For now, I was outside town limits, by myself, in the growing dark.
But then a light flashed. My phone was blinking—and the small screen on it was bursting with a series of missed calls. The notices kept coming: calls and texts and voice mails, scrolling fast across the screen. My cell phone was acting like it had been jammed for days and was now spitting out every piece of communication in a breathless rush before final detonation.
Clearly the thing was broken.
I was about to pull out the battery, to see if that would help, when my phone lit up once more—this time with an incoming call. I answered immediately—expecting Ruby. But I hadn’t checked the caller ID. If I had, I would have seen it was a call from Pennsylvania.
“Chloe! I can’t believe it, Chloe, is that you?”
It was a woman’s voice. She seemed distantly familiar, like a television character from some long-canceled show, someone I swore I knew but couldn’t come up with a name and place to fit to her. My mind searched for recognition.
Then the woman said, “Your father’s been worried sick! You’ve given him an ulcer. What were you thinking, Chloe!”
Then it came to me: my stepmother. That’s who was on the phone.
“Sorry,” I said. “I—”
“Your father’s been trying to reach you. We thought something happened! You never answer your phone!”
“I didn’t get any messages . . .” As far as I knew, I never even heard the phone ringing. But had all those missed calls eating up the memory of my phone just now been for real?
“We’ve been calling this number, Chloe. This number. Your father called. And I’ve called. Your voice-mail box ran out of space. We would have contacted the police if your mother hadn’t been in touch with us to tell us where you were.”
“You talked to Sparrow?”
“Yes. She called us. You know I don’t enjoy talking to that woman, but at least she could pick up a phone.”
Ruby must have forced our mother to call and be my alibi, that was all I could figure.
“Sorry,” I said again.
“There must be something very wrong with your phone, Chloe,” my stepmother said. “Your father was terribly worried.”
“Really,” I said. For sure I didn’t believe it. Even though my phone was being difficult now, it had worked fine in town—there were no problems with the service, at least before tonight. Clearly he was only pretending to call me. He must have been relieved to have me off his hands all summer, not cluttering up his lawn with my life.
“Yes, really,” my stepmother said. “Don’t be so sarcastic. Stay right where you are; I’m running to go get your father. Do not hang up, Chloe. He wants to talk to you.”
As I waited, I sucked it up and decided to start walking. Eventually this road would hit a more trafficked road, like a highway, and I’d come upon a car willing to take me the rest of the way into town.
Town. Where girls didn’t disappear, at least for forever, and where no one could die, maybe ever, unless my sister wanted them to. Even if it was all in my head and I’d erased London permanently by letting her leave our borders, I wanted to be back inside. Where my sister had control over what was happening. Where things made sense.
My dad came on the phone and jumped straight into it: “You are not staying in New York. Your sister does not have the authority to enroll you in school, and I don’t know what imbeciles are running that high school, but they can’t . . . when you come home . . . don’t even know this Jonah . . . called that house . . . don’t even have an answering machine . . . tell your sister I said . . . not allowed to . . . sorry excuse for a mother . . . listening to me, young lady?”
“I can’t hear you,” I said, which was true, partly. I just liked knowing that Ruby wanted to keep me here. She wasn’t ever going to let me go again, and I was glad of it.