Disappear

She laughed, an edge of hysteria accompanying the sound. “Do I get a new family, too? A new mom and dad? How about a baby brother? Can we add a little sister, too?”

He didn’t react at all. He simply stared at her, those bottomless black eyes taking it all in without a flicker.

She blinked and looked away, the finality hitting her again, harder than ever. She thought of a thousand things she wished she’d grabbed from the house. Her mother’s fake pearls. The video of her graduation. Toby’s Pooh bear. Her father’s favorite sweater. None of it valuable but all of it priceless. Then she thought of the photo. When Gabriel O’Rourke had ripped that picture from her hands, he’d taken her history as well. Her past was gone. Her family was gone.

She was gone. The person she’d been twenty-four hours ago no longer existed.

And she had a bad feeling that she didn’t even know the real reason behind the nightmare. “Why?” she said almost to herself. “Why?”

Surprising her, the man in black answered her question, his voice a knife. “Your father was an honorable man, that’s why. He always did the right thing.”

“And Mom?”

He shrugged, the emotion he’d allowed her to see already evaporating, already disappearing. “She loved him.” He paused. “Just like they both loved you. That’s one thing that’s for certain.”

“Nothing’s for certain.” Alexis looked down, into her coffee mug. An oily reflection of her face looked back, more real to her right now than her actual existence. She lifted her eyes. “Not anymore. You’ve taken that away from me.”

“But you have your life,” he answered. “And you will be safe. I’ll see to that.”

She tried to doubt him but she couldn’t. For the first time since they’d met, she knew Gabriel O’Rourke was telling her the truth.

HE TOOK HER to a small private airstrip, three hours away from where they’d been. They didn’t speak the whole trip, both occupied with their own thoughts and regrets. He’d let her ride in the passenger seat after they’d finished their coffee, his fears growing dimmer with each mile he put between the house on the quiet street and them. When they arrived and he’d parked, Gabriel turned to the young woman beside him.

He thought he’d aged, but Alexis Mission now looked like an entirely different person. Part of the change was at his insistence. They’d stopped at a twenty-four-hour drugstore and gotten a bottle of bleach and some harsh makeup. In a service-station bathroom near the interstate, the brunette he’d grabbed inside the Mission home had become a blonde with a slash of red lipstick that didn’t match her skin tone.

The changes to Alexis Mission went beyond just the physical, though. Her eyes were completely empty, her demeanor that of another person. She was someone less sure, he decided. Someone less confident, the darkness of depression already settling into her soul.

A small Cessna taxied out of a rusted hangar to their right and headed to where they were parked. Behind the plane, the tips of the mountains were just beginning to glow in the rising sun’s rays. Gabriel handed Alexis an envelope and she took it woodenly, placing it in her lap.

“There’s some cash in there to get you by until the money is wired. My people at the other end will give you more.” He held out a small white card and she took it, too. “That’s how you can reach me. It’s a drop number.”

She looked at him impassively.

“You call it and leave a message,” he explained. “Then I phone you back. You won’t ever get me directly. The system doesn’t work that way.”

Her eyes went to the piece of paper with the phone number written on it. She stared at it for a moment then she crumpled the note into a ball and opened her fingers. It fell to the floorboards.

“You might need that,” he said softly.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “You’ve done enough already.”

Her stiff reply wasn’t a compliment. Alexis Mission held him accountable for everything that had happened because she had no one else to blame. Similar damnation had been heaped on him before.

But he hadn’t cared then.

He felt the need to say something. “Alexis, your family was… Your mom and dad…”

“Don’t bother,” she said. The swosh of the plane’s rotors drawing close, she opened the van’s door, a wave of frigid air sweeping into the vehicle as she stepped out. She spoke through the window, her fingers gripping the edge so tightly her knuckles went white. “I don’t want to hear whatever you’re trying to say to me. I’ve had enough of your lies to last me forever.”

Her glittering gaze met with his, then she turned and walked away.

