“You need to find a place to hide,” she said. “You need to run. Your dad and Sadie got held up in Harrisburg. It’s about ten thirty now. Here’s your jacket. Your phone and keys are in the pocket. Buster still has the Chevelle; I suggest you leave it where it is. Find somewhere safe to go. You understand?”
I nodded, mute, then realized she couldn’t see me and choked out, “Yes.”
“Good girl. I’ll open up the back door.”
25
Behind the police station was a sparse stand of mulberry trees and a swath of grass. Past the mulberries stretched the Denfords’ cornfields. Grandpa Denford usually stood like a scarecrow out there, his flickering edges the only movement in the night. He wasn’t there now. I slid down a short slope and kneeled beside a tree, making sure the tall grass hid me.
An Addamsville without its ghosts was a house without people. Abandoned.
I flipped my phone open. Hit the power button. An empty battery icon flashed. I’d charged it two nights ago; a flip phone this old couldn’t hold a charge for two whole days, even when it wasn’t being used.
I had to call Dad and Sadie to warn them to stay away, and to do that, I had to get my phone charged. The fastest way to the bluffs meant a hard diagonal cut straight through town, crossing over both Handack Street and Valleywine Road. A lot of bright public parking lots, but no one would expect me to be walking in plain sight.
I crept back up to the road. Chief Rivera’s cruiser was gone from the parking lot, if it had ever been there. The lights were still off. I pulled my hair back, put my hood up, and stuffed my hands in my pockets. I’d done plenty of sneaking around in my time; I wasn’t going to let dyed hair and gloves give me away. Most people couldn’t tell me from the next teenaged trash fire when they couldn’t see my face or my hands.
Crossing Handack was the easy part. The Fool was far enough away from the police station that no one saw me, and the Family Dollar was already closed for the night. I slipped between the Family Dollar and the antique shop and slid into shadowed yards divided by chain-link fences. Trees hid them from the main roads; tourists cruising through town would never see this clutter. Old swing sets and plastic sandboxes stacked with coiled hoses, fraying lawn chairs, and sun umbrellas. I tripped over a rusted bike and almost speared myself on a fence. A round Sputnik grill with a maple tree sprouting through its grate. A playhouse, plastic door hanging open to reveal its empty insides, waited for occupants who would never return.
I grabbed the last fence to quiet its rattle as I climbed over, into the bank parking lot. Valleywine was lit up from the fire station to the post office, but there weren’t nearly as many people out as I had feared. I jogged across the road, heading for the shadows of the trees near the library. As I hit the sidewalk, a girl came out of the gas station right next door, with a wave of swinging black hair and a Happy Hal’s visor dangling from one hand. The other held her cell phone up to her ear. Mads.
I sucked in my breath, and the sound was enough for her to glance my way. The phone dropped from her ear. “Zora?
I ditched calm and charged into the bushes behind the library, through another thicket of trees and out onto a long, rolling lawn. One lawn, two. I sprinted down a fence line, across a street, then dove behind the hedge between two houses.
Seconds later Mads appeared, barely winded. She scanned the empty street, then hissed into the night, “I’m in the marching band, Zora! We work out more than the football team! You can’t outrun me!”
Except I had, just this one time, because Mads might have been in better shape, but I knew Addamsville at night. I hunkered down in the bushes until her expression turned to worry, and she pulled her phone out again. I crept away before the cops could show up.
I hurried on toward the bluffs, past the last of the houses and into the wide field that spanned the gap to Hampstead Road. On Hampstead, a fork split east to the bluffs and west to the trailer park and the rest of town. The trailer park’s lights glowed to my right. As I neared Hampstead, the ground sloped upward.
Headlights turned onto Hampstead from the north, the direction of the junkyard. I dropped into the grass and waited for it to pass. An old truck, probably one of Buster’s guys. Someone inside was hollering like the Colts had won the Super Bowl. My bones rattled as they swept past, but they hadn’t seen me—were they celebrating? Or had they found someone else to chase down? I climbed onto the road and watched the truck go, and something tickled in the back of my mind, a little voice that said don’t turn left, don’t turn left, don’t turn left.
