A/N: Chapter Two! Thanks for all of your love, especially those of you who followed me from my last story. Yeah, this isn't the one I was talking about writing before, this just kind of came to me. Also, I'm sorry to all of the Jackie fans out there... this may be a little OOC but I just saw it in my head going down like this. I know we had a lot of character development with her at the end, but I guess maybe I'm choosing to ignore that? I guess maybe.
Chapter 2: New York City
After three weeks of living with Uncle Wallace and several counseling sessions later, Linley was actually starting to lose her mind. Although she didn't particularly like school in D.C., she especially did not like school in New York.
Linley sat at the dinner table and pushed the food around her plate, not really eating anything. "I know you're hungry," Wallace said, causing her to look at him, "Your mother could put away food unlike anyone else I have ever met; even with only half of her genes, you should be starving." While she appreciated his attempt at a joke, she made no outward signs of it and resumed pushing her food around the plate.
She continued to do so until Jackie snapped and took the plate off of her, obviously insulted that the girl refused to eat her cooking. Wallace stood and followed his wife into the kitchen to calm her. "Jackie…" he started, and she brushed him off, "she just lost her mother, she's hurting. I'm sure it has nothing to do with your cooking."
"She's ungrateful and rude," Jackie whisper-yelled back, not wanting either girl to hear their conversation, "after we so graciously took her in and she sits around here ignoring everyone; I can't do this anymore, Wallace."
Unfortunately, both girls could hear the conversation. It didn't take a genius to figure out that as much as Jackie didn't want Linley there, Linley did not want to be there. Most days she woke up hoping it was all a terrible nightmare and that her mother was still alive and they were still living in their crappy D.C. apartment ordering delivery from Charley's Chinese, which served a lot more than just Chinese. Their favorites were always the Italian dishes and cheeseburgers.
At night, instead of sleeping, Linley went through all of the files on her mother's laptop and external hard drive. Most of it was pictures and home movies of her when she was younger, which would often relax her enough to fall asleep watching them, hearing her mother's voice. However, those nights were usually followed by rough mornings and she knew it wasn't the best way to move on.
With each passing day, the relationship between Linley and Jackie became more strained. Thus, Linley's nightly research took a more directed approach: finding a new place to live. On that particular evening, having gotten nowhere with the laptop, she opened a box she didn't remember packing and found an interesting collection of items inside. There was a flash drive on a silver chain, a key chain with several neatly labeled keys attached, a small velvet covered ring box, and an old cell phone with its charger wrapped around it. She organized these items around herself neatly before moving the box out of the way.
Winning out as the most interesting item, Linley picked up the ring box first and opened it, her eyes widening at the ring it contained. A diamond that big should be in a museum, not with a ring band attached to it. Carefully she removed it from the box and tried it on her finger, noting that her own slender fingers were a bit too small to wear the ring properly. Who had given such an expensive ring to her mother? More importantly, why didn't she sell it and use the money to buy a better apartment for them to live in? Clearly the piece of jewelry meant a lot to her mother if she had kept it instead of selling it to make rent.
For the moment, she put the ring back into the box it came in and tried the cell phone. Obviously all of the years had drained the battery, even in its current off state, and needed to be plugged in. Standing, she located the nearest outlet and plugged the phone in, hoping that it would spring to life.
After a few minutes of trying the power button, the phone finally lit up and Linley had to contain a squeal of delight. Naturally, it asked for a password. Anyone else and she would have assumed they were paranoid, but her mother had her reasons. She had to be careful, though, knowing that she would only be allowed a certain number of attempts before the phone permanently locked.
Linley also knew her mother wasn't stupid enough to have a document anywhere containing her passwords and access codes. She never used birthdays or anniversaries, numbers from addresses or anything with any sort of significance. Anything that Linley currently did not know would have died with her mother. Yet, she had hope that somewhere in her brain contained the knowledge to unlock the phone.
