The Retribution of Mara Dyer Read online

“Responsible like, maybe he’s the one behind it. All of it,” I said. “If this—if we’re some kind of experiment or whatever, him following us could be part of it. Watching what we do, how we react, what happens to us when we do react.” I thought of the things we had seen in Horizons, the things Kells had said to us. “Maybe he’s the one—maybe he’s the one who funded Dr. Kells.”

  “But then why bring us the bag? Why would he want to help get those—whatever they were—out of you?” Stella asked.

  “Maybe she put them in without permission,” Jamie suggested. “Speaking of which.” He looked at me. “Do you think the rest of us have them too?”

  “I don’t feel any different,” Stella said. “You?”

  Jamie swallowed. “I don’t really know what ‘different’ means anymore. I woke up one day on the island and couldn’t walk, just like you,” he said, staring at me. “But then why aren’t I sick?”

  “You are sick,” Stella said carefully. “But you’re a year younger than us. Maybe you’re just in the first stage of whatever’s happening . . .”

  I remembered the words written on the whiteboard when I’d first woken up in Horizons.

  J. Roth, manifesting.

  “Manifestation,” I said out loud. “That list, remember it? It said Stella and Noah, they’ve manifested already. Kells wrote that, in her notes.”

  “What does that even mean, though?” Jamie asked.

  “It means that you’re going to get sicker,” Stella said. “When it was happening to me—I got worse before I got better.”

  “What, you mean when you were—”

  “Manifesting, or whatever. The voices, they weren’t always loud. In the beginning I could kind of ignore them. Sometimes I even listened to them,” she said quietly. “I heard things I shouldn’t have, and sometimes I—did things,” she said. “I used what I knew, even though part of me knew it was wrong. I cheated on a test. This girl who was bullying me, I exposed her secrets to everyone. And each time I did something, the voices got louder. Stronger. There were more of them. It got so I couldn’t tell which thoughts were mine and which belonged to someone else. I felt like I was going crazy. I was going crazy.” She rounded on Jamie. “Using your ability—it’s not free, even if it seems that way now. It’s working pretty nicely for you right now, and for that you’re lucky—but it’s going to eventually bite you in the ass.”

  Jamie seemingly had no reaction to this.

  “And if there is something inside of you,” Stella went on, “like whatever was inside Mara? It’s going to activate at some point, just like it did with her, and you’re going to go through the same shit.”

  Jamie rolled his eyes, but he was unsettled. I could tell. “So fine,” he said. “What do we do now?”

  I interrupted the both of them. “I almost died tonight,” I said. “Tomorrow we’re going to find out who almost killed me.”

  35

  IT WAS ELEVEN-ISH WHEN WE finally dragged ourselves out of bed the next morning. I could walk on my own, but it hurt. A lot. So I was slow. But our only real lead was the tax stuff Stella had taken from Kells’s office with the address of the accountant on them, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Probably.

  The cab burped us up in the bowels of Midtown. The three of us stared up at a squat, ugly building sandwiched between a Laundromat and a FedEx, a building that bore the address where Ira Ginsberg, CPA, purportedly filed taxes for evil corporations such as Horizons LLC.

  “So, what’s the plan exactly?” Stella asked.

  “We’re going to ask him who he works for,” I said.

  Stella scratched her nose. “And what if he doesn’t just . . . volunteer that information?”

  “Then Jamie will encourage him to volunteer it.” And if that failed, I would encourage him myself. I felt strangely well and strangely confident. Whatever Dr. Kells had tried to do to me, she had failed. I was still here, and those things that had been inside me, whatever they were, were gone. We had the address of the man who’d made it possible for her to do what she’d done. We were getting closer to everything. Closer to Noah. I could feel it.

  Jamie cleared his throat. “Shall we?”