The truck reached the fork and turned left. Up to the bluffs.
I ran. It was too far to run the whole way there, but I ran. The ground began to rise more steeply and my knees burned, my head pounded. There was shouting ahead, breaking the still night, rising above the trees. I tore up the path. Shouts and metal grinding, metal screeching. Someone was laughing like a hyena. I ran. Light up ahead, in our clearing. Headlights from four trucks, an SUV, and Buster Gates’s own red juggernaut, the truck so big it could take a semi head-on. They all rumbled, spewing clouds of exhaust into the chill air. Figures of men and women stood silhouetted in the light, including Buster, next to the open door of his truck, which was poised at one end of the trailer. Four other guys moved the cinder blocks and potted plants we’d put around the base of the trailer to keep it in place and make it look nice.
“Hey!” I pushed on, realizing too late that my adrenaline was gone and my legs had turned to jelly. I stumbled toward Buster, wheezing. “Hey! Stop it! Stop!”
A few people near their cars turned and saw me, and one of the guys holding a cinder block motioned to Buster.
“How’d you get out of jail?” Buster said, leaning against the door of his truck. “Abby must be slipping.”
He didn’t move as I lurched forward, grabbed his collar, and took a drunken swing at his face. Surprise took over his expression until he grabbed my arm and tossed me onto my back. Laughter erupted.
“This is what happens when you grow up with a father who doesn’t know how to fight,” he said. “Stay down there and let the adults take care of business.” He turned to climb into the truck.
Get up, Zora. “Stop it—leave my house alone—”
“House?” he snorted. “This is barely a sardine can!” He snapped the door shut. “Is it all out of the way, Bobby? Good, make sure she stays straight.”
I grabbed hold of Buster’s truck window and reached in for him. I got a fistful of sleeve before someone caught me from behind and lifted me, flailing, away from the truck. Buster revved the engine. The truck’s massive grille guard bumped into the end of the trailer. Buster kept going.
Forward. To the gap in the trees. To the edge of the bluffs.
I reached back and dug my fingernails into the face of the man who held me. He let go with a yell. I scrabbled back to Buster’s truck, but he’d rolled up the windows and locked the doors and made no move when I pounded on the glass and screamed.
The trailer lurched. Another guy tried to grab me. I used the side-view mirror and the huge wheel well to climb onto the truck’s hood. Buster wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t hear myself. I couldn’t hear what I was saying, but I know I screamed it at the top of my lungs. Metal screeched; the pipes Mom had jerry rigged to the old Aberdeen plumbing tore open. The generator wires snapped.
I slid off the hood and hurried to climb the ragged remains of our front steps. I fumbled with the Chevelle’s keys until I found the right one and unlocked the door. The trailer’s walls swayed. The TV fell off the table in the living room and smashed on the floor. Cereal and canned food rained from the cabinets in the kitchen nook. The boxes of Mom’s and Dad’s things remained where they were, too heavy to be unsettled. Too heavy for me to carry out by myself.
Dad’s wood axe fell from its spot by the door and hit the linoleum with a solid thwack.
I grabbed it and leaped outside.
Trying to hold an axe with one hand missing two
fingers doesn’t make for great swinging, but I managed. Buster’s side-view mirror went first. The axe-head cleaved a fat line down the back on the first swing, and sliced it nearly off on the second.
Then I was on the hood again. I was no longer sure how I got from one place to the next, only that I was there, and my legs had found some of their strength, and my arms brought that blade down on Buster Gates’s windshield like an executioner. The spider cracks made him jump, but the truck revved again, and the trailer shuddered. The trees were behind us, and now there was only night sky above the trailer. Night sky above, and the sound of water lapping against rock far below.
Buster reversed. I lost my footing and grabbed the windshield wipers to stay on top of the truck, which meant letting go of the axe. It slid sideways off the hood. The green glow of the dashboard lit Buster’s furious face. The trailer groaned. The engine roared again, and the truck shot forward.
The trailer made a last soft whisper as it fell.
