by Ella James
He straightened, shrugged without turning around; I could sense his distress building. “Can I have some water? Food, too.”
“Friendship cake?”
“Sure.”
“Good.” I forced myself to smile. “I can maybe even find an interesting rock to go with it.”
Nick smiled back, but I could see the strain.
I lobbed a huge piece of cinnamon-vanilla cake onto a pottery plate, filled an old jam glass with ice cold well water, and set both on the table in front of him. Then I eased into the red chair across from his, armed with our neighbors’ numbers and my cell.
It felt wrong to interrupt when he was eating, so I scrolled through my contacts, stealing glances as he cut his cake into neat squares with large, hard-looking hands.
I looked over the list of phone numbers, letting him have a few more bites before I started throwing questions at him. Maybe I was putting it off because I was nervous we wouldn’t learn anything. But we had to, right? Other than Mitchell Road, which was a long way from the tree house, there wasn’t another road in any direction for at least ten miles. So he must have come from one of the neighbors’ houses.
“Who should I start with?” I asked. “Our neighbors are the Simpsons, the Roanokes, the Patels, the Coles, and Mr. Suxley.”
I held my breath, praying he didn’t say Suxley. The man had to be near seventy by now, but he still ran his enormous organic vegetable farm on the land directly north of ours. When my family had moved here, he’d protested the turbines at Golden’s city council, and when they’d ignored him—the council was as thrilled about “green” energy as they’d been about his green veggies—Suxley had petitioned the city of Denver. When no one minded the “abomination,” old Suxley’s only revenge was honking the horn of his dingy Landrover any time he passed me on Mitchell Road. For years I’d regarded him as a sort of community terrorist, and the idea of phoning him now was irrationally daunting.
“I think the Simpsons would be our best bet,” I said, when Nick didn’t speak up. “Unless one of the other names rings a bell.”
He shrugged as he took a swig of water.
I was punching the first digit when I heard a low hum. In the silence of the house, the sound was loud. It drew my eyes to the window, where I couldn’t decide which was weirder: the sky full of inky black clouds that had suddenly appeared in the last five minutes, cloaking the cliff tops (on a day the forecast had called for clear skies) or my mother’s truck, an ancient F-250 that I usually never saw before 9 o’clock.
“Wow. My mom is home.” I looked at my cell phone—4:48—and moved toward the door. “Something really bad must be going on with the turbines. Or the weather. Maybe both.”
If I heard Mom coming—or, more often, saw the truck’s lights from my bedroom window—I tried to open it for her. After a day up at the turbines, her hands were often covered with grease, and the door knob was a fancy stained glass creation she’d made several years ago, back when she was still just an artist.
I opened the door, and she said, “Milo!”
It was the same way she always said my name when she got home: happy but exasperated, like she had some story to tell me about her day. She went in for a light hug, but I stepped back.
“Um, Mom—” I started. I glanced over my shoulder. Blinked once. Twice.
The table was empty, all signs of Nick gone.
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