I doubted that was true-whatever Milla thought about me, it seemed like she felt it strongly. I tried to think of a way to ask about her, and the Morries in general, without offending Sawyer. The way he’d agreed to walk with me so readily, the way he looked at me at school when he didn’t think I’d notice-I was pretty sure he had a crush on me, and it felt good. I’d never been wanted by a boy before, and I didn’t want to mess it up by making him uncomfortable.
“I… always wondered why Milla and I were never friends,” I said carefully. I was trying to figure out what to say next when a car pulled up behind us and gunned its engine. We scrambled off the shoulder into the weedy edge of the woods.
When I turned around to look, I saw that it wasn’t a car at all but a battered old green Ford pickup. The driver rolled the window down and hung out an arm.
It was Rattler Sikes.
Cold fear shot through my body as Rattler leaned out the window and looked straight at me, but when he spoke, it was directed at Sawyer.
“Git on in the truck, boy,” he said, and I could see that his teeth were surprisingly white and straight. His eyes were a brown so dark they were almost black, flinty and sparking some strong emotion. Maybe curiosity. Maybe rage.
“I don’t-she asked me to-” Sawyer started, his gaze darting between me and Rattler.
“I didn’t ask you a question, did I, boy,” Rattler said. His tone stayed even, but there was a threat in it, a shadow of violence that reached into me and curled around my heart.
“No,” Sawyer mumbled, his chin lowered.
“Ain’t gonna tell you agin.”
Sawyer glanced at me-he didn’t meet my eyes, just gave me a quick view of his face, which was cast in misery and, it seemed to me, apology. He trudged around to the passenger side and got in. Inside the cab, he stared straight ahead.
Rattler continued to watch me. As uncomfortable as it was to be the focus of his attention, I didn’t look away. There was something in the way he looked at me, something that kept me from running.
Rattler’s voice lowered even further, a raw whisper. “You take care, hear, Hailey girl.”
The truck pulled away slowly, the tires crunching gravel and spitting up loose rocks and dead leaves. Rattler’s eyes tracked me, and just when it seemed like he would run off the road, he smacked the side of the cab with the flat of his hand and turned the wheel back straight on the road. He sped up and I smelled the exhaust from the hanging, corroded tailpipe.
I walked toward the house, and Rascal came bounding across the yard, ears flying, happy to see me-but Rattler’s voice stayed in my head. So low, I thought again, that most people wouldn’t even be able to hear it.
But I could hear. I could hear him just fine.
SHE ALMOST DIDN’T STOP outside of town, but at the last second she took the exit that led past the Show-Me Trading Post before heading out to State Road 9.
She’d left first thing in the morning after the longest night of her life, lying in the dark and replaying that horrible scene over and over, the things she had learned about her boyfriend-and the one surprise he’d saved for last.
So much would have been different, if she had only known. It didn’t help anything to think about what might have been, but deep in the night, when the silence was most profound and the dark reached all the way into her soul, it was hard to resist.
Today she would start to put things right.
The Show-Me Trading Post was even more run-down than she remembered, a ramshackle cinder- block building with gaudy displays in dirty windows, hardly the place to buy someone a gift. But she was worried that the girl, who would never have heard about her either, might be skittish. Maybe a small token, a gesture to show that she wanted to help, could smooth things over for their first meeting.
There was nothing on the shelves that felt right, though. She considered a cardboard stand displaying fruit-flavored lip gloss, a cheap-looking bead bracelet kit, a rack of fashion magazines, before settling on a generic MP3 player with earbuds. She could buy the girl something nicer later-once they were together, once she had proved that her intentions were good.
As she slipped the player off its hook on a Peg-Board rack near the back of the store, the door jangled and two men walked in, caps pulled low.
She shrank back, slipping into the shadow of a tall refrigerator that held soft drinks and beer. She had seen those men before, at the lab. They sometimes came to meet with her boyfriend in private. They didn’t look like scientists-not with their generic-looking dark jackets that did not entirely conceal the holsters underneath. Their visits were brief, and afterward her boyfriend usually grew distant for a day or two, saying little, staying in his office late and monitoring the high-res displays in his office that were tilted so that only he could see them.
One of the men talked to the cashier, showing her something small and flat. The cashier, a brassy-haired woman with glasses on a chain around her neck, answered in a voice loud enough to hear in the back of the store.
“No, don’t b’lieve so,” she said indifferently.
More murmuring as the man gestured insistently while his companion glanced around. She edged back into the corner between the refrigerator and the wall and flattened her body into the small space so that she couldn’t be seen from the front of the store.
“No, never,” the cashier repeated. “But then again, I ain’t from town. I live twenty miles down to Casey, so I wouldn’t probably know her, now would I.”
The man tucked the photo away-because that was what it had to be, wasn’t it, a photo of the girl-and slid a bill onto the countertop glass, then flipped a card on top of the money.
“Call if you remember anything later,” he said in a louder voice. Her heart pounded as she watched the two men turn and make their way out of the store.
So, he hadn’t waited, then. He might have believed the story she gave him last night, her terrified attempt to convince him that finding out about the girl meant nothing more to her than good news for the research. He might have believed her lies, but it hadn’t stopped him from sending the men down to Gypsum. Clearly he was determined to move forward immediately.
She had to stop him. But she couldn’t just go bursting into the house and demand that the girl leave with her-not when there was no telling what the old lady had told her.
No-first she had to build trust.
She looked at the cheap trinket in her hand and slowly slid it back on the hook.
A gift wouldn’t help. Bribery wouldn’t help. Neither would demanding or threatening or pleading or begging.
She poured a cup of stale coffee with shaking hands. She paid the cashier, who barely looked at her as she counted out the change, then stood in the parking lot drinking the bitter liquid before she got back into her car and drove the once-familiar streets to the house where she had grown up, a place she had hoped never to see again.
She had a near-impossible task ahead of her. And the only weapon she had was the truth.
