Trust Me, I'm Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page B

pyramid scheme is more than a pyramid scheme,” I answer before turning to Murphy. “What’s the slightly less bad news?”
    “I think I have a lead on your mom,” Murphy says.
    I nearly fall over. “What?”
    “It’s not a good lead.”
    “Murphy,” I say sharply. “What lead?”
    “Up till now, we’ve only been scratching the surface in our Internet search. There’s so much the search engines don’t index. So I started combing online databases—university libraries, media archives, that kind of thing—to see if I could find anything. And, well…”
    He grabs his laptop, clicks something, and turns the computer to show me a grainy scanned image of a newspaper article from February 2012. A picture of my mom dominates the left side of the column. Her name, Alessandra Nereza Moretti, is the caption. My heart climbs into my throat as I start at the top of the article.
Thirty-three-year-old Alessandra Moretti reported missing. Last seen at Deer Run Café on Mercator Dr. Reward for information leading to her recovery. Call 555-…

    I pull back in confusion, then scroll to the top of the page and down to the article again.
    “This can’t be right,” I say. “It’s a missing person report. It says she disappeared three years ago.”
    “I told you it wasn’t a good lead.”
    “I don’t understand.” It’s definitely her. Dark brown hair, blue eyes, the same smile I used to see in the mirror before everything went haywire last year. I may not have seen my mom in eight years, but I’d still recognize her in a picture. “Why wouldn’t I have heard about it? Who would have reported her missing if not me and my dad?”
    “I don’t know,” Murphy says. “It’s a local article from some nothing town in Alabama. A missing person is hardly national news. Still, it seems like they would have notified next of kin if they knew her name.”
    I pull out my phone and dial the number listed in the article, but all I get is a “This number is no longer in service” message.
    Then my stomach drops. “Wait. Did it say February of 2012?” I scan the newspaper header for confirmation.
    “I think so. Why?”
    My knees shudder, and I sink into my chair. “I would have been thirteen. And that’s about the time of year my dad took off and was gone for two weeks with no explanation.”
    Murphy goes quiet, digesting this. “Do you think he knows about it?”
    “I—I never asked him where he went or why. I just assumed it had to do with a job that had gone wrong. I thought he left to protect me. But now…It can’t be a coincidence.”

    Murphy shoots me a sympathetic look as he resumes control of the laptop. “Speaking of coincidences…,” he says, pulling up a web page he bookmarked.
WELCOME TO THE ALL-NEW BAR63.
    “What is this?” I ask, the sixty-three pinging around in my head like an eight ball.
    “Maybe nothing,” he says. “But it might be worth checking out.”
Located in the vibrant Rogers Park area, just steps away from the campus of Loyola University, the new Bar63 offers something for everyone…opened its doors in March. Talented bartender Victoria Febbi…live music every Thursday night…designed for sports enthusiasts, with more than twenty giant flat-screens…
    “What is it?” Lily asks, no doubt tired of our cryptic discussion.
    “It’s a bar that just opened a couple of months ago called Bar63.”
    “Why is that significant?”
    “My father has this saying: ‘You, me, and sixty-three.’ He used it as a clue last year when everything went down with the mob. I always thought the sixty-three was meaningless, something he just made up because it rhymed and it was catchy. But now there’s this bar.” I look up at Murphy. “I don’t know, Murph. This one really could be just a coincidence.”

    “I thought so, too, when I first read the article. But something about it kept nagging me. So I dug around a bit, and I found something else pretty coincidental.”
    He uses the