“The poor boy must be scared to death.”
Ah, the guilt card, Jake thought. No one plays that one better than Carolyn. “He needs to know enough to be careful. And that the stakes are huge.”
“But you told him too much.”
Here we go. “So you want me to un tell him somehow?” God, he was sick of feeling defensive.
Jake possessed an arsenal of facial expressions, any one of which could launch Carolyn’s temper into the stratosphere. It was this one, though-the smug, know-it-all smirk-that propelled her into orbit. “No,” she snapped. “I want you to remember that he’s only thirteen years old. He’s just a boy.”
“Got it,” Jake said. “Thirteen years old. I’ve been wondering about that all morning. Thanks for the reminder.”
She opened her mouth for another round, but then shut it again. She’d said her piece, and he’d said his. Getting along was important now. She let it go. Or tried to, anyway.
As the terrain became steadily more vertical, the roads shrank from four lanes to two; winding ribbons of black, snaking through endless miles of switchbacks and meandering curves. Jake hadn’t been down this road in well over a year, and it was bad then. Now the worn, potholed roadbed bounced them like they were on a trampoline. Between the weight of the vehicle, its rear-wheel drive, and the hazardous road conditions, he found himself wondering if perhaps this ride wasn’t the most hazardous aspect of their entire plan. Thank God for seat belts. Otherwise, they’d have been bounced through the ceiling by now.
Miraculously, Travis slept through it all.
Soon enough, the ride went from treacherous to positively boring. They’d skimped on engine size when they purchased the van, forgoing the optional V-8 in favor of the standard V-6, and now they were paying the price. The additional weight of the family, combined with the load of supplies, completely maxed out the vehicle’s capabilities going uphill. Currently, Jake found himself trapped behind a tractor-trailer loaded with telephone poles, doing twenty miles an hour, with no hope of pulling past.
“Did you ever really think it would come to this?” Carolyn asked. Her voice carried an emotion that Jake didn’t quite recognize. Sadness maybe, but not quite.
He answered her softly, not entirely sure what she hoped to hear. “I used to,” he said. “You know, back at the beginning. In the last couple of years, though, I’d talked myself out of it. I let myself believe we’d made it. I let my guard down. I’m sorry.”
She let his answer just hang in the air for a while, not saying anything. Then she ran her fingers into her hair and made a growling sound. “I’m not doing as well as I thought I would,” she confessed.
He smiled. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, if you promise not to make a scene.”
He saw her head turn in his peripheral vision.
“Neither am I. In fact, I’m scared as hell.” As more silence filled the van, he couldn’t let pessimism prevail. “We’ll make it, though. I promise you, we’ll get out of this somehow.”
For another full minute, they each pondered worries too awful to articulate. Carolyn broke first. “So what’s next?”
He turned. “Next?”
“Yeah, next. Let’s say we make it as far as the Den…”
“Oh, we’ll make it, all right.”
She waved off his defensiveness. “Yeah, okay. When we get all the way to the Den. What happens next?”
“We sleep?”
She rolled her eyes. She hated him when he was intentionally obtuse. “Come on, Jake! What do we do tomorrow? And the next day, and the one after that?”
He shrugged. “We live.” He stated it as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “We live, we wait, we make a life for ourselves as best we can. You know that. Then, when the time is right, we try coming out again and making the best of it. That’s the plan; that’s always been the plan. You know this.”
“And that’s what’s been gnawing at me,” she blurted. “You’re right. It’s always been the plan, but there’s no future in it. We might as well all go to jail together.”
Instantly, she realized she’d pressed the wrong button. Jake twisted his neck the way he did when he was angry, and he opened and closed his fists around the steering wheel. “I guess there’s a reason why you’re bringing this up now, after it’s too late to do anything?”
“I’m just stating my concerns…”
He cut her off. “Then keep them to yourself. I’ve invested way too much time and effort into this to have you start tearing it apart now.”
“Don’t tell me what I can’t say!” she declared. “If I have a concern, I’ll damn well let you know about it.”
“Why?” His tone was combative, but the question was real. “What do we possibly have to gain by your second-guessing now? The situation is what it is, and we are where we are. It’s truly that simple. How many times did I ask you to come here with me?”
“And do what with Travis?”
“Bring him along! He’d have loved it.”
She set her jaw angrily and turned to face out the window. “Well, Mr. Secrecy, you always were so paranoid about anybody finding out about this.”
“Paranoid?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “We’ve got warrants out for our arrest-for murder. We’re at the top of the Most Wanted list-at least, we were. And I’m paranoid for wanting to keep a few secrets?”
She held up her hands, as if surrendering. “Look,” she pronounced. “I’m only saying that maybe we should have more of a plan than just heading out into the middle of nowhere to wait for God knows what.”
He thumped the steering wheel with his palm. “And what would you have us do, Carolyn? Get on an airplane? A bus? A boat maybe? Perhaps we could go back to the Rebel Yell and check in for the year. Hell, with the cash we’ve got in the bag there, we could stay at the Plaza for a month! But you know what? There’s people there, Carolyn. There’s not a single plane, train, bus, or boat that we could get on without being spotted in a heartbeat.”
She took a breath to argue, but he cut her off again. “No, wait. Listen to me. We’ve been planning this day for fourteen years, okay? You’ve got to believe that we’ve worked most of the bugs out. The place is ready for us, and we have to be ready for it. If you start losing confidence now, Travis is going to come unglued.”
“What about Travis?” Carolyn shot. “We talked about schooling him ourselves, but I don’t know what eighth graders are supposed to learn. Suppose we screw it up?”
Jake sighed. His planning had always centered around escape and a decent hiding place. The rest was just too unpredictable; and because it was so unpredictable, it was irrelevant. Now, in the heat of it all, she wanted a specific plan for every conceivable contingency. Why couldn’t she see that this was a time for flexibility? Ever since this whole thing started yesterday, she’d focused on nothing but the negatives, and he was sick of it.
What difference did it make if something went wrong at this point? They’d either recover or they wouldn’t. It was that simple. Worrying about it only made everything seem more complicated.
“Carolyn,” Jake said, making his voice suddenly much softer. “If we screw it up, we screw it up. Then we move on. Our hand is dealt, honey. It’s too late to worry about a stacked deck.”
She bowed her head toward her chest, and her voice got very small. “This is just all so unfair to Travis,” she said.
“Carolyn, look. Family first, remember? Everything else second. If we do our jobs right, Travis will grow up remembering this as one huge adventure.”
She breathed through her mouth to rein in her emotions. It didn’t take long. “God help us,” she whispered.
Travis awoke fifteen minutes later, as Jake slowed the van at the top of Falls Ridge to make the left-hand turn onto a dirt road that would ultimately take them to Donovan’s Den. “Where are we?” he asked groggily.
“Almost there.”
“Where’s ‘there’?”
The answer became apparent soon enough. “There” was about two miles east of nowhere. The dirt road,
