“Dang it,” I muttered and tugged at my collar. This was all I needed. I’d pushed past my reservations about leaving Ellis and Jeannette and the boys for a few weeks, and now I was already on the ferry and on my way. Well, it just rubbed me raw that I’d now have to turn around and go back, having wasted both time and money.
“No,” I said to out loud as I stomped my foot and crossed my arms over my chest. He wasn’t going to get rid of me that easily. The person nearest me gave me a doubtful stare, then gathered his umbrella off the floor and moved to another seat.
My thoughts raced as I tried to think what to do. I wasn’t giving up without a fight. I wanted this gig. No, I needed this gig.
Coming to a decision, I gritted my teeth and held onto the button until my phone powered off.
“There,” I said to myself, keeping my voice down so as not to tip the ship by number of people exiting my location, “if I didn’t actually hear the message telling me not to come, then when I got there I could just say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get the message. Let me show you my portfolio, seeing as how I’ve come all this way.”
Yes. That might just work. He couldn’t just send me away… not after I’d driven so far. Not when I hadn’t received the message not to come.
So I wouldn’t be tempted to pull out my phone, I hid it deep in the bowels of my purse and tried to put it out of my mind. I stared out the window at the sea as we sailed toward Vancouver Island. There was wind on the water, and white caps that looked like whipped cream appeared and disappeared on the surface like they were playing a game of whack-a-mole. After fifteen minutes of doing that, my leg was bouncing and my fingers were going a mile a minute on the hard-wooden bench. I tried to think of something, anything but that damn unheard voicemail. The more I tried not to think about it, the more alternative scenarios raced in my head.
What if the message wasn’t what I thought it was? What if it wasn’t anything bad at all? What if it was just the client telling me to come in the morning, instead of tonight? Could I risk ignoring it? Would I blow my chances for certain because I showed up at the wrong time?
At that point, the back of my teeth started to make a racket as I ground them together. My jaw ached from the stress. “Screw it,” I blurted as I dug through my purse for my phone. I turned it back on, and found the message.
“Here goes nothing,” I said. Immediately, a man’s voice came on the phone and for a split second my hopes fell, thinking that I was right and it was the billionaire telling me not to come.
“…I’m in Vancouver. I got on a plane as soon as I heard about the article. I want you back. I miss you, Sabrina….” Blood seemed to drain out of my face as I froze in my chair, my hand seizing up as I gaped at my phone. My leg muscles tightened and I jerked up from my seat, sucking in short gasps of air as the voice on the phone continued, “…please, Sabrina. I need you. Come back with me. It wasn’t my fault. I love—”
I pitched the phone away from me as fast as I could, as if it were made of live spiders crawling all over my hand. It bounced off the metal support beam, then clattered to the floor with a sickening crunch. The room swayed as I stumbled, scooping up my purse and my phone, then, clutching them to my bosom, I jerked around, eyes darting as if I expected him to be standing there on the passenger deck, watching me.
Lunging towards the hall to the bathrooms, I pushed past startled passengers, as sweat poured down my neck. I made it into a stall just in time, then doubled over. The nausea and the dizziness passed, as I held onto the walls of the stall for support. When it felt safe to move again, I slumped onto the toilet, fully clothed and hugged myself, and rocked, until my body stopped shaking.
“No, no, no, no, it’s not possible,” I repeated to myself again and again, as I stayed in that stall for the rest of the voyage. I couldn’t make sense of how he’d tracked me down. I’d left the country for pity’s sake, and he didn’t know anything about Jeannette and Ellis, I was sure of that.
The horn blew, and the ferry jerked, forcing me to brace myself in the stall. As the anchor chain clanked down the side of the hull, I remembered what Jack had said in his voicemail… “I’m in Vancouver,” he’d said. “I got on a plane as soon as I heard about the article.”
That’s how he found me. That stupid article.
Piedmont Gazette
* * *
Valuable Art Work from Mysterious Talent Found Selling for Peanuts at Vancouver Coffee House
An artist whose identity had been shrouded in anonymity and mystery since first coming to light while she was just ten years old, has allegedly been selling her valuable and distinctive mosaic artwork at a Vancouver coffeehouse at coffee house prices for the last several months.
“Needless to say, discovering her artwork in Vancouver, at a coffee shop no less, was a huge surprise.” Local art collector, Lee Thibodaux told the Gazette. He brought in the 2-foot by 3-foot mosaic he purchased at the Piedmont Coffee House in Piedmont, last Thursday, and showed us examples from the internet and a brochure he’d received at a recent showing of her work in San Francisco, to help show that the artistic styles were the same.
Citing a desire to keep his lucky find to himself, he refused to allow us to photograph his piece for this article, but we brought in our local art critic and everyone agreed, there was no doubt that the artwork had the same look and feel.
For those that aren’t familiar with the story of Sabrina, Child Psychic Artist, the following is a summary.
In 2001 on the 4th of July, three children from three prominent and wealthy Seattle families were kidnapped while watching fireworks at a fancy party at a private estate in Beacon Hill. During the first twenty-four hours, while the police negotiated with the kidnappers, the public was not informed of the event. But, after the ransom was paid and the three children were not delivered as promised, police went on the offensive and the public was notified. When the story broke on the night of the fifth of July, images of the three missing children, and the heart-wrenching pleas of the devastated parents, filled every television screen both in Seattle and across the country, including here in Canada.
Police and the parents asked anyone with any information to call a hotline. Rewards were established, but despite hundreds of calls, police had nothing to help them find the missing children. That was until a hotline volunteer received a call from a parent who claimed that her daughter had created a picture of the kidnappers. “My daughter knows who the kidnappers are,” the hotline volunteer remembers hearing. He told her to bring the picture to the police station, but when the caller claimed that he couldn’t because the child had done the image on her bedroom wall, the volunteer passed the information along to the police who dispatched a patrol to the caller’s home to take a photograph of the image.
Police were stunned to find on the bedroom wall of a ten-year-old girl the images of not only the three missing children but also of three men. Since the artwork had been made painstakingly with scissors and paper and glue, and could not have been completed after the pictures of the girls were broadcast, and because the parents identified the clothing being worn as clothing the children owned, yet not shown in the public photographs, it was determined this child might be onto something.