Stubby’s face fell. “That, I haven’t figured out yet.”
And then I offered up my idea—the one that’d formed after looking at the last birthday card I’d received from my Dad, which I had tacked to my bulletin board at home. “I think we should send her a card for her birthday.”
“A birthday card?”
I nodded vigorously. “Yeah, Stubs, she’d totally open a birthday card, even if it didn’t have a return address, just to see if there was a check inside or to find out who it was from. I’ll bet if you dig around on the Web, you could come up with her parents’ home address, right?”
“Her last name is Wyly, and she lives in Jupiter. Yeah, I could find it. What would we say in the card?” Looking at him I knew he was intrigued by the idea.
“I don’t know, but we’d have to be careful about it. We’d have to say something like, ‘We heard you’re getting a new car for your birthday, and you need to be really careful driving it.’ Maybe we could throw in something like, ‘Don’t text and drive!’ and back it up with a statistic or something.”
Stubby eyed me like I was nuts. “She’s not going to believe something like that, Mads. Plus, we don’t know for sure if that’s the way she’s going to die.”
“Well, then, what would you suggest?” I was a little exasperated. I had no idea how to warn Payton, because, like Stubby pointed out, I had no idea how she was going to die. If I knew that, then I could set something in motion to prevent it, but all I had was the date. That’s it. Only a date to indicate that she was a dead girl walking.
“Maybe we could call her parents’ house like we called Mrs. Tibbolt?”
I shook my head. “If the feds are tapping my phone, they might also be tapping yours, Stubs. We called her from your phone, remember?”
Stubby frowned, but then he brightened. “Okay, then we’ll make the call from a public phone, ask for Payton, and disguise our voices. We could say we know something she doesn’t. We know she’s in danger, and we’re worried that she might die on her birthday.”
It was my turn to look at Stubs like he had to be kidding. “If you got a phone call from a total stranger telling you that you were about to die, wouldn’t your next call be to the police to report a death threat from a lunatic? She’d dismiss the warning, which wouldn’t help her, and report the call, which wouldn’t help us. What if a surveillance camera catches us using the phone? Those cameras are everywhere. We can’t risk it.”
Stubby’s gaze dropped. “Well, we have to try something that she’ll believe, Mads.”
“I agree,” I told him, and I meant it. “But you also need to accept that even if we get her attention and she believes us, it might not prevent her death. It could still happen.”
Stubby frowned. “But even if there’s a chance we can save her, we have to try,” he said. I could tell that he was still feeling guilty over not trying harder to save Tevon.
I put a hand on his good arm. “You’re right, and we’ll warn her with the card. We’ll be really careful not to leave our fingerprints on it, and we’ll choose the wording so that we don’t come off sounding crazy. Hopefully she’ll listen and be careful next Wednesday, but that’s the most we can do. Anything else is too dangerous for us and could even push her to do something risky simply to prove us wrong.”
Stubs sighed and nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “We’ll go with the card.”
After school we headed for the Drug Mart, and I almost came up short when I saw Ma in a blue smock standing next to another employee who was showing her how to organize the developed-photos envelopes. “Hi, you two!” She waved when she spotted us.
“Whoa, Mrs. Fynn!” Stubs said, almost as shocked as I was to see her behind the counter. “When did you start working here?”
“Today is my first day,” Ma said proudly.
I smiled encouragingly at her but couldn’t help drop my gaze to her hands. If there were tremors, I knew she’d be totally sober. If they were calm, I knew she’d be sneaking sips in the back.
I bit my lip when I saw that there wasn’t a hint of a tremor. I could only hope that nobody at the store caught on.
Ma waved us away, saying that she had to focus on her training. We headed to the card rack and picked out one together. Making sure not to handle it with our bare hands, we paid for it and headed across town to the Starbucks next to the Jupiter post office to carefully craft a message.
Stubby wrote the message out using his casted hand, which was a good thing because it altered his handwriting enough to make it nearly illegible. We decided to send Payton a message from a secret admirer (that part was true at least), and told her that we were someone who sometimes had strange visions that came true. We wrote that she needed to be very careful when she drove, especially on her birthday. And in general we told her to be careful on her birthday because the alignment of the stars suggested that it was an unlucky day for her.
As Stubby read it back to me I had to admit that it did sound a little crazy, but it was the best plan we had. “If you got this card, what would you think?” Stubs asked me.
I frowned. “I’d probably think that some wacko had sent it, but I’d probably also listen to the message—just in case.”
Stubby then shoved the card into the envelope using his sleeve to cover his hands. Then he used his phone to look up her address. It took a few clicks to get the Wylys’ new address in Jupiter, but we were confident our card would find its way to her. Stubs then stood to head next door to mail it and said, “You coming?”
But I was only halfway through my caramel latte, and it was so nice and warm in the Starbucks. “I think I’ll stay here and study for a while.”