The force of the impact rattled through my hands, and the sudden stop pried them free. I slipped off the hood. I caught for a second at the grille guard, hands failing me. My toes clipped the ground, then that slid out from under me, too, and my torso hit the edge of the cliff, knocking the air out of me. My arm caught on a lone root sticking from the ground, and my hand snagged a large tuft of grass. My feet kicked at open air.
Below me was the empty sound of something large falling. Then a crash and crunch of the trailer; a cacophony of furniture, cardboard, metal, and glass slamming; a creak and groan before one final crash; then only the hush of the wind.
Buster’s truck reversed again.
“Help!” I couldn’t breathe. “Help, I can’t—” My hands weren’t made for holding on to things.
They had to see me. They had to know I hadn’t gone over the edge. I heard voices, but none of them came closer. My boots scraped the curving rock wall beneath me. My shoulders had already begun to protest. My arms drooped and my head dipped below the cliff edge.
Someone made a noise. Tires rumbled on dirt. Headlights began to move. Someone was yelling now, a woman, her voice carrying into the darkness.
“What have you done? I know all of you, I know all your faces and where you live, and when this gets reported—I can’t believe this—this—this inhumanity!” Her voice came closer.
My arm slipped slowly and steadily from its nestled spot, and the grass in my grip started coming up by the roots.
The night sky above was so clear.
Just let go, I thought. It’ll be easier if you let go.
You won’t have to do this anymore if you let go.
A face appeared above me. Dark eyes and blond hair. Artemis. Then Mads, Lorelei, and Hal, piling on top of one another to reach down for me. They hooked my arms and pulled. Artemis grabbed my belt to haul me up the rest of the way, then dropped beside me, panting, as soon as I was out of danger.
“I saw some of Buster’s guys heading this way, and I knew you were, too,” Mads said, quiet and breathless. “So I called Mrs. Wake. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t know it would be like this. . . .”
“They ran once we got here,” Hal said, voice rough. “Even Buster, like he thought we wouldn’t know it was him.”
Lorelei shook like a leaf.
Headlights still shone in the clearing, but in a different arrangement. The shouts and hollers and growls of engines had faded, and from between headlights came the silhouette of a woman blazing toward us.
“Are you okay?” Greta kneeled in the dirt in her pristine white pants to rest a hand against the side of my face. “Are you in one piece?”
I wriggled out from her touch, turned away from them all, and crawled to the edge of the bluffs. Hands latched onto my belt and my coat, but I stopped before going over, just enough to peer down at the rocks and sand far below.
The trailer was a crushed can in the moonlight. It lay on its top, half on the shore and half in the water, glass sprinkled around it like glitter. Curtains fluttered from windows and both doors swung open. Seams had split in the walls.
Ringing filled my ears. Louder, louder, louder. It began to sound like screaming. Then like chanting, chanting to the fast, hard drum of my heartbeat, louder, until it was all I could hear, until it was a primal command that had lived inside me since Mom disappeared, stifled after losing my fingers, waiting for the moment it could return.
FIRE, FIRE, FIRE, FIRE
On aching arms and unsure legs, I pushed myself up and past Greta and Artemis, past Mads and Hal and Lorelei. I grabbed the axe from where it had fallen. There was nothing left in the clearing. A few scattered potted plants. Cinder blocks. The foundation where a house had once stood. I had firestarters after me, and Addamsville thought this would do me in?
“Zora!” Artemis yanked on my arm. “You almost fell off a cliff. You need to stop.”
“Let go of me.” With more than a little effort, I pushed her hand away. My hands shook. My legs ended in stumps.
Artemis grabbed at my sleeve again, then my hand. She held it so tight my bones ached. “Stop! Jesus, Zora. Where are you even going?”
“Let go of me!”
“No!”
“I’m going to set fires!” I rounded on her. We were almost the same height, but Artemis shrank back as I towered over her. “I’m done! I’m done with all of this! I’m done with firestarters threatening my family and assholes pushing my house off a fucking cliff. I’m done trying to help people who don’t care about me! I’m done trying to figure out why I’ll burn everything down myself, and then there’ll be nothing left for Buster, nothing for Forester, nothing for Ludwig, nothing for you. Everything will be gone, and I’ll be gone, and I won’t have to deal with this bullshit anymore!”
