I walk away from the crowd and step into the narrow alley that runs between Mountain Candy and the pharmacy and leads to the back parking lot, where I can get to the police station’s side door without being seen. The space is tight enough that I have to walk almost sideways, my shoulders rubbing against the brown-shingled walls.
I come out of the other side of the alley to the narrow dirt parking lot that separates the buildings from the forest. Most of the people who work in the stores park back here, freeing up parking spaces out front for the weekenders. I walk quickly down the line of cars until I come to the end of the last building. I peek around the corner and then hurry down the side to reach a set of metal stairs that are just out of sight of the front sidewalk. I take them two at a time, yank open the door, and almost trample a girl my age who’s trying to walk out.
She looks me full in the face and gives me a wide smile, like we’re long-lost friends, like we’ve just been reunited and we’re studying each other’s faces to see what’s changed.
“Sorry,” I mumble, stepping aside so she can get through the door.
“That’s okay,” she says, still studying me as she passes. She pauses for a moment when we’re face-to-face, her smile exaggerating the sharp point of her chin.
I step farther out of the way, but she doesn’t move. I clear my throat and say, “Okay, then.”
She nods, still staring at me, and finally starts down the steps. I let the glass door close behind me, and watch the girl walk down. I look quickly away when she turns and smiles at me.
“Friendly people freak me out,” I say, walking over to where Lucy Barrett, my childhood babysitter, sits reading behind the reception desk.
“She was just being friendly,” Lucy says, absently, turning a page in her romance novel.
“Exactly. Freaky. What are you reading?” I ask, walking over to the desk and resting my chin on its high counter. Lucy’s got a wet chunk of her hair stuck to her cheek. Lucy has always chewed her hair, especially when she’s reading romance. Pilar and I stole one of her books once, when Lucy babysat for us. The book was called Forbidden Lust, and we took turns with MayBe and Thea reading it out loud to one another at slumber parties.
Lucy closes her book, placing it cover-side-down on the desk. “I’m not reading anything. And that friendly freak of a girl is going to be starting at your school in the next couple of days.”
“No way!” I say, looking back toward the door. “That was the new girl?”
Yep.
My excitement at being the first one of my friends to see her disappears when I realize that when the new girl sees me at school, she’ll probably mention seeing me here, at the police station. I’ll need to make up a lie.
“Say you’re picking up a wood-burning permit for your mom,” Lucy says.
I look at her. When Lucy started working at the station, I made Deputy Pesquera promise that she wouldn’t tell Lucy about me.
“Look,” Lucy says, exasperated. “I don’t know why you’re here, and I don’t care. It’s obvious you care, though, so just tell the new girl you were here picking something up for your mom. Does it have something to do with the bruise on your cheek? Because I’m not above kicking someone’s ass for you. Are you here for Deputy Pesquera?”
I nod.
“She’s out, but should be back soon. Do you want to see Sheriff Dean instead?”
“That’s okay, I’ll wait. Did you see that bullshit going on in front of Sheboa’s?”
“Watch your language, and yes, I saw it.”
“You don’t think it’s bull … crap?”
“Weekenders spend money, Dylan,” Lucy says with a sigh. “And they’re more likely to spend their money in a place called Paradise than a place called Pine Mountain.” She draws out the i in “pine,” imitating the flat-sounding vowels that the old mountain folks have. “That’s why the new name passed, because lots of people up here have no other way to make money except from the weekenders.”
“I guess. It’s still bullshit. They’re not supposed to change the name till January.”
The front door of the station opens and Deputy Pesquera walks in.
“Lucy,” she says.
“Dylan’s here to see you,” Lucy says, as if the deputy couldn’t see me for herself.
“Come on back.”
I follow Pesquera through the heavy glass-and-metal door that separates the reception area from the main part of the station.
When we get to her office, she sets her hat on top of the computer printer and sits heavily in her chair.
I sit in the chair across from her.
