"It's what she does, Ms. Morgan." Mr. Solomon's eyes found mine, but there was a change in him somehow. "Running," he added. "Of course, technically, her pattern is to do something to get kicked out, but that's not an option now, so she's taken matters into her own hands. Do you know what I'm saying, Ms. Morgan?"
But sadly, I didn't.
"Sometimes people run… to see if you'll come after them."
I've seen Joe Solomon every school day for more than a year, but I don't think I'll ever really know him. There are times when he's one of the strongest people I've ever known, and then there are moments—like that one—when I think he might be broken, deep down, in a place that will never mend.
And then just like that, he became my teacher again. "Is anything missing from your room?"
I stopped for a second, closed my eyes, and visualized the space. "Her passport."
"No clothes? No money?"
"She has fourteen different credit cards and knows all the numbers by heart."
Mr. Solomon looked as if he wanted to smile, as if he wanted to laugh. "She also has the most famous face in the country right now, Ms. Morgan," he told me, not a hint of worry in his voice. "I think we can track her down." But then he read my expression, and the smile slid from his lips. "What?"
"Well," I said slowly, "remember how we had that disguise class?"
There wasn't time for yelling. It wasn't the place for mother-daughter lessons in regret. As our teachers huddled around us, I gave them details of the items Macey had taken with her. When I finished, my mother shook her head and started for the phone. Unfortunately, Aunt Abby wasn't as easily distracted.
"I know what I did," I said before my aunt could utter a word.
"Do you?" There was something deeper in her eyes. She wasn't just Aunt Abby then; she was more than Macey's protector; for a split second she was the woman on the train, but then—just as quickly—that woman was gone. "You went into town alone and…and now, come Tuesday, we are going to have to produce Macey McHenry, and if we can't, every agent in the Secret Service and half the FBI is going to descend upon this mansion, Cameron, and I don't know if even your mother can keep them out. They're going to pull back carpets and knock down doors until they track Macey's every step, and in the process, they might take my head for good measure. And meanwhile, she's—" Abby placed a hand on her hip, and for the first time, I saw a holster. Like smoke and fire, I knew that somewhere there was a gun. "She's out there. She's goodness only knows—"
"New York!" Buckingham shouted and banged down a phone. "A young woman matching Macey's description purchased a bus ticket to New York last night. And someone using one of Macey's mother's business accounts reserved a private jet to Switzerland."
Abby looked at me. "Her family has a house there," I said. "It fits."
Mom turned to Buckingham. "We have alumni in Switzerland?"
"Of course," was Buckingham's reply.
"Have them sit on her until we can get a grab team in place." Professor Buckingham turned to go, but Mom called after her. "And Patricia, tell them she's a hard target. Tell them she's one of us."
I would have given anything for Macey to have heard that. Maybe then she would have believed me. Maybe then she wouldn't have run away. Maybe then things would have been very different. But Macey didn't hear, and that was the problem. She was half a world away. On her own. And one look at my mother's worried eyes told me that we probably weren't the only ones looking for her.
As Abby bolted for the door, Bex, Liz, and I rushed after
her.
"When do we leave?" Bex said.
"We aren't going anywhere," Abby snapped. Through the windows I could see that a chopper was already spinning its blades, waiting for her. She rushed toward the staircase, but then stopped short. "She'll be okay, you know." For a second, Abby was her old self as she cocked a hip. "Trust me."
I know, scientifically speaking, that all days have twenty-four hours. One thousand four hundred and forty minutes. Eighty- six thousand, four hundred seconds. But even Liz admitted that the days that followed seemed longer, as we stared out every window we passed, expecting the gates to swing open, to see Aunt Abby and Macey coming down the lane.
But the gates stayed closed. The lane stayed empty. And Macey stayed gone.
By Monday night, a feeling was resurfacing inside of me like a virus that had been dormant for years, as I thought about when my parents would go away for days or weeks on end; before the days when I knew my father wasn't coming back at all. Walking downstairs for supper, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'm really great at disappearing, but Macey might have been a whole different kind of gone.
"Oops, sorry," someone said, just as I looked up to see Tina Walters running up the stairs. The sign above the Grand Hall told me we were going to be conversing that night in Portuguese; the aromas that filled the foyer told me we were having lasagna. But something in the way Tina looked at me told me that none of the junior class was feeling very hungry.
"You okay, Cam?" she asked, and I nodded, but for some reason I couldn't move out of her way.
"Tina, have you …" I started, then paused because I honestly couldn't quite believe what I was about to ask. "Have your sources heard anything?"
I wanted her to tell me that Macey was okay. I would have settled for a crazy story about a girl matching Macey's description who had been staking out an ex-KGB hitman in Bucharest. I needed anything but the sight of Tina shaking her head and saying, "Not a word."