by C.L. Bevill
* * *
After another hour we stopped at a wide spot in the road and raided a couple of houses for lunch. Kara offered to share Beluga on Ritz Crackers with us, but neither Zach nor I were biting. We counted our blessings based on the smell alone.
“You’re sure that isn’t spoiled?” I asked innocently.
Kara screwed up her face. “You’re spoiling my buzz, kid.”
Zach chuckled. We were sharing sliced Spam on Ritz Crackers from the same package. It was, I’m told, another acquired taste. We had a can of spray cheese and used it liberally. I was also digging into the fresh carrots that Kara had brought with us. Plenty of vitamin A for my eyesight.
An odd thought occurred to me. “Kara, you don’t wear glasses?”
“Nope,” Kara said agreeably, devouring a cracker piled high with fish roe.
“And you’re pretty healthy otherwise, right?”
“Yes,” she said, eying me curiously. “What’s your point?”
“I was just wondering what the odds were of three people ending up together who were all basically physically fit.” I considered. “Disregarding your knees and my being sick from the gryphon’s scratches.”
Zach was perched on a rock close to me. He leaned back and said, “Nothing wrong with me. The last physical I had had absolutely no downside.”
“And Kara, do you have any problems?” I asked warily.
Kara cocked an eyebrow. “Why don’t you just throw it out, hon? I am middle aged. I should have a few afflictions, right?” She smiled genially. “I don’t. No high blood pressure. No cholesterol issues. I’m a healthy girl.”
“And him,” I said slowly. “He seemed healthy enough. Maybe not mentally healthy, but physically.”
“What are you getting at?” Zach asked brusquely. It was increasingly obvious that he didn’t like to talk about the man who had attacked me.
“I was wondering if the survivors, if that’s the right word for us, are healthy people,” I answered. “I was wondering if that was something we have in common.”
Zach thought about it. “We don’t have enough of a selection of people to make that observation. The three of us. Four,” he corrected with a glance at me, “if you include the wacko. Well, the four of us could be a fluke. And we don’t really know about him. For all we know, he could have a brain tumor the size of an orange in his head.”
I shrugged. “It’s a thought.”
Relenting, Zach added, “It’s possible, Sophie. But truly, what about Kara’s knees? They’ve been rebuilt. That kind of negates the healthy people scenario.”
“Maybe,” Kara said interestedly. “The VA doctors used something new on me. It’s all organic material in my knees. One of the docs said you wouldn’t know it from the original if I didn’t have the scars to prove it. And I’ve run mini-marathons with them. It’s just when I overdo it, like I did when I walked over the mountains without a break, I pay the price.”
We finished the lunch in a semi-comfortable silence. Zach bent over the map and said, “Shall we try for Brookings?”
“That’s twenty miles with me in the back,” I protested.
Zach looked at me challengingly.
“Well, it’s not like I weigh nothing,” I muttered in dissent.
“You’re barely skin and bones, Sophie,” Zach grated angrily. “I don’t know how much weight you lost while you were sick, but it was a lot. You’re not even close to the size you used to be.”
I glanced down at my jeans. They weren’t mine. They were probably Gigi’s, and she had been a size four. They hung on my hips. I didn’t have a mirror, but I knew I had gotten light. “Bring on the donuts,” I said irately.
Zach produced a candy bar and tossed it in my lap. Then he stalked off.
It was Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
Kara was looking interestedly at the sky.
I looked at her for a moment and then at the candy bar. Zach had rounded a corner of the road and disappeared. I sighed loudly and said, “I’m taking a bathroom break, Kara.”
Kara smiled at me knowingly. She waved in the opposite direction that Zach had taken. “There’s a house beyond those trees. Don’t be too long.”
I crossed the road and went in the direction she’d indicated. Across a short field and a dry stream bed was a single-story house. It was someone’s beach house, not a hundred feet from the trail that led down to yet another fabulous Oregon seashore. I went up a little hill and then down a set of stairs to the small yellow house. There weren’t many trees around it, but it had a magnificent view of a set of rocky outcroppings that burst from the bluish-green ocean.
I sat down on an Adirondack chair that was on the deck facing the ocean. Two things were bothering me. One was that Zach had correctly guessed what candy bar was my absolute favorite. It could have been happenstance. It could have been, but somehow I didn’t think it was. There could have been a simple explanation, as well. Well, I had been sick for a full week, and I could have said just about anything in my delirious ramblings. I could have even said something about my favorite candy.
It was weak, but it was possible.
But it was the other thing that was a problem. Zach had said that I had lost a lot of weight while I was sick. It was true. But most of the weight I had lost had been in the days immediately following the change. The days where I was most panicked and most uncertain were the times where I couldn’t bring myself to eat much. However, Zach didn’t meet me until after I had dropped twenty pounds.
How had Zach known how I looked before the weight loss? And did it have another simple explanation? I couldn’t think of one.
The troubling question made my stomach roil in distress. It made me suspicious about the only two people whom I knew in the wide, wide world. I didn’t want to think that way about them.
I sat there for a while and then got up to use the yellow house’s bathroom. The patio door was unlocked, and I didn’t even get to use the bathroom before I saw the note taped to the glass.
The contents of the note made me shudder.
When the hand came down on my shoulder from behind, I screamed like a little girl.
