Before He Finds Her Read Free

college paper as a way of testing the waters: see how they react, then decide what else they could know.
    Well, they were flunking the test royally. Melanie set the glasses of juice on the table and asked her aunt, “What do you mean, ‘of all things’?”
    But she knew. She was a seasoned pro at imagining how her father might find her even after all these years.
    Her aunt and uncle? Also pros.
    “Does the paper have a website?” Uncle Wayne asked.
    “I don’t think so,” Melanie said—though of course it did.
    “Still,” he said, “your picture could end up on the Internet.”
    It all sounded so paranoid, it was easy to forget that her aunt and uncle hadn’t chosen to live like this, hidden away in a remote hamlet in West Virginia. But the U.S. Marshals had determined that this was best place for them all to “relocate,” which meant to hide. Which was why, at seventeen, Melanie had never been to a city, had never stayed in a hotel or traveled farther than Glendale for its music and hot-air ballooning festival. She’d never ridden in an airplane or seen the ocean. Never met a famous person. She had hiked in the Allegheny Mountains but had never eaten sushi or a fresh bagel. She had twice seen tornados funneling in the distance but had never attended a dance or a football game.
    Whenever she felt herself becoming too critical of her aunt and uncle, she would wait until she was alone in the house, open her uncle’s desk drawer, and read through the horrible letters from the U.S. Marshal’s office that he kept hidden there—letters she’d first come across innocently enough years earlier while rummaging for a pencil. The letters were horrible because they were uniformly brief, never more than a paragraph or two, and because they said nothing. Or, rather, they said the same thing again and again, which was the same as saying nothing. Ramsey Miller continued to elude the authorities; the authorities continued to fear for Melanie’s safety. The letters were horrible, too, because they were crisp and clean and on nice paper (she pictured a tidy but bustling office where the employees joked with one another and talked about football games and their plans for the weekend), and they were horrible because of their consistently optimistic tone, despite there never being any real cause for optimism. She would return the letters to the manila file in the bottom desk drawer and remind herself not to depend on some hero in a police uniform ever coming to their rescue. Not after fifteen years. No, the only heroes were her aunt and uncle and the sacrifices they had made to keep her safe. But that didn’t make it easy.
    At least they were okay to be around. In winter, they played board games. They played cards. In spring, Melanie helped Wayne turn over the soil and plant the seedlings. Kendra bought cheap paperbacks from the CVS, and at sunup the two of them would carry their juice or coffee and whatever books they were reading out back, where they’d sit in adjacent chaise lounges, their privacy protected by the high hedges that surrounded their property, and by the woods beyond. Maybe once a month, as a treat, they ate at Lucky’s Grill—always a weeknight at 4:30 p.m., when the place was mostly empty.
    Her aunt homeschooled her through the eleventh grade, at which point Kendra admitted that she’d reached her limit as a teacher. So, frightened but excited by the idea of being away from 9 Notress Pass for seven hours each day, the next fall Melanie stepped onto the groaning yellow school bus each morning and afternoon, sitting either alone or next to Rudy, an autistic boy who pressed his nose against the window and said nothing. She didn’t join any extracurricular activities. Didn’t attend games. She went to school, ate alone in the cafeteria, and came home.
    Still, that uneventful high school year had been a morsel of freedom, and now she found herself wanting more. After all, she couldn’t stay shut inside the