"What are you still doing up?" Wallace asked, knocking before poking his head into the room. Linley quickly piled most of the stuff, except the charging phone, back into the box and into her bag.
She shrugged, "found this in some of mom's things. Surprised it still works," Linley confessed, holding the phone.
Wallace smiled, "wow, that's old. Do you mind?" he asked, holding out his hand for it.
Nervously Linley handed it over and watched him start pushing buttons, "Don't!" she said before she could filter herself, "I mean you only get a few tries before it locks itself and…" Her eyes widened in amazement when she noticed he unlocked the phone. "How did you do that?" she asked, taking the phone back.
Wallace shrugged, "I don't know, I must have done it a million times back in the day; I guess my hand just remembered. There weren't many people your mom trusted, and I was lucky enough to be one of them, at least for a little while."
"Do you remember anything else about her?" Linley couldn't believe that she was talking. Since the funeral, she really hadn't had much to say.
Wallace fully entered the room and sat down on the bed, "She was tough as nails; not scared of anything. She always had about a million thoughts running through her head at once, and it was better to just not ask questions. You never wanted to get on her bad side, but deep down, she was a marshmallow."
Linley nodded, "Why did you stop being friends?"
"Your mom got offered a job at the F.B.I. in D.C. right after graduation and she took it; left without saying goodbye to anyone. I was drafted to the NBA and travelled a lot. She had you. Time and space, I guess. I don't think we ever stopped being friends, though, I think we just grew apart," Wallace said sadly, wishing he had made more of an effort to spend time with his best friend. "I'm going to head back to bed, don't stay up too late, you have school in the morning."
Once he was gone, Linley went back to the phone. There were several saved messages on it, which delighted her. When the voicemail prompted for a pass code, without thinking she typed in the pass code for her mother's current cell phone's voicemail, and was surprised that it actually worked. "First saved message…" the automated voice said before bringing up the message, "Hey Veronica, I know you said you needed some time, but I miss you. Please call me…" the message cut off and the automated voice came back, "Message recorded at 11:29 P.M. on Friday, May 29."
"Next saved message…" the automated voice continued, "I need to see you, tonight. I'll be there in twenty minutes. Please…" Linley noted that it was the same male voice, but a little more desperate this time as the automated voice continued with the time stamp, "Message recorded at 1:12 A.M. on Saturday, July 19."
"Next saved message…" Linley wondered how many her mother saved on the phone as the male voice came on again, "I know you're nervous about tomorrow or today rather, when you hear this message, and I just wanted to leave you a message to wake up to. I'll see you in a few hours. I love you... Message recorded at 11:58 P.M. on Sunday, August 24."
After several more messages in the same love-y manner from the same male voice, Linley began to wonder who the mysterious man was. Too bad the messages didn't have his name. Some parts of the year were dry spells; she figured whatever messages left there weren't important enough to save. Listening again, once they were finished, she began jotting down the dates and times into a notebook.
Looking through them, she noted that they spanned about a two year period almost exactly before stopping suddenly in the middle of May. Knowing that the messages had to occur around the time her mother was close to Uncle Wallace, since he recognized the phone, she narrowed down the possible years to high school and college and a quick internet search of calendars from those years pinpointed the exact dates: May 2008 to May 2010.
Counting on her fingers from her birth date on February 14, 2011, Linley could almost comfortably conclude that the mystery man on the phone messages had to be her father. That was certainly bizarre; the first time she heard the voice of her father was on an eighteen year old saved voicemail message to her mother. Why hadn't anyone said his name in any of the messages?
Was he the one that gave her mother the fancy ring? Were they engaged? What happened? Linley continued to make notes in her notebook of her thoughts, wanting to find answers to all of her questions. Her mother had taken a job in D.C. right after graduation. Was she running away? Did she know she was pregnant? Could she have met someone right after moving to D.C.?
The questions swirled making it impossible to sleep. Giving the voicemails a break for the moment, Linley searched through the saved text messages. While there were plenty of saved messages, with the same love-y tone, there wasn't a name in sight. Either her mother had removed the name from the phone number later or she never put it in so anyone glancing at her phone wouldn't have a clue who anyone was.
