by Eileen Wilks
Almost everything in the trailer worked. One of the two burners on the stovetop was out, but that wasn’t a biggie. Demi only cooked twice a week, on her days off: a pot of soup on Saturday and a pot of beans on Wednesday. She fixed rice to go with the beans, but that could wait until the beans were done, so making do with one burner wasn’t hard. She didn’t have an oven, which was a shame; she’d like to be able to make cornbread. But otherwise, she was set up okay here.
Especially when it came to Wi-Fi. Her landlady’s old frame house was over seventy feet away, but Mrs. MacGruder had a really strong router and no imagination. Her password was one, two, three, four, five. Demi snorted at such stupidity and toweled off.
She brushed her teeth, humming the alphabet song to time it, then took the six steps that put her in front of the vanity tucked next to the closet opposite her bed. She ran both hands over her cheeks, frowning at her reflection. Her skin was slowly reverting to its usual smooth, hairless state. For the tenth time she considered getting more of the testosterone gel she’d used when she first went on the run. For the tenth time, she voted it down. Too risky. In Cumberland she’d been able to steal it . . . poor Jake. She spent a moment in sympathy for the man who’d been her boss at the warehouse. Jake hadn’t been that much of a jerk. And even if he had, she told herself virtuously, that didn’t make it right to steal from him. Necessary and right were not the same thing.
But she didn’t know anyone here she could steal the cream from. She could get some online, but you couldn’t be sure what you were getting from those places.
She grabbed a clean pair of tightie-whities. Even without the testosterone, she thought she made a great boy. Some people thought she was younger than the eighteen she claimed, and they were right, which was funny because when she’d been a girl . . . well, she still was a girl. When she’d publicly been a girl, a lot of people had thought she was older than she was.
People mostly saw what they expected to see. When she’d been just herself, people had expected her to be older because she was in college. Now she wore boy’s clothes and walked differently—that had taken a lot of practice—and worked at guy jobs, so people expected to see a boy. Not once in the eleven months she’d been on the run had anyone guessed that she was a girl. It helped that she had narrow hips and no butt, plus her voice was kind of deep for a woman.
Demi wrapped the wide elastic bandage around her chest. She’d never grown beyond a double-A, so it was easy to smush her boobs all the way flat. Then she pulled on a pair of baggy jeans she’d bought at Goodwill, an equally oversize T-shirt, and her shoes and socks. She didn’t have to do anything to her hair. Now that she was being a guy, she just kept it really short, which meant twice-a-month visits to Faylene’s at $10 a pop. Faylene’s was the only place in town to get a haircut, so both men and women got their hair done there.
She was ready, yet not ready. She stared at her computer. Maybe she should send the code to delay the release of the first file and try to contact Mr. Smith again. Maybe he was in the hospital. Maybe he’d died. Maybe . . .
Maybe she’d better do exactly what she’d said she would. This was why she’d broken the data up into three files, after all. She hadn’t expected Mr. Smith to stay silent, but she’d planned what to do if he pleaded for more time.
Demi grabbed two dog biscuits and a bag of M&Ms and headed for the door. The M&Ms went on the rickety front porch behind a pot with a dead plant. No sign of Harry, but there usually wasn’t. The biscuits were for Samson and Murphy. Samson was a bulldog mix. Murphy was just a mix, a charming clown of a dog with ears just like Zipper’s had been—one all perky, the other flopped down. Having to wait and wait and wait to have a dog of her own again was hard. Visiting Samson and Murphy helped.
She hummed the theme song from Frozen as she set off down the twin ruts that passed for a driveway along the east side of Mrs. MacGruder’s half acre of land, heading for Elm Street. Three blocks up Elm, then she’d turn onto Main. Two more blocks and she’d be at the Tip-Top.
Now that she was up and moving, she felt better. The sky was a bright, bright blue. She’d made the right decision about the file. And today was pancakes day.
