Evie blinked back fresh tears. “Okay, Nan,” she said. “I’ll let him know.”
19
E
Baxter Grains had once been a pretty big employer in Cold Water, but it had mostly closed when the economy had collapsed, leaving this whole end of town limping and destroyed. The Grains still operated, but not like it used to. Most of its buildings were empty now, most of its workers long gone.
But that’s what made it interesting.
With its lattice of crumbling fire escapes, and storehouses full of rust and echoes, the Grains was a fantastic secret fortress. One big, broken playground.
Freight trains still ran through it, but they didn’t stop anymore. Just blew on past like they couldn’t get away fast enough. Evie had learned how to listen before running across six lanes of tracks, how to feel for the rumble in the steel. Everything with Shaun had been a slide of adrenaline, from her brain to her fingertips, from her heart right down to her toes. Even just walking across a field.
She came up alongside that dirty industrial yard, bright sun picking out bits of broken glass, making it sparkle and wink in the breeze. If she squinted, she could just see him kicking around in the scrub, hair the color of dry wheat against a light-blue sky.
She asked, Do you remember, Shaun Henry-Deacon? Do you know what happened to you?
And then she was climbing. Sliding the toes of her sneakers into the too-small holes of the fence, her weight cutting into her fingers where they curled around the wire.
Before Shaun, Evie had never climbed a fence in her life. She wasn’t sure she’d ever climbed anything, to be honest. But if you wanted to hang with the boys, you had to learn to keep up. She’d climbed her first fence after watching Sunny go gracefully over this one, and since then she’d seen most of the town from fence-tops just like it.
On the other side, she jumped the last few feet to the ground, tumbling onto her rear end—gravity had changed a little since she’d got knocked up. “Crap,” she muttered. The cut on her knee had reopened. She wiped a dot of blood away, then stood and brushed herself off, picking bits of stone from her hands.
Shaun’s body had been found on the other side of the empty storage building, close to the corrugated fence that blocked the parking lot from the tracks. There was a little hill there, where a thin trail skirted the bottom of the fence.
Evie had never used the trail. The tracks there went from six to eight lanes, two of them peeling off onto Grains property, and if she were honest, she was too chicken to go near them, even though they looked rusty and probably hadn’t been used in years.
Besides, if you walked just a little farther west, the ground went flat, the tracks thinned out, and you could see in both directions for a good long way.
But Shaun had been found by the trail, so she headed in that direction.
The grass was already brittle and dry, though it was barely summer yet. It looked like a mangy hide, long in some places, scratched bald in others, flea-bitten skin poking through. For years, people had used this field as a trash heap, throwing litter over the fence and letting the rats and coyotes sort it out. The ground was strewn with faded takeout containers, bent soda cans, rusty nails, glass. She stepped through it toward the fence.
As she rounded the side of the storage building, she saw remnants of yellow police tape lifting in the breeze. Three whole weeks had passed since they found him here—was there still no verdict yet on what had happened to him?
Maybe nobody really cared, she thought. Shaun was just a punk-ass burnout flunking out of high school. Kids at school had laughed at his memorial. His own mother didn’t want him, and his nan didn’t even know he was gone.
She stepped over the twirling end of tape and started up toward the trail. The ground was uneven, covered in loose gravel with bits of grass shooting through to keep it all from sliding back down onto the tracks. There was less garbage over here. Fewer people came through this way. Or maybe the police had gathered it all up as evidence and hadn’t bothered to bring it back.
At the top of the hill, she continued east, eyes scanning back and forth across the trail, searching for anything that might have been his, might have been missed.
She reached the arc light and stopped. There was nothing here. Either the police had already taken it all, or there had been nothing here to begin with.
That same surreal feeling—that it was all a fake, that Shaun was going to jump out, laughing, any minute—rose up inside her. How can a guy like that just blink out of existence? One second he wants forever from you, and the next he’s just…gone.
Of course, she knew his body had been found. He wasn’t missing—he was dead. But it just felt so impossible to believe. Was it really so crazy that Nan still waited for him to come home?
Evie saw a glint of metal at the edge of the little hill. She crouched down. It was a shiny silver bead about a centimeter wide, and as she rolled it between her fingers, the ground began to rumble. “Shit!” she hissed, stuffing the bead into her shirt pocket.
The gravel shook, and she stumbled to her knees and rolled, trying to skitter back up over the lip of the hill before the train reached her, but it was too late.
It wasn’t on the closest track, or even the next one over, but still. The thunder of it pinned her to the ground, and as it passed, the first engine let out a succession of short, staccato wails, as if it was coming right at her.
She
