“A coincidence?”
Riley turned to face her friend. “Coincidence? Five seconds ago, my dad was a baby-stealing Wild Bill Hickok.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s Hitchcock. And why don’t you just ask to see your real birth certificate or something? If they won’t let you, then you know.” Shelby’s eyes were glazing again as she came up with a new storyline for Riley’s so-called life. “And then you can confront them with the evidence.”
“And what am I supposed to say? ‘Hey, Mom, Dad, did you snatch me away from my birth parents?’”
Now Shelby was biting her bottom lip. “Right. If they really are criminals, accusing them like that could make them snap. That could be their trigger.”
“Their trigger?”
“For going on a murderous rampage. And since you have no next-door neighbor, I would have to give the interview saying that the Spencers were nice, quiet people who kept to themselves mostly. The girl seemed well adjusted, nice enough. Kind of paranoid, but I guess that’s to be expected of a child cut out of her own mother’s womb.”
Riley crossed her arms in front of her chest. “So now my parents aren’t just kidnappers; they’re psychopaths on a murderous rampage who cut me out of my mother’s womb.”
“It’s possible I watch too much TV.”
? ? ?
Shelby blew Riley a kiss before dancing down the newly constructed front steps and locking herself in her Toyota Corolla—a rusting, paint-chipped heap that lacked a left turn signal but had a radio that could be heard from space. She cranked up a Death to Sea Monkeys song, and Riley poked her head in through the passenger side window while she and Shelby belted out the last refrain of “Underwater Universe.” At the last drumbeat, Riley stepped away, watching the Corolla roll down the driveway and into the street.
Riley suddenly felt very alone—last person in the world alone—as she watched Shelby’s ancient clunker head away from the house. The car looked remarkably out of place against the stark, modern houses all lined up in orderly rows. She stood on the porch, watching as the sun dipped, bleeding a heavy pink into the twilight. There was no sound out here. No sirens, no cars, no horns or echoed conversation, and suddenly the birth certificate, the emptiness, struck an icy finger of fear down the back of Riley’s neck.
I’m being ridiculous.
But still she couldn’t tear her eyes from scanning the horizon, from scrutinizing every house she could see: the black, gaping windows, empty driveways, open roads. It looked as if she was in a universe all her own, as if someone had sucked up every human being and left everything else as it was. Out here, all alone, in the middle of nowhere.
Riley thought of the birth certificate, of Shelby’s ridiculous stories about Riley being snatched and hidden away from her “real” family.
But if you wanted to keep something hidden, the Blackwood Hills Estates was the place to do it.
Riley’s phone was chirping with a missed text when she came back into the house.
RY-PIE DAD & I ARE GOING TO BE LATE. 9:30? EAT SOMETHING. DO HOMEWORK. LV MOM
She instinctively called back, chewing the inside of her cheek while her mother’s phone rang and rang.
Did they ever say where they were going?
Random, irrational scenarios played out in Riley’s head: her parents were shopping for another child. They were spying on her birth parents. They were going to check on Jane.
She shook her head and laughed at herself for letting Shelby’s crazy ideas get to her. Her parents were her parents, and they were late because they were at a fundraiser or at her father’s work or watching one of their mega-boring foreign films.
But baby Jane…
Riley shimmied the birth certificate out from the biology textbook she had absently shoved it in and settled herself in front of her laptop. She typed JANE ELIZABETH O’LEARY into the search engine, culling through the pages and pages of hits that came up. When she exhausted her Google search, she tried out a few others—People Search, People Find, Yellow Pages. Each turned up a handful of names that semi-matched her search parameters, but nothing was a direct match. Riley snatched up the birth certificate then carefully typed in Jane’s city and state of birth, Granite Cay, Oregon. The same pages she had filtered through the night before popped up, but this time, a little animated map also showed up as well. Riley clicked on it then felt her breath catch. Granite Cay, Oregon, was just a few inches from the California university she was about to visit.
When the doorbell rang, she sat bolt upright, not immediately recognizing the slow, melodic chimes.
No one had ever come to visit yet.
Heart thumping from the start, she picked her way down the stairs carefully, turning on lights as she went, each splashing a wash of yellow over the few family pictures that lined the walls.
“Who is it?” she called as she reached the door.