Page 58 of Ringer
“Please,” Lyra said. Her palms were sweating. The overhead lights were very bright. Remembering the lie Rick had coached her on, she added, “He’s my cousin.”
The old man shook his head again. But this time, his voice was a little softer. “I’m not in the business of giving handouts, young lady,” he said. “It’s a store. Not a church. Besides, if I’d let him get away with it, who’s to say someone else couldn’t just waltz on in here and strip the place?”
“Do you know where he went?” she asked. Fortunately, her voice didn’t shake. She had gotten very good at that, at hiding, at burying things deep inside of her.
The old man blinked at her as if she’d just appeared. “Where do you think he went?” he said, scowling again. “The cops took him down to the station. And if I were you, young lady, I wouldn’t hurry to bail him out.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 7 of Gemma’s story.
EIGHT
IT WAS EASY ENOUGH, IT turned out, to find a police station, even if you had no idea where you were going. All you had to do, Lyra discovered, was start walking—and eventually, when it started to get dark, the police would findyou.
She walked down a long street empty of cars. Lyra couldn’t exactly be considered lost, since she did not know where she was going: still, she very definitely did not know where she was.
At some point, it had begun to rain. She crossed an empty playground darkened by shattered floodlights. Next to the swings, several guys paused to watch her, the happy rhythm of their conversation abruptly silenced. A woman with a big metal cart piled with plastic bags wheeled slowly down the sidewalk, her feet swollen with rags instead of shoes. Lyra saw a rat picking at trash bagspiled on the street, and the gutters were knotty with empty bottles and old sandwich wrappers and cigarette packs.
She had been walking for at least an hour, wondering whether she would recognize a police station if she saw it, and if so, whether she would have the courage to go inside it, when a dark sedan pulled up beside her.
“Are you all right?” A man leaned over to squint through the passenger-side window. His skin was very dark, and his hair was threaded with gray. He was wearing a dark suit.
Lyra’s immediate thought was to run. She knew sedans, knew the look of the Suits who drove them, knew that they carried smiles along with their guns. But she was trapped: he could easily follow her if she took off running down the block, and there was nowhere to hide, and no possibility of cutting across a nearby park that was hemmed in by a tall chain-link fence.
“This isn’t a good place for you to be walking this late,” the man said. Lyra backed up, shivering, until the fence punched her between the shoulder blades. She wondered if she should scream. But who would help?
“Hey.” The man’s voice got softer. “It’s all right. I only want to make sure you’re safe out here.” Then: “It’s okay. You’re not in any trouble.”
Lyra was confused by the tone of his voice—none ofthe Suits had ever spoken to her like that, or looked at her the way he was, as if his eyes were something warm he wanted to give her. And he hadn’t come at her with a gun or tried to force her into the car.
Maybe, then, he wasn’t a Suit.
Still, Lyra was frozen. The man didn’t move, or get out of the car. He just sat there, looking at her, his face touched with light from a streetlamp on the corner.
“Do you speak English?” he asked. And then:“¿Habla español?”Then: “My name is Detective Reinhardt. I work with the Nashville Police Department.”
Finally, Lyra eased her weight off the fence. She was positive, now, that he hadn’t been sent to find her. And she had to be brave, if she was going to find Caelum, which meant she had to believe him.
She hesitated. “I was looking for a police station,” she said finally.
He stared at her a second longer. “Get in,” he said, and opened the door.
His car was very clean, which relaxed her. A picture of three girls was mounted to the dashboard, and when they passed beneath a streetlamp, she saw two of them were identical and felt a kind of ecstatic relief: twins, she knew, not replicas, but still it seemed like a sign. The other girl looked older, and she had the policeman’s long nose and the same enormous eyes. She wore a bright-red headband and had her arms looped around the twins. Her eyes wereclosed and she was laughing.
He saw her looking. “The twins are my nieces, my sister’s kids. Jamie and Madison. And that’s my daughter, Alyssia,” he said, thumbing the girl in the middle of the photograph. “An old photo. She’s in college now.”
“She’s pretty,” Lyra said.
He smiled. “Don’t I know it,” he said. He had a little bit of an accent, like Nurse Curly, who’d come from a place named Georgia. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Gemma Ives,” she lied quickly. Before leaving Haven she hadn’t been a good liar, but this was a skill, she’d rapidly learned, that most humans had perfected; it was necessary to lie, living in the human world.
“Nice to meet you, Gemma Ives,” he said. His eyes were big enough to root her in place: as if he wasn’t just seeing her, but absorbing everything about her, her past and even her future. “You can call me Kevin.”
“Detective Kevin Reinhardt,” she recited, and he laughed.
“Just Kevin is fine, like I said.”
Lyra was glad that his suit was rumpled, and smelled like soft old wool. Not sharp, like the suits the military men and women wore when they came. “Why don’t you wear a uniform?” she blurted out.
