Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (Gallagher Girls #3)

Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (Gallagher Girls #3) Page 29

In the distance a siren wailed. Someone yelled, "United States Secret Service!" And forty feet away my aunt lay on the ground. Not moving.

Macey leaned over her. Zach's jacket had fallen from my shoulders, and Macey held it to the wound in Abby's chest, trying to stop the blood that spilled onto the dark asphalt, staining all it touched.

"Abby," I whispered, but Zach didn't let me pull away.

I heard the van come to life behind us. Secret Service agents yelled. More shots rang out, and yet I felt Zach stop. I ran into his shoulder, too busy looking behind me to see the man who stood between us and the door.

I saw the gun. I sensed the van as it rushed forward, seconds away and coming faster. I heard the screams of the fight behind us. But nothing that night was louder than the masked man's astonished whisper as he looked at the boy who stood beside me and said, "You?"

We have theories about what happened next—but no reasons. No why. Maybe it was the sirens or the Secret Service, but the man ran instead of fought. He fled into the darkness while my mother cried my name, but her voice was too high. Her momentum was too strong as she hurled her body against mine, driving me deep into the shadows.

A wall of bodies went up around me—Secret Service agents, police officers, the women who had escorted us from the van and into the hotel. The women who had been waiting … on me.

I tried to get up, but strong hands pushed me down, back against the building, safe underneath the walls of my sisterhood, which had been transported somehow from Roseville and were standing guard around me.

"Abby!" I cried as one of the women shifted. I could see through their legs to where my aunt lay on the ground, blood soaking her blouse, not moving. "Aunt Abby!" I yelled again.

My mind flashed back to Philadelphia. I saw an angel holding a fallen soldier, flying from the fires of war. "No!" I started to crawl like a child, weak and helpless, thinking about my father, who had died in a way I'll never know, in a place I'll never see, wondering in that terrible moment what was worse—not knowing, or watching the life seep out of someone you love before your very eyes.

My mother was screaming. She was falling to her knees at Abby's side. So I fought harder.

"Keep her down!" The voice was Mr. Solomon's. The tone was one I'd never heard before and I never hope to hear again. "They could come back!" The circle around me tightened. "They won't stop coming until they get her."

Get her.

All of my fight left me then. I fell against the wall while the sirens wailed and numbness came and the words echoed in the night. Get me.

Chapter Twenty-eight

2300 hours

"She's hysterical!" one of the paramedics said. The lights and sirens were too much for me. I yelled. I fought. I had to be heard.

"Give her something," a woman said. "But—" the paramedic started. "I'm her mother! Do it!"

0200 hours

"Doctors have no comment about the condition of the Secret Service agent who was shot last night in a reported drive-by shooting in downtown Washington, D.C. The agent had been assigned to Macey McHenry's personal detail, but reports indicate that, given the outcome of last night's election, Ms. McHenry will have no more need for

protection from the Secret Service, that life for Macey McHenry can and will return to normal." I heard the TV click off.

I stirred and blinked and recognized the room around me—the leather sofa, the shelves of books. But the drugs were too strong. Or maybe I was too weak. I slept again.

0445 hours

"You girls should be in bed."

"No thank you, professor," Bex said. "Rebecca, your mother and father have personally asked me to watch out for you, and I would like you to go to bed."

"I'm fine where I am, professor. Thank you."

"I had a feeling you might say that. At least let Ms. Sutton get some sleep."

0520 hours

I knew I wasn't alone. Bex's whispers were soft outside the door. Liz was mumbling something, half-asleep. Then a shadow cut across the room, and I saw Mr. Solomon standing in the moonlight, staring out across the grounds.

But it must have been the drugs—I must have still been sleeping—because it looked like his shoulders were shaking. I could have sworn his hand wiped across his face. It wasn't real.

I was asleep.

Joe Solomon does not cry.

0625 hours

"Cammie." My mother's voice was high and scratchy, and I knew that she'd been crying. If you want to know the truth, that scared me most of all. I thought that maybe I was dead. I wondered if I was looking up from a coffin and not a leather couch. And then I thought about Aunt Abby.

"She's out of surgery," my mother said, answering my unasked question, reading my mind. She drew a deep breath. "She's out of surgery."

I pushed myself upright and a blanket fell from my lap to the floor. There were bandages on my head and arm. It was far too familiar to be anything but a very bad dream.

"Did you sleep, sweetheart?"

I thought it was an obvious question—a stupid waste of time. But all good interrogators know to start with the things the subject knows for sure. So I nodded my head. My mother said, "Good."

She was sitting on the coffee table in front of me—the very place where every Sunday night she laid out trays of veggies and bowls of dip. But that morning she just sat there with her hands in her lap. Was she a mother or a spy then? I'm not sure. But I knew the one I needed.

