Читать книгу Run to You Part Three: Third Charm - Clara Kensie - Страница 11

Chapter Forty-One

“I’m not lying,” Tristan said.

“Yes you are! This,” I said, waving the photo in his face, “is Dr. Fielding.”

“The college professor?”

I stabbed the words under his portrait with my finger. “He died in Hebron, Iowa, on November twenty-third. My family moved to Twelve Lakes, Illinois, in August. We never went further than ten minutes away from our house. And Iowa was at least two hundred miles away. There’s no way my mom could have killed him. She’s not that powerful.”

Tristan’s face went white.

“I knew you were lying.” I ran my finger down the professor’s portrait. Dr. Fielding had rescued my family after all.

Tristan scrambled to gather the papers that had scattered on the floor and began to read them again. Elated, I held Dr. Fielding’s photo in front of me. I could have kissed it. A hysterical giggle escaped from behind my lips.

They were innocent.

My parents were innocent.

They had never blackmailed anyone.

They’d never killed anyone.

They’d never lied to me.

I turned to Tristan with my hands on my hips and snarled. “Now let my parents go, you disgusting, pathetic liar.”

But instead of being intimidated, he just gave me another one of his sad, sympathetic looks. “You didn’t read the notes on the next page. It says here Dr. Fielding was in Twelve Lakes on November twenty-second.”

“That can’t be true. He didn’t know who we were. We left all of our personal information out of that email, and Logan made it untraceable. How would he know to come to Twelve Lakes?”

He referenced the notes again. “Because your parents called him and told him to come.”

“But...how would my parents know about him back then?”

He shrugged. “Maybe when Jillian was piggybacking he was able to see inside her mind. Or maybe your parents didn’t trust her, so your father still watched her.”

If that was true, then my parents had mistrusted the wrong daughter.

“It says here your mother arranged to meet him at the coffee shop in the town square,” Tristan said. “The security cameras show him getting there at 10:54 a.m. He waited for two hours, and when no one showed up, he left.”

“See? My parents never met him. So they couldn’t have killed him.”

He read the notes. “Your mom came in at 11:06, bought a cup of coffee to go, then went home. She never spoke to him, but she was close enough to plant an aneurysm in his brain. Aneurysms don’t necessarily kill right away. She probably chose that method so he wouldn’t die until he got home.”

I stared at him for a long moment. “Don’t talk about my mother that way.”

“Sorry, Tessa. For a minute there, I really thought the APR might be wrong about your parents.”

I sat down hard on the cot. “This file is fake. It has to be.” I grabbed it from him and flipped through the pages, almost tearing them from the binder.

“My parents donated to charities,” I said. “They gave money to anyone who needed it. Once when we were on the run, driving through Massachusetts, we were at a motel and the manager was kicking out a woman and her two little kids because she couldn’t afford to pay. My parents gave her enough cash to stay in a different motel, a better motel, for a month. If they were killers, they wouldn’t have done that. They wouldn’t.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Tristan said.

I tried again. “What about the police detective and the FBI agent we asked for help?” I said. “My dad watched your father kill them, he watched your father slice them right down the middle, and each time, I watched my dad. He could not have faked the horror in his eyes. My mother could not have faked her tears. She was hysterical, Tristan.”

He only shook his head with a sorrowful sigh.

Memories. All I had were my memories of my parents’ altruism and my father’s horrified expression as he witnessed those murders. Those memories were enough evidence for me, but they wouldn’t be enough evidence for Tristan.

I was no longer happy that Jillian and Logan had escaped. Selfishly, I wanted them here, with me. They’d help me prove our parents were innocent.

But Jillian and Logan were gone. I’d have to find the proof myself.

* * *

Shaking off my despair, I studied the notes in the binder again. Kellan wrote how he could not use his telepathy to read our minds in case one of us could sense his intrusion. He recorded his plans, from hiding a tiny camera under our front windowsill to record our comings and goings—it must have been Kellan’s handprint on our window—to pulling the wires in our getaway car in an effort to provoke my mom or brother into using psionics to fix it. But with my mother standing watch and clearly ready to attack, and still not fully informed on all of our powers, he had decided not to move in.

The bulk of his strategy involved Tristan prying information from me. It was those notes that made my stomach churn.

A note written by Tristan, on the day we met for the first time: Followed targets 4 and 5 as they left the house and went running in park. Made first contact with target 4. She resisted conversation. —T. Connelly

A note written by Kellan, from the night of Ethan’s party: Instructed agent to tell target 4 he has fallen in love with her to prompt her to confess her own secrets. Partial success. —J. Kellan

“Our whole relationship was set up,” I said, my voice small. “You manipulated every moment of it.”

“Tessa—” He took my hand.

I jerked it away. “I think you mean ‘Target 4.’”

He grabbed my hand back. “No. I mean Tessa. I love you. That is not a lie. I wanted to tell you, but not because Kellan said to. I wanted to wait until you knew the real me.”

I knew the real Tristan now, and he was a liar.

“Tell me, Tristan.” I narrowed my eyes. “Was the tree almost falling on me part of the plan too?”

“God, no. We’d never purposely put you in danger like that.”

“And what would you call this?” I waved my arms around the cell.

“This,” he said as he copied my movements, “is the first time in your entire life you haven’t been in danger.”

I rolled my eyes.

He roared then, a frustrated, furious growl, and jumped up. “It terrified me when you told me some man was hunting you, Tessa! The first thing I did was call Kellan to demand an army of guards to protect your family until we found him. But before Kellan answered, I saw the name you wrote in my notebook. Dennis Connelly. My father.”

He slapped the wall. “So I hung up on Kellan and called my dad. All missions are supposed to be confidential, but I told him everything. That’s when he realized which case I was on, that I was on a criminal case, his old case. Kellan was lying to us all along, and your parents were lying to you.”

His anger scared me a little, and I shrank back. He sank to the cot and raked his hands through his hair. His next words were gentle. “When I was ten, my dad went out of town with his team on a simple recruitment mission. That afternoon, some guards came and brought my mom and sister and me to the APR. They told us my dad had a heart attack and his partners had been killed. We were never told any details except they were interviewing a potential psionic subject, and something went wrong and the subject and his wife attacked them. They stabbed his partners to death, and they suspected they actually gave my dad that heart attack. The healers healed my dad, but he was weaker than before. He spent the rest of his career here trying to find your family and bring you and your siblings to safety, until my mom finally convinced him to retire so he could rest his heart.”