Page 1 of Two is a Pattern

Chapter 1

Thirty-six down was an eight-letterword forrueful,remorseful,repentant. Annie picked up her pen and tapped it against the handle of her ceramic coffee mug.

“I’m not a waitress, Anabelle! You know where the coffeepot is,” her mother Patty said, her voice light and airy but her words biting.

Annie looked up from her crossword puzzle, momentarily bewildered, then shook her head.

“Sorry, Mom. No, I was just thinking.” Annie was a fidgety person by nature. Always squirming in her seat, drumming her fingers, clicking her pens restlessly until someone made her stop. Her best friend in undergrad—a tall, blonde brainiac named Lori—had once bought her as a gag gift an expensive pen designed for astronauts to take into space. It had been made to look like the American flag—red and blue anodized aluminum with little white stars—and you could write with it anywhere. Upside down or underwater or on practically any flat surface. Lori had said it was the only pen that might actually outlast a stressed-out Annie during finals.

Annie had given it to her father, Ken, who still had it on his desk in his office. It wasn’t that she hadn’t appreciated the gift or the gesture, but Annie liked her cheap little pens and not having to feel guilty about gnawing up the top of a twenty-four-cent Bic. The pen she held now was resting against her bottom lip, in place to be chewed, but she wasn’t thinking about the crossword anymore. She was watching her mother angrily scrub a muffin tin at the sink.

Her parents had been ticked with her for some time now. Ever since she announced her intention to go back to school.

It was Lori’s idea, actually. Not another degree, but the idea of going to school out West. They’d both gone to the University of Mississippi and become friends while Annie worked her way through an economics degree and Lori studied prelaw. They had no classes together their first semester, but Lori had lived three doors down from Annie’s dorm room. The next semester, they took the same Russian language class. For the next three years, they were nearly inseparable. After graduation, with their matching caps decorated to sayClass of’87, Annie was recruited to the CIA and went to Georgetown while Lori went to study law at Stanford.

They still kept in touch, though they weren’t as tight as when they were twenty. Annie had mentioned in one of her letters last year that she was thinking about pursuing a second master’s degree, maybe something more practical than Slavic languages. The government had technically paid for that one, but she’d recently resigned to figure out what she really wanted to do. Law like Lori? Foreign policy? Education? She could teach, maybe.

Lori had written back, expressing support for the idea. She mentioned that there were some great schools out West where she lived and told her not to discount it simply because her parents thought it was all stoned hippies past the Rocky Mountains. Lori probably meant Northern California because she’d settled in Marin County with her husband, Louis, but once Annie started to research, most of the schools she applied to were in the southern part of the state. She’d settled on criminology; it was a career change that would let her utilize her skillset.

Her mom finished scrubbing the muffin tin, banged it into the dish rack, and started on the big cast-iron skillet she’d used to fry bacon for breakfast.

Annie was three days away from moving cross-country, and her parents still were not entirely on board. Her father thought it a waste of time and money, and he was horrified at the amount of the loan Annie had procured. Her mother never tired of pointing out to her only daughter that by the timeshewas twenty-seven, she had a toddler and a baby on the way, and what would Annie have to show for herself except for a pile of degrees and no job?

“Mom, leave that big heavy pan. I’ll do it,” Annie offered.

“What about next week when you aren’t here anymore?” Patty asked. “Who’ll do it then, hmm? Me, that’s who. So I may as well get used to it.”

Annie sighed, picked up her pen, and returned to her puzzle.

Thirty-six down.

Rueful, remorseful, repentant.

Her pen scratched against the newsprint.

Contrite.

* * *

Three debate trophies in high school and negotiation training by the United States government and it still took Annie most of the summer to convince her father that she didn’t need anyone to drive from Ohio to California with her. At first, both of her parents had insisted on going, and then she’d got it down to just her father.

Two nights before she was due to depart, she got her wish. Her father relented if she promised to stop in Missouri and again in New Mexico to sleep solid nights in hotel beds. He even offered to pay for the hotel rooms, then spent the rest of the evening calling around for the best rates and booking her rooms, reading his credit card numbers over the phone loudly.

Annie hovered in the hallway, fretting.

“He just loves you is all,” her mom said, coming up behind her.

“I know. But it’s too much money.”

“Can’t put a price on your safety, honey. It’ll make him feel better, so you may as well let him do it.”

Annie nodded; the weight of his care heavy enough that it felt difficult to move from the spot.

She’d been feeling guilty about a lot of things lately. Going back to school, moving far away from her parents when she’d just come back to Toledo. Quitting her job with the CIA. Turning down a job offer from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington DC six months ago even though she had no other prospects. It wasn’t the idea of being a police officer she disliked; it was the way Deputy Chief Mason Worth had offered her the job. Worth was a celebrated and decorated officer, but the way he praised her—offering her a better-paying job and an alluring life in a new town—made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. He was so desperate to poach from the intelligence community that he contacted her the day after she left the Company. She had no idea how he knew anything about her, and the nicer he was to her, the more her stomach churned and the worse the fight-or-flight feeling got. So she said no and flew home to regroup.

Anabelle Weaver didn’t need another authority figure in her life. She’d already learned that lesson the hard way.

She didn’t sleep well the night before she was supposed to leave for California. Part of it was her childhood mattress, narrow and squeaky. But it was also her jangly nerves about her sense of direction. The majority of the trip was driving west on Interstate40, but first she had to find her way out of the city, then negotiate the freeway system once she reached Los Angeles’s outskirts.

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