Red Rock Island (Damian Green Book 1) (11 page)

Chapter Nineteen

No further effort was made to get any more information from Hannah. Instead Ariana encouraged all three of them outside into the sun and Miguel was more than willing to distract. Soon Damian had Hannah using the drone to drop toys for Miguel in the water. It provided the perfect cover for Ariana and Damian to discuss next steps and to cheer up Hannah.

“She’s a great kid and she has been through a very hard time,” Ariana said.

“Yeah. I don’t think her parents are necessarily dead which is good, but they have fallen off the face of the earth. I think we need to keep Hannah at your house until we can figure out what to do. I was thinking of starting by slipping into her home to see what clues there are.”

“Me? What do I do with a teenager?”

“I don’t have guest space at my house and besides I’m a guy,” Damian replied as if that settled matters.

“Yes, but she needs to be in school, I don’t have the legal right to care for her. What if she has a medical emergency, how to I explain her existence?”

“I can set up all the fake identification you and she’ll need, remember, I’m a computer genius,” Damian replied with a grin.

“Are we doing the right thing? Maybe we should call the police?”

“I’d hate for someone like her to get caught in the system, until the situation with her parents is straightened out. I can share her with you when you have to leave town. We’ll just be surrogate parents until the real ones are found.”

“How are you going to explain her to your friends?”

“Good question and I don’t have all the answers yet, but let’s ask her as well. She’s a smart kid, let’s explain to her what we’re thinking and go from there.”

Miguel looked tired and Hannah walked over to them and asked, “Are you done discussing me yet?”

As Damian said, the kid had intelligence and backbone; he started the conversation with Hannah about her future.

“Hannah, we’re not sure that your parents are dead and you shouldn’t be either, but someone has to care for you right now and keep you safe until we have answers about your parents. Like you, I’m a genius also. I can create paperwork so that it appears you’re Ariana’s daughter and I’m her back-up. You need to be in school, though not the one you were in. If you have a medical emergency, we need paperwork that gives us the legal right to take care of you. Our alternative is contact the police and keep this all proper and legal. What do you want to do?”

Hannah was quiet as she considered their offer. Her family and her future were so perfect a week ago. She wanted Damian to turn back the clock so that her parents had time to get into their safe room. Did she trust these strangers not to hurt her? Would they help her find her parents? Her intuition had never been wrong before. If she sensed someone was bad, she usually had evidence of their bad behavior within a few weeks. She didn’t feel that there was anything too bad about these two people, even though she didn’t so much as know their last names. Their pets were well cared for and that was always a good sign. She sighed not knowing what to do.

Damian had watched the girl and found himself guessing at what she was thinking and so he asked, “Would you like a computer so you can look us up and read about us?”

Hannah had pretty much made the decision to take a chance on these two strangers. But if she could do an internet search on them that would probably seal the deal for her. So she nodded her agreement.

They went back inside and before Hannah sat down at a computer, she asked, “You’re sure you can create a secret identity for me? Do you know how to code?”

Damian laughed at her question and replied, “Hannah, I hold ten patents related to things I invented that required coding. When you want to learn, I can teach you. Is that what you want to do in the future?”

The tears suddenly welled up in her eyes over the word ‘future’. For the past week, she’d concentrated on surviving and now she could devote a sliver of her personality to thinking about her future.

“Will you teach me regardless of my future? Can I look you up someday to help?”

Damian nodded, swallowing a lump over such a small request from someone who’d been through so much.

Hannah sat down at a computer and began looking the two of them up. Since Damian had looked Ariana up, he knew that Hannah should be able to form an opinion of Ariana based on what she found on the internet. He was curious to see what Hannah would find on him.

Thirty minutes later, she stopped typing and looking at Damian said, “Was your family really murdered seven years ago? Your daughter and I must have been about the same age at the time of her death.”

“Yes.”

Hannah continued to look at him solemnly, aware that he’d suffered as much as she had. Then she blinked and looked at Ariana and said, “You lost your husband to cancer three years ago and you don’t have children. Right?”

“Yes,” this time it was Ariana providing a single word, large meaning response to Hannah.

“If you’ll have me, I’d like to stay with you. Will your niece mind if I stay in her room?”

“No, she’ll just move to another when she visits.”

“Will you take me back to my house so I can retrieve some things?”

“Hannah, I don’t think that is safe. What exactly do you want?” Damian replied.

“Pictures. I had pictures in frames and pictures on my cell phone and I dropped it when I crossed a creek on the way to the marina. Can you get information off a wet phone?”

“Maybe, anything else besides the pictures? Is the creek close to your house?”

“Clothes and books can be replaced. What will happen to the house if my parents don’t come back?”

“We’ll have to do some research on that. In the near future, is the guy that was trying to find you still in the house? Longer term questions about electrical, water, and tax bills will need to be sorted out. At some point, law enforcement will need notification that the entire family is missing. We won’t tell them that you’re with us, but it would be good to have someone looking for your parents officially.”

