Page 124 of The Five Year Lie

—A

That might keep Mom from worrying for, oh, an hour.

Buzz follows me outside, and I pull the door shut without locking it. Then I buckle Buzz into yet another car with no booster seat. The driver heads for the Amtrak station.

My phone buzzes two times in quick succession.

Ray: Ariel, honey, can you come back to the office?

Ray: Something terrible has happened. It’s about Zain.

Then my phone rings.Ray Calling.

I decline the call. Then I power the phone all the way down.

But that’s not really enough, is it? Phones are trackable even when they’re off.

I slip the phone into the pocket on the back of the driver’s seat.

It cost me eight hundred dollars when I upgraded. But I’m going to leave it there.

That’s either smart or crazy. Like everything else I’ve done in the past twenty-four hours.

“Can we go to the museum?” Buzz asks as we pass the sign for it.

“Another day,” I whisper. “This is a different adventure.”

Buzz loves the train ride. He spends it on his knees, peering out the window, even when there’s nothing to see.

When we arrive in Boston, though, the station is chaos. I have to clamp my hand onto his arm as we dodge commuters at South Station.

“Where are we going?” he wants to know.

“On a bus,” I say. “But first we have to buy some tickets.”

Everything I know about long-haul buses I learned from listening to Larri and Tara complain about them. Buses take forever, and they always take the longest routes.

But they don’t usually check IDs. So that’s how we’re going to travel.

So I brace myself for the conversation with the woman at Boston’s South Station. “Where would you like to go?” asks the woman at the Greyhound counter.

It’s time for another round ofSmart, or crazy?

My college roommate lives in Evanston, Illinois. She’s pregnant with her first child, between jobs and recently invited me and Buzz to come and visit. So I should head for Chicago. We know each other well enough from drunken nights in college that if I turned up on her doorstep, she’d take it in stride.

Door number two is a wild little theory I’ve been nursing about where Jay Marker might be. It’s so outlandish that I didn’t even mention it to Zain. “There’s a tiny town in Michigan that probably doesn’t have a bus stop. It’s near Cadillac, though.”

She starts typing. “We have Cadillac. What’s the other town’s name?”

“Harrietta.” It was Drew’s password.

More typing, and then she shakes her head. “Cadillac, then?”

“Two please. One adult and one child.”

“The next bus leaves at seven p.m.”

Ouch.It’s only four thirty now.