  We shall. A doorman handed us visitors’  badges, which we slapped on (my chest, Stella’s hip, Jamie’s left ass cheek). Then we rode the elevator up to the stated suite. The waiting area looked like a doctor’s office, complete with a gum-chewing, ponytailed receptionist. Stella looked at Jamie and gestured at Chewy.

  “You owe me so much, I can’t even count how much you owe me,” he muttered.

  “Names?” the receptionist asked us.

  “Jesus,” Jamie answered.

  “Mary,” said Stella.

  “Satan,” I said as I walked past her and pushed open the door to Ira Ginsberg’s office.

  The room was painfully unremarkable, and so was Ira. He had a slightly doughy face that emerged from the collar of his slightly too tight dress shirt and tie. He rose the instant we walked in, followed by the receptionist.

  “It’s all right, Jeanine,” he said. “Tell my client on line one that I’ll have to call him back.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ginsberg,” she said, glancing at us on her way out.

  “How can I help you?” Mr. Ginsberg said to us.

  Jamie slid into a seat opposite his desk. “I’m so glad you asked.” He handed Mr. Ginsberg the tax thing Stella had stolen from Kells’s office. “Who hired you to prepare this?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t divulge client information, Mr. . . .”

  “Jesus,” Jamie said. I snorted.

  “Mr. Jesus,” Ira said, without humor.

  Jamie nodded thoughtfully. “I understand. I’ll rephrase. Who hired you to prepare this?” This time when Jamie spoke, his voice was sharp and compelling, and Mr. Ginsberg looked at the paper for only a second before answering. The interrogation had begun.

  “Horizons LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary; a representative of its parent company contacted me and asked if I could incorporate them in New York and handle their finances. Why?”

  “Do you know what they do?”

  “No,” Mr. Ginsberg said cheerfully.

  “Someone from the company, Horizons, must have had to sign these, right?”

  “I believe there was an appointed agent of record, yes.”

  “Who?”

  Mr. Ginsberg rubbed his chin. “I don’t recall the name. It was very generic.”

  “But it’s on the documents you prepared for them?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Then give us the documents,” Jamie said, his voice cutting the air like glass.

  “Oh, I would, I would, except I don’t have them. Everything that relates to EIC—the parent company—is kept in the archives, not in the office.”

  “The archives?”

  “A repository of documents relating to the corporation and its subsidiaries. But the files are all coded. You’re going to have a hell of a time finding anything in there without the access key.”

  Jamie gave Mr. Ginsberg a hard look with a raised eyebrow. “Then give us the access key.”

  Mr. Ginsberg’s eyes looked unfocused. “I can’t. I no longer have it.”

  I locked eyes with Stella.

  “What did you do with it?” Jamie asked him.

  “Those particular documents were requested just a few days ago, along with the key. I was instructed to send the key to a box at New York University.”

  “By whom?” Jamie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Ginsberg said. “You have to understand, these are the corporation’s operating procedures. One authorized person provides the access code to me, and I provide him or her with the access key, to facilitate the location of documents in the archives. Very useful for litigation.”

  Jamie leaned forward in the chair. “Explain?”

  “Without the access key the corporation could provide discovery and bury its opponents in paper, and they would have no clue what any of it meant,” Mr. G
insberg said with a sly smile. “It would take years to sort it all out, and they’d have to pay their lawyers by the hour while they did.”

  I couldn’t accept that we’d come all this way and been through everything we’d been through to face yet another dead end. “Tell us who you sent the documents to, then,” I said, my patience dwindling. “And give us the address for the archives.”

  Mr. Ginsberg acted like he hadn’t heard me. Jamie repeated my questions.

  Mr. Ginsberg sighed. “There was no name to go with the address at New York University, only a department.

  “Which one?” Jamie asked.

  “Comparative Literature.”

  I was already walking out the door.

  36

  WE LEFT THE OFFICE WITH two addresses in hand—one, the archives; the other, the Comparative Literature Department at New York University.

