Page 14 of Sunset Cove
Chapter Seven
There wasn’t an easy way to get around the island, and Marty was far too paranoid to take a taxi. Plus, the public bus only ran during the summer. Not that he’d risk that, either.
It hadn’t been much of a problem when he first got to Orcas Island. He’d caught a ride with a friendly driver from the ferry terminal to Moran State Park. From there, he was able to camp in the dense forest unnoticed. Though he was tempted to spend a few nights at a campsite, he resisted. If the FBI knew he was in the area, it was too risky.
It was his own fault if they found him, too. He got sloppy and used his burner phone to call his best friend – a number that the FBI was watching. He’d needed her help, though – in his rush, he had run out of his house without his wallet. Lesson learned.
Marty knew that he should leave the island. He knew he was playing with fire, but he just couldn’t leave. Not yet. His mom had made no attempt to contact him, but he held a small hope that the mother who abandoned him all those years ago had simply missed his letter.
Or maybe she was scared? It was possible that the FBI had already gotten to her. They could be setting a trap for him…
He didn’t care. After enduring four straight days and nights of heavy rain, Marty decided that he’d had enough. He would go to Claire’s place and see what she had to say for herself.
It wasn’t like he had a ton of options at this point. His own parents, his adoptive parents, were back in Spain. It’s where his mother – er, his adoptive mother – had grown up, and he didn’t want to tell them what was going on, worrying them from an ocean away.
Plus, he was still angry at them for hiding his adoption from him for all these years. If it hadn’t been for his drunken aunt at Thanksgiving, Marty never would’ve found out the truth.
His mom, ever the free spirit, didn’t understand why he got upset. “It’s not like we werelyingto you,” his mom said, shaking her head, sending her long brown hair into violent waves. “We planned to tell you, but we wanted to wait until you were older, until you could understand.”
“Yeah,” his dad had added, nodding eagerly.
“So you waited until I was almost thirty?” Marty asked, incredulous.
“Of course not, but as you got older, you were such a moody teenager…” His mom trailed off and laughed. “What does it matter? What does it change? I’m still your mother, aren’t I?”
It changed everything, of course, but Marty couldn’t find the words for it. It felt like he’d been the butt of a thirty-year joke.
Had everyone known that he was adopted? Did they laugh about it behind his back?
His parents had hidden it from him for so long that it stood to reason they could’ve lied to him about everything else in his life. He’d believe anything, apparently. It seemed impossible for Marty to ever trust again.
“She was a very sad girl, nice, but very sad,” his mom explained. “She didn’twantto let you go. She lived with us for the last three months of her pregnancy, and a week after we adopted you, she disappeared.”
It made no sense to him. The records surrounding his adoption were sealed, with no option to open them. His parents had a single picture of her, his birth mom, the one who went by Rebecca.
It was a fluke he’d even managed to find her. Marty debated for weeks whether it might be worth it to sign up for an ancestry website. The most popular one, with the most possible matches, had recently had a data breach. Thousands of people’s information was hacked, and Marty would normally want nothing to do with a company like that.
Yet...the temptation of finding his birth mother was too great. He sent his DNA in and got a match. With the FBI chasing him down, though, he didn’t have time to wait to see if she was interested in meeting. He took advantage of the ancestry website’s security weakness, which had been fixed poorly, and got her name and address for himself. It was a bit of light hacking, but for a good cause – he was able to find out that his birth mother was now going by the name Claire.
From what he could see online, her life had been an interesting one. Despite giving him away, she’d had three daughters – none of whom she gave away – and recently bought an expensive hotel on the island.
It nagged at him. That was really what made him come all the way to Orcas Island. He needed to know. How could she leave him to some couple she met in a Kmart parking lot, but keep threeother kids?
That was what he needed to know. He wanted to hear what this woman had to say for herself, what had been so wrong with him that she left him behind.
Naturally, he couldn’t admit to himself that he wished she’d welcome him with open arms, tell him she’d made a mistake, and offer him a safe place to hide from the FBI.
That was too unlikely to even fantasize about. Unfortunately for Marty, he’d never realized how difficult it was to hide, especially when all of the people willing to hide him were under surveillance by the FBI.
He packed his tent before hiking out of the park and onto the main road. There was no sidewalk, and though it felt a bit precarious at times, most of the drivers moved relatively slowly. He kept the hood of his jacket up. To any passersby, he looked like another anonymous hiker.
It was too far and too windy to walk all the way to Claire’s cabin, though, so when he got to Eastsound, he rented a kayak and launched it from the bay. It was an easy, peaceful trip out and around the western tip of the island – so peaceful that he almost forgot he was a fugitive for a few minutes.
After finding a suitable beach, he paddled in and dragged the kayak onto shore. From there, he made the trek to the main road, still going unnoticed, and to the address for Claire’s place. He wasn’t positive she was living there, but that was where her DNA results were supposed to go.
Marty may have broken a few rules getting that information from the system, but to be fair, the company’s security was almost nonexistent.
When he got to Claire’s road, he paused. It didn’t seem like anyone was around, and it was starting to get dark. He figured he would take his chances and started to walk through the woods alongside the rocky driveway. When he reached the cabin, he waited for half an hour, looking for any signs of life inside.
There was nothing. No lights, no sounds, no movements. He stood there and debated what to do. His damp clothes clung to his skin and sent a chill through his core.
It didn’t seem like he’d be meeting his birth mom today. However, it seemed like the perfect chance to get a hot shower, and to change into dry clothes.
He approached the cabin slowly, still listening, still hearing nothing. Marty managed to pop open a window in the back and pull himself inside.
As he walked around the tight space, he got a feel for the lady that was his mother. There wasn’t much in there. She was living curiously simply, almost like he was, out in the woods.
It seemed like no one had been in the cabin in a long while. Though he wanted to poke around more, he decided to take a chance on showering. He was filthy and freezing, and it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes.
Marty stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. He comforted himself with the thought that if she were to come home in the next ten minutes, he’d have to be one of the unluckiest guys alive.
