She felt a little guilty about it and she hated missing PE, the last period of her day, her favorite class. Even the teacher, Mr. Jamison, was cool. One of the few cool teachers at Harrington Junior High.
But she had to do this. Had to. Even though it was only the third week of school.
Hitching her backpack onto her shoulder, she left by a side door near the gym. She walked rapidly past a row of arborvitae that prevented anyone in the school office from seeing her—especially nosey Miss Craig, the pinched-faced attendance person—then dashed around the bus barns.
So far, so good, she thought, already sweating. It was late September and there wasn’t the breath of fall in the air. Just dusty, dry leaves and overhead, in an intensely blue sky, the fading vapor trail of a jet heading east. The sun was beastly, sitting above the mountains and sending out shimmering waves of heat. Still she increased her pace to a jog. She had forty minutes to get to the cybercafe and back before the buses were scheduled to leave for the day. She’d be marked absent for PE, her dad would be called, but she’d be home and ready with her excuse before he could get really mad.
She crossed her fingers at that thought. Hated when she made Dad angry, hated it worse when she disappointed him. But this time she felt that she had no choice.
Never looking over her shoulder Dani just kept jogging along a side street, then cut through the park, the bottoms of her Nikes slapping the asphalt trail where fir trees stood tall and green, offering shade, and the oaks were already shedding their leaves.
Her plan was pretty simple. Once inside the cybercafe and seated at a computer, she would log on to a server using her new free Internet account. It was one she’d opened at her friend Jessica’s house, giving the server fake information about herself. Jessica knew nothing about her new name, nor did Andrea, whose computer she also used. They thought she was always DaniSet321, the cybername and e-mail address everyone knew her by, the one she used when she was instant messaging or e-mailing her friends.
No one imagined that she had another alias because every time she used someone’s computer, she logged on as DaniSet321, then, when no one was paying any attention, she switched to the other name. She figured she was pretty safe and wouldn’t get caught because Andrea and Jessica’s older brothers had installed antispyware. Between that and some other programs, information got buried so deep on the hard drive “it would probably blow up the CIA’s computer if they ever tried to sort through all the layers of information,” Stephen—Jessica’s pimply, technogeek older brother—was proud of saying. She tried to forget that she’d often called him a “moron of unchallenged proportions” and had to trust him this time.
So Dani had taken a chance that she wouldn’t be found out and nearly a year ago she’d started surfing the net as BorninSF0923. So far it seemed that no one around here was the wiser. Her new name was designed to attract the attention of someone looking for her. She knew she’d been born in San Francisco and her birthday was September 23.
She felt a little guilty about deceiving her dad, but if he found out, he’d flip and he was stressed out enough as it was. Though outwardly cool about being a single parent, she knew it bothered him, a lot. Recently he’d started dating again and the thought of him getting married to someone other than Mom really blew. She was glad he was getting over the pain of Ella’s death, but Dani wasn’t that thrilled with the prospect of a new “mother,” who probably would have a couple of kids and an ex-husband and other relatives to muddy the water.
But Dani had her own mission. Ever since her mother had died, her curiosity about her biological roots had grown into what she now realized was an obsession. She was getting so close! Not that the people she hoped to find—those related by blood—would ever replace her parents. No way! Thinking like that was just plain stupid.
Nonetheless she had the driving need to know where she’d come from. Who were her birth parents? Where, exactly, had she been born? What were the circumstances? Did she have any siblings, even half brothers and sisters? Were her mother and father married? Had they been? Were they even alive? In prison? Had she been the result of a one-night stand, or maybe even a rape? At that thought she withered inside, but she kept on jogging down the back alleys toward the river.
It had taken nearly a year but finally someone in the chat rooms she visited had indicated there was hope of finding her birth parents, or at least learning who they were. That person was BJC27, a woman who claimed she had been adopted and had struggle
d for years to find her birth parents, both of whom were alive and whom she’d finally, at the age of twenty-seven, met. Though her father still denied that he had sired this daughter, her mother had cried when they’d reconnected and introduced her to her two half brothers. It had been the most profound experience in Bethany Jane’s life and she’d since dedicated her free time to helping others do the same. She and Dani, under the guise of BorninSF0923, had started e-mailing. Bethany Jane was certain she would be able to help her and had been looking into private adoptions in the San Francisco area that took place thirteen years ago.
