Snakes and Ladders Read online

  He was regaling her with the details of a study that found a correlation between number of cortical neurons and yawn duration when Lizzy interrupted him.

  “Uncle Owen, could I get a job?”

  “I think you would need a social security card—or at least know your social security number—to do that. Do you know what your social security number is?”

  She shook her head.

  “We can look into that when we get home and can get to your house and find your card.” He poured himself some orange juice. “What kind of job would you like to get?”

  “Maybe I could help you out at Penn. Help you with research and stuff.”

  “Maybe, but those jobs usually go to grad students.”

  “I could get a job helping out at a yoga studio.”

  “Yes, that’s a possibility. We can look into that when we get back to Pennsylvania.”

  They ate in silence for a minute, then Lizzy said, “Did I inherit any money from Dad?”

  Owen took a sip of orange juice, then put the glass down. “Yes, you did. I didn’t want to bring it up because I didn’t know if you were ready to talk about that, but your dad left everything to you to have when you’re eighteen, and I’m the trustee until then.”

  “Can I get some money ahead of time?”

  He used a piece of toast to maneuver some egg onto his fork. “It would be tricky to take care of the paperwork long distance—the original of your dad’s will is at your house in Parkesburg—but you aren’t an extravagant person. I can probably give you whatever you need until we can get it.”

  “What if I wanted a car?”

  His egg-filled fork stopped halfway to his mouth and he raised his eyebrows. “You want a car?”

  “Why not? I’m old enough to drive, I might want a car of my own soon.”

  “You’d need a driver’s license first.”

  “Okay, I’ll get a driver’s license.”

  Owen put his fork down. “Do you really want a car, or is this just a for-instance?”

  She shrugged. “Just a for-instance, I guess.”

  He sat back, his chair giving a slight squeak of protest. “We’re contending with a couple of issues, Pumpkin. One is that you’re a little underdocumented. And it’s not just the lack of a social security card. I don’t know what records the authorities have on you since your mom started home schooling you when you were six. If you suddenly pop up on the official radar when you apply for a license, I don’t know if that’s going to cause problems.”

  Lizzy poked at her eggs with her fork. After a few moments, she asked, “What’s happening with the house?”

  “Your house?”

  She nodded.

  “I hired a service to take care of the yard.”

  “We could sell it.”

  He nodded. “Yes, we could do that. If we sold the house, you’d have plenty of money.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  “I guess we could hire someone to pack it up—”

  “Uncle Owen,” she burst out, “let’s just go home and pack it up ourselves—I’m just about tired of waiting here for something to happen!”

  He sighed. “It is tricky trying to do all this long distance.”

  “We don’t even need anyone to pack it up. Maybe you can sell the stuff that’s in it too.”

  “Don’t you want anything from the house?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing?”

  She thought back to the house in Parkesburg. It had been her home for a decade, but in some ways it had felt less like a home than a hideout, the place her father took her to keep her and her powers away from an unsuspecting world. She had never felt about it the way she had felt about her grandparents’ cabin in the Poconos. That had been a hideout too, but she had been just a little kid, and it had seemed like a fun adventure with her mom—and her dad too, on the weekends. She remembered the walks they had taken, the games they had played, the crafts they had made. Her favorite had been a corn husk doll in a long corn husk dress with puffed corn husk sleeves, carrying a corn husk broom with a twig for a handle. That was on a shelf in her bedroom in the Parkesburg house.

  “Well, maybe a couple of things,” she said, almost reluctantly. After a moment, she added, “But most of it we could sell.”

  Owen nodded. “Okay. Let me make some phone calls and find out what we would need to do to put in on the market.”

  They ate in silence for a minute, then Lizzy said, “Could I have an advance?”

  “Pardon?”

  “An advance. On the house.” She paused. “That’s what it’s called, right?”

  Owen laughed. “Yes, that’s what it’s called. Depends on how much of an advance you want.”

  Lizzy did a quick calculation. “Four hundred dollars.” At eighty dollars for a half hour, that would be five sessions with Philip Castillo.

  Owen raised his eyebrows. “Four hundred?”

  “I want to take extra yoga classes.”

  Owen pulled out his wallet and counted the bills. “I can give you one hundred now and the rest after I go to the ATM.” He handed over five twenties.

  “Thanks, Uncle Owen,” she said. “I’ll keep track.”

  He smiled at her. “I know you will, Pumpkin.”

  22

  Lizzy’s new hairstyle had reminded Owen that he was overdue for a haircut himself—his hair was now longer than Lizzy’s—and he stopped at a barber shop after making the withdrawal at the ATM.

  The receptionist said a barber would be available shortly, and while Owen waited he pulled the withdrawal slip out of his wallet. The account balance wasn’t alarming; he had a comfortable income from William Penn University, he turned a small profit through his buying and selling of antique Craftsman furniture, and he was a silent partner in a business founded by some of his neurobiologist colleagues. The house they were staying in belonged to one of those colleagues, so they were enjoying room for free, and board was negligible, although hundreds spent on yoga classes might start to be a strain if Lizzy kept it up at this pace.

  His phone buzzed: Andy.