"Tell me," I demanded, not caring who heard—how far our voices carried. I saw Mr. Solomon by her desk, knew why he was there. "Both of you, start talking," I said, but Mom was easing toward me.

"Sweetheart, this is not something—"

"I have the right to know!"

She grew harder, still the boss of me and not about to let me forget it. "Cameron, there is a time and a place for—"

"They weren't after Macey," I said. "They were never after Macey. And…you knew."

"Cameron, this—" But Mom didn't get the chance to finish, because Mr. Solomon was easing onto the corner of her desk, crossing his arms as he said, "We didn't know anything more than you, Ms. Morgan. Not for a long time."

"But…" I started, my mind spinning, "Philadelphia." I thought about the closed door of my mother's office that next day, my aunt's newfound terror on the train. A chill like none I'd ever felt ran through me as I said, "What did Zach tell you in that tunnel, Mr. Solomon?"

My teacher nodded. He almost smiled. "He'd heard Macey wasn't the target. That was a possibility all along—we knew that, but Zach has sources—"

"What kind of sources? Who are they? Where are they? What—"

"That's all you get, Cammie," Joe Solomon said, and I hated him a little. But then he shrugged, defeated. "Because that's pretty much all there is."

Mr. Solomon is a good liar—the best. And I hated him for that too.

"Joe," my mom said calmly, as if I weren't ranting and bruised. As if everything in my life weren't suddenly different. And over. "Could you give us a minute?"

A moment later, I heard the door open and close. I knew we were alone.

"Sweetheart, don't…" She trailed off, unable to finish, until the Gallagher Girl in her overruled the mother, and she found the strength to carry on. "You're going to be okay, Cammie. The Gallagher trustees have been notified. The full strength of the school and The Agency are behind us. You're going to be okay."

I love my mother's office. It's the closest thing to home I've had in years. I sat there for a long time that morning looking at the pictures that used to sit on her dresser in our apartment in Arlington. Before she was a headmistress. Before I was a Gallagher Girl. Before we lost Dad.

Before we lost a lot of things.

"What happens now?" I heard my voice crack and knew that I was almost crying, almost pleading. My anger was gone, and in its wake rushed a wave of grief and terror so powerful that I could hardly breathe. I thought of Abby bleeding. I thought of Macey and Preston. And finally, I saw Zach as he hovered over me, as my mind whirled down a laundry chute, plummeting in a free fall that I feared might never end. "It's just…Mom…why?"

My mother held me. My headmistress smoothed my hair. And the greatest spy I've ever known whispered, "We'll find out. I promise we will find out."

Chapter Twenty-nine

Classes should have ended, but they didn't. Finals week should have been over, but it was still weeks away. And yet every girl at my school knew that my roommates and I had already been tested. I thought about Aunt Abby, and I knew we'd barely passed.

It took three weeks for it to happen, for Mr. Solomon to knock on the door of Madame Dabney's tearoom, for my roommates and me to get called downstairs.

Following our teacher through the hall that day, I didn't let my mind wander—I knew too many dark places where it might go, so I kept my focus on the footsteps, on the stairs and on the walls. Until Mr. Solomon opened my mother's office door—

And someone said, "Hey, squirt."

"Abby!" Bex and Liz called at the same time, rushing toward her, throwing their arms around her.

"Girls," my mother said, as if to remind them that (at

least in Bex's case) they don't know their own strength.

My aunt was paler than I remembered. And thinner, almost frail. Her right arm was held in a sling. But her eyes were the same—so that's where I looked as I stepped closer.

"How are you?" I asked, almost afraid of the answer, but asking the question anyway.

My aunt smiled. "Never better." I wondered if she might be lying—or if I would be a good enough operative to know. "Evidently, Langley needs someone with a recent gunshot wound to impersonate a known arms dealer in…well…somewhere." She looked up at the sky and cocked her hip, then held her sling out for us to see. "Is this the ultimate cover or what?"

But, amazingly, the four of us didn't agree.

"Do you really have to go?" Liz glanced at Abby's suitcase. "You could stay here, couldn't you? You could teach?"

"Awesome!" Bex exclaimed, but Abby was already shaking her head, pulling her bag onto her good shoulder. But that didn't stop Bex from saying, "Ooh, you could come home with me for Christmas. Cam's coming. Mom and Dad would love to see you."

"Thanks, Bex," Aunt Abby said, "but I'm afraid I have some…other things I've got to do."

For about the millionth time in the past month I thought about what was happening outside our walls, but then I remembered not to ask the questions that I didn't want answered.

"So I guess I'll see you later." Abby hugged my mother,

who whispered something in her ear.

As she stepped toward the door she looked to my roommates and me. "Sorry, gang, but I don't do good-byes."

But then she stopped. She dropped her bag and turned. "Oh, what the heck."

And I can honestly say that none of the spy training in the world prepared me for the sight of my aunt grabbing Joe Solomon by the shirt.

And kissing him.

On the mouth.