So I tell them. All about the way he'd watched me talk, the things he'd told me about Taylor and his brothers, about being friends and doing drugs and bailing out. Then I tell them how he'd held my hand and pulled me inside, and about Heather, standing in the kitchen in her ratty hair and saggy socks.
And when I'm all done, Marissa and Dot say, “Oh my god. That is just too much!” But Holly's not shocked anymore. She's grinning. Grinning and shaking her head. And when I ask her, “What are you thinking?” she says, “I'm thinking this is perfect.”
“Perfect?! How can you say that?”
She leans in and whispers, “Can you think of a better way to torture Heather?”
It was my turn to stare. “Torture Heather? I don't want to torture Heather! I just want to be out of her life, and have her stay light-years away from mine.”
Holly grins. “Seems to me, you're out of luck.”
“No, I'm not!”
Marissa says, “So what are you going to do?”
“I'm going to stay away from him, too, that's what I'm going to do.”
“But you like him!”
“No, I don't. I don't even know him, so how can I like him? Besides, it's too weird. The whole thing is just too weird.”
Dot pipes up with, “Yeah. Can you picture Sammy and Heather being sisters-in-law? Or having Heather's mother as a mother-in-law? Talk about torture! I can just see them gathered around the table at Thanksgiving, throwing food and yelling. Wow! It would be a mess!”
Well, that gets them going. And while they're busy marrying me off and writing the script for the rest of my life, I get up, get myself a drink of water, and listen. And after my firstborn child has been kidnapped and held for ransom, I can't help it—I bust up. And pretty soon we're all in stitches, crying from laughing so hard.
Then the phone rings. And Dot snatches it up with a giggle, saying, “DeVries.” But after a few seconds she's not giggling—she's looking real serious as she holds the phone out to me. “It's Officer Borsch.”
We look at each other like, Uh-oh! but what can I do? I take the phone and try to sound calm as I say, “Hello?”
“Sammy?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you might want to know that Lucinda Huntley's pig is missing.”
It took me a second to realize he wasn't calling about stolen blueprints. “Still?”
“So you knew, then. Well, on the 911 tape she sounded very upset, but the sheriff doesn't have the manpower to go chasing after missing pigs. I'd go out there myself, but I'm on duty, and I can't really justify another trip to the boondocks. Especially not for a pig.”
“Are you asking me to go look for it?”
He hemmed and hawed, and finally he said, “That's up to you.”
I laughed and said, “Wow. For a minute there I thought you were actually asking me to help.”
He laughs, too. “You do have a fertile imagination, don't you?”
“So I've been told.” I twist the cord a little and say, “Um…that's all you were calling about?”
I could practically see his eyes pinch. “Should there be something else?”
Me and my stupid mouth. “Well, no. I mean…”
“Sammy…?!”
“No, really. Thanks for letting me know about Penny. I'll try to get over there and help Lucinda look.”
I got off the phone before he could ask me any more questions, and when I turned around, there were Dot, Holly, and Marissa, waiting. I smiled at them and said, “Anyone up for a pig hunt?”
Marissa groans, “Oh, please.”
“C'mon. It'll be fun. Besides, Officer Borsch says Lucinda's really upset.”
So after some moaning and groaning and serious armtwisting, everyone agreed: We'd go back to Lucinda's again, this time to scare up her pig.
What none of us knew—or could ever guess—was just how scared we would be, once we got on Huntley property.
TWENTY
Kevin hadn't come home yet, but Lucinda wasn't pacing pine boards over him. “Where can she be?” she kept asking. “Where can she be? Do you think they stole her?”
We ask, “Who?”
She stops and looks at us. “The Murdocks, of course!”
Dot asks, “Why would the Murdocks want to steal your pig?”
“They've stolen everything else, haven't they? My home, my nephew, why not Penny, too?”
