He lifts the desk right-side up, and the drawers rattle as he shoves it against the wall. He kicks aside the torn maps on the floor, the office supplies. He checks the drawers and checks them again and then pulls them all out and turns them over just to be sure. He drops to his hands and knees, his cheek flush against the hardwood.
It has to be here.
Victor had managed to get inside the room only once more after his first look—Winslow, on a hike with Victor’s mom, had uncharacteristically left the door unlocked—but once more was enough. The maps. That argument with Victor’s mom about wealth. The chunk of gold just lying on the desk as if it were nothing.
Winslow had reopened the dormant mines.
When Victor got home, a little research told him that the nugget on Winslow’s desk could be worth over $100,000, and that’s when the plan began to take shape.
He would figure out a way to get up there by himself somehow. He would learn how to pick a lock—that turned out to be the easy part; lock-pick set delivered to his home, how-to videos abundant online—and he’d break into this room without a trace, and he’d take the paperweight with him.
And if he did it right, Winslow would never be able to prove a thing. The man’s suspicions would make it even sweeter. Now Winslow would know what it was like to live with someone who had stolen what he valued most. Now Winslow would be angry and hurt and unable do anything about it.
Only now, the door is cracked and the doorjamb is destroyed. Only now, on his hands and knees, shuffling among the mangled maps, Victor can’t find the paperweight.
Only now, the cabin is a mess and the gold is nowhere to be found and there is going to be hell to pay.
31
Victor and Davis Higley had grown up together. Played together. Gone to school together. Friends at first because their mothers were friends, then something closer to family after Victor’s dad left, sharing the holiday kids’ table. Mother’s Days, Thanksgivings, Easters.
It got old by the time they were twelve. Year after year of dinners together, and every time, Davis’s mother telling Victor’s mother how well Davis was doing in school, how Davis was the captain of the soccer team, how Davis and Rachel Fisher were so happy together. And every time, Davis’s dad taking it upon himself to provide Victor with the fatherly advice he was no longer getting at home.
By the time Winslow joined the fun, it was so far past old that Victor rarely said a word.
“That guy seems to have it all together,” Winslow told Victor more than once. “You should pick his brain some. See if he has any tips for you.”
What kind of a name was Davis anyway? Who could trust a guy with a last name as a first name? Might as well have been Wellington. Wellington Davis the Third.
They’d been Webelos together. Graduated from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts together. And only a month before the end of their junior year, the two soon-to-be Eagle Scouts stood in the park together.
It was a bluebird Sunday afternoon. Victor and Davis in full uniform behind a folding picnic table covered with stacks of scouting literature. Troop 99 emblazoned on their shoulders. The yellow bandanas around their necks. Hiking boots and wool socks pulled halfway up their calves because their scoutmaster thought it best they “look the part.”
Torture. Every second he had to spend with Davis was a reminder of what he would never be. While Davis flagged people down, selling himself, selling scouting, Victor decided he wouldn’t talk unless he was answering a direct question.
“How’s your project coming?” Davis said during a lull in the traffic.
Victor’s Eagle Scout service project—a neighborhood lending library—was not going well. He was only halfway through building the shelf, and he hadn’t even started to collect books to fill it. He knew better than to ask about Davis’s project, though. Some crap about renewable energy education or recycling or reducing carbon footprints. The asshole had already been on the local news twice.
“It’s good,” Victor said.
“I’m sure it will be awesome.”
“Fuck off, Davis,” Victor said.
It was the first time he had ever actually told Davis to fuck off, and now that he’d done it, he wondered why he had waited so long. The satisfaction of that one puzzle piece finally clicking into place. It just felt so right.
“What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
“Okay,” Davis laughed. “Might as well get it out in the open.”
“Get what out in the open?”
“Come on, Victor, I’ve been dragging your ass along with me for the last three years. My mom took pity on you, what with your dad leaving and everything, and she told me to make sure you made it to Eagle.”
“What the hell are you talking about, took pity on me?”
“I get it,” Davis said. “Your dad left and your stepdad is kind of an ass. But damn, dude, you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
Then suddenly Victor had done it.
The first punch was to wipe the shit-eating grin from Davis’s face. He threw the second punch because the first punch felt so good.
Davis hit back, but Victor didn’t even feel it—the pain of it, at least. Felt pressure on the side of his body, on his chest, but not the pain. Like when he got a cavity filled at the dentist, he could feel the dentist working around in there, but not the pain. It was miraculous.
Davis pushed him away and staggered backward, stunned. Victor recognized the look on his face. Betrayal, surprise. Life wasn’t supposed to work this way. His eyes were watering.
Victor lowered his shoulder into the other boy’s chest and the two of them crashed into the picnic table. Brochures went flying as a table leg buckled. Victor was on top of Davis now. He ripped the stupid yellow scarf from around his neck and threw it to the side.
To say that Victor had snapped wouldn’t be exactly right. That would imply that he had been whole and then became broken, but that’s not what it felt like. In fact, it was the opposite. He was made whole. Everything he hated was right there in front of him, and he could do something about it! Davis with the house. Davis with the family. Davis with the father.
