Харлан Кобен - Found

Troy nodded. “Think about it. You know all the pressure he was already under with his brother being a superstar, right?”

“Yes.”

“Now add you in the equation. It got to him. Bad. To lose your starting job in your last year...”

I saw where Troy was going with this. “So you think he took steroids.”

“I’m not saying that. He’s my friend. But at some point, Brandon and I wanted to lay off you. We knew that you could help us win. That’s all that really mattered to me.” He leaned closer to me. “But, see, I would still be a starter. Buck was the one on the fringe.”

We sat there, in the dark, and watched the video game characters run rampant.

“He hasn’t called me back,” Troy said.

“Buck?”

“Yeah. He sent me a few texts, but he won’t talk to me.”

“Why do you think that is?”

Troy shrugged. “I don’t know.”

My cell phone rang. It was Ema. I got myself out of the chair and headed over to a quiet corner. “Hello?”

“You found Jared?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Where are you?”

“We just got back home.”

“I’m on my way.”

I told Ema everything about our meeting on Adiona Island with Jared Lowell.

She listened intently, as she always did. We were sitting in the kitchen of the enormous mansion she calls home. Niles, the family butler, was puttering around the house, but he knew better than to get in our way. Ema’s mom, the actress whose fan board had started this whole thing, was still in New York.

When I finished, Ema didn’t speak. She just sat at the kitchen table. Her hands were folded in front of her. She stared at them. I started to reach my hand across, but I stopped. Her body language was all wrong.

“Ema?” I said.

“He’s lying.”

I waited for her to say more. She kept her eyes on her hands. She started twisting the silver skull ring on her right hand around and around. Finally she said, “I want to show you something.”

She took out her smartphone and started playing with the buttons. I sat quietly. “I don’t like doing this,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Showing you this e-mail. It’s the last one Jared sent me.”

“You don’t have to...”

“I know that. And, yeah, it’s really personal. That’s why I don’t really want to do it. But I need you to understand. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

With a deep sigh, Ema handed me her phone. The cover was black with silver studs. The girl was consistent, I had to say that. She had blown up the screen so I couldn’t see the address or the top of the e-mail. I didn’t scroll. If she had wanted me to see the whole thing, she would have left it alone.

I can’t wait to see you. I can’t wait for this all to be over and to tell you what’s in my heart and how I’ve changed. You changed me, Ema. I have made so many mistakes and there is still one more thing to do, but once that’s over, I promise it will all be behind me. We will be together if you’ll accept me.

I looked up. “That’s it?”

“That’s all I want to show you.”

“What’s with the ‘if you’ll accept me’?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

I handed her back the phone.

“But does that sound like a guy who had a change of heart?”

“No, but you know how guys are.”

“I do,” Ema said with a frown.

I thought about it. “Jared wrote that he still has one more thing to do and then he can put it all behind him. What was he talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

I mulled it over for a few seconds. “He left school. Do you think it has to do with that?”

“I guess it has to,” Ema said. “School was important to him. He’s as basketball crazy as you are.” She checked her phone and slid it back into her pocket. “Did he tell you why he was home?”

“No.”

“Did you ask?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I remembered what Rachel had said. “We didn’t come to change his life. Our mission was to find him and make sure he was safe.”

My words came out with more sting than I intended. This all felt strange for some reason. Seeing that e-mail had thrown me off guard a little. Ema, a girl I cared about a whole lot, had this big relationship with some guy she was really into and with whom she exchanged words of... love?

I wanted not to care. But I didn’t like it.

For a second — a half second, maybe less — I considered asking her when she had first sent him her picture. Had it been late in the game, maybe right after she received this e-mail? I know how cruel that sounded, but I had seen the way Jared looked at Rachel.

Was that it? Was the answer that simple — and that superficial?

I started thinking about that again and now my emotions turned back to rage at Jared Lowell.

But I stayed quiet.

“He may still be in danger,” Ema said. “He could be covering something up. He could be trying to protect me.”

“Protect you how?”

“There was something going on in his life. Something he was trying to get away from so that he could be with me. But suppose he couldn’t? Suppose he tried to but, whatever it was, he couldn’t escape it.”

We sat there in silence. Finally I asked, “What was he trying to escape?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But maybe we still need to find out.”

It was dark when I headed home. Niles offered me a ride, but I wanted to walk. I needed to clear my head. The walk home would do me good. Ema’s house was not only ginormous but it sat atop a ginormous plot of land. I started down a driveway that had to be a quarter mile long.

When I reached the bottom of the hill, I spotted the familiar car across the street. It was black with tinted windows. Its license plate number was A30432. During the Holocaust, prisoners in Auschwitz had numbers tattooed on their arms. Lizzy Sobek had survived that death camp. Her tattoo number?

A30432.

The car was here for me. I didn’t walk toward it. I would let them make the first move.

The back door opened. The man I had called Shaved Head stepped out. He wore a dark suit and tie. I knew now that his name was Dylan Shaykes. As a young child, curly-haired Dylan Shaykes had vanished, never to be seen again. I didn’t know what happened or how he had joined Abeona, but he had been watching me from the beginning.

The black car drove away, leaving Dylan alone on the street with me.

“Funny thing,” I called to him.

“What?”

“I’ve never seen the driver. Who is he?”

Dylan didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

We started down the street together. Neither of us spoke for the first hundred yards or so. We were waiting each other out. It was odd. I had always thought my... what was he anyway? My mentor? My immediate superior? I didn’t know. But I always thought that my relationship with a guy like this would be more teacher-student, master-pupil, like in some karate movie. But it wasn’t. He was on my side. I knew that. He had been with Abeona a long time and would, I’m sure, help me in a pinch, yet there was always a tension between us.

“You have something that doesn’t belong to you,” Dylan said.

“What’s that?”

“A tape.”

“Oh, right. Well, since my father was on it, I kinda think it belongs to me too.”

We kept walking.

“My father helped rescue Luther, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“So why is Luther our enemy now?”

“It’s a long story,” Dylan said.

“I can walk slower if you’d like.”

“You’re still new to this,” Dylan said.

“Not that new.”