I'd never actually seen anyone wring their hands before, but that's exactly what Lucinda was doing. Back and forth, back and forth, her knuckles stretched and white. She says, “To their eyes, Penny would make a mighty tasty New Year's supper. Those…those… barbarians!”
I'd had enough of watching her fret; I wanted to get out and look. “Okay, Lucinda. When's the last time you saw Penny?”
“Right after you left this morning.”
“Where was she?”
“Right here. On this very spot. There's only about an hour of daylight left. Oh, I have a horrible feeling. A horrible, horrible feeling.”
So I said, “Okay. We'll split up and scour the place. Are there fences anywhere but along the road?”
“All the way around, except for by the ravine.”
“So. She's got to be either somewhere on your property, or over on the Murdocks'.”
“Oh, she couldn't have made it up the other side of the ravine. That's much too steep for her.”
We decided to start on the side of the property opposite the ravine and work our way around the fences—Holly and Dot inspecting the back end of the property while Marissa and I scoured the front end. And after about half an hour of looking in and out, up and down, whistling and calling, “Here, Penny! Come on, girl!” Marissa and I found ourselves at the length of broken fencing where we'd been so many times before.
The sections were still together, and along the bottom of the fence there was only a gap of about six inches. Marissa says, “No way she could squeeze through that…”
I nudged the bottom end, but it didn't flex very much at all. “Nope. No escape there.” I looked up and down the road and shook my head. “I wish I knew who's been coming in and out through here. I think it would explain a lot.”
“Probably the Murdocks, don't you think?”
“Maybe. But I can't exactly see Chubby and the Darling Damsels walking down here, can you? They'd drive, and if they drove, where would they park? Right along here? Everyone would see their car.”
Now as I'm talking, I'm looking at an area off the shoulder just across the road. It's your typical section of Sisquane wilderness—shrubs, oaks, dry grass, and weeds. At least it looks that way, until I notice that there's an area about four feet wide where the weeds are smashed flat.
I pop off the leather strap and wrestle the fence open a few inches, but Marissa grabs my sleeve and says, “Where are you going? I thought we decided she couldn't be out there!”
I point at the road and say, “Look.”
“At what?”
“At those weeds! C'mon!”
She follows me, but when we get across the street, she says, “Why are you looking at weeds? We're supposed to be looking for a pig!”
I stood at the section of smashed weeds, and straight ahead of me is a sort of tunnel into the shrubs and oaks. “Marissa, look! Do you think a car could fit in there?”
We took a few steps inside. “I think so. Oh, yeah—easy.”
Right away my heart sped up. Right away I knew. I whispered, “Marissa, this is where they parked their car.”
“Who?”
“Whoever burned down the cabin!”
“You think so?”
I start thinking out loud, saying, “Well, okay. How can we tell if a car's actually been in here?” but I must've been talking to myself, because as I squat down and start checking the bed of oak leaves in the tunnel, Marissa walks off to a different part of the tunnel. And just as I'm confirming that all the leaves in the middle are crushed and the ones on the sides aren't, she says, “Sammy! Oh my
god, Sammy, come here!”
I drop my crushed-leaf analysis and join her. And there, at her feet, is a cap the size of an old silver dollar.
A shiny cap.
A gas cap.
Marissa whispers, “Do you think…?”
I grab a stick and flip it over. It's red, just like the can had been. And there's not a speck of rust on it. I nod and say, “Absolutely.”
She kneels down next to me and whispers, “So what are we going to do?”
“Well, I'm sure not going to leave it here.”
Even when she's kneeling, Marissa can do the McKenze dance. “Do you think we're being watched?”
I look around, too. “I don't know. But this time I'm not taking any chances.” I pull the sleeve of my sweatshirt down over my hand, pick up the cap, and slip it into my sweatshirt pocket.
Marissa whispers, “Are you going to call Officer Borsch?”
“You bet,” I said, then took another look over my shoulders and stood up.
Marissa got up, too, only she says, “Oooo! Oh, what is that? Oh, gross! I was kneeling in something.”