Victor felt hands on his shoulders, trying to pull him away, but at that point it didn’t matter, because Davis was getting hit and getting hit and getting hit and Victor was the one doing the hitting.
32
Victor stops in the doorway because of how closely they’re huddled next to each other. Because of how quiet the living room is. They shouldn’t be this quiet after the fight downstairs. They don’t see him.
Amelia rests her good hand on Santi’s shoulder. They both look down at something in Santi’s hand. She whispers into his ear, and Santi shakes his head. She whispers again, this time with more urgency but Victor still can’t hear, and Santi shakes his head again.
But then Amelia shifts her weight and a space opens up between her body and Santi’s, and Victor catches a glimpse of the object in Santi’s hand.
Victor steps into the room now, next to the fireplace now, but they don’t even seem to notice.
And what had been in Santi’s hand is now in his pocket.
And what’s in Victor’s hand is the Remington.
And Victor is halfway downstairs again before he even wonders if they saw him grab the thing off the mantelpiece.
With the office door shattered, Victor’s original plan will never work, but he can figure out another way. Until then, Victor will fix the maps, put the books on the shelves, drain the house so the pipes won’t freeze. Winslow will forgive him if he explains everything, if he explains how Santi tried to rob the place and how Victor stopped it from happening. He can blame everything on Santi, but first he needs Santi to give back the paperweight.
Santi won’t just hand it over, so Victor needs the rifle. He’ll point it at them, wave it around a bit, and get the gold back. But if Santi calls his bluff, he’ll have to do something, right? Like a warning shot, to prove he’s not messing aro
und. He has to load it. Just in case.
The ammo is exactly where it should be, on the second shelf to the right of the door in the storeroom. The little box refilled just as he’d left it. A hundred bullets in the clear plastic case, a ten-by-ten grid, each bullet rattling against the edges of its own little slot as Victor snatches the box off the shelf.
He kneels on the hardwood floor, lays the butt of the rifle between his knees, and lets the barrel rest against his shoulder. He unscrews the loading rod from below the barrel and pulls it out and his fingers are shaking as he pushes the ammo through the little bullet-shaped hole.
A little scrape as each bullet slides down the magazine and a click when it reaches the bottom. One, two, three bullets, and then one leaps from his fingers and clanks on the floor. Victor holds his breath. Like a marble on the hardwood, the sound echoes, seems too loud for its size.
The bullet stops against the feet of an old coat rack. Victor lets himself exhale, tries to hear any part of the conversation upstairs, but they must still be whispering.
Back to the Remington. Another bullet loaded, then another, and another, and now he’s lost count. Why does he need to load the full fifteen rounds, anyway? So he stops. He guides the loading rod back into the magazine. It takes both hands. Victor turns it the wrong way at first, and it doesn’t catch, but once he tries clockwise, the rifle is loaded. He’ll put the ammo box back later.
His kneecaps twitch when he stands, but his legs work well enough to get him back upstairs.
He turns the corner into the living room and sees Santi wearing a raincoat, hunched over the top of an open backpack, stuffing things inside. Amelia stands just behind him, a red poncho in the hand of her good arm.
Santi freezes the moment Victor steps into the room. Amelia yelps and hops backward, and the poncho opens like a parachute as it flies out of her hand.
Victor holds the gun across his chest. He doesn’t point it at them, can’t bring himself to actually point it at them yet. Now that he’s here, in the room, holding the gun across his chest—not pointing it at them—the idea of bluffing Santi into handing over the gold seems ludicrous.
“Give it back,” he says to Santi anyway.
“Those were mining maps in there,” Amelia says, blinking through her realization. “You came up here to steal—”
“Nobody was supposed to come with me. I told you to stay. I tried to get you to stay.”
Still hunched over the open backpack, Santi says, “You’re not going to kill me.”
“I’ll let you take as much food as you want,” Victor says. “I’ll give you the map, and you can go down to the bottom of the trail and flag a car. You can say that there was a mudslide and you don’t know where I am, and that’s how you get out of this. All you have to do is give back what you stole from me. What you stole from him.”
“Victor,” Amelia says. Too slowly, too gently. “This isn’t you. You’re not thinking clearly.”
“How do you know who I am? You’re just some debutante from Houston who’s never had shit go wrong.”
She’s coming at him with her good hand up, toward him like she’s not afraid of what he’s going to do, like she has no idea what he’s capable of. “I know you don’t want to be doing this.”
“You don’t know anything about me! Why do you think I’m even on this trip? You think I’m an Eagle Scout? I put my best friend in the hospital!”
Santi still hasn’t moved, not even an inch, and Amelia finally seems to notice this. “Santi?”
Victor wants to scream, but he’s not going to. That will only make things worse. “You think I don’t see you working against me already? You think I don’t know what happened last night after I went to sleep?”
“Nothing happened,” Amelia says.
“You think I’m stupid!”
He doesn’t mean to point it at them. He really doesn’t. And besides, it’s more of a wave anyway, kind of a swipe across the room, but Amelia shrieks, a mix of fear and pain as she covers her eyes with her forearm. Santi snaps up, hands in front of him, and he finally looks scared.
