And right into a chest.
The matchbook flew out of my hands and skidded across the floor, bumping to a stop against the wall. “Shit,” I breathed, scrambling for it.
I snatched it up, and it wasn’t until I straightened that I saw who I’d run into.
It was the belt buckle I recognized first.
Mustard. Candy cane.
Holy crap.
I slowly raised my eyes, only to find myself staring into a pair of eyes so pale blue they almost looked light gray. The white-blond-haired man. The one who’d been driving the truck. My heart squeezed until I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.
His jaw tightened, and then he said, in a cold, threatening voice, “Nikki,” sending waves of chills up my spine that almost knocked me over. He started to reach for me, and I jumped back.
“Where is she?” I asked. My hand trembled around the matchbook, and I pressed my fingers in on it tighter. “Luna?” The word scraped out of my throat like shards of glass.
His lips curled up in a growl over his perfect and blindingly white teeth. “You shouldn’t have follow—”
“Director?”
A young man wearing a headset had come into the lobby from a different hallway. We both jumped.
The man turned toward the voice and then back to me.
“I think we’re about ready to shoot the sidewalk scene?” the young man said, clearly nervous to be talking to this man. This white-blond-haired man who looked like the devil in my eyes. This man who knew Luna and knew Jones and knew Celeste.
Director? He was the director?
“I’ll be there in a minute, Corey,” the white-blond-haired man said. “I’ve got—”
But I didn’t give him the chance to finish the sentence. I shoved past him and bolted out the door.
I veered away from the front doors wildly, guessing at which would be the faster way to Chris’s car. I’d lost my bearings in the dark building. I tried to jump over a low bush but was too nervous to clear it and tumbled. I let out a grunt as I hit the ground and rolled, my shoulder groaning under the blow. I thought I heard the swish of the door opening behind me but was too panicked to look back. I scrambled, pushing myself back up onto my feet and churning through the grass, cramming the matchbook into my pocket as I went. I turned a corner, nearly colliding with a Dumpster, and my feet hit asphalt. Thank God. I pushed harder, raced faster, until I saw Chris’s car, which was already on the move, coming for me.
I dove into the car, breathing so hard I was gagging. Fucking cigarettes. I pulled the door shut, and Chris took off out of the lot. We were probably a mile down the road before one of us finally spoke.
“I would ask you what happened and why you’re dressed like that,” he said. “But I have a feeling I already know.”
I was breathless from my run, and in no mood for his judgment. “Just keep driving,” I said. The matchbook pressed into my hip, but I didn’t tell him that.
8
WHILE I WAS inside Pear Magic, Chris had spent his time idly searching for Heriberto Abana on his cell phone. He had come up with nothing much. I remembered sitting in his office before the hit-and-run. Heriberto’s name had been searched and searched on his work computer, but, other than some addresses, nothing had really come up. I told him I’d do some poking around when I got home, which, for some reason, pissed him off. I got hit by a car, but I’m not dumb, he’d said. I didn’t point out to him that I never called him dumb. He was being sensitive. I guessed I couldn’t blame him. If I’d lost a big chunk of my memory, I would be sensitive too.
I made a sandwich and poured myself a glass of iced tea, dumping so much sugar in it, you could see a layer of white on the bottom quarter of the glass. I rummaged in the pantry until I found an old, likely stale bag of chips, and took it all up to my room.
I sat at my desk, the food spread out next to my open laptop, and wolfed down half my sandwich while checking the IMDb page for Celeste’s movie. Of course, the director was still listed as TBA—it couldn’t be that easy. So instead I pulled up my email. I’d been neglecting it since the night at Tesori Antico, only popping in every week or so to weed out my in-box. Most of the time, it was crammed with junk, but every so often there was a legit email that I wanted to ignore. This time there was an email from my grandma—pictures from my graduation. I looked sweaty and irritated. My shoulders were bunched up and tense, as if I was waiting for something bad to happen. And Peyton’s chair shrine was in the background, turning the edges of every photo crimson. I closed the email and dragged it into the trash. Dad would be pissed that I didn’t share the pictures with him, but he was a photographer, so I knew he had more than enough of his own. So many he wouldn’t know what to do with them. Probably stuff them away somewhere and never look at them again.
I scrolled down, picking off emails and sending them to the trash, one by one. A sale ad for a boutique. A postgrad questionnaire from the school. A reminder from our former class president to join some stupid classmate website so they could find us come reunion time. Uh, no thanks. Junk, junk, and more junk.
I drained my tea, pushed my empty plate over by the chips, and brushed off my hands. I didn’t have time for pictures and questionnaires and websites. I had searching to do.
It took no time for me to learn that Chris had been right. Heriberto Abana didn’t have much of an online footprint. In fact, if the internet was any indication, there didn’t seem to be any existing person with that name at all. It was like he was a ghost. Maybe I had the name wrong. Maybe Albany came to me in eggplant for an entirely different reason. Maybe that was just the color of the word Albany and there was no connection behind it at all and I was totally giving my synesthesia too much credit. But no, I felt strongly that wasn’t it. Because even if Albany was eggplant all on its own, so was Abana. I could see that clearly.
I also remembered some numbers. A five and two threes. An address that I’d seen when I’d been snooping in Chris’s office. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not remember anything else. Just the colors, flashing at me like an OPEN sign. Ugh, was it possible to have amnesia by proxy?
Nothing in my life was adding up, even though it seemed like everything was so close. I remembered Heriberto’s name, but he didn’t exist. I got to search Jones’s truck, but there was nothing in it. I found Celeste Day, but not Luna. So frustrating to be this close on so many levels, but continue to come up just short.
I dug the Angry Elephant matchbook out of my front pocket and turned it in my hand, studying it. I half expected to feel something—some sort of cosmic current that would link me with my mother. Maybe hear her voice, guiding me. But it just wasn’t there. She was gone, and it was just a coincidence that I’d found something belonging to the studio where she used to work. Not really all that outside of reason, when I thought about it, for an actress to own something with a studio label on it. Especially an unknown actress and a small, independent studio. She probably owned loads of stuff from small studios. It would be much stranger for her to have something from a big studio, probably.
There was a knock on my door frame and I jumped, dropping the matchbook on my desk.
Dad was standing just inside my room.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. You looked pretty deep in thought there.” He gestured toward the matchbook. “Anything important?”
Because I couldn’t trust him, I didn’t want Dad to know about what I’d found or where I’d found it. If I told him I’d lifted it from an actress, he would undoubtedly want to know what I was doing at Pear Magic. And the truthful answer—trying to find the girl who’d twice tried to kill me—would not be a popular one.