Now Marissa's jeans are stonewashed to begin with, but since they're her favorites and she wears them every chance she gets, they're extra faded from all the washings. But the stain on her knee isn't dark, and I'm about to tell her not to freak out, that it'll wash out, when it hits me.
The spot on her knee is pink.
Oaks don't drip pink resins, and no animal on the planet has pink pee. Not even in Sisquane. And since there's only one liquid I can think of that's pink like that, I squat down, bend over, and sniff Marissa's knee.
She jumps back. “What are you doing? Smelling it? Oh, gross, Sammy! What if it's…what if it's…”
I laugh, “Pig pee?”
“Is that what you think it is?” Her face crinkles up.
“Oh, Sammy, yuck!”
“Marissa! Don't short-circuit on me now. Of course I don't think it's pig pee.” I check out the leaves and dirt where she'd been kneeling, but I don't find a thing.
“Then what? God, it's gross. It's like sticking to my knee.” She gasps and whispers, “What if it's blood?”
“It's way too light to be blood.”
“But what if…what if…”
I waddle over toward her and say, “Just hold still, would you?” and take a good whiff of her knee.
“Well?”
I stand up and say, “It's not pee, or blood, or beet juice for that matter—it's transmission fluid.”
“Transmission fluid? Like from a car?” She cocks her head. “How would you know that?”
“My face took a little bath in it yesterday.”
“What?”
“And it washed right off.” I smile at her and say, “Your jeans'll come clean. Don't worry about it.”
“Wait a minute.” She grabs my sleeve as I peek out the tunnel entrance, up and down the road. “You think I'm going to let you off that easy? When did your face take a bath in transmission fluid?”
I give her the quick-clip of my little experience under the truck, and of course she turns it into some romantic rendezvous. Then I say, “He's Heather's brother, remember?”
She cringes and says, “Oh, yeah,” then switches stations, just like that. “So are you saying you think Ben or Karl burned down the house?”
“No! Why would they want to burn down Mary's cabin? I think transmission fluid is like oil. Cars drip it. And whoever parked in those bushes has a car that drips transmission fluid.”
“So that could be anybody.”
“Well, I don't know. I guess we should see if one of the Murdock cars drips tranny fluid.”
Marissa plants herself and puts her hands on her hips. “No. Sammy, I am not going back there. N-O, no!”
I keep on walking. “Neither am I. I'm going to tell Officer Borsch about it and ask him to go. What I'm really hoping is that he'll be able to lift some fingerprints off this gas cap.”
So we're power-walking across the vineyard, and we're almost to the house when Marissa says, “I'm sorry about Casey.”
I don't know what to say to that. So instead, I ask something that had been nagging at me ever since I'd peeled myself off the pavement the day before. “Marissa, do you kind of like Taylor?”
“Taylor? You've got to be kidding! To tell you the truth, he scares me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Oh, gross, Sammy. No, I don't like him.”
I let out a sigh and say, “Thanks.”
“Why? What's the matter?”
“Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I think there's something wrong with me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just don't get it about people sometimes. I don't understand Heather and Tenille and why they have any friends at all. I don't understand what Casey's doing hanging out with Taylor—even if they have known each other since they were six. And I don't see how in the world Brandon can be best friends with Karl. They seem like opposites to me.” I shrug and say, “Maybe I don't know Brandon at all, either.”
Marissa's quiet for a minute, then she says, “Well, that's probably true. I mean, he's my cousin, and I don't really know him all that well, so how could you?”
She's right, of course, but something about it really bothers me. Like the better I get to know people, the less I know them. Like I can't trust my instincts anymore.
And even though I tried to close the door on that thought, it just would not shut. And the whole time I'm talking to Lucinda about what we'd found and why we needed a Baggie to store the cap in, there it is, pushing back. Even while I'm on the phone to the police, tracking down Officer Borsch, learning that he can't come out to Sisquane for at least another hour, it kept pushing back, harder and harder.
