Frank laughed. “Nah. You know I love you, babe, but two of you are enough for me. Plus our girl’s prints matched May-Ruth’s. I’m just saying it’s odd. I know people who’ve dealt with identity-swappers-protected witnesses, adult runaways like our girl-and they all say the same thing: these people were the same afterwards as they were before. It’s one thing getting a new name and a new life; it’s a whole other thing getting a new personality. Even for a trained undercover, it’s a constant strain. You know what it was like, having to be Lexie Madison twenty-four seven-what it’s like now, sure. It’s not easy.”
“I’m doing OK,” I said. I had that wild urge to laugh again. This girl, whoever the hell she was, would have made a fantastic undercover. Maybe we should have swapped lives earlier.
“You are, of course,” Frank said smoothly. “But so was our girl, and that’s worth looking into. Maybe she was just naturally gifted, but maybe she had training, somewhere-as an undercover, or as an actor. I’m putting out feelers; you have a little think and see if you’ve noticed any indicators that point in one direction or another. That sound like a plan?”
“Yeah,” I said, slowly leaning back against the tree trunk. “Good thinking.”
I didn’t feel like laughing any more. That first afternoon in Frank’s office had just flashed across my mind, so vivid that for an instant I smelled dust and leather and whiskeyed coffee, and for the first time I wondered if I had completely missed what was happening in that little sunlit room; if I had bounced blithely, unconsciously, past the most crucial moment of all. Here I had always believed the test had come in the first few minutes, with that couple on the street or when Frank asked me if I was afraid. It had never occurred to me that those were only the outer gates and that the real challenge had come much later, when I thought I was already safe inside; that the secret handshake I had given, without even realizing it, might have been the ease with which I helped come up with Lexie Madison.
“Does Chad know?” I asked suddenly, when Frank was about to hang up. “About May-Ruth not being May-Ruth?”
“Yep,” Frank said cheerfully. “He does. I left him his illusions as long as I could, but this week I had my boy tell him. I needed to know if he was holding something back, out of loyalty or whatever. Apparently he wasn’t.”
The poor bastard. “How’d he take it?”
“He’ll survive,” Frank said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” And he hung up. I sat in my tree, making patterns in the bark with my fingernail, for a long time.
I was starting to wonder if I’d been underestimating, not the killer, but the victim. I didn’t want to think this, I’d been flinching off it, but I knew: there had been something wrong with Lexie, way deep down. The flint of her, the way she had left Chad behind without a word and laughed while she got ready to leave Whitethorn House, like an animal biting off its own trapped paw with one snap and no whimper; that could have been just desperation. I understood that, all the way. But this, the seamlessness of that switch from sweet shy May-Ruth to bubbly clown Lexie: that had been something else, something wrong. No kind of fear or desperation could have demanded that. She had done it because she wanted to. A girl with that much hidden and that much dark could have sparked a very high caliber of anger in someone.
It’s not easy, Frank had said. But that was the thing: for me, it always had been. Both times, being Lexie Madison had come as natural to me as breathing. I had slid into her like sliding into comfy old jeans, and this was what had scared me, all along.
It wasn’t until I was getting into bed, that night, that I remembered: that day on the grass, when something had clicked into place and I had seen the five of them as a family, Lexie as the cheeky late-baby sister. Lexie’s mind had gone along the same track as mine had, only a million times faster. She had taken one look and seen what they were and what they were missing, and fast as a blink she had made herself into that.
I had known, from the moment Sam said he was planning chats with his three potential vandals, that there would be consequences. If Mr. Baby-killers was in there, he wouldn’t be one bit happy about being questioned by the cops, he would blame the whole thing on us, and there wasn’t a chance in hell he would let it lie. What I missed was how fast the strike would come, and how straight. I felt so safe in that house, I had forgotten that that in itself should have been my warning.
