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Ravinia took another swallow of her coffee, strong but cooling as her gaze wondered around the glass walls of the coffee shop and she thought about how she’d actually come to leave her home.
She’d been thinking of getting out of Siren Song for some time—the walls were too high, Catherine’s world too archaic, the rules too restrictive.
Her aunt gleaned what was on Ravinia’s mind. “When are you leaving?” Aunt Catherine asked as they stood in front of the fire at the lodge. For once they were alone, her sisters in their rooms for the night.
“Leaving? What? For good? I’m not sure I am. What are you saying?” Ravinia responded, slightly alarmed that her half-formed plans to leave Siren Song had been thrown on the table. She intended to get away but hadn’t settled on a date, wasn’t certain when it would be.
“Cassandra’s seen you on the road with a friend. I’m asking you, when are you planning to go?”
Cassandra was Ravinia’s sister who had a knack for seeing into the future—her “gift.” And the hell of it was, as usual, Cassandra wasn’t wrong. Ravinia had met someone. And she really did want to leave the lodge behind her, so she impulsively said, “Tomorrow,” finalizing her plans just that fast.
Aunt Catherine answered in her pragmatic way, “Then you’ll need some money,” and walked to her desk and opened a strongbox within. She returned with a roll of bills that damn near blew Ravinia away. “Be wise and frugal,” Aunt Catherine cautioned, blinking as if tears were forming behind her eyes. “And most of all, be safe.”
“I will,” Ravinia promised and tucked the money into her bra.
She shook her head to clear the memories and touched the money belt around her waist that she’d purchased during those weeks in northern California. The friend Cassandra had seen her with hadn’t caught up with her again, but Ravinia had the sense that he’d gone north when she’d gone south, first to the San Francisco area, finally landing in Santa Monica. She looked at her phone again, realizing that she had burned up the minutes talking to Aunt Catherine who called her on an irregular basis. She wished her aunt would come out of the Dark Ages, for crying out loud, but she supposed she should be happy that Aunt Catherine knew how to drive a car. Ravinia was determined to get her license at the first opportunity, but that would have to be after she found Elizabeth . . . and how was she going to do that without an Internet connection? And how was she supposed to get that when she had no credit history? It was a phrase she’d learned when she’d looked into getting her own phone,
She glanced around the dining area again. Nearly everyone in the chairs was using their smartphones in some capacity. Probably connecting to the Internet.
Cash was great, but to really think about getting a smartphone with a phone number she could definitely use credit history. But before she could get credit history, she needed a credit card or some record of payments, like to utilities. The truth was, no one wanted to help her all that much after they learned she was a blank slate. She needed an address for billing, which she didn’t possess.
She’d learned all this when she was in the San Francisco area and she’d made the mistake of telling SoCal who’d laughed at her and declared that she must have been living under a rock, which kind of pissed her off. He’d also told her that she must have been “living off the grid” her whole life because she was definitely “under the radar.” She’d never heard either of those phrases before, but she’d gleaned that she was an oddity and that she’d already known, if for different reasons from those Mr. SoCal realized.
Good riddance that she’d left him at the train station.
Ravinia sipped her coffee and contemplated her next move.
Coffee long gone, she was sitting in the same spot an hour later, still undecided, when a woman somewhere in her forties came hurrying into the coffee shop, bypassing the line.
Frantic, she glanced around the room, zeroed in on the older dude at a table near Ravinia’s. “Thank God.” The woman made a beeline to the table with the guy who, by the looks of him, was old enough to be her father.
He half-rose from his seat to give her a quick kiss, and then she launched in. “Oh, my God, I’m so glad you’re still here. It’s just hell with Kayla right now. I could kill her!”
He sighed and picked up his cup. “What happened?”
“Ran away again. Just like I knew she would. Everybody said the teenage years would be terrible, but I had no idea . . . oh, Jesus! Last weekend she snuck out the window to be with her friends. When I discovered her missing, I tried to connect with the friends I knew about, the ones I had numbers for. I called and called. The kids. Their parents. I went to their houses, but no one had seen her. Or at least that’s what they said. But they lie. They all lie. Thick as thieves those damned teens. Couldn’t they see how frantic I was? I mean, I was out of my mind. Literally out of my mind. I was about to start going to hospitals or the police.” Reliving her ordeal, the woman was talking faster and faster, her voice rising.
The older guy patted the air, silently reminding her to slow down and maybe not talk so loudly.
But the woman was too wound up to put on the brakes. She barreled on, “I had to hire a private investigator to find her. And when he located her, it didn’t matter.” The woman was pulling a face and shaking her head. “Kayla still wouldn’t come home with me.”
The guy looked at her as if she were crazy. “You’re kidding.”
“Oh, no, I’m not.”
“But to hire a private detective?”
“I had to. I couldn’t find her. Jesus, didn’t you hear me?” she accused, then took a deep breath before going on. “This friend of mine, Linda? Her son’s got a real drug problem and was missing for weeks, and she called this guy and he found him. The guy’s an ex-cop and anyway, he did whatever it is those guys do, and found Kayla right away.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” She flipped a hand upward toward the ceiling. “And I don’t care. He specializes in runaways and family problems. Doesn’t matter how he tracked her down. What’s important is that Kayla’s home and I’m trying to get through to her—which is damn near impossible.” Rolling her eyes, she added, “It feels like I don’t know her anymore. It’s like living with a stranger. One with a really bad attitude.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t be moving in right now.”
“Oh, no.” She reached a hand out and grabbed his arm. “That’s just what she’s aiming for. You have to move in or she’ll think she’s won and then it’ll be even worse. We’re moving your stuff at the end of the month and Kayla’s just going to have to get used to it!”
Ravinia realized that the older guy was a romantic interest for the younger woman, which made her give him a second look. He was kind of homely with big ears and thinning hair and glasses that sat on the end of his nose. But his clothes looked expensive. Money, she decided.