It didn't matter, using her mother's password on the "Prying Eyez" website; Linley entered the number and pulled up the information on the owner. The search returned three results. Since the number originated, three people had the number. Immediately, she mentally crossed off the woman from the list. Clearly a woman did not send those kinds of messages or have a man-voice.
So that left Bachelor #1 and Bachelor #2. Though desperately wanting to continue her research that evening, she felt her body betraying her mind succumbing to its desires to sleep. Thus, she hid the notebook away inside her bag with the rest of her stuff, making sure each bag's lock was secure before crawling into bed.
The fact that she insisted upon leaving everything she owned in one of the three bags she brought with her, locked up at all times, really annoyed Jackie. About a week ago, Jackie had tried to unpack for the girl while she was at school, thinking it would be a nice gesture, but found all of the bags to have locks on them. She complained to Wallace, insisting he talk her into removing the locks and unpacking, but it never got any further than that.
The next morning at school, she found hers thoughts wandering back to the two possible men that could have sent the messages to her mother sixteen years ago. By lunch she found herself at a table, alone, continuing her research. Linley blocked out the noise of lunch hour by replaying the cell phone messages through her headphones once she uploaded the files to her laptop.
She was so involved in her research that she didn't notice when someone else sat down at her table. "What are you listening to?" the boy asked her, to which she made no response. Again he tried to get her attention by waving a hand in front of her face.
She cursed in excitement before looking up from her computer and pulling out her headphones, "What do you want?"
"I'm Scott," he said simply, to which she responded with an annoyed eye roll. That was certainly not what he was expecting. "Did you really kill your parents?" he asked, questioning one of the rumors he heard around school.
Really? That's why everyone was staring at her? Someone started a stupid rumor that she killed her parents? "Sure, why not," she said sarcastically, "and now I'm on the run from the law, right?" With that, she put her headphones back in and refocused her attention back on to her laptop.
Again he distracted her, receiving yet another glare from the teenage girl, "What are you doing?"
"Research," she responded simply. She'd been there almost a month and now the welcome committee was harassing her? If looks could kill, the boy sitting at her table would have been dead by now.
Thankfully the bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. Linley packed up her things and instead of heading to her fourth period class, she left the school grounds. If her mother was still alive, she never would have pulled a stunt like this, but she went "home" or rather Uncle Wallace's, in the middle of the school day and didn't give it a second thought.
She needed to finish looking through the box to confirm her suspicions of Bachelor #1 being her father, and the box was in her bag in the guest room, which was now her room. The last piece of evidence that she had was the flash drive on the chain. Putting it in to her laptop, Linley was surprised at the lack of password protection.
Looking through the files, many of them were saved e-mails, really old saved e-mails and a few photos. Linley clicked on the first one and waited while her computer accessed the file. It was short, only a few lines of text, and certainly informal.
I tried calling you but you won't answer your phone. Maybe e-mail will work better for you? We really need to talk, please call me back. I'm not mad. Please? I miss you.
Checking the date, it fell right around the time that the phone messages stopped: May 2010. The next one was of a similar nature, her mother asking some still nameless person to call her. It wasn't until the lastone that the tone changed. Linley noted that the date was a few days after she was born.
Logan,
Since you probably don't check this e-mail address anymore, I might as well just tell you. We have a daughter, Logan. I named her Linley: Lynn, after your mom, and "ly" after Lilly. She always was nice to me. She's beautiful. I attached a few pictures for you. If you ever want to meet her, you know where we are.
Veronica
Bachelor #1: Logan Echolls, Neptune California. Her father had a name and a location and she was going to find him. The great thing about living in the 21st century was the ability to buy a plane ticket for the next flight to wherever from any computer with internet access. Watch out California, Linley Mars is coming your way.
A/N: Yeah, I had to. Logan of course. Reviews are awesome. For reals.