  He answered—“Hold on one sec”—and walked to the reception desk. “I’m just going to go outside for a minute to take a call.”

  The receptionist nodded. “No problem.”

  “Hey, what’s up?” he said as he stepped into the sunny Sedona morning.

  “Nothing exciting,” said Andy. “Just had a minute before seeing a patient and thought I’d check in.”

  “How’s Mom doing?”

  There was a pause on the other end. “Not so good the last couple of days.”

  Owen rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry to be making you deal with all this, Andy.”

  “No worries.” Andy paused again. “Although she does keep asking for you.”

  “Damn.” Owen stuffed his hand into his pocket. “I wish the FaceTime thing had worked.”

  “Seems like she can’t quite get her brain around the fact that that’s really you on the screen. I think it freaked her out more than helped.”

  “Yeah.” Owen looked over the buildings on the opposite site of the street to the mesas beyond. “What I really wish is that I could just fly back for a day or two.”

  “No chance of that?”

  “I can’t leave Lizzy here by herself. You remember how well that worked when I left her in Smoketown. I’m afraid she’d get some harebrained idea and disappear again.”

  “I guess bringing her with you isn’t a possibility? Considering what happened on the train, I can imagine she might not want to risk a replay of that at thirty-five thousand feet.”

  “It isn’t just that, although that would be enough. The other problem is that she doesn’t have any of the documentation she’d need to get through a TSA check.”

  “Good point, I hadn’t thought of that.” After a moment, Andy asked, “So, what are you guys going to do?”

  Owen lowered himself onto a bench outside the barber shop. “I don�
��t know. If it weren’t for Mom, I wouldn’t have much incentive to leave. Not only is it nice to have a continent between me and Louise Mortensen—I wish you and Ruby could say the same—but I have to say that Sedona in February is a nice alternative to Pennsylvania. I can do my research and writing here just as easily as in Philly. Easier, in fact, because there are fewer distractions.”

  “You have a class coming up in the fall, right?”

  “Yeah. That’s my nonnegotiable deadline—but that has felt so far away. I hadn’t had much reason to think about coming back until Mom started getting worse.”

  “Setting aside the Mom situation for a minute, if you came back in the fall, what would you do about Mortensen and Millard?”

  “I don’t know, Andy,” Owen said testily. “I thought I still had months to figure it out.” He looked again at the withdrawal slip he still held in his hand. “The other complication is by that time, it will be only a few months until Lizzy turns eighteen. She’ll get the money her dad left her, so she’ll have the wherewithal to do what she wants. I hope she would listen to my advice, but she’ll be an adult and can make her own choices.”

  “She’d be an adult with an oddly limited experience with the real world.”

  “Yes,” said Owen, sighing again. “I’m well aware of that.”

  “What do you think she’ll want to do?”

  “She says she wants to sell the Parkesburg house.”

  “And live where?”

  “With me, I hope.” After a moment, Owen added wistfully, “It is nice having someone around.”

  He expected Andy to have a smart-ass response to that, but he just said, “Yeah.” He sounded a bit wistful himself. “Anyhow, let me know if you see your way to a quick trip back—I know it would do Mom good to see you.”

  The receptionist popped her head out the door of the barber shop. “Owen, we’re ready for you.”

  “I’ll be right in,” he said to her, then, to Andy, “I’ve got to go. Give Mom a kiss for me.”

  “Will do,” said Andy. “You take care of yourself and Lizzy.”

  “I always try to,” said Owen.

  23

  When Lizzy got to Philip’s office for her second session, he was escorting a jubilant-looking middle-aged man out the door.

  “He looks happy,” said Lizzy, as the man walked away, humming softly.

  “Yeah, that was a good session,” said Philip, smiling.

  Lizzy glanced at her phone. “Man, I just about made it on time.”

  Philip glanced at his watch. “You did make it on time.”

  “Yeah, just barely.”

  They stepped into the waiting room and Philip flipped the sign to Session in Progress - Please Stop Back Later, locked the door, and waved her toward the back room.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” he asked.

  “No, thanks.” She sat down at the table.

  “Phone off?” asked Philip.

  “Oh, right.” Lizzy took her phone out of her pocket and switched it off.

  Philip sat down opposite her. “I thought a lot about what you told me at our first meeting.”

  “Do you have any advice for me?” Lizzy asked.

  “I don’t think I can offer you good advice unless I know the whole story.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, shifting in her seat.

  “There is no Ferris wheel in Marathon.”

  “What?”

  “I asked you if you liked the Ferris wheel in Marathon and you said it was a good one. But there is no Ferris wheel in Marathon.”

  “Maybe I got it confused with a different Ferris wheel.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you do that to all your clients?” she asked angrily. “Try to trick them into agreeing to things that aren’t true?”

  “No, but I do enjoy trying to guess where people are from based on their accents or references they make or regionalisms they use, and you are definitely not from the Keys.”

  “Really? So where am I from?”