“Zora!” Artemis screamed. We stared at each other in silence, me trying to get my breath back, her cheeks puffed up, looking scared. When she spoke again it was very soft, but not comforting. “You’re not going to burn anything down,” she said. “You aren’t going to set any fires.”
“What did I just say?”
“You aren’t. You love this town.”
“Like fuck I do.”
“Shut up!”
I snapped my mouth shut. Artemis had actual tears in her eyes. The others stood behind her, looking just as stunned as I felt. “You do love this town! You wouldn’t go around fixing porch lights and pruning mums in the middle of the night if you didn’t! You care about what happened here, and you care whether tourists trash the place. You care about your mom and what she started. Your whole family came from here. You grew up here. I’m sorry about what I said before. I don’t think you’re a thief or a liar or a bad person, and I’m really sorry I was horrible to you. I do believe you. You don’t need to set anything on fire. You need to sit down. You probably need sleep and real food, and you definitely need a shower and new clothes. You look terrible.”
She paused, panting.
“You always say I look terrible,” I muttered.
She finally released me. “No, normally I say you look like a raccoon that got into garbage. This time I mean . . . ugh, Zora, really. Look at yourself. You’ve got bruises and cuts all over the place, your clothes are torn, you’re covered in soot and dirt. And Mads said you ran all the way here. You’re a mess. Mom, can you—?”
She turned to Greta. Greta, who had been watching silently with that unforgiving look in her eye and that hard set of her lips.
“Who knows that you’re here?” she said.
“Buster and the others,” I replied. “And you all.”
Now they’d heard my ranting. Did it matter anymore? Did it matter who knew and who didn’t?
“Have you called your dad or your sister?” Greta asked.
“No. My phone’s dead. I was coming back for the charger.”
“Mom,” Artemis said, “can they stay with us? Can she—”
Greta was nodding before she finished, fishing her phone out of her pocket. “The two of you g
et in the car; we’re going home.” She put the phone to her ear. After a moment, she said, “Lazarus, where are you now?”
Artemis towed me toward the car.
“Wait.” It was Lorelei who grabbed my sleeve. A ghost of a touch. Mads and Hal flanked her. “We know you didn’t set the fire at the motel,” she said, voice quivering. “Did Tad do it?”
That question made everything seem so simple. But the truth was anything but simple. “You wouldn’t believe the story if I told you.”
“We’re willing to listen, though.” Mads stepped up. Her black hair was in tangles now, but she didn’t stop to fix it. “Whatever’s going on, we know you aren’t doing it, and we want to help you prove it.”
Lorelei nodded vigorously, the most determination I had ever seen in her.
“You sure you don’t feel guilty because your dad pushed my house off a cliff?” I asked her.
“Of course I feel guilty,” she said. “But I want to help because it’s the right thing to do. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
I looked at Hal. He was still bandaged up and moving stiffly. “And you?” I said. “You were already in the crossfires of this thing one time. You really want to go again?”
“Are we going to take out the motherfucker who set me on fire?”
“Ideally.”
Hal considered for a moment, then tipped his head back. “Then you have the services of Hal Haynes III, local legend.”
“The story can wait,” Artemis said. “It’s too late tonight.”
“And I almost fell off a cliff,” I added.
“And it’s, like, twenty-five degrees too cold,” Hal finished.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll explain tomorrow.”
They agreed and retreated to their own cars. Artemis opened the back door of Greta’s Lexus. As I climbed in, I caught my foot on the doorframe and nearly collapsed on the seat. Sometimes you don’t realize how badly you need to sit until you’re crumpled on the cushions. I rested the axe carefully on the floor. My legs and arms shook hard, my muscles going haywire.
Artemis climbed in the back with me and leaned over to buckle me in. I mumbled, “Thanks, Mom,” but she acted like she didn’t hear. She buckled herself in, too. We waited while Greta stood outside and made her calls.
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