“Wait a minute!” I said. “I don’t understand how you can say a thing like that to me. I saved your life.”
She leaned in closer, through the half-open doorway. Leaned in until her nose was only three or four inches from mine. I thought I smelled tequila on her breath.
“I didn’t. Want it. Saved.” Her deep voice came out eerily calm, with tiny groups of words forming their own weighted sentences.
Then she slammed the door and set the poorly aligned dead bolt.
I walked home. What else could I do?
That was my first meeting with the infamous Zoe Dinsmore. It was also the day my curiosity tipped, and I couldn’t stop wondering how she had gotten so infamous.
I broke Connor loose from his house the best way I knew how. Really the only way I knew how by then. I offered to buy him an ice cream.
There was this place on Main Street. That’s actually what it was called—the Place. It was about seven blocks from his house. They made a treat he couldn’t resist. It was a sugar cone with that swirly soft-serve vanilla, spiraled up all pretty and then dipped in a vat of melted chocolate that hardened immediately into a candy shell. And you had to start eating it right away to keep it from melting, so he couldn’t even ask to sit in his room while I brought it to him.
We stepped out of his house, and I saw him squint up into the sun. Maybe I was exaggerating the situation in my head, but he reminded me of a vampire. I wondered when he’d last gone outdoors. I think school had been out for four days.
While we walked to the Place I told him about my experiences of the past twenty-four hours. Both with the lady and her daughter.
He didn’t say much. Once he made a little noise in his throat and then said, “That’s weird.”
We turned the corner onto Main Street, and I saw the ice cream place at the end of the block. I was surprised we’d gotten there so fast. I guess I’d told the story in more detail than I’d realized.
“So . . . ,” I said, “. . . you don’t know anything about what happened. Do you?”
“Tell me the lady’s name again?”
“Zoe Dinsmore.”
“No. Can’t say that rings a bell.”
That was honestly the way Connor talked. At age fourteen. I guess that helps explain why we had no real friends except each other.
“But her daughter said people bring it up to her to this day. Like everybody knows about it, whatever it is. So if everybody knows about it . . . why don’t we know about it?”
He answered with no hesitation at all. As though the answer had been fully formed in him all along and just waiting to burst out.
“We’re kids. People keep stuff from kids. They think we’re supposed to stay all pure or something until we grow up, and nothing should upset us. So they whisper about bad stuff behind our backs so we don’t get upset. But it’s so totally useless, because then at the same time they’re always doing stuff that’s really upsetting.”
“Wow,” I said. Surprised by how much he knew and how well he could put it into words. “That’s so . . . true.”
We stepped into the shop together.
“What’re you getting?” he asked. He seemed happy enough to change the subject. He was staring up at the menu board behind the counter, but I had no idea why, because he always got the same thing. “I know you know what I’m getting.”
“I’m getting the chocolate ice cream with the chocolate coating.”
“That’s a lot of chocolate,” he said.
“You don’t say that like it’s a good thing.”
We waited in a short line.
When we had been handed our cones and I’d paid for them, he did something that disappointed me.
He headed for the door.
“I thought we were going to sit here and eat them,” I said.
He shook his head and looked down at the black and white squares of linoleum. The way his mother would have, if she’d been there.
“I should get back.”
So I resigned myself to our eating them on the way home. I knew I’d have to spit out what I wanted to say fast, because I only had seven blocks to get it all covered.
“So, how do you find out a thing like that?” I asked as we walked away from the shop.
“I’m not sure.” He took a bite of his ice cream as if it helped him think. Then he added, “You could ask your parents.”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“I was three when we moved here, remember? And this happened before I was born.”
“They still might’ve heard about it.”
“Maybe. But there’s another thing. I don’t want my mom to know I’ve been out in those woods. She’d be really mad.”
“What does she have against the woods?”
“She thinks I’ll get lost in there.”
“Oh. Did you ever?”
“Once. For a little bit. But then I came out on the River Road, and then I knew where I was again.”
We walked in silence for half a block. I ate my chocolate ice cream, wondering why anyone would get vanilla when they could get chocolate. I thought he was out of suggestions, which was disappointing. I wasn’t sure which way to go with this thing. I needed somebody’s help, and Connor was pretty much my whole set of options.
“I could ask my mom,” he said. “She’s lived here all her life.”
“Yeah. That would be good. Would you?”
“Yeah. Sure. Why not? And if she doesn’t know, well . . . if I were you, I’d go talk to Mrs. Flint.”
“How could she help?”
“She’s a reference librarian.”
“Well, I know, but . . .”
“They know everything.”
“But whatever happened, it’s not like somebody wrote a book about it or something. Or even if they did, I wouldn’t know the title or the author.”
“She knows about more than just books. They keep the newspapers there. And when they get too old and