CHAPTER THREE

Ten years later, Austin, Texas

ALEX WORTHINGTON dusted off the last table in her workroom and picked up an errant paintbrush that had escaped her notice. Tucking the brush into a nearby drawer, she surveyed the area one more time. When Claiborne Academy’s final bell rang at Thanksgiving break, most of the staff fled as quickly as the students, but not Alex. She liked to return in January to a tidy space and a fresh start.

Fresh starts were her specialty. She’d had quite a few of them.

Claiborne itself represented one of the better ones. Alex had been the school’s resident artist for almost four years, her longest stretch anywhere. A private facility, the exclusive Austin school that blended art and technology was the favorite of parents who had plenty of money and wanted to spend it on their kids. When they’d hired her, she’d warned the administrators she wasn’t a teacher and they’d said they weren’t looking for one. Claiborne was innovative—the facility needed someone who would “guide” the children into developing their own creativeness, not teach them.

Atypical in its schedule as well as its philosophy, the academy shut down completely between Thanksgiving and New Year’s so the students and their families could head across the globe to second homes and exotic vacations. The faculty escaped as best they could and collapsed…working at Claiborne demanded a lot.

Alex was different though. She didn’t mind the hours any more than she minded tidying up her area, especially at this time of year. For obvious reasons, the holiday stretch always left her feeling restless and anxious. She usually planned an out-of-the-way trip herself, but before she could make reservations this year, Ben had called.

They’d married six years ago. After two, they’d divorced but had remained really good friends. Ben had asked her to spend Christmas with him and Libby, his twenty-year-old daughter. Alex couldn’t turn him down. Twenty-five years her senior, Ben was dying from a rare liver disease and he wouldn’t see another Christmas. If he wanted Alex with him, then she had to go. She owed him that much…and probably a lot more.

Taking down the last of the few decorations she put up each year—a gathered stalk of dried corn and apples—she told herself she’d get through tomorrow, then concentrate on Ben and Libby. They each needed Alex in a different way, and helping them would take her mind off her memories and all the ghosts that came with them.

But just thinking about the past summoned everything to her. Her fingers suddenly tightened on the dried corn husks and pieces of the chaff fluttered to the floor. She stared at the yellow bits, then all at once, despite her best intentions, her heart started to pound and her mouth went dry. With a quiet groan, she closed her eyes. Behind the lids, the image of her mother’s wreath appeared. The lopsided arrangement looked just as it had on the door of the house in Los Lobos the day Alex had come home from Peru.

Gabriel O’Rourke’s face came next, but before it could fully form, a voice broke the silence.

“Hey, you’re supposed to go home first and then fall asleep!”

Alex’s eyes shot open. Randy Squires, Claiborne’s dean, stood in the doorway of her classroom and grinned.

She smiled gratefully at the tall, balding man. Randy was a sweetheart and he never failed to make her feel better, no matter how badly the day had gone. If she let him, she suspected he’d give his right arm to make her happy, although he’d never come out and asked her for a date or made any kind of obvious move. He was too professional for that, but even more importantly, he sensed the wall Alex kept around herself and respected it.

“I’m too tired to go home and go to bed,” she lied. “I think I’ll just hibernate here like some big old bear until January. Is that okay?”

He strolled into her classroom and perched on the edge of her desk. “No fancy trips this year? No big vacation?”

Alex shook her head and explained Ben’s situation.

“I’m sorry to hear he’s so ill.”

“I am, too.” She sat down at one of the tables in front of her desk. “Ben’s a nice guy.”

“Your divorce was amicable, I take it?”

“Very. The last thing Ben Worthington would do is make a fuss over a divorce. He’s too much of a gentleman.”

“But the marriage didn’t work?”

Alex didn’t discuss anything personal with anyone. She couldn’t. “No,” she said in a curt voice. “It didn’t work.”

Her sharpness brought him to his feet. “I guess I’d better head home. If you get bored during the break, give me a call. There’s a new Mexican place over on Guadalupe Street. We could hit it.”

Alex felt a sweep of guilt—she shouldn’t have been so harsh—but she kept her face noncommittal. “Sure.” She nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind. It sounds like a lot of fun.”