“So, what can I do for you?” she asks me.
“Did you find anything out?”
“About what?”
“About who it was who killed that girl.”
“Nothing conclusive.”
“Nothing conclusive,” I mimic. “But you think it might have been …”
“Dylan, what are you doing here?”
I look away from her heavy stare. “What is that?” I ask, standing and walking to the map hanging on her wall. “When did you put this up?”
She doesn’t answer. She just sighs, gets up, closes the office door, and walks over to where I’m standing. The deputy towers over me, the elbows of her crossed arms even with my ears.
The map is of the mountain and of the flatlands below. There are two pins stuck into it.
“This is where we were the other night?” I ask, pointing to the red pin set into the desert.
She nods down at me.
“And this blue one’s in the woods outside the village, where they found Clarence?”
She nods again.
I press a finger next to the pin in the desert and stretch out my hand until it reaches the pin in the village.
“You think he’s coming back,” I say, looking at the small bowl full of tacks sitting on the bookshelf below the map.
“Let me show you something.” I follow the deputy back to her desk and watch as she opens the top drawer. She looks at me. “I’m not supposed to show you this.” She pulls out a large plastic evidence bag. At first I think it’s empty, until she holds it out for me to see, her large knuckles gripping the top of the bag.
“What is that?” I ask, peering at the tiny shreds caught in one corner of the bag. They look like tiny wood shavings, except made out of metal.
“Do they mean anything to you?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Look harder,” she says, holding the bag closer to me. The thin shreds are curled around one another, some of them corkscrew-shaped, others in the shape of Cs or Ss.
“Where did you find these?” I ask.
“In Clarence’s hair,” she answers, dropping the bag back into her drawer. I sit down heavily in the chair next to the desk, painfully bumping my hip on the chair arm as I do.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I say, rolling forward so my palms are pressed against the linoleum floor. I close my eyes to keep the view of my sneakers from swirling in front of me.
I hear the deputy step closer, and open my eyes to see she’s set the wastebasket next to me.
“Why did you show me that?”
“They found the same sort of metal shavings in the barrel with Tessa. They look like a match. And what I need”—she crouches down in front of me—“is for you to think back to the other night, and to Clarence, and see if you can remember anything.”
“But I can’t,” I say quickly. “I told you everything I saw.”
“I know you did,” she says, “but maybe you can think back. Maybe there’s something you missed.”
“There’s not.” I try to keep the growing panic out of my voice. “There’s never anything different, just what I saw the first time.”
She can’t hide the disappointment in her face.
“I’m s-sorry,” I stammer, a familiar hotness creeping up my neck. “I’m really sorry.”
The deputy pulls a tissue from the box o
n her desk and hands it to me. “It’s all right. I shouldn’t have asked you that. You’ll be hearing a lot about those shavings. In the next couple of days we’re doing a joint press release with Salvation. Until then, keep it to yourself.”
“Okay.”
“You want a ride home?”
“No, thanks. I’ll call Mom from the library.”
Great. I’m just coming out of the driveway between the police station and the post office when Frank’s truck rumbles to a stop in the street in front of me. Next to Frank is Thea, and sandwiched next to her are Ben and Cray. Frank says something to Thea, and she shrugs. Cray opens the passenger-side door without saying anything, and I grab his outstretched hand and get in, climbing over him and Ben so I can sit in Thea’s lap.
“Hey, neighbor,” Ben says. “How’s that belly?”
“It’s all right,” I say, bracing myself with a palm against the peeling roof of the truck as we start bumping down the road. “Frank, you need new shocks.”
“You and Pilar have a fight?” Thea asks.
“Nope. I just had to come to town before I went home.”
“But I thought your stomach …”
“Nope. I’m fine. I had to pick something up for my mom; that’s why I couldn’t go to your house.”
“Whatever.” Thea snorts.
“We’re taking a shortcut,” Frank says.
