I shook my head.
“The pads are right next to each other. They have hedges, that kind of thing, but no real privacy. I mean, most of it is a glorified parking lot. We’ve got an eyewitness, and he says Keme threw the first punch.”
I shook my head again and sagged against the counter. Whatever had been powering me up until now—adrenaline and fear and a thin oil slick of anger—it drained out of me. My head was empty and throbbing. I wanted to close my eyes.
“Hey,” Bobby said, and he chafed my arms. “We just need to talk to him. Once we can establish where Keme was last night, it’ll be over.”
I didn’t say what we were both thinking: what if Keme couldn’t prove where he’d been last night? What if he’d been sleeping rough, the way he used to, and there was no one and nothing that could verify what he claimed?
The creak of the treads from the servants’ staircase announced Tripple’s return. I drew myself up as best I could. Iwaited for Bobby to take a step back, establish that professional distance to avoid another nastygram from Tripple about our relationship. But Bobby stayed where he was, hands on my arms, too close for anyone to have any doubt about who we were to each other or that he was trying to comfort me.
Tripple poked his head into the kitchen, spotted us, and sneered. All he said, though, was “I can’t find him.”
I managed not to say,I told you so. But only because Bobby was on duty, and me being a petty, um, witch wouldn’t help anything.
“Please let us know if he comes home,” Bobby said. “If you can talk him into going to the station, even better. It’d be good if he came in on his own.”
I nodded. And then I followed Bobby and Tripple to the door and watched them drive away. The smell of french fries lingered, but it only made me feel sick now.
For a while, I paced. Hemlock House was big. And it had lots of connecting rooms. Which meant it was easy to make a big loop—perfect for pacing.
Keme wouldn’t hurt anyone. But Keme had punched this guy, and people had seen it. The spouse was always the most likely suspect. Cameras on the motel parking lot. Cameras everywhere. An airtight alibi. Tripple saying,That boy’s a bad seed. Always has been.But Keme wasn’t a bad seed. Keme was a teenage boy. They did dumb things, sometimes, sure, but he was loyal, and he was protective, and he cared so deeply about the people he loved.
I remembered the cold rage on his face as he’d watched Louis and Millie walk away.
That kind of rage didn’t go away easily. It lingered. It held on to you. It made it hard to think rationally. It made you want to hurt someone else so that you weren’t the only one hurting anymore.
Vandalism. Destruction of property. Shoplifting. Assault.
But Kemewouldn’t.He just wouldn’t.
He always walked away from it because he was a minor, but now that he’s an adult…
And then something clicked into place. Keme had been at the Gull’s Nest last night. He had to have been—he’d gotten in a fight with JT. So, wouldn’t it make sense that Keme had stayed the night with his mom? Maybe she’d look at me like I was crazy and say,He was here the whole time. Or at least checked in? Maybe he’d stopped by, talked to her, told her where he was going? Maybe she knew where he was, or where he’d gone last night. Maybe she hadn’t felt comfortable telling the deputies. Maybe she’d kept quiet because she thought she was protecting Keme.
And maybe she’d tell me.
It was a gossamer bridge of maybes, and a part of me knew I was indulging in a fantasy.
But if there was even the tiniest chance—
I grabbed Bobby’s keys and ran for the car.
Chapter 4
I drove Bobby’s Honda Pilot north into town. It was late afternoon, and at this time of year, the sun was already starting to go down. As I made my way through the thick growth of pine and spruce, the light was long and slanting low between the massive trees. It caught beaded drops of water and sparked them with gold. It traced the saw-toothed outline of ferns. It threw dark shadows, and when the hanging moss drifted in the breeze, it was like ghosts moving among the branches.
That was too morbid a thought, and I tried to shake it off. I tried to think about practical things. Like cars. A few months ago, a very, um, unhappy man had run me off the road. I’d survived, but the Jeep hadn’t been so lucky. And since I was currently in the precarious financial position of having eight dollars and sixty-seven cents in my savings account, I hadn’t bought anything to replace it—the insurance payout had disappeared startlingly quickly into saving one of Hemlock House’s particularly slanty chimneys. Bobby was kind enough to get a ride to work most days and let me borrow his Pilot, but I knew that wasn’t ideal. It made Bobby’s commute much longer than it needed to be, and it wasn’t convenient, even though he never complained. It made me dependent on Bobby, and I was working hard not to repeat some bad patterns about relying on other people to take care of all the un-fun adulting stuff. And there was one other thing: there was this tiny part of me (the teensiest) that thought the Honda Pilot was maybe, just a little, a mom car.
Don’t tell Bobby.
Also, don’t get me wrong. It was a great SUV. It was big, and it had a tow hitch, and Bobby had gone for a trim that made it look extra sporty. Obviously he kept it in pristine condition. (It never smelled like french fries, for example.) But sometimes, when I had to pick Keme up from school, I started noticing all the other cars in the pickup line. And who was driving them. And the fact that I was driving one too. And that I was picking up my feral wolf-child from school, and on the way home, I was going to get milk and bread and eggs from the Keel Haul General Store, and then I was going to wait for my man to get home.
Sometimes, I really, really,reallymissed the Jeep.
The Gull’s Nest RV Park & Self-Store was situated along the bay. It had a wooden sign made of one-by-fours with the name of the park and the words OFFICE HOURS 8 AM – 5 PM below it, and the turn-in showed the passage of lots and lots of heavy vehicles: broken asphalt, rutted grass, a slightly flattened culvert where some enterprising dad-type had gotten overly optimistic.
I’d never been to an RV park before, and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it looked like a fairly straightforward operation. The RV park itself consisted of asphalt pads tucked between straggly lines of yew that must have been intended to serve as privacy hedges. Many of the pads were occupied, and it looked like there were two kinds of tenants: temporary and permanent. The temporary ones were parked at sites that could be described, at best, as impersonal: park-provided picnic tables that looked saggy from years of water damage; concreted-in grills; and often a smaller vehicle with out-of-state plates. The permanent residents, on the other hand, had clearly made themselves at home. They had little wooden signs announcing THE SMITHS, and they had patio furniture instead of the park’s disintegrating picnic tables, and many of them had Halloween decorations hanging from their awnings and strung along the yew. Somebody had clearly gotten into the spirit of the seasonand hung a witch on her broomstick from a nearby spruce. The witch had her face pressed up against the trunk, her hair a gray cloud around her head, legs kicked out in surprise. The effect, I guess, was to look like she’d crashed into the tree.
