With the truth? My gut instinct told me not to. “No, I was just curious. That’s all.” He stared at me, his bright green eyes weighing heavily on me, causing the intensity of the electricity to spark up. “Gemma, it feels like you’re keeping something from me.
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Are you? Because if you are, whatever it is, you can tell me.”
I’d have liked to have been able to tell him, but I was afraid he’d just freak out. I had to tell someone, though. It was important. And since he was the only one here… “I don’t know…Well, it’s just that back at Laylen’s house I thought—” Alex’s phone rang, interrupting me. He slid his phone out of the pocket of his jeans, and relief swept across his face as he glanced at the screen. “It’s Stephan,” he said, then answered it.
I could hear Stephan’s voice murmuring on the other end. Alex pulled out onto the main road, and we drove by a sign welcoming us to Mountain View, Population 523.
Wow. A town smaller than Afton. Who’d have thought?
“Yeah, hold on,” Alex said into the phone. He parked the Jeep on the side of the road, in front of a cedar-sided house that had 544/695
a giant sculpture of a moose decorating the yard.
“What are we doing here?” I asked, but he was already climbing out of the car. “Stay here,” he told me and slammed the door shut.
He didn’t head toward the house. He walked around to the back of the Jeep and stood there with the phone pressed to his ear.
Obviously,
they
were
discussing
something that they didn’t want me to hear.
That meant I needed to hear it, right? I mean, it could be something important.
Maybe something about me. Oh no. What if they were making a plan to remove my emotions again?
One good thing about an old Jeep is that the windows aren’t automatic. This allowed me to crack the window without all the noisy buzzing pressing a button would have brought on. I leaned my head toward the 545/695
window and tried to listen, but Alex had left the engine running and I could hardly hear a thing. I eased the window down a sliver more, and put my ear up to the opening, the cold air biting at my skin.
“Well, what do you want me to do until then?” I heard Alex saying. A pause and then, “I know, but she’s growing suspicious.
You don’t know how she is…She asks a lot of questions.” Another pause, this time longer.
“I know, but it’s hard for me to do that with her. She just…I just can’t…I don’t know. I have a hard time lying to her.” Well, that was news to me. Not the lying part—I already knew he was a liar—but the part about him having a hard time lying to me. That was a shocker, and, hey, maybe I could use it to my advantage.
“Alright, fine. I’ll see you in a bit,” Alex said.
I had very little time to react to the “see you in a bit” part. I fumbled to roll the 546/695
window back up and barely got it up in time, my hand dropping from the handle right as Alex opened the door.
All I could do was pray he hadn’t seen me.
“Stephan’s on his way,” he told me, slamming the door closed. “He’ll be here in a bit.”
Oh, yippy, I thought sarcastically. “Oh yeah.”
He pulled the Jeep back onto the road.
“Yeah. Marco and Sophia are with him, and he said that Laylen and Aislin are alright.” I’d have felt relieved except for the sick feeling in my stomach, warning me that it was a bunch of crap. It was Stephan we were talking about, and Laylen had warned me not to trust him.
“So we should probably get some food,” Alex said, turning into a parking lot belonging to a brick building that had a huge sign that read Edmunds Grocery’s. “Then we’ll go 547/695
back to the cabin so we’ll be there when everyone shows up.”
“So where are Aislin and Laylen,” I asked. “I mean, why did they never transport back?”
“Stephan said that he sent them on an errand,” he said, not really answering my question.
“What kind of an errand?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral, not wanting to let on that I was suspicious.
“I don’t know—he didn’t say.” He parked the Jeep and shut the engine off, then turned in his seat so he was facing me. “Gemma, what exactly is it your getting at here?” I shrugged. “I wasn’t getting at anything.
I was just wondering where they were. That’s all.”
He studied my face over warily. “No, that’s not all….Okay, what did Laylen tell you?”
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I unbuckled my seatbelt. “I already told you, we didn’t talking about anything really.” He kept his eyes on me. Despite my urge to hover back, I stayed where I was and kept my face expressionless. I don’t know what he was expecting—me to breakdown and pour my heart and soul out to him. But finally, he gave up on whatever it was he was trying to achieve, took the keys out of the ignition, and opened up the door. “Let’s go.” Okay, so I know this is going to sound totally weird, but I’ve never actually been inside a grocery store before. No, I’m not kidding you. All through my childhood, Sophia and Marco rarely took me anywhere and never to a grocery store. So strolling through a store full of food was a whole new experience for me.
But I wasn’t basking in the it’s-like-I’m-a-real-person experience. No. I was too distracted. The whole vision thing was really 549/695
bugging me. I wanted to piece everything together. Every ounce of my body was telling me I had to.
And fast.
And there was also something else troubling me. The whole Marco, Sophia, and Stephan are-on-their-way thing. It wasn’t just my lack of enthusiasm that was troubling me either. No. It was that there were so many holes in the story Stephan had told Alex. Like for instance, why hadn’t anyone answered their phones during the millions of times Alex had tried to call them? Another thing, why did Alex have to get out of the Jeep to talk to Stephan? I hadn’t heard anything suspicious during my eavesdropping investigation. However, I couldn’t hear what was being said on the other end of the phone either. The only thing I’d really heard—and it only seemed semi-important—was that Alex had a difficult time lying to me.
I know. Who’d have guessed, right?
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Maybe I could use this information to my advantage. If Alex had a hard time lying to me, then perhaps, if I asked him enough questions, he just might let something slip out that he didn’t want me to know.
As we roamed up the snack aisle, I put on my best poker face. Well, here goes nothing. “So…I have a question.” Alex stopped pushing the cart to eye over the selection of granola bars. “Okay…what’s your question?”
Okay, so another thing I might have going for me here was that he seemed distracted. “Where were Marco, Sophia, and Stephan when you couldn’t get a hold of them?”
He selected a box of granola bars and dropped it in the cart. “They were up at a lodge in Jackson. I guess their car got stuck or something and they ended up having to stay longer than they expected to.” 551/695
There was so many things wrong with his answer. “Yeah, but why didn’t they answer their phones?”
He motioned behind me where the chips were. “Grab a bag of Doritos, would you?” I snatched one up and tossed it in the cart.
“Because you know how it is up there,” he said, inching the cart forward again.
I shook my head. “No. How is it up there?”
“Well, the phone service is really crappy.
There are just too many mountains or something, and most of the time you can’t get a signal.” He arched an eyebrow at me.
“Haven’t you ever tried to call anyone up there before?”