Then their eyes met and both of them knew she wouldn’t call.

He left a few minutes after that. Relief washed over Alex as she picked up her purse and briefcase to follow his path out the door. Randy was the kind of guy any woman would be thrilled to have. Any woman but Alex.

She didn’t want anyone in her life, so it was always best to head off relationships before they started: You never knew when the other person might up and disappear.

GABRIEL O’ROURKE watched the bartender flick his rag at the caged parrot hanging over the bar. The sight provided the most entertainment Gabriel had had in the past two days. There wasn’t much to do in Baja this time of year. Or any time of year, but that was exactly why Gabriel came here, or so he told himself.

He’d left the Agency the year before, and he hadn’t given a damn about anything during that time. Caring cost more than he had to give, emotionally and physically. Burned out and disillusioned, when he needed money he did contract work for the government.

He took a sip of his lukewarm Dos Equis and listened to the conversation of the people sitting behind him in the bar. They’d come in late last night, two couples from Denver. The men had talked incessantly about fishing, but Gabriel had the feeling they’d already been hooked. One blonde, one redhead, the women were much younger than the men and their jewelry outshone the lights above the bar. Gabriel wondered idly if the men’s wives knew where they were.

“Well, pecan is my favorite.” One of the women behind him spoke in a deep Southern accent, the words drifting over Gabriel’s shoulder along with cigar smoke from the man at her side. Gabriel glanced at her in the mirror above the bar—it was the blonde. “We always had it on the table when I was growing up. It’s just not Thanksgiving without pecan pie.”

The redhead said something, the men guffawing at her reply, but Gabriel didn’t hear her. His brain was still trying to absorb what the first woman had said.

Until that very moment, he hadn’t realized tomorrow would be Thanksgiving.

A shadow glided across his memory, the whisper of a young woman with a pale face and stunned expression. He blinked and tried to send her away, but he failed as always. Standing up, he threw a handful of pesos on the bar and left, the cool breeze from the ocean hitting his face as he walked outside.

The ghost of Alexis Mission followed him.

Opening the screen door to his bungalow, Gabriel stepped inside the one-room shack. He grabbed another beer from a cooler he kept stocked, then he turned and went back outside to the porch. Fifteen yards away the Pacific Ocean rolled endlessly, the sky beyond it so dark and deep it made him dizzy just to look at it. He’d been on the sandy strip of beach for a week, his original reason for coming the same as the men in the bar—the fishing. He had yet to rent a boat though, and when he was honest with himself, he knew he probably wouldn’t. He’d come to Baja to recuperate, not to fish.

The month before, he’d finished another job for the Agency…and another relationship, and he’d wanted somewhere private to lick his wounds. Usually he missed the former more than the latter, but this time had been different.

He’d met the woman in a bar and Gabriel had been shocked when she’d come to his table and sat down to strike up a conversation. Like men everywhere, he’d kept his mouth shut and let her do her thing, his ego inflating with each admiring glance she’d sent his way. She’d been beautiful and smart and ambitious. Younger than him, too, a helluva lot younger, but then again…weren’t they all?

She’d moved in two weeks later and out after two months. He’d packed up his shit and left San Diego. It wasn’t home anyway—no place was home. He’d come down here.

And now it was almost Thanksgiving.

Gabriel stared at the water but Alexis Mission’s face formed in the waves and mocked him. Like still photos framed inside his mind, he saw snapshots of her life, times when he’d been there and she’d never known. The rough period right after Los Lobos. The emergency room, then the recuperation. The paintings. Her wedding. The divorce. Her job. Each event had brought him close to her…but never too close.

Gabriel had told so many lies in his work he couldn’t remember them all, but he’d never forgotten the ones he’d told Alexis Mission.

Back then, though, catching Guy Cuvier had been his only goal. The man had gotten away with stealing American technology for years and Gabriel had been so determined to stop him that nothing else had mattered. The result had been disastrous and the deception still haunted him: Alexis Mission’s parents hadn’t been killed. And Richard Mission hadn’t witnessed a murder.

He’d committed one.

