Without a Trace

Chapter Five

"Shit!" I exclaim.

"What is it?" Haden asks in alarm.

"We're being followed." I tell him. "Go downtown. We're gonna try to lose them." He turns left towards downtown. It's about noon, so it should be at least kind of busy. "Pull over."

"Why?"

"We have to find some other way of transportation. They've seen this car."

"But if we get out of the car, they'll catch us!"

"Not if we lose them in the crowd. Just trust me. I've seen it in a movie." Haden looks hesitant to do it, but listens to me anyway. He pulls over and we both get out. "Run!" We start running down the sidewalk. I glimpse behind us and see the SUV pulling over and Zane getting out.

"In here!" Haden grabs my wrist and pulls me into a clothing store. "Change clothes." I run to the women's section and grab a grey jacket with a hood and some sunglasses. I start to go to the cashier up front to check out, but see Zane walk in the store. I duck behind a rack of clothes, praying he doesn't see me. He starts to walk toward where I'm crouched so I pull on the jacket and put the hood on, taking out my phone so I don't attract attention. Thankfully, he walks right past me. I walk up to the cashier, slipping out of the jacket and handing her the sunglasses so that she can scan them. After I pay, I wait outside for Haden. When a couple of minutes have passed, I become worried. What if Zane got him? I'm about to go back inside to search for him when he comes out wearing blue blue hoodie and a pair of glasses. "You good?" he asks me. I nod, but see Zane walking toward the door of the store. When he comes out, he'll see us if we don't do something.

"Just to remind you, you're not my type." I whisper to Haden.

"What-" Before he can finish, I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him on the lips, hiding both our faces. Zane walks right past us and when he's far enough away Haden and I pull apart, a look of disgust on both our faces.

"Ew." I say, feeling almost sick. "Sorry, I saw it in a movie once."

"You have got to stop making your decisions based on movies."

"It's not like there's an instruction manual on this kind of thing!" I retort. He rolls his eyes.

"What do we do now?"

"I actually had an idea about that!" I answer excitedly. "I was thinking about how the day before Emma disappeared she was out the entire day. Maybe we could go to the library look at news for that day and see if there's anything that happened that made her leave?"

"Did you get that from a movie too?" he jokes and I glare at him.

"Let's go."

An hour later, Haden and I are busy looking through newspapers from the day before Emma went missing. We haven't been very successful.

"We're not gonna find anything!" Haden exclaims after a half hour of searching. "This happened three years ago. How are we supposed to find anything on it, especially when we don't even know what we're looking for?"

"Patience young grasshopper." I reply, not looking up from the obituaries I'm looking at.

"You know, when we decided to be on the run from these guys, I thought it would involve car chases and fighting bad guys. I never agreed to spending hours in a library looking at newspaper articles." I roll my eyes.

"We've only been here for a half hour Haden." Then I see a familiar face among the obituaries I'm looking at. "Hey, I know him!" I say, pointing at his picture. Haden walks over to where I'm sitting and looks over my shoulder.

"Who's that guy?" he asks.

"Adam Willervy." I answer. "His dad was friends with my dad before he died. He actually died in the same fire as him." My dad had died when I was nine. He had worked in a research lab and it had caught fire, with him and other scientists inside.

"How did Adam die?" Haden asks. It doesn't say how in the obituarie, so I type his name in the computer next to me. An article comes up: Man Found Dead in Home From Suicide.

"He hung himself." I say.

"But what if he didn't?" Haden says, and I give him a look of confusion. "What if somebody made it look like an accident, and Emma found out? That would explain why she had to leave."

"Haden you're a genius!" I exclaim excitedly.

"I know." He smiles smugly. "But why would Adam be murdered and what would Emma have to do with it?" I think about the one connection between him and Emma.

"I think this might have something to do with my dad." I whisper. "I think that his death might not have been an accident."