And when I hung up, I held the receiver on the cradle with both hands, closed my eyes for a minute, then gave up. I took a deep breath and asked, “Marissa, what's Brandon's phone number?”
She came around so she could look at me straight on. “Are you serious?”
I nod and look down. “There's something I have to ask him.”
She stares at me a minute, but thinks better of cross-examining me. “928-5683,” she says, then sits down. Right beside me.
I'm still holding the receiver on the cradle, and I'm telling myself not to call him, but I know I'm going to. I have to. I look at Marissa and say, “Can you keep Lucinda company or something?”
She glances over her shoulder at Lucinda, staring out the window. “She's fine. It's you I'm not so sure about.”
“I'm fine.”
She doesn't budge.
“Marissa!”
“Sammy! He's my cousin and you're my best friend. What don't you want me to hear?”
“It's no big deal, I just want a little privacy, okay?”
“If it's no big deal, then why are you shaking?”
I look at my hands, clamped to the receiver, and say, “I am not!” but there they are, shaking away. Finally, I say, “Oh, good grief,” pick up the phone, and dial. And on the fourth ring, a man picks up, so I say, “Hello, is Brandon home? This is Sammy calling.”
The voice on the other end says, “Sammy? Really? Hey! What's going on?”
Now, normally when I talk to Brandon, sentences come out as single words. Usually monosyllabic ones like Yeah and No and Um. But what comes streaming out of my mouth now is, “Not much. Well, actually, that's not true. Marissa and I are at the Huntley house. It's this pioneer place out in Sisquane? Anyway, we're trying to help Lucinda Huntley find her pig. She's like ninety and can't get around too well, and she's really attached to her pig and—”
Brandon interrupts me with a laugh. “You're calling to tell me you're spending New Year's Day finding a pig? Did you want me to come help or something?”
“No, I…actually, that's not why I'm calling at all. See, we're all up here spending the weekend at Dot's new house, and last night we went to the Briggses' party because—”
“You d
id?”
“Well, yeah. Sort of. We weren't actually at the party— we just went there to get my skateboard back.”
“Your skateboard? How did it wind up at the Briggses' party?”
“It's kind of a long story, but that's not what I wanted to talk about, either.”
“Okaaaaaaay…”
“What I want to know is…” I let out a big breath and blurt, “Did you not go to Karl's party because you had somewhere else to go, or because you didn't want to go?”
Silence.
“Brandon?”
“Yeah. I'm here.”
“I know it's none of my business, but it's kind of important to me.”
“Because…?”
“Because it is, okay? I mean, you and Karl are best friends, right? And if he's throwing this big New Year's Eve party, why didn't you go?”
“Were you looking for me there?”
“No! I mean…no!” My cheeks were on fire. “Look, okay. Never mind. I'm kinda confused about some stuff and I really just wanted to know.”
“Why I wasn't at the party?”
“Yeah.”
Silence. Then, “Sammy, it's kind of complicated. And I'd feel like a rat talking about it.”
Suddenly my heart was running away with my breath. “Brandon, look. I saw what was going on in their backyard, and I want to know—does that have anything to do with why you weren't there?”
There was another long silence and then, very quietly, he says, “Let's just say that Karl and I don't have much in common anymore. And since he dropped off the swim team, I really haven't talked to him much.”
“But I thought you guys were best friends.”
“That's right. We were best friends. We're not anymore. He's getting into some heavy stuff, and I just can't go there.”
I sat there for a minute, catching my breath. And I can't really explain it, but I was so relieved I started to cry. Water just streamed out of my eyes. And while Marissa's scurrying off to find me a Kleenex or a napkin or something, I'm choking out, “Thanks.”
He says, “Are you all right? You're not crying, are you? Did something happen over there last night?”
I brush away the tears, then force out a laugh. “Well, I didn't get my skateboard, and we didn't actually see Ben raging at his brothers, and I didn't get arrested, but yeah, I guess you might say a lot happened.”