There was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice. The anger.
‘I understand it’s a shock,’ said the man, with an attempt at empathy that clearly did not come naturally to him. ‘But those things will all improve. With training. Once you’ve learned how to master your abilities, we hope they will prove to be an invaluable asset to The Group, and to the greater good. Just as your parents intended.’
He stood up, pushing back his chair and straightening his silk tie with a perfectly manicured hand. ‘I know it’s a lot to take in. Download the information on the memory stick. Try to focus when you do, because once viewed it will automatically and permanently delete. I’ll be in touch in the coming days about next steps.’
Ella stood up too. She couldn’t just let him leave. She no longer thought he was deranged, but at the same time none of this made the remotest bit of sense. How dare this man, this stranger, walk into her life and drop bomb after bomb after bomb, refuse to answer her questions, then saunter off, leaving Ella to pick up the pieces?
Reaching out, she put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Wait! Hold on. Please.’
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said, shrugging off her hand and heading for the door.
‘You know what? Don’t bother!’ Ella yelled after him defiantly as he started down the stairs. ‘Because I’m not joining any stupid Group. Not for you or my parents or anyone else. So don’t come back here!’
The man kept walking.
‘I have a life of my own, you know,’ shouted Ella.
He stopped and turned to look up at her, his expression curious rather than angry.
‘Do you? No job. No family. No friends. No real purpose.’ He counted off Ella’s deficiencies on his fingers, not spitefully but in a matter-of-fact way, like a scientist letting the data speak for itself. ‘That’s not what I would call a life,’ he concluded. ‘But perhaps we have different standards?’
Ella spluttered furiously, trying to think of a suitable comeback, but by the time it came to her the man had gone. She stood alone at the top of the stairs, the silver USB stick clutched in her hand, feeling as if a tornado had just swept into her life and upended every single thing in it. If the man had still been in range, she would have hurled the stick at his head and hoped she knocked him out cold. Smug bastard.
Well, if he thought he was going to determine her future, he had another think coming. Ella wasn’t Frankenstein’s monster, whatever her parents might have intended. The man could take his stupid Group and his training and his missions and stick them where the sun didn’t shine.
I’ll show you, Mr ‘perhaps we have different standards’? Mr …?
It dawned on Ella in that moment that this man who claimed to know so much about her and her parents; this stranger who’d unlocked the mystery of her secret voices and solved the riddle of her past, hadn’t told Ella a single thing about himself.
She didn’t know how he’d come to join The Group, or what he did for them.
She didn’t know how old he was, or where he lived.
She didn’t even know his name.
Helen Martindale pushed her greying hair back from her doughy, round face and fixed it back in place with a bobby pin. She smiled patiently at the young woman opposite her, who hadn’t looked up from the single-page contract Helen had handed her more than six minutes ago, reading and re-reading every line of text as if it held the answer to the meaning of life.
‘It’s just our standard vendor’s agreement,’ Helen explained. ‘Shouldn’t be any surprises in there.’
The young woman kept reading.
‘We’ll get you a fair price for the place,’ Helen said reassuringly. She was delighted that Mimi Praeger’s granddaughter had chosen to list the valuable Paradise Valley ranch with Martindale and Jessop, rather than go with some fancy city realtor, offering all of those ‘virtual tours’ and ‘social media presence’ and promising pre-drought prices that locals like Helen Martindale knew couldn’t be achieved any more.
‘Is there something bothering you, hon?’ Helen asked, once a full ten minutes had passed.
‘Hmm?’ Ella looked up, bewildered, as if suddenly seeing the older woman for the first time. ‘Oh, no. Thanks. Everything’s fine. Do you need me to sign something?’
Helen Martindale pointed to the dotted line at the bottom of the page and handed Ella a pen. The poor child seemed to be in a world of her own. Of course, she’d always been a funny one, a few biscuits short of a breakfast, as Helen’s daddy used to say. No wonder, given the isolated life she’d been forced to lead up at that ranch. Other than at school, she barely ever got to play with other children and learn how social interactions were supposed to work. But she seemed worse than usual this morning. Maybe parting with the ranch and saying goodbye to the cabin she’d grown up in was proving more of an emotional wrench than she’d anticipated.
‘Are you staying on the property while you’re here?’ Helen asked, kindly.
‘No,’ said Ella. She didn’t intend to be rude; she simply didn’t have any facility for small talk.
‘Well, that makes things easier from our point of view.’ Helen smiled. ‘Feels hard for you, I daresay, coming back to the valley now your grandmother’s gone?’
Not sure how to respond to this observation, Ella stood up, shook Helen’s hand stiffly, and left, closing the office door behind her.
Helen Martindale looked through the window as the girl stood on the sidewalk, swaying like a poplar tree in the wind, uncertain which way to go, before suddenly deciding to make a left on Main Street.
Poor thing, the real-estate agent thought again. She wondered whether the profits from selling the Praeger ranch would make her new client’s life better or worse, and she couldn’t quite shake the depressing feeling that it was probably the latter. Ella’s problems, Helen Martindale rightly suspected, weren’t the kind that you could fix with a check.
It did feel hard coming back to the valley, but not because Mimi had gone. Right now Ella was still too angry with her grandmother to allow in any other feelings. No, what was hard was the fact that she was still in limbo, with no idea what the next chapter of her life would look like. Stupidly, she’d put off her job search until she heard back from ‘the man’, who’d promised he’d be in touch again within a few days. It was now nine days since his unannounced visit to Ella’s apartment, and she’d heard nothing from him since.
Not that she had the remotest intention of joining his ‘group’ or attending whatever nonsensical ‘training’ it was that he had in mind for her. But she’d been looking forward to delivering that defiant message in person. And, if she was honest, simply to seeing him again. Although she didn’t like to admit it, the man’s random appearances in Ella’s life provided a thrill that was only partly connected to the tantalizing clues he offered about her parents.
But now he was entirely absent, leaving Ella to return to Paradise Valley feeling even more hopeless and deflated than she had at the funeral. Thankfully, so far, Ella hadn’t run into any of her old high-school classmates/tormentors. That would really be the icing on the—
‘Well I never! If it ain’t Miss Ella! Ella Praeger, as I live and breathe!’
If it had happened to someone else, it would have been funny.
Danny Bleeker, blond, blue-eyed Danny, star pitcher on the Paradise High baseball team and bane of Ella’s life from tenth grade right through to her senior