Five days of the week she ate her first meal of the day at the Tip-Top Café. Monday was oatmeal with blueberries. Tuesday was an omelet. The Tip-Top didn’t offer a lot of options for vegetarians, but Frank made excellent omelets. She skipped Wednesday because it was her day off and one of her cooking days. After that came grilled cheese and fries on Thursday, the special on Friday, skip Saturday, and pancakes on Sunday. The pancakes were pretty good, but the syrup wasn’t. She’d asked once if it would be okay if she brought her own syrup, but Jamie had given her one of those looks, so she let it drop.
It was extravagant, eating out so much: $38.83 a week. Friday was the most expensive. That’s when she had the meatloaf special with double vegetables and no meatloaf. With tax and tip it cost $9.73, which was almost half her grocery budget. Demi had spent some time figuring out if she was supposed to tip based on the menu price or the real, after-tax cost of a meal. In the end, she’d decided it wasn’t fair to use the before-tax price. The special was $7.95. Sales tax here was 6 percent, which brought it to $8.43, and 15 percent of $8.43 was $1.26, but Demi tipped a full $1.30. She always rounded up on the tip because it was probably annoying to get pennies, and besides, Jamie worked hard. Her mom lived with her and Jamie still had one kid at home. A teenager. Teenagers cost a lot more than toddlers, Jamie said, plus they were more trouble and not nearly as cute. “Present company excluded, sweetie,” she’d said, and for a minute Demi had thought Jamie was going to pat her on the head. Sometimes Jamie acted like Demi was twelve, not eighteen, but that was just her way. She mothered everyone, even Frank, who was her boss.
Demi made $241.04 a week at the gas station, and that’s if she worked all the hours she was supposed to. Sometimes Mr. Burgenstein cut her hours, and once she’d missed a day because she’d been puking her guts out. So she had to watch her pennies, but she loved eating at the Tip-Top. She hadn’t been able to eat out at all in Washington, unless you counted the soup kitchen. Demi refused to count the soup kitchen. Washington was expensive. The room she’d rented there had cost more than she paid for her trailer now and she’d had to buy a hot plate and a mini fridge, which had come out of her emergency funds. She’d eaten a lot of beans and rice and peanut butter. Vegetable soup had been a treat.
But she was in Whistle now, headed down sunny Main Street on her way to the Tip-Top Café, and Mr. Wilkins from the hardware store gave her a friendly nod when she walked by. People did that here. She’d been in Whistle five months and three days and pretty much everyone knew who she was. Who she was supposed to be anyway, but that was okay. She liked being Danny Stone.
The Tip-Top was pretty empty this time of day. Old Mr. Hawthorne sat at the counter drinking coffee and there were two deputies at one table, a man and a woman. Demi had seen them in here a few times, but hadn’t ever talked to them. Their uniforms made her nervous.
Jamie was refilling the napkin dispensers. She looked up with a crimson smile. Jamie liked to wear bright red lipstick. “Hey, there, Danny. You have a seat and I’ll put your order in. Pancakes, right?”
Demi smiled and nodded. She liked it that Jamie knew what she wanted without her having to say a word. She went to the counter and sat three stools down from Mr. Hawthorne. That’s what she’d decided was a sociable distance without being pushy. The old man gave Demi a nod that she returned. Mostly Mr. Hawkins didn’t talk to her, but mostly he didn’t talk to anyone. Demi figured he liked people okay, or he wouldn’t come to the Tip-Top every day. He just didn’t like to talk.
Demi knew that other people didn’t eat a fixed menu the way she did, and that made her stand out. Standing out wasn’t good when you were on the run. But other people did a lot of things differently than she did. It couldn’t be helped. She needed routine, and really, she was proud of how flexible she’d been. She’d
had to completely reinvent her routine twice now. Three times if she counted moving off to college, but the two hardest ones were when she’d first gone on the run and, later, when she’d nearly been caught in Washington. If she hadn’t run across Harry . . .
He’d claimed he’d been waiting for her. Maybe he had, but he wouldn’t explain what he meant, and Harry liked to joke, so he might be pulling her leg about that. But he’d steered her to the right place. Whistle fit her really well. Not that she blended in. Even if she could have faked normal perfectly, she’d still stand out in southern Ohio. This had to be the whitest area in the whole country.