Hannah’s shoulders looked weighted down by the view of her new future. So Damian said, “Hannah, I’ll continue to search for your parents until we have an answer on their location. In the interim, we’ll need a new name for you and a story so that we can enroll you in school. Do you want to be adopted by Ariana and I or would you rather be a relative that lost her parents in a car accident? What new name would you like? You could pick the maiden name of your mother or perhaps that of a grandparent, or maybe a nickname that your parents called you. You can think about it for a few days, but I think we should take you to be registered for school on Monday. I will be able to create all that you need by that date with your help. Just think about those questions and let me know when you’ve got answers.”

Hannah nodded and then Ariana added, “We also need to change your appearance some and the easiest thing to do is hair and glasses, so give some thought as to whether you might want short blond hair and cool glasses to wear at your new school.”

Hannah showed both fear and excitement with Ariana’s comment. She’d get to start over at a new school and be anyone she wanted to be, but then she was reminded that there was someone looking for her that might want to kill or kidnap her.

“Hannah, Ariana and I have to make a few more arrangements for you and we need to have a private conversation. It’s one of the few about your future that you’ll be excluded from, okay?”

“Okay. I’ll go sit in the kitchen until you’re done.”

Once she was out of earshot, Damian said to Ariana, “Are you up for this? I thrust this child on you less than twenty-four hours ago and now you’ll be a full time parent. I’ll be there to help and I’ll look into modifying my home so she can stay there some times. I’ll pay her bills. I don’t know you well at all Ariana, other than you’re a widow and a kind, occasionally reckless adult, but I think the two of us could make good surrogate parents until we have an answer on what happened to her own parents.”

“I’ve enjoyed being an aunt, so I’ll just slip into the role of doing it full time. Every other option I can think of puts that child in a worse position than she would have in my home. Damian, will you look at Hannah and see your younger child? After my initial attempt at trying to learn who you were, I never went back and looked you up after you told me your full name. I’m very sorry your wife and children were murdered.”

“It’s been seven years since their murders and just the other day I was thinking that if my oldest was alive she’d been preparing for college or a prom or something. Both of my children didn’t get a lot of milestones with their lives cut short. I will think about my youngest at times with Hannah, but she’s got a very different look and affect so other than the age, there’s not many similarities. I hate to be crude, Ariana, but I researched you and I know that financially you can take care of Hannah, but so can I and I would like to set up a trust fund to pay for her expenses. You’ll be doing the yeoman’s work of caring for her day to day, at least let me take care of her major expenses.

“A final comment, if my wife and I had been murdered and our two children left in the wind, I would have been far happier for someone like you to care for them, than for them to go through all the proper legal channels. It had been an area of worry in our marriage as neither of us had family and so we looked at a few friends as possible parents, but we hadn’t come to an agreement on what to do.”

“Ok, we’ll see how this goes and these are the raging teenage years. She may seem normal at the moment, but at some point her hormones will take over and you better be able to hang in there with me,” Ariana demanded. “We’re each going to be a single parent to this child.”

“I guess I’ll be making many mistakes from this day forward,” Damian replied. “Speaking of being a parent, we have work to do and we need to go inside and talk to Hannah.”

Ariana stopped suddenly and said, “We should probably look into Hannah’s relatives, she may want to go to one of them instead of us.”

“We’ll check with the kid, but I would have thought she would have said something before now if that was the case.”

They returned from a brightly lit living room and walked into the large open kitchen where Hannah sat at Damian’s laptop with Miguel at her side.

“Hannah, you’ll want to be careful contacting anyone from your life in Shepard Canyon. You don’t know who is watching or who might accidentally mention you in passing.”

“I know. I posted a note on Mom and Dad’s Facebook pages, so that they would know I’m still alive if they ever check. I used an avatar of my favorite cartoon character and just said, “The drill was cancelled until further notice as I performed well on the last one.” Mom and Dad will know I mean the safe room drills and that I’m alive. With a name and location change, if they’re alive, they’ll have a hard time finding me, but I don’t want them to wonder, I want them to look for me when they’re able.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Ariana said as she gave the girl a hug.

“Hannah, I will look for them forever until we find them and I’m pretty good at finding information. I’m working with a retired detective on cold cases that date back almost thirty years and I’ve been able to find new leads for them so I’ll work on your parents. I don’t want you searching online as you could give away your location to the bad guys. I’ll show you every week in my laboratory what new stuff I’ve done to find your parents, ok? Will you promise to leave the online world alone for now? I’ll take you to my home on Sunday so you can see the work I’ve done to find your parents.”

“Ok,” Hannah said.

“Now we all have things to do today. Ariana, what’s your schedule like today?” Damian knew that Ariana had an active schedule with her Silicon Valley start-ups and she was probably missing meetings.

“I told my contacts that I was taking a long week-end vacation and I’d be back in touch on Tuesday. That gives me time to set up Hannah’s story and her new life. What do you need, Damian?”