With a deep breath, she turned back to the house.
Everything was packed—most of her possessions were already in the car. Amber clenched her jaw and then strode back inside.
Eleven: Ricky
“Ricky?”
He was staring at his phone, looking at the messages—nothing new.
“Ricky?”
Shutting down the phone, he started to slip it back into his pocket when he realized that maybe the phone needed to be rebooted. He held down the two buttons until the logo appeared and then he…
“Ricky,” his mother said.
“Huh?”
“What is wrong with you? Doesn’t your shift start in a few minutes? Shouldn’t you be on the road?”
“Oh. Yeah. I might have to take the day off.”
“What? Why?”
“My friend. She was having trouble last night and I told her to call the police. This was down in North Carolina. Then she texted me back to say that she was okay. She got away from the house. I don’t know where she went after that though. I haven’t heard anything back and I sent her two more messages and I think…”
“You’re thinking about going back down to North Carolina?”
“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “I think I have to.”
“No,” his mother said.
Ricky blinked as he stared at her. “Sorry?”
“No. You’re not going to North Carolina.”
“Mom, I wasn’t asking for permission.”
“I know it’s none of my business how you conduct your life, and I know you’re all grown up and you can make your own mistakes if you want to. I never thought that I would be the one advocating for you to get to your job in the sheriff’s office, but here we are. I’m telling you that you’re not going to North Carolina. You’re going to be on time for your shift and if you don’t hear from your friend by the end of it, you’re going to make another call and then let it go.”
“What? I can’t…”
“You can’t what?”
“I’m not just going to let it go,” he said.
“Good. So we’re in agreement about the rest of what I just told you to do?”
“Sorry?”
“We still rely on each other, right?” his mother asked. After the question, she turned and looked down at Tucker.
“I guess,” Ricky said.
“Good. Then I think you’ll agree that my opinion carries a little weight.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Ricky said.
“One of us doesn’t. That’s for sure.”
His mother turned her head towards the hall before she yelled. “Vernon!”
# # #
Ricky tried to argue, but it was no use. His mother had decided his fate—he was going to work and his father was going to drive him. He climbed into the passenger’s seat as his father started the engine.
Mary had arranged everything, saying that Vernon had to drive Ricky in so he could explain something to him on the way. Ricky thought that she had arranged for Ricky to be dropped off just to guarantee that he didn’t do something stupid like driving to the airport and jumping on the next plane down to North Carolina.
“You want to hear about the snow storm?” Vernon said. “That’s why I have to go out of my way to drop you off?”
“This was mom’s idea.”
“Right,” Vernon said. “Well, it was the nineteenth of January, in nineteen-ninety-one. All ones and nines—easy to remember.”
Ricky sighed and looked through the car window at the passing terrain.
“We were up near Farmington. It was me, your mother, Nancy, Old Bob, Paul, and Wilson. None of those other people matter though because the thing that happened was just me and Nancy. She was a bit older that me and your mom. She was one of those tough people. You could never imagine that she would ever feel uneasy. There was a quiet confidence around her like a shield. Untouchable.”
“Dad, we don’t have much…”
“Don’t worry. It’s not a long story. Nancy and I drew short straws and we had to go out on foot to the neighbor’s cabin because we brought everything except matches. Old Bob had a lighter, but the wheel fell out and we couldn’t find the flint. Anyhow, it was a bright day, everything was frozen, and all we had to do was follow the snowmobile tracks a half-mile. The snow was unbelievably deep that year, but the snowmobile path was hard-packed and walking was easy. It gave us a false sense of security.”
“Is this the time you were out all night?”
“It is,” his father said. Ricky’s prompt didn’t seem to make his father get to the point any quicker. “We were walking and talking and we heard some snowmobile’s coming from down the way. You could tell from their engines that they were running full out, and the way the path curved we knew that we had to stop to the side if we didn’t want to be run down. I was first. The loose snow on the side of the path swallowed me, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Under the loose snow, it was packed into a shape like a bowl that funneled me right down to the base of a tree. Under the branches, deep in the center, there was actually a patch of bare ground. A second after I rolled to a stop, Nancy rolled right down next to me. We were both laughing. At that point, it still seemed like it was going to turn into a funny story that we could tell the others when we got back. We didn’t know how trapped we were.”
“The snowmobiles?”
“We heard them go right by without dropping their speed at all. They didn’t even know that we had been up there, stepping aside to make room for them. They missed the whole thing. Nancy pushed her way under the branches and started to try to climb back out of the darkness. I was right on her heels as she tried to climb and then slid back into