It’d been self-defense, of course, but Richard had shot Guy Cuvier. Gabriel had worked quickly, knowing nothing but a total disappearance could keep the Missions safe afterward. He’d been wrong about that and regretted the decision as much as he now regretted telling Alexis that her family had died. The idea had seemed like a bad one at the time; in retrospect, it was the worst thing Gabriel could have done.

In the past few years, it seemed as if things had begun to smooth out for Alexis. The new name had become her own, the town her home, the life, one she liked. Deep down, however, Gabriel often wondered if her adjustment was genuine. In his eyes, she wore her past like a mask she couldn’t take off. The divorce had set her back, too. Before she’d even married the guy, Gabriel had predicted the outcome. Ben Worthington had been too old for Alexis. He was incapable of giving her what she searched for, what she needed.

Truth be told, Gabriel had actually thought at one point about making contact with her, but he’d held back. Why disrupt her life a second time? Six months after Los Lobos, part of the lie he’d told her had actually come to pass, but there was no good reason to revive her sorrow. She’d already grieved for her parents and brother—unearthing an empty grave just to dig a real one was too cruel to even consider. Gabriel carried enough guilt as it was.

He told himself she wouldn’t have listened to him, anyway. Before leaving the cold mountains outside of Los Lobos, Alexis Mission had made herself perfectly clear; he was the last person on earth she ever wanted to see again. She hated him.

Gabriel hadn’t felt the same way about her. He’d made a promise to watch over her, but for the past ten years that pledge had meant nothing to him.

He’d kept vigil over Alexis Mission because he couldn’t stay away.

THEY SAID they heated the pool, but the water still felt icy to Alex. She stuck her big toe into the deep end and tried not to think about it, choosing instead to simply dive in and swim. As it was with most things, that seemed to be the best policy. With even, steady strokes she sliced through the water and quickly reached the other end. Touching the cold tile with her fingertips, she sucked in a breath then flipped over to head back the way she had just come.

The natatorium wasn’t usually empty but it might as well have been tonight. Only two other swimmers occupied the lanes to either side, their strokes splashing loud enough to keep her company. Everyone was sleeping off their Thanksgiving feasts; going to the YMCA was the last thing on their minds.

In general, Alex liked it when no one else was around and she was the only one in the water. Tonight, though, she welcomed the other swimmers. There was something creepy about the echoing walls, something unnerving about the size of the room.

She was nervous and edgy, more behind her anxiety than just the holidays: For the past few days she’d been sure someone was following her. Every time she’d stepped outside her apartment, she’d experienced the horrible sensation of eyes on her back. Her neck would tingle and she’d look around sharply, but so far she’d spotted no one. The feeling refused to leave, however.

Thrusting these thoughts away, she swam for almost forty minutes, her arms and legs growing heavy toward the end. A half-hour workout was her usual maximum, but tonight she wanted to tire herself out completely. She finished the final lap then clung to the edge of the pool and fought to regain her breath. When her huffing and puffing slowed and she looked around, she realized everyone else had left. She was all alone.

Paddling quickly to the edge of the pool, Alex climbed out and grabbed the towel she’d draped over a chair. She made her way to the ladies’ locker room and within fifteen minutes, she’d showered and dressed and was on her way to the parking lot.

The day had been a repeat of Alex’s other Thanksgivings. Over the years, she’d developed a finely tuned ritual, a way she both remembered then walked away from her past. The rite was never completely successful of course, but one day it might be. One day she might find herself unable to recall every single detail.

As she always did, she’d started the morning by writing a letter to Toby. There were ten of the white envelopes now, sitting in a box, just waiting. He would never read the letters, of course, but they weren’t for her little brother anyway. They were for her. She didn’t want to forget him. When she finished that task, she sat back and closed her eyes. The memories she kept tightly guarded the rest of the year were then allowed out.

The empty house. The icy road. The look on Gabriel O’Rourke’s face when he’d told her her family was dead. As soon as she could, rendering the images with sharp, swift strokes, Alexis had re-created the photo that he’d ripped from her hands that night. Holding that sketch, she sat in the middle of her bed and let the past flood her. At first, the ritual had almost killed her, but lately, the mental pictures had begun to dim. If she hadn’t had her charcoal memory, her mother’s eyes would be a blur now, her father’s expression a dim relief. Alex wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.