Amelia’s going to cry soon. Victor can hear it in her voice even though he can’t see her face.
“I don’t think you’re stupid, Victor.”
“Holy shit,” Santi says. “This is crazy.”
“This was supposed to be mine! I had a plan! You should have left when you could. I told you to leave.”
“Let’s think about this, okay?” Amelia says. “We can fix it. What do you want to do?”
The idea comes to him fully formed. He sees himself in brief glimpses—snapshots—packing food, lacing his boots with a double knot. Setting the fire. Running. Escaping.
“Burn it,” he says. “I’ll burn it all down. He’ll never know.”
Santi is moving now, gradually placing himself between Amelia and the gun like he thinks he’s some hero. He’s staring at Victor the whole time. Side step, side step, but Amelia is crying now, crying for real, and Victor can’t concentrate. If she would just shut up, he would be able to think.
“Stop crying!”
“It’s in the middle of a forest,” she says, trying to stifle her tears. “You can’t do that.”
“Don’t tell me what I—”
Santi snakes his hand out toward the kitchen counter and all of the sudden he’s holding a knife, pointing a chef’s knife at Victor—that’s why he was moving across the room.
“Santi!” Amelia says.
Victor almost laughs. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Santi sidesteps back across the room, knife out the whole time, and he slides one of his arms through the strap of the backpack. He kicks the poncho over to Amelia, and it lands at her feet. She seems to resist looking at it.
“Santi,” she whispers.
But Santi won’t stop staring at Victor, won’t stop pointing the knife at him, won’t stop moving toward the door.
“Stop.” Victor raises the rifle and points it directly at Santi. His throat is suddenly dry. “Please stop.”
The barrel trembles and becomes blurry and Victor feels a thin strip of metal pressing into the skin of his index finger.
Someone is stealing from his stepdad, and Victor is going to be blamed for it. And it makes no sense at all, but he has never pointed a gun at another person before and none of this makes sense.
33
Amelia Timmons looks at the shadowy outline of Celeste next to her. Celeste curled into a ball, the sleeping bag covering her head as it has every night. Sleeping like a stone, or a log, or a baby. Sleep being her escape from the day.
This was a mistake, this whole thing is a mistake. Everything about it.
Screw it, Amelia thinks. If she can’t reverse the mistake, at least she has a way to take the sting out of it.
The patter of rain on the tent masks the rustling sound of her sleeping bag’s nylon cover as Amelia sits on top of it, sliding her legs into her jeans. She eases her arms into her rain jacket, opens the tent’s door flap, just wide enough to crawl through. Zip. Zip. Zip. She can hear the zipper’s teeth opening individually, like the starting clicks of a roller coaster.
Amelia crouches in the tiny space of the vestibule and puts her feet into her still-wet hiking boots. The fabric of the rainfly presses against her back. There’s a headlamp in the pocket of her raincoat, but she doesn’t dare turn it on—not yet.
More zipping. The roller coaster rises as she closes the tent, opens the vestibule, closes it again.
Screw it, she thinks again as she sloshes uphill toward her backpack. This is all too much. Too much sharing and responsibility and too much leadership and too much of basically everything.
The pretending is the hardest part. Pretending that she’s in some sort of control, pretending that she has any idea what she’s doing. One week of orientation with Jerry and the rest of the Bear Canyon staff was not enough. One week of role playing—not enough to prepare her for Celeste. When Celeste cries in the t
ent, in the anonymity of the dark, crying that she doesn’t know what to do, has fucked up her life so bad, has ruined everything. When Celeste asks Amelia what to do now, what does Amelia say? What is she supposed to say?
She knows what she wants to say.
She wants to say that they’re not so different, she and Celeste.
She wants to say, No shit, life sucks. Let’s go get high.
But she can’t. She’s supposed to listen. She’s supposed to share the experiences Jerry assumes are hers, the decisions he assumes she’s made, to try to show Celeste and the others that there is another way. That a person can make good choices. She’s supposed to say all of this from her side of the net, not offering feedback, just telling her own stories and letting the others make the connections for themselves. It’s more impactful that way—that’s what the research says.
Now under the canopy of some sort of pine tree, Amelia kneels to tie her wet laces. The drops coming through the branches are less frequent but much larger; when even one of them hits her hood or shoulder, it sounds like the crack of a distant rifle.
Mud squishes underneath her boots as she passes Jerry’s tent. Jerry and Rico. Poor little Rico. She probably has more in common with him than with any of them. The need for approval, the awkwardness, the cluelessness, the lack of self-confidence, the—
See, this is her problem. Too much thinking. Too much self-exploration.
She wants not to think. She wants not to self-explore. She wants to get out of her own head.
On with the headlamp now. She’s far enough from the tents that the light would be out of view even if someone happened to wake up. Her pack dangles from a branch, and she unties the rope, easing the pack to the ground. She unfastens the two clips and flips over the top pouch. One final glance over her shoulder, even though only an idiot would be out here in the rain.
On the Free Page 14