Thea slips an arm around my waist, and we all sway to the side as Frank pulls sharply off of Lakeshore Drive and onto the trail that runs up the mountain to Ben’s house. When we come out of the woods into the small field above Ben’s barn, Frank stops the truck. Cray opens the door and looks at me. I look at Ben. “Aren’t you going home?”
Ben shakes his head.
“Yeah, he is. We’re running an errand,” Frank says. “He doesn’t want to come. Neither do you.” Cray opens the door farther.
“Come on, neighbor,” I say, trying to laugh. “I know when we’re not wanted.”
I climb over Ben and Cray and out of the truck. I can’t hear what the low conversation is that Ben’s having with Frank, but I can tell neither one of them is happy about it. Ben finally gets out of the truck, and Frank starts driving before Cray even has the door closed.
We watch the taillights disappear into the forest. I look up the trail that cuts through the woods from Ben’s, and see the dark outline of my house, and wish that its black windows were glowing with the warm lamplight that would mean my mom was home. Instead the house stands dark and uninviting.
“You want help with the horses?” I ask.
Ben’s still staring at the tracks left by Frank’s truck. He finally sighs and grins at me. “Sure. Thanks.”
“Hey, Toots,” Mom says from the kitchen when I walk into the house an hour later. “It’s dark out; I was getting worried.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, dropping my bag and jacket onto the couch in front of the fireplace and going into the bathroom to wash the dirt from my hands. I can smell chicken baking. I’m starving. “I was helping Ben with the horses.”
“That was nice of you.”
“Who’s the message from?” I ask, eyeing the blinking red light on the phone.
“Your aunt Ruby.” Mom opens the oven and pokes at the chicken with a fork.
“Again? Why’s she stalking us?”
“Don’t talk about your aunt that way. And I don’t know why she’s stalking us. Damn it!” she yells, running to the sink and putting her hand under cold water. “I burned myself.”
I’m already at the freezer, wrapping ice cubes in a dish towel.
We eat dinner in front of the TV, trying not to spill rice on the old quilt that covers us both. The angry red blotch on Mom’s thumb fades to a muted pink, and the uneasiness inside of me settles with the sound of Mom laughing at dumb jokes on the television.
“I’ve got homework,” I say. “I’m going upstairs.”
“You sure?” my mom asks. “I thought maybe we could talk.”
It’s too late, I think, you’ve already ignored anything worth talking about out of existence.
“I have got to call Pilar,” I answer, standing up and laying my share of the quilt over her lap.
She takes my hand and gives it a quick squeeze before letting go. “Okay,” she says. “Just don’t stay on the phone too long.”
I nod and head upstairs.
I call Pilar.
“I’m better!” I say as soon as she picks up the phone.
Four
“You had a lot going on last night,” Mom says when she comes in from her run the next morning. I’m curled under the afghan on the couch, slurping a bowl of chocolatey cereal and watching one of those really perky morning-show ladies interviewing a puff-haired woman who has a really appealing snaggletooth. “How long have you been up?”
I shrug. “I got up right after you left. Did you know this show is on for, like, three hours every morning? It’s called Good Morning, Sunshine! and they do the local news and weather every ten minutes, and in between they do cooking and fashion shows and interviews. This lady here,” I say, pointing to the snaggletooth, “works for Celebrity! magazine and she’s giving the weekly ‘Hooked Up, Shacked Up, Knocked Up, Broken Up’ update. It’s all about what celebrities are—”
“I get it,” Mom says.
What I don’t say is that I’ve been watching to see if the local news mentions the metal shavings found in Salvation.
Mom sits down next to me on the couch and unties her sneakers. “That host bugs me. Too perky.”
“She’s not so bad,” I say. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, but the host’s helmet-head hair and corny jokes are starting to grow on me.
“Were you having nightmares last night?” Mom asks.
I drink the chocolatey milk from the bowl and keep my eyes on the TV. “Nope” I lie. “Why? Was I talking?”