She immersed herself in the pain for an hour and then she stopped. The ghosts went back into the lock-box she kept inside her heart. The framed drawing returned to its position on her nightstand and she forced herself through the day.

The YMCA had been a last-minute addition to her routine. Because of her anxiety about being followed, the ritual hadn’t cooperated and the past kept breaking in, flashes of the night she wanted to forget coming back. Reaching her car, Alex knew she’d have to think of something else to do to keep it all at bay. She’d pick up some movies, she decided impulsively, throwing her gym bag into the car and starting it. Something that would keep her mind more occupied than the book she’d been saving for that evening.

She stopped at the video store down the road from her apartment and grabbed two mindless films. The Thai place next door was open, so she went in there as well and ordered takeout. By the time she reached home, she’d managed to kill another hour. Glancing down at her watch, she figured she only had four more hours to endure. She’d allow herself a single sleeping pill then hopefully wake up to a day with fewer memories.

The parking lot of her apartment was almost as empty as the YMCA’s pool had been. The complex was a small one near the University of Texas campus and a lot of the university people lived there. Students and professors alike, they were a transient bunch, coming and going with each semester, a fast turnover of neighbors who fled during the holidays and summer. Some people wouldn’t have liked it for that very reason, but that was exactly why Alex had selected the apartment. She didn’t want long-term neighbors who had to know your life’s history. When you didn’t have one you could talk about, conversation turned stilted.

Tonight, though, just like at the pool, she would have welcomed a few more souls. The hollow echo of her tennis shoes slapping the sidewalk was too reminiscent, the cold too chilling, the empty feeling too familiar. She had friends she could have called, other teachers, people from church… A number of them had even invited her to their homes for the holiday meal, but she’d turned down all the offers as she always did at Thanksgiving. She needed to be lonely on Thanksgiving.

But knowing this didn’t diminish the emotion. Or the feelings of being frightened that were mixed with the loneliness. She ordered herself to buck up. She’d get through this year just as she had the other nine. By sheer grit and determination.

Alex climbed the stairs to her second-floor landing, then shifted the gym bag and the two plastic sacks to her left hand so she could unlock her door. Stepping inside, she closed the door behind her and locked it once more.

Then she froze.

Something wasn’t right.

Someone had been inside her apartment.

Her glance shot to her right, into the well-lit living room. Her apartment was close to the pool and the lights from the patio came through her blinds at night. Bright lines sifted their way through the open slats to reveal the sofa and two chairs. They were empty. To her left, behind a wall, was a small kitchen.

Alex carefully emptied her arms, the sacks going to the floor, her gym bag dropping silently to a nearby table. With her eyes still sweeping the room in front of her, she felt behind her for the bat she kept by the front door. Gripping the taped handle with both hands, she advanced into the entry, her back to the wall, and lifted the bat to her shoulder as she stepped around the wall.

The kitchen was as empty as it had been when she’d left.

Her pulse ringing, Alex returned to the hallway that led to the guest bedroom. The room served as her studio and was filled with art equipment, a worktable and a potter’s wheel, a small loom and drawing supplies. As she eased around the doorway, her eyes jerked to one corner, her heart stopping with a violent thump. A tall shadow was poised by the window. A second later, her scream died in her throat.

She was looking at her easel.

Sick with fright, she returned to the corridor and forced herself to continue. The guest bath was empty, too. The only rooms left were her bedroom and bath.

She crept toward the back of the apartment, her palms so wet her grip on the bat was slipping. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t done the extra laps at the pool. The polished piece of oak felt as if it weighed fifty pounds. She wasn’t sure she could swing it if she had to.

But her bedroom was just as empty as the rest of the place, the white matelassé bedspread smooth and pristine, her slippers tossed carelessly beside the bed, her robe in the chair on the right. Her chest eased slightly, her fear starting to fade.