Dani had been suspicious at first, wary of a fraud. She’d even gone so far as to check out BJC27 through her server where, in the user profiles, she’d found Bethany Jane was from Phoenix, single, was in her early forties and was a librarian at a small college. Though Bethany had given her nothing but her first and middle names, Dani had checked her out. She’d gone to the college’s Web site and seen that Bethany Jane Crandall did work at the library. Her picture was included. A Google search brought up several Bethany Jane Crandalls, but this one was linked to the library, a reader’s group, and an organization that was called Birth Writes and was dedicated to working for and with adoptive families.
Good enough.
The last message Bethany had left BorninSF0923 was to assure Dani that she’d found the names and addresses of her birth parents and was going to send documents of proof over the Internet. Dani couldn’t take a chance on having them sent to the house or even to her friends’ homes, so she’d decided on the cybercafe located on the north end of town.
And she was almost there! The smell of the river, a deep, dank odor she’d grown to love, reached her and as she crossed the streets of the town, she caught glimpses of the Columbia rushing steadily westward. Sunlight spangled the ever-moving gray water, catching in the frigid current as it slashed a sharp, swift canyon between the states of Washington and Oregon.
Over the years her dad had shown her how to respect the river. He’d taken Dani windsurfing, fishing and boating on the Columbia’s ever-changing surface. They’d ridden horses on the steep ridge overlooking the river’s chasm, they’d pitched a tent near the falls.
She felt another sharp pang of guilt. Travis Settler had done everything he could to teach her about living in the wild, taking care of herself and preserving nature. She knew how to man a canoe, hunt with a bow and arrow, track and make a campfire. He’d shown her which plants and grubs were edible, and which were poisonous. All in all, he’d done everything in his power to make her strong and self-sufficient.
And how was she repaying him?
By lying to him through her teeth!
Yet she’d come this far and wasn’t about to turn back. She was too close to the truth.
As she passed by a Dumpster behind the Canyon Café, she scared a cat who had been sunning himself. Hissing, the tabby scurried off the top of the large green box and slunk into the adjoining parking lot, where it hid beneath a dirty white van with Arizona plates. Dani probably wouldn’t have noticed that the van was from out of state, except for the game she and her dad had played for years when they took road trips. Each would try to outdo the other, spotting new and different plates as they drove. Hadn’t she seen a van like this across from the school yesterday afternoon?
With the cat glowering from beside a back tire, Dani slowed to a walk and shoved the sweat out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. She slipped into the shade of an awning covering an empty loading dock for the hardware store. Quickly, before anyone came through the open back door, she slid off her backpack, unzipped the main compartment, reached in and retrieved her disguise, which she felt she had to use just in case she came across anyone she knew. It wasn’t much, but at a passing glance no one would recognize her. Just in case she messed up and her dad started asking questions.
Besides, though she’d never seen anyone spying on her, lately she’d had the weird feeling that she was being watched and followed. She worried that her dad had sensed something was wrong and was tailing her. Which was just stupid. Her guilt eating at her for deceiving him.
Shoving those uncomfortable thoughts aside, she put on a tattered Yankees’ baseball cap and oversized gray sweatshirt she’d taken from the school’s lost and found. Next she withdrew a pair of cheap dark sunglasses she’d bought at the drugstore. She completed the outfit with a pair of blue sweatpants that someone had left in the locker room two days earlier.
Her shoes would have to do. She wouldn’t change out of her favorite Nikes. Just in case she had to make a quick getaway. Beyond the obvious dishonesty, there was something about her scheme that made her nervous. Probably because she looked like a total dweeb. The fact that she did look so nerdy and overdressed for the hot day might cause someone to notice her more than if she’d just left well enough alone, but she was committed to her plan.
She crammed her hair into the cap, drew the bill down over her eyes, slid the sunglasses onto the bridge of her nose and sweltered in the huge, stinky sweatshirt. Then, to make sure she wouldn’t attract attention should her cell phone ring, she turned it off and slipped it into her pocket.
So it was now or never!