Dropping Like Spies - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Twenty-Four

So instead of yelling at my father, I yelled at my grandmother.  “You can’t do this!  You can’t—”

“Morgan,” she snapped, instantly reminding me exactly why no one ever even raised their voice in her general direction.  “You are grounded and you will not leave this mansion.  Is that understood?  If I hear that you’ve even thought about leaving this mansion, you will face severe consequences.  Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes ma’am,” I mumbled.

“Good.”  She collected a stack of papers, thick enough and colorful enough to be my entire disciplinary file, and struck them against the desk until they were straight.  She needed a binder clip to hold them together, since paper clips had stopped doing the trick since their eighth grade.  “Now,” she said, looking to my father.  “Is there anything else you’d like to add?”

Dad made an effort not to look at me.  He sounded almost resentful as he asked, “Did you have fun?”

The question seemed so out of place in the conversation that I had to look at Grandma just to make sure I’d heard right.  She didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about it and so I said, “What?” because there was no way that Dad had just asked what I thought he had just asked.

Dad looked significantly less patient this time around.  The words were supposed to hurt, I could tell, but he just couldn’t make them.  “I am so completely angry with you, but I am still your father and you still ran an op so I am asking if you had fun in Romania.”

Even just the name took me back to the land.  To the sweet air and the local lore.  To the spicy tango and the carved buildings.  To that star-filled night and more adventure than I ever could have imagined.  I caught myself smiling, and so I had to say, “Yeah.”

But then I remembered the woman. Remembered drowning in a closet.  Remembered the fear.  “I mean, aside from the part when I almost died.  That would have been a pretty big downer, I think.”

Neither of them found this very funny, but I don’t think I expected them too.  Really, I think a part of me knew.  Knew that it would cause some sort of reaction.  Knew that it would make them exchange a glance.  It was a look that was meant to be covert.  The conversation held within its silence was probably far above my clearance level and yet, I recognized it.  Not for the first time, I found my brother in my father’s features, and I saw him giving my grandmother the exact same look Matt had given Aunt Bex.  Another one, he had said when Dad had delivered the mystery news.  Another what?

“What is it?” I asked.  “What aren’t you telling me?”

The two of them found me, looking as if I’d just appeared out of nowhere.  Like I wasn’t supposed to be able to hear the conversation they were having.  Don’t they know by now?  I hear everything.

I’ve rarely seen hesitation cross my father’s face.  It’s just not something that he’s programmed with.  Dad’s a doer.  He does things.  Right then, right there.  But in that single moment, I saw it.  I saw the hesitation.  I saw the look in his eye as he tried to read me.  Tried to see my reaction before it even came.

“She’ll find out one way or another,” Grandma continued.  There was a sort of repetitiveness to her tone.  This was a conversation they’d had multiple times already.  I could hear it in the way she spoke.

But still, Dad waited and I realized what he was doing.  He was giving me my seconds—those last few seconds of ignorance that a person has before they find out something terrible has happened.  Dad was giving me the opportunity to hold on to those seconds and to remember a world which was not affected by the information he was about to give me.  Whatever he was going to say, it was big.  And it was bad.

“What is it?” I asked, handing him his cue.  Letting him know that I was ready for anything.  At the time, I couldn’t have possibly known how wrong I was.

He took a big breath in and then a slow breath out before he was finally able to say, “Yesterday morning, William Kasey was reported missing.”

My heart plummeted into my stomach and almost instantly, I felt like I was starting to drown again.  The air left my lungs, leaving the word, “Bill,” hanging in the air.

Dad leaned forward now, any anger about Romania temporarily stored away.  He looked right at me, almost begging for me to stay with him as he explained further.  “We thought that maybe he was with you,” he said.  “But when Bex called…”

Bill wasn’t there.  That was the end of his sentence, but not even the great Zachary Goode could get it out.

It was growing again—the darkness.  The empty space inside of me.  All this time that I had spent in the shadows, it never once occurred to me that maybe the shadows were spending time in me.  “Who, um…?”  My mouth was dry, my breaths shallow.  I felt like I was flailing, barely staying afloat, but in reality, I couldn’t make myself move.  Couldn’t even form words.  “Who has him?”

Dad shook his head, a leftover fear in his expression, and I realized why he had been so angry.  Why he hadn’t slept.  I had gone missing at the same time as Bill.  For a brief period of time, I had been as missing as my mother.  

The thought made me want to apologize all over again—to assure them that I was here.  I was here.  But there was no time for apologies because Bill wasn’t.

Bill was gone.

He was gone.

“We don’t know,” Dad said after what felt like an eternity, but only lasted a second.

I started to stand up, desperate for air.  Desperate to reach the surface.  “Where is he now?”

Dad sat there, looking up at me with his hands hovering at my front.  As he spoke, I could hear that same tone in his voice that Aunt Bex had used with Mom.  That same caution that came when someone was close to jumping.  “Maggie, please.  Sit down.”

I looked at the chair, but I couldn’t move my body.  “I—I—” I stuttered.  “I can’t—Dad, who has him?”

You’ll never find him, my mother whispered to me and I wanted to scream.  I wanted to yell from the rooftops, but even if I did, no one would hear me.  Not while I was twenty feet under water.

I threw my hands over my ears, hoping to block her out, but I could still hear my father say, “Mags, sweetie, we don’t know.  Sit.”

“No, no, no!” I yelled, banging on my head.  If she wasn’t going to shut up then maybe my mother would make herself useful for once and give me the answers I was desperate to hear.

“Maggie, stop!” Dad said, pulling my hands down and pinning them to my sides.

This couldn’t be happening.  Not after everything.  Not after Mom.  The universe wouldn’t possibly tear another person away from me.  It had to be an impossibility.  Bill had people who loved him—Bill had a soulmate for god’s sake.  The universe can’t specially craft one person for another and then take them away.

Oh god.

“Will,” I spat.  I looked to my father and then my grandmother, both of them unsurprised by the conclusion that I had reached.  “Dad, I know I’m grounded, but you have to let me go talk to Will.  You just have to.”

Again, Grandma and Dad shared a look and again, I saw the hesitation on my father’s face.  He leaned into his words as he said, “Will was brought to the Gallagher Academy for questioning earlier this morning,” he informed me.  “He’s got the strongest relationship with the subject—”

“Don’t call him that,” I yelled.  I probably sounded angry, but I wasn’t.  I was desperate.  It’s so strange how often the two get confused.  “Use his name.  Once you stop using his name, he’s dead.”

Dad was still for a moment before nodding.  “Will knows everything about Bill.  CIA wanted to interview him, so he’s down in Sublevel One, but Maggie—”

It was too late.  By the time Dad started to forbid it, I was already running.