She laughs. “No more than usual. You’ve always been a jabber-jaw in your sleep.”
Then why can’t I ever remember dreaming?
“What’d I say?”
“I don’t remember,” she says, getting up. “I’m going to go stretch and shower.”
“I’m going to watch the news and the weather”—I glance at the clock—“three more times, and in between I’m going to learn how to set a gorgeous Thanksgiving table, improve my credit, and find out if my kids are smoking weed. And then I’m going to school.”
“You might want to get dressed first,” she says on her way upstairs.
Aunt Ruby calls when Mom is in the shower, and I watch the Thanksgiving segment on mute while I talk to her. The cereal’s made me hyper, made me brave.
“Auntie, why are you calling so much all of a sudden?”
“Ask your mama,” she answers.
“I did. She says she doesn’t know.”
“Your mama lies,” she says, stretching out the word “lies.”
I’m speechless for a second. Does the fact that she’s Mom’s sister trump the “nobody talks bad about my mama” rule? I decide that even if it doesn’t, I’ll let it go because I actually like talking to Aunt Ruby.
“So, what are you doing today, Auntie?” I ask.
“Ohhh, nothing, nothing at all. I’m going to set here on the porch, and then I might take a walk after it rains, find some worms, go fishing, and catch dinner in the river.”
“That sounds nice,” I say, turning off the TV. “Did Mom fish when she was a kid?”
“Oh, your mama loved to go fishing,” Aunt Ruby says, laughing. “And when I was a little girl, she’d hold my hand all the way down the river, and put those squirmy worms on the hook for me.”
“Did Aunt Peg come?”
“She did,” Aunt Ruby answers, “but she didn’t fish. She liked to sit and read out loud to us while we fished.”
I can picture them, three little girls in pretty dresses sitting in the sun on the weedy green banks of a river, feet dangling into the water.
“Would you bring snacks?” I a
sk. Descriptions of food are always my favorite part of a story. I’m wondering if Mom and her sisters brought theirs down to the river in a bucket, like Laura Ingalls Wilder did in the Little House on the Prairie books.
My aunt laughs. “We did, we did, but we carried our snacks in brown paper bags, and since we also carried the worms in brown paper sacks, sometimes your aunt Peg would get confused while she was reading and reach her hand into the bag and get a wiggly, sticky surprise.”
I laugh. “You would switch the bags?”
“Only when she wasn’t looking,” she says, and laughs.
“That’s funny.”
“Oh, it was just silly fun. That was a long time ago.”
“It’s still like that where you live, though, isn’t it? Sort of peaceful and quiet?”
“You have your mama bring you out here so you can see for yourself. You need to meet your people, Dylan.”
“I met you guys,” I say, “when Great-Grandmama died.”
“You call that pit stop a visit? No, you need to come and set at my kitchen table and tell me about your friends while I make you some of my famous fruit salad.”
“Then can we sit on the porch and snap beans?”
She laughs. “Sure we can. I buy my beans at the grocery, but if you want to snap them in half, you’re welcome to it.”
“Thanks,” I say, embarrassed by my front-porch country fantasy. I can’t help it. Mom’s stories about being a little girl sound even better than Little House on the Prairie to me.
“Tell your mama to call her sister,” Aunt Ruby says, and then I’m talking to the dial tone.
“Who was that?” Mom asks, coming back downstairs in her work clothes.
“Who do you think?”
“What’d she say?”
“For you to call her.”
“I bet she did. You should go get changed for school.”
Great-Grandmama was ninety-eight when we went to visit. She was in a nursing home already by then, close to the house my mom grew up in, where Peg and Ruby and my grandma still live. It wasn’t just me and Mom and my dad who came to visit, it was all the Driscolls, from everywhere. Everyone was greats and seconds—great-aunts, great-uncles, second cousins, second cousins twice removed.
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