  “So where to?” Jamie asked as we stood outside. “Archives first, right?” he asked, at the same time Stella said, “NYU first.”

  She shook her head. “If we figure out who received the access key at the university, that could give us at least a name to go on more quickly than sifting through millions of pages of possibly crap documents.”

  “But there’s no name with that address,” Jamie said. “Whoever gave the code to Ginsberg could have just had him mail the key there to pick it up, and I just want to find out something, anything, already, even if all we find are crap documents in a mammoth warehouse somewhere. What say you, M?”

  “Actually, I’m with Stella.” I shrugged. “NYU is going to be easier, simpler, than finding our needle in the archives haystack.”

  Jamie held up his hands in defeat, and the three of us took a train to the Village. Jamie had to persuade the security guard to let the three of us in without ID. Then we headed to the floor where literatures were compared, and asked the blank-stared intern at the front desk where and how the incoming mail was routed. She pointed us to a milk crate piled high with envelopes.

  “I distribute mail to the professors during their office hours. Everything without a professor’s name goes to the head of the department, Peter McCarthy.”

  Stella and I raised our eyebrows. “And where is Professor McCarthy’s office?”

  “Last door on the left.”

  When we reached it, it was locked.

  “Of course it’s locked,” Stella said after she’d tried it. “Of course.”

  “Wait,” Jamie said, and withdrew something from his pocket. He stuck what looked like a bobby pin into the keyhole and jiggled it around purposefully. We practically held our breath until we heard the mechanism click.

  “After you,” he said, pushing the door open. I went in first.

  Rows of overflowing bookcases lined the room, littered with papers and notebooks and random objects on every available surface, and many unavailable ones too. A damp-looking plant hung from a planter attached to the ceiling. Jamie ducked beneath it and began exploring.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?” he asked.

  “The access key, I guess,” Stella said, carefully lifting up some papers on the desk.

  Jamie squinted. “You realize that could be a code, not an actual key?”

  I made a beeline for a half-buried inbox perched precariously on a shelf, and started looking through his mail. “Ginsberg said he’d sent the access code here, though. Which means he mailed it.” I lifted an armful of envelopes and doled them out to Jamie and Stella. “Happy hunting.”

  “I’m pretty sure opening someone else’s mail is a crime,” Stella said.

  “I’m pretty sure so is accessory to murder,” Jamie said. “And yet here we are.” He held up a manila envelope and raised his eyebrows. “No return address . . .”

  “Open it,” I told him.

  He carefully slid a finger beneath the flap and peeked inside, then withdrew a thick, glossy IKEA catalogue.

  Next. The three of us worked in silence. I flipped through my pile, looking out for anything with Ginsberg’s name on it, or even just an address. But nothing stood out.

  “This can’t be another dead end,” Stella groaned.

  I knew how she felt. Frustration and anger bubbled up inside me, and I found myself abandoning the pile of hastily-checked-through mail and dropping to the floor to sort through the papers, notebooks, and file folders stacked up in piles all over the cramped, stuffy office. Any hope I’d originally had was thinning out by the second. The archives would be a thousand times worse than this. How could we find what we were looking for if we didn’t even know where to look?

  Stella and Jamie had each abandoned their stacks of mail and were now following my lead, looking through the papers on the floor. “These papers are at, like, a fourth-grade reading level. What does this guy even teach?”

  “ ‘Pacific Islander Gender Studies from 1750 to 1825,’ ” Jamie said, reading from a paper and not looking up.

  “This is useless,” I said as I rose from my crouch. “If the key was mailed here, whoever told Ginsberg to mail it here could have picked it up already. We might be looking for something that isn’t even here.”

  “So, what, we just leave?” Stella asked.

  “We have a better chance of finding what we’re looking for in the archives,” Jamie said. “As I told you before, FYI. Look, there’s going to be a ton of stuff there, obviously, but we’re bound to stumble onto something we can use to find out who’s behind all of this. Eventually,” he added.