  “Southeastern Pennsylvania. Philadelphia.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “The way you say ‘water’ is typical of Southeastern Pennsylvania. ‘Water’ is a marker word—you can really narrow down where a person comes from based on how they say it. And when you were here the first time, you said ‘anymore’ in a positive sense: ‘Anymore I can ride my bike.’ That’s unusual. I looked it up and it’s a Southeastern Pennsylvania regionalism. And when you showed up today you said ‘just about’ to mean ‘just barely’: ’I just about made it on time.’ I’ll bet if I looked that up, I’d find that that’s a regionalism, too.”

  “But you said you thought I was from Philadelphia,” she said, her voice tight. “What makes you think I’m from Philadelphia specifically?”

  “Last night I spent some time on Southeastern Pennsylvania news websites looking for ‘Elizabeth Patrick’ and finally found an article on the Philadelphia Chronicle website about two people—Elizabeth Ballard and her father, Patrick Ballard—who the police wanted to talk to after a woman died on a train. Lucia Hazlitt. Evidently something of a local celebrity in Philly.”

  Lizzy stared at him.

  “And then the next day there was a story about a Patrick Ballard being found dead in an alley. It was the same day you said your father died.”

  Lizzy grabbed her knapsack and stood. “I don’t want to talk with someone who’s going to try to connect me to people who are dying in Pennsylvania just because of the way I say ‘water.’”

  Philip remained sitting, his hands folded on the table. “And I started thinking,” he continued, “that it was strange that a young woman would show up at the office of someone she doesn’t know and seem completely comfortable turning her phone off and having the door locked behind her.”

  “I could have gotten out if I wanted to. I can get out now.”

  “I’m sure you can. You’re not worried. You’re not nervous. Mad, maybe, but not nervous about being here with me. Like you know you could handle the situation if I did something you didn’t like.”

  “I could.” She glared at him.

  Philip nodded and gazed back at her. “When people in your life died—whether they were people close to you or people with no apparent connection beyond a coincidental crossing of paths—you moved on. From the mountains to a small town when your mother died, from one city to another at about the same time that this woman on the train in Philadelphia and your father died. You feel guilty about your mother and your father’s deaths, and you’re alarmed when I mention the death of the woman on the train.”

  “I’m not—” Lizzy began, then clamped her lips shut.

  Philip leaned back. “The woman on the train died of a stroke, and you said your mother had had strokes as well, and that you made her situation worse. You’re on the scene when seemingly healthy middle-aged people suffer fatal strokes, but here you are, walking around Sedona, and I feel fine, so it doesn’t seem like something you’re carrying, like a disease. Plus, your father died from gunshot wounds, and although you feel guilty about that, the guilt is different.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice wobbly with barely-held-back tears.

  “No, I don’t. Not completely. But I’m not totally off track, am I.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because I was truly interested in your story,” he said, “and if you weren’t going to tell me, I wanted to try to find out myself.”

  “But why?”

  He leaned forward. “Because there is something special about you, Elizabeth. The ‘psychic counselor’ title is a little New Age—that’s what people in Sedona want—but I do have the ability to sense things about people, and the advice I give people based on what I sense about them is good advice. I’ve changed people’s lives for the better. I have a sense about you—a sense of power. I also sense you’re afraid of this power—afraid of it
because you believe you can’t control it. Because that’s why you originally came to me, right? ‘I want to be more in control so I don’t hurt people the way I hurt my mom’—that’s what you said. That’s what brought you to my office, what made you decide to find out what a psychic counselor could do for you.”

  Lizzy said nothing.

  “Am I right about any of it? Because if not, I should hang up my shingle.”

  Seconds ticked by, and finally Lizzy said, “You just about figured it out.”

  “Does that mean I can keep my shingle up anymore, Elizabeth?”

  “Yeah. And you can call me Lizzy.”

  Lizzy told him about her power—that ability she referred to as the squeeze. About her mother’s death. About hearing the news of her father’s death as she sat, drugged, in Gerard Bonnay’s Pocopson home. About her escape and her plans to avenge her father’s death. About her last-minute change of heart as she stood in Gerard Bonnay’s empty office, and about the confusion of his arrival, and the final betrayal of the gun he drew on her. Of Louise Mortensen’s shouted instructions to Gerard to “Finish it!”—the “it” being Lizzy herself.

  The only thing she didn’t tell him was who Owen’s accomplices were who had spirited her away from Gerard and Louise’s control. She was willing to take a risk with herself—and, she realized belatedly, she had unintentionally involved Uncle Owen in that risk as well—but she saw no reason to share with Philip the role Andy McNally and Ruby DiMano had played.

  When she was done, she felt a lightness that she hadn’t felt in a long time. Not, she thought, since before her mother’s death. He didn’t comment, he didn’t judge. He didn’t try to convince her that she shouldn’t feel the way she felt. He just listened and sometimes asked for clarification or acknowledged what she had said. And as she talked, she felt as if the constriction she had felt for most of her life—like the thorns that had held her down on the Sugarloaf Trail as the angry biker railed at her—were plucked free, one hooked barb at a time.

  24

  George Millard stepped into the Cowboy Club. Philip Castillo was already at the bar, chatting with the bartender who was pouring him a Knob Creek bourbon neat. Many of the other barstools were full, and the dining room was starting to fill up.