Demi thought she had pretty skin. It was a pale caramel color that the sun sprinkled with freckles—a lot like her mom’s really, only darker. But put that with her kinky hair and she did not look like anyone else in Whistle. In spite of that, she hadn’t run into prejudice here the way she had in D.C. At least she didn’t think so, but she missed out on some social cues, so it was possible she just hadn’t noticed.
She was pretty sure Mean-Eyed MacGruder was nasty to everyone, though.
“Here’s your water, sweetie.” Jamie set the glass in front of Demi. “Pancakes will be up in a minute. Listen, you like beans, right?”
“Sure.” Jamie knew that. She’d given Demi some tips for cooking them. But Jamie, like a lot of people, liked to ask questions that she already knew the answer to.
“My pole beans and limas have come on like gangbusters this year. Cucumbers didn’t do much, but I’ve got beans coming out my ears. More than I can pick, and that’s a fact. I thought you might want some. You’ll have to pick ’em yourself, mind.”
“Oh, I—I’d like that, but I thought you were going to freeze your extra.”
“Got to get ’em picked before I can freeze them, and I can’t get ’em all picked, what with Craig staying with his sister and me working doubles. I sure hope Susie can start picking up some of the supper shifts again soon, but she’s at the age where you don’t bounce back fast, and that surgery took a lot out of her. Now, if that young niece of Frank’s would just—but never mind that. My mother keeps threatening to go pick those beans so they don’t go to waste, and she doesn’t have any business doing that, not with her bad hip.”
Demi immediately resolved to pick all the beans, not just however much Jamie was giving her. If she was still here, that is. If Mr. Smith hadn’t grabbed her. “Thanks, then. Uh . . . I’ve never picked beans.”
Jamie chuckled. “You are a city boy, aren’t you? You’re off Wednesday, right?”
Demi agreed that she was.
“You come over about four, then, and I’ll show you how to pick beans.”
Demi knew where Jamie lived because she’d gone there once to see if she could fix their computer. Turned out the hard drive was damaged, but Demi had been able to recover most of the data—why did people never back up their stuff?—using Linux. It was a tedious job, but nothing special, though Jamie and Craig had made a fuss about it. That was her youngest kid’s name, Craig. Craig usually ignored “Danny Stone,” but that night he’d been impressed. He and Jamie had acted like she was some kind of tech wizard.
Well, she was, but not because she could build a bootable Linux system on a USB stick. Anyone could do that. You just had to be able to follow instructions. But Jamie had been happy that she hadn’t lost all her photos and had insisted that Demi stay for supper, which had been fried chicken, which of course she didn’t eat, but there’d been mashed potatoes and corn on the cob, too, and a salad with cucumbers and red onions. When Demi went back a few days later to install the new hard drive (which she’d ordered for them so they wouldn’t get soaked), Jamie had paid her for the drive and given her a whole pan of peach cobbler to take home. Really good peach cobbler.
The deputies left just as Demi’s pancakes were ready, so while Demi ate, Jamie hung around and talked, mostly about Craig and Lisa—Lisa was her married daughter—and her son Roger, who was in the Army. Their father was dead. He’d died in a car crash fourteen years ago, leaving Jamie a small insurance policy and three kids to raise. Which she’d done, though Craig was worrying her. Demi wasn’t sure why, but it had something to do with the crowd he was hanging out with, plus he hadn’t gotten a summer job the way Jamie wanted. That’s why he was staying with his sister, Lisa, this summer, to keep him out of trouble. Mr. Hawthorne even chimed in at one point with advice.
Then it was time for Demi to leave for work, so she counted out $7.52 and told Jamie she’d see her Wednesday for those beans. And hoped she was telling the truth. She nodded at Mr. Hawthorne and headed out.
The gas station where she worked was only a hop and a skip away. It was a boring job. People pumped the gas themselves, so she was mostly there to sell them cigarettes and candy and sodas. Now and then someone wanted a tire or their oil changed, or their battery or wiper blades replaced. Demi could do that sort of thing because of Nicky. His dad being a mechanic, he thought everyone should know how to do basic stuff like that, so he’d taught her.
A pang shot through her, so sharp she stopped walking. She hadn’t thought of Nicky for days. She’d thought about Mr. Smith a lot, but not about Nicky and the others. She was so comfortable here in Whistle, and it hurt to think of him. Of them.
