“What did you name her?” I take a bite of bagel as I listen.
“Valeria, after my grandmother,” Thea says. “She was a pistol, apparently.”
Valeria was not our grandmother’s name. We had a Kelly and an Alvina, but I let it pass.
“Thanks for helping me with her,” she adds. “That was bad in the tunnel.”
“I know. I’m just glad you made it okay. I’ve been worried,” I say.
“Tom was fit to be tied when he found out.”
“I bet,” I say, smiling. It’s easy to picture the big, protective guy in a state over Thea.
A bird chirps from nearby. I turn my gaze in the right direction and search the bushes for movement.
“Want to hear something kind of different?” she asks.
“Sure.”
A shifting noise comes over the phone before she goes on.
“When I was in labor, I had the strangest vision right before the baby came,” Thea says. “I could see Althea’s grandfather on the porch here at the ranch, and Althea’s old dog Gizmo, only Gizmo was still a puppy. A little collie. And I was a girl with little-kid hands. The thing is, it felt like a real memory, like my own. What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know. Has that sort of thing happened before?”
“No. I’ve had some of Althea’s feelings before, around Tom especially, but that’s the first time I’ve ever had anything like a real memory.”
“What feelings for Tom?” I ask.
“Just feelings. That’s not the point. It just made me wonder if part of her is still alive in me.”
I pause a moment to idly push a dry stick with the toe of my sneaker.
“You said something,” I say. “That night, you asked me to give a message to Althea’s parents and her grandfather. You told me to thank them and tell them they did right by you.”
“I did?” Thea asks.
“Yes.” At the time, her voice even sounded a little different. I was terrified, actually. I thought she was dying. I chomp down on my bagel again and work through a thick, stale bite. She’s quiet for so long, I start to wonder if we’ve lost the connection. “Thea?”
“I’m just thinking,” she says. “It’s scary. It was a nice memory, but I don’t want Althea to come back. I couldn’t handle sharing my brain with her, and I wouldn’t want her taking over, squeezing me out. Is that selfish of me?”
I hadn’t thought of Althea taking over.
“No,” I say. “Or yes, it is, but you deserve to feel selfish about your own mind.”
“Even if it was hers first?”
“Thea! You’re not giving up, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you having headaches or déjà vus? Any dizziness?” I ask.
She exhales a big breath, and then speaks very quietly. “Actually, the headaches are pretty bad.”
“Have you told your parents?” I ask, alarmed.
“They know,” she says. “Did you say you’re home? How’s Dubbs?”
“You’re changing the subject,” I say.
“I want to hear about you,” she says firmly. “And our family.”
I squash down my anxiety for her, but I’m not forgetting it. “You’re not going to like this,” I say. Then I tell her about my visit to the boxcar and how our family was gone. I add in my run to Peggy’s and the mess with Ian. “Berg’s after me,” I say. “He wants to mine me again, and I’m worried he’s kidnapping Ma and Larry and Dubbs to force me to cooperate with him.”
“And you think they’re in Vegas?”
“That’s what Berg said.”
“I’m trying not to freak out here,” Thea says. “It’s weird that they didn’t leave any note for you. Did you look everywhere?”
I’d completely forgotten Dubbs’s note. Now I chuck away the rest of my bagel and pull the scrap of paper out of my pocket. “There was something from Dubbs, actually, but it didn’t say much. She hid it under the bed, where she usually kept her journal.” I smooth the paper and read the message into the phone. “It says, To Rosie, period. From Dubbs, period. See you, no period.” I hadn’t noticed the periods before. Dubbs is eight. She’s not big on punctuation. Then again, maybe she is. I’ll take any clue.
“There’s no drawing?” Thea asks.
“No.”
“Does it smell?” she asks.
I lift Dubbs’s note to my nose and breathe in the dry scent of lemon. An odd possibility occurs to me, and I inhale the scent again. No, I think, awed. Then I smile.
“The little sneaky genius,” I say. “It smells of lemon.”
“You know what that means,” Thea says, excited.
“Yes. Just a minute. Let me find a match.”
“We’re like twice as smart now,” she says. “This is so exciting. Check quick. Valeria’s waking up again.”
“Hold on. I have to go back to the car.”
Dubbs and I once had a trick for secret messages that we wrote with lemon juice. I read about it in a magazine from the library, and we spent a string of summer afternoons squeezing lemons, writing messages to each other with the juice, and letting them dry so the writing disappeared. Sometimes we’d write a decoy message on the paper with regular ink, so no one would ever guess a hidden message was layered beneath.
Now, with the phone tucked under my ear, I light up a wooden match and hold it beneath the paper, close enough to feel the heat, but not near enough to catch fire. At first, nothing happens, and then the heat makes brown letters appear where the dry juice is hidden in the paper and completes the message.
To Rosie. From Dubbs.
See you at 240 Mallorca Way
in Miehana, CA.
Don’t tell. I miss you.
The last line encircles my heart and squeezes. I hold the match an instant longer to see if any other writing will appear, and then I wave it out.
My brilliant, brilliant sister left me an address. And she hid it, too, like she knew someone might come looking through our house, like she knew she was in danger. Not good. The address is in Miehana, the same place as the big vault of dreamers. It can’t be a coincidence.
“What did you find?” Thea asks.
“It’s an address in Miehana, California: Two forty Mallorca Way,” I say, trying to remember if I’ve ever said anything to Thea about the vault in Miehana. I don’t think so. “It has to be where my family was going. She says not to tell anybody.”
“Dubbs is a genius,” Thea says. “You’re going there, right? I wish I could go with you!”
“You just had a baby. Your head’s a mess.” Already I’m walking around the car to get in the driver’s seat. I toss the matches on the dashboard and take another sniff of Dubbs’s note. Now it smells like smoke as well as lemon, and it’s almost as good as having her in the car with me.
“At least tell me what can I do to help,” Thea says. “I have money now. What do you need?”
“You sound like Burnham.”
“Burnham! Exactly. We have to tell him. He’ll be a huge help.”
I look again at Dubbs’s note where it says Don’t tell.
“I’m not sure I want to tell him,” I say.
“Why not? How much does he know about you and me?” Thea asks.