02 Seekers by Lynnie Purcell Page B

him.
    He nodded and kissed me goodbye. His hand rested on the door’s handle for a long moment, and I wondered how hard this was for him – as hard as watching him leave? I saw him fighting
    against the impulse to simply stay and forget the mission. A part of me hoped he would. Instead, he turned the elegant handle and stepped out of the room. He didn’t look back, though I knew he wanted to. I heard him call goodbyes to the others and then, like a soft breeze in summer, he was gone.
    I ran to the window to watch him leave, but my view was of a small fenced in area with round tables and beautiful flowers. I scowled at the pretty flowers, hating them for their unhelpfulness, and abandoned the window. I flopped down on the bed and put my arm over my eyes, counting
    the seconds until he was really gone. The bed creaked slightly as Alex sat on the opposite side.
    She lay back so that her body paralleled mine. We were silent for a long moment then she rolled over and put her head on my shoulder. “Thanks for letting me stay,” she said.
    “Thanks for loving me enough to ride the bus down here,” I replied.
    “What else are best friends for?” she asked.
    “How did Sam take the news?” I asked.
    “He yelled a lot then promised me I would be grounded forever and tried to guilt me into coming home. He even cut me off from my bank…like I didn’t think he would. I pulled all 305.02 out of my account before I came.”
    “That’s smart thinking…”
    “Yep.” She took my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Daniel will be fine,” she promised.
    “Yeah…”
    “Clare…can I confess something to you?” Alex asked.
    “Anything,” I said.
    “I’m starving. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse, its saddle, and the grass it was munching on.
    Then, I would probably even eye the owner hungrily.”
    “Cannibal.”
    “Do you think we could get Jackson and Margaret to pay for room service?” she asked.
    “Order it and find out,” I suggested.
    She laughed. “I’m not that stupid.”
    I pulled her to her feet and headed for the door. “Let’s see if we can convince them to feed us, then.”
    Jackson was in the common area, Daniel’s laptop propped on his knees. His long hair was pulled back, and he was wearing clothes similar to the ones Daniel had been wearing. From the slightly shabby, but not too shabby appearance, I understood them to be camouflage. He wouldn’t be out of place in a lot of places. He kept his eyes glued to the screen as he spoke. “I ordered food.”
    “Hey, thanks,” Alex said happily.
    I pointed at the laptop. “So, what now? How can I help?”
    “How can we help?” Alex corrected.
    “What she said,” I said.
    “We could always use more information. And we could use someone to sort all this data. Danny designed this thing for disappearances, but it doesn’t account for people running away and your normal human murders. It’s a lot of data to sort through,” he told us.
    “Data sorters?” I asked in distaste.
    “I’ll do it,” Alex said. “I like lists.”
    “All right.” Jackson gestured her over and showed her the logistics of the program.
    They were just getting into ways to track everything when there was a knock on the door.
    Jackson got up at the sound – his head tilted so he could listen – and peered through the
    peephole. He opened the door slightly when he was convinced the person on the other side
    wasn’t an axe murderer. He talked to the person on the other end for a moment then handed
    whoever it was a bill. He waited until the person was gone then opened the door the rest of the way. A cart full of food was on the other side.
    “Yummy!” Alex said.
    Jackson wheeled the cart in, and Alex started picking pieces of food off the platters. “I forgot to mention…” he said slowly. “Don’t open the door unless Margaret or myself is here. If its
    housekeeping, tell them to come back.”
    “Are you actually making a rule?” I asked in mock