But he was the reason she was here. It won’t be long now, she told him fiercely as she started moving again. While Jamie had been telling Demi about her son Roger’s overdue promotion, the first packet of data had gone out. One lucky reporter was getting a fantastic scoop. She wouldn’t get everything, not yet, but enough to make Mr. Smith wish he hadn’t ignored her. Enough that he’d see he had to make a deal to let Nicky and the rest of them go.
If he didn’t, another file would go out—to two reporters this time, in case Mr. Smith had somehow silenced her first choice. Then the third file, to three reporters. They’d get get everything she had except for the Lodan files. She didn’t dare let anyone know about them. But she didn’t have to. The financial data should put Mr. Smith in prison for a long, long time.
He had to know that. It was going to work, she promised herself. She just wished she knew what he was up to.
NINE
AS it turned out, Charles wasn’t much company. Mostly he slept. He did wake up when they pulled into a drive-through in Cumberland for lunch, where he demonstrated that being in the process of dying hadn’t hurt his appetite. He skipped the fries and ate six quarter-pounders.
He woke up again when they pulled to the side of the road twenty miles outside Cumberland. The right-rear tire had gone flat. That shouldn’t have slowed them down too much, and Mercedes Benz used full-size spares, so they wouldn’t even have to drive on a donut. The problem was the jack. It was missing. The lug wrench was where it should be, but no jack.
They could have worked around that if she’d had more guards with her. José and Carson could lift the rear of the car, but José wasn’t sure they could hold it up long enough for Lily to change the tire. Lily might have talked him into trying if she hadn’t started seeing little birds. Dozens and dozens of them. Each was the size of a gypsy moth and the bright turquoise blue of a swimming pool, and they circled her head like in an old-time cartoon. The air was so thick with little blue birds that she couldn’t see the damn car.
The hallucination didn’t last long. Nor did the headache it triggered. But it convinced José it was not safe for her to change the tire, and he refused to lift the car so she could try, which made her regret telling him about the damn blue birds. They waited a full forty-five minutes for roadside assistance to arrive, leaving them barely enough time to make it to Whistle by six . . . if they kept to the speed limit. So they didn’t. They didn’t dare push their speed too much—getting stopped would slow them down even more—but Lily wanted some margin of error in case the park proved hard to find.
Normally she would have spent some of the drive-time learning more about the case she was headed to. Normally she’d spend time just thinking about the case, t
oo, lining up the questions she needed to find answers to, maybe talking to Rule about it. Normally he’d be with her.
He wasn’t. And this wasn’t a case.
She hadn’t realized how often she checked on Rule’s whereabouts, how habitual that had become. She kept doing it without thinking and getting back that he was alive and a thousand miles to the west. Or sitting on the hood of the car. Or several miles due north. Or floating a dozen feet overhead. Every time that happened, it derailed whatever train of thought she’d been pursuing.
She tried to keep her mind busy. She had no idea why she was needed in the hamlet of Whistle—founded in 1821, with a population of 1,356 as of the last census. She did learn that much by cruising the Internet. She also learned that the town adjoined the Crown City Wildlife Area, a state-managed tract of over eleven thousand acres, almost half of it forested, with ponds for fishing and “both game and non-game wildlife,” according to the state of Ohio.
Whistle was roughly equidistant from Portsmouth, Gallipolis, and Jackson, so she looked up newspapers in those cities. She read about a meth bust, a car fire, and a lecture at the Madding Center for Welsh Studies. A man’s body had been found in the Ohio River. The Jacksonville City Council was considering revising statutes concerning dilapidated or condemned houses. Three Lawrence County correction officers had been arrested for inappropriate treatment of a prisoner, and the annual River Days Festival was only a month away.
Lily read the piece about the correction officers closely because there was little she hated as much as bad cops of whatever stripe. She read what she could find about the body, too, but there wasn’t much. It had been in the river feeding the fishes awhile, so no ID yet. No cause of death yet, either, but a source “close to the investigation”—probably a cop with a big mouth—said there were no obvious signs of foul play.