  I hated to admit it, but this was in fact turning out to be another dead end. “Let’s just put everything back where we found it before someone finds us rifling through his shit.”

  Stella looked stricken. Jamie was eager to leave, and started putting things away as fast as his hot little hands could move. I rearranged the pile of notebooks I was holding on the corner of the desk and turned around, but as I did, I tripped over a small wooden carved statue I’d moved to the floor earlier. I threw my hands out against the bookcase to break my fall, which worked, but the movement sent something tumbling down from the top of it, right onto my head.

  I swore and held both hands against the crown of my skull as I mimed kicking the stupid bookcase. Jamie picked up the thing that had fallen on me.

  “I would’ve thought your head would be hard enough to break the glass,” he said, holding the picture frame.

  “You’re going to feel crappy about making fun of me if I have a concussion.”

  “You don’t have a concussion,” Jamie said. He turned the picture over. “Does anyone remember where this was?”

  I said, “I think it was on top of the bookcase?”

  Jamie reached up to put it back. The picture was facing forward—it was of someone speaking at what looked like a graduation ceremony. McCarthy, I think, was the grizzled man at the podium. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. In the background, standing off to the left of the stage in front of dozens of robed graduates and in a cluster of suited academics, was someone I thought I recognized. I snatched the frame from Jamie’s hand.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Not what,” I said. “Who.” I was pointing at Abel Lukumi.

  37

  STELLA STEPPED OVER A PILE of academic journals on the floor and stood next to us. “What are we looking at?”

  “The person responsible for all of this,” I said without hesitating. There was no other explanation. “That’s Lukumi.”

  “Wait—the guy from Miami? From Little Havana?”

  “As opposed to the one from Sweden?”

  “Shut up.” Stella punched Jamie’s arm.

  Jamie snapped a picture of the photo of Lukumi and McCarthy immediately, and then we hastily rearranged the professor’s office to look the way we’d found it. Mostly.

  “What are the odds, though?” Jamie asked as we walked.

  I shrugged. “One in who cares? He was in the picture with that professor—the head of the department where Ginsberg mailed the key. And he was on th
e train platform in DC. And he was in the hospital after Jude slit my wrists. He’s been following us the whole time.”

  “Not us,” Jamie said quietly.

  Jamie had it exactly right. “Me. He’s been following me. Ever since I met him.” My thoughts raced faster than I could speak. “He has to have been the one who sent the note, with the doctor’s bag, when I got sick. Which means he has to have known what was happening to me, what was inside me, which means—”

  He would know where Noah was too. Maybe he was the one keeping him.

  “But then why would he need the access key?” Jamie scratched his nose. “If he’s the man behind the man or whatever, if he orchestrated all of this, funded all of it, and is following us to, I don’t know, monitor what’s happening to us, wouldn’t he have access to the archives already? Why would he need the key?”

  “Maybe that’s not how this works,” I said. “Maybe, to stay anonymous, he organized the corporation that funds Horizons so that only one person at a time can access the archives—so he needed to get the key before he could check whatever he wanted to check, and because even the people who work for him don’t know who he is, he had the key sent here to his friend.”

  “Far-fetched,” Jamie said.

  Stella wound her hair around her finger. “I’ve heard worse theories. But wait . . . does that mean he has the key now? If one person at a time can access it, maybe—”

  “Maybe he’s there,” I said, finishing her sentence. “Maybe he’s there right now.”

  We all looked at one another. It was more than past time to end this. “Let’s go.”

  We caught the train just before the doors closed, and Stella and I squished in between an older lady with purple hair clutching a Bloomingdale’s bag to her chest and a Hasidic teenager slouched over a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Jamie mocked a man in a business suit jamming audibly to something on his headphones, but otherwise we were silent until we got off. When we emerged from the subway, the sun was setting. Whatever neighborhood we were in looked pretty industrial. There were hardly any people walking around at all. It almost looked deserted.