And if anyone messed with his family, he would be able to stand up to them. The guns had always protected him before.
He started to close the vent, but something sticking out from the bottom of the filter caught his eye. He pulled the filter out and looked behind it. A stack of letters was bundled there, bound in a rubberband. He grabbed it and glanced through the envelopes. They were all from his grandparents. Why would his mother have kept them hidden? They must have been important to her. He thought of telling Doug, but decided not to. He’d read them first. Then, if it sounded like his grandparents were good enough to take care of his brothers and sister, he’d hand them over.
But if they were like his mother said, then he’d toss them into the fire … and no one would ever find them.
fourteen
WHEN THEY GOT BACK HOME, DENI WENT TO THE LAKE TO get water. The empty lot where everyone came to get water from the lake was bottlenecked with the morning rush. So much would change when the well was finished. Already, the neighborhood association had forbidden people from washing their laundry in the lake, since the place was getting so polluted.
Leaning on the rolling garbage can she used to carry water, she waited her turn. She saw Chris at the water’s edge, dipping a bucket into the water and dumping it into a rolling garbage can of her own. Chris’s nursing scrubs were soaked. She worked for the one doctor in the neighborhood — Derek Morton. He’d set up a clinic in his home, and Judith (Deni’s next-door neighbor) and Chris took turns working as his nurses. He paid them with whatever he bartered for his services — vegetables, bread, eggs, and sometimes meat from patients who hunted. Once Chris had gotten a chicken. Whatever she earned helped her family.
As she waited for Chris to finish, Deni saw her friend Mark coming up the street with a barrel on wheels. As he passed, the crowd parted, as if he carried a machete and intended to use it. Deni had tried to tell everyone that Mark had had nothing to do with his father’s crimes, but most considered her naive. Still, she knew Mark’s heart. He’d been devastated by his father’s actions, and the shame had kept him home for two weeks. But then he’d emerged to help with the work on the well and his family’s chores. He still had his bad days, and the smiles he’d once worn were fewer and farther between. The neighbors’ cold shoulders only made things worse. But Deni and Chris had made sure the entire neighborhood knew the two of them were still his friends.
As he approached, Chris finished filling her container, dropped her bucket in, and began trying to roll it over tree roots and grass to get it back to the street. Mark left his barrel and came to help her. He easily lifted her garbage can up to the street. He’d gotten so much stronger since the outage. Though he’d already been doing manual labor as a carpenter before the outage, the hard work post-outage was so much more strenuous than anything anyone could have expected. His arms and shoulders had developed a bulk they hadn’t had before, and his skin was tanned dark from the time he spent outdoors. He wore his hair a little shorter than he had before, to combat the heat. He looked like a mature man now, rather than the teenager she’d grown up with.
Deni joined them at the street. “Chris, I hope you’re not going to work in those wet scrubs.”
“As a matter of fact I am,” Chris said. “As soon as I get the water home, I have to report for work.” She wiped her blonde waves back from her forehead. “But it’s so hot they’ll probably dry before I get there.” She shaded her eyes in the sunlight and looked at Deni. “Hey, did I hear right? Someone said your parents took in four extra children.”
“You heard right.”
“Four children?” Mark asked. “What’s up with that?”
She launched into the story, ending with this morning’s search of the apartment. “Do you guys remember a girl named Jessie Gatlin?”
Chris frowned. “I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, you do,” Mark said. “Remember the girl who got pregnant in eighth grade?”
“Oh yeah.” Chris’s eyes widened as the memory came back. “Talk about a scandal. She came back to school after the baby, didn’t she?”
“Not until the next year. She repeated ninth grade and wound up in our class.”
“Then she got pregnant again the next year.”
Mark nodded. “I don’t remember seeing her after that.”
“I think that was the end of her education,” Deni said. “But she’s the kids’ mother, and now she’s disappeared, so we’re trying to find her. I’ve been trying to remember who her friends were.”
Mark looked at Chris. “Didn’t she hang out with John Carrigan and Lacy Frye and that group?”
“Yeah,” Chris said. “Druggies, mostly.”
“You got that right,” Mark said. “Carrigan’s in prison now for dealing.”
Deni’s mind raced as memories rushed back. “I wonder if she still hangs around with those guys. Anybody remember where Lacy used to live?”
“She lived across the street from the high school,” Chris said. “I have no idea if she’s still there. Remember the house with the gnomes in the front yard?”
Deni remembered. The kids had teased Lacy mercilessly about her yard. “Well, that’s a place to start. I think I’ll go over there today. See if she still lives there, and if she knows where Jessie is.”
“If you ask me,” Mark said, “a woman who leaves her four children to fend for themselves at a time like this — she should probably just stay lost.”
“But what if something happened to her?” Chris asked. “I mean, wouldn’t that be sad if she was in trouble somewhere and no one ever came looking for her?”
“Who knows?” Deni said. “If there’s ever a time she could get clean, it would be now, wouldn’t it? I mean, drugs aren’t any easier to get than anything else. She certainly doesn’t have any money. I’m going to go try to find Lacy Frye today and see if I can get any information.”
Mark took off his baseball cap and raked his hair back. “I’ll come with you.”
“Great,” she said. “Dad has his well shift, so he can’t go, and I really didn’t want to go alone.”
Mark helped Deni get her water, then she rolled it back home and waited for him. He rode his bike over a little while later.
Though Mark was one of the first ones in the neighborhood to convert his Volkswagen into a horse and buggy, he preferred to take his bicycle on short jaunts like this one. Deni rode her bike alongside him as they headed toward their old alma mater to look for Lacy Frye.
Mark seemed quiet as they rode.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.” He forced a smile and changed the subject. “So, how was that letter from the Craigster yesterday?”
Deni didn’t answer for a moment. Part of her wanted to slap on a happy face and pretend the letter was all she’d hoped. But she didn’t have to pretend with Mark. “It was a little … disappointing. I had hoped for poetry, but I got a travelogue instead.”
“A travelogue? What do you mean?”
“I mean, it was a play-by-play of what happened after the outage. Not much about him missing me, or our relationship. And he left it a little open-ended, saying if we’re meant to be together, we will be.”
Mark rode quietly for a moment. “Well, that’s true, isn’t it?”
“If?” She shot Mark a look. “I wouldn’t have said if. I made up my mind that we were meant to be together the day I said I’d marry him.”
“Well, you know, he is a guy. Words aren’t always our best thing.”
“They are for him. He writes brilliant legal briefs, and he’s a fantastic debater.”
“That’s not the same, and you know it.”
Her mouth was dry. “I just wish he’d written me more than one letter. I sent him a whole stack.”
Again, silence. Mark slowed down as they came to a stop sign. “You care if I read the letter? Maybe I could read between the lines, give you a guy’s interpretation.”
We
ll, maybe he could shed light on it. She stopped at the stop sign and pulled the folded letter out of her pocket. She’d already read it six times that morning, but her feelings hadn’t changed.
He got off the bike as he read. “Well, see? He said he missed you.”
Deni sighed. “Keep in mind that we haven’t talked to or seen each other since May. That I was on a plane just minutes before the outage, and for all he knew I could be dead.”
He went back to the letter. For several moments, he read silently. As he did, his face grew harder, as if he saw the lack of feeling that had crushed her.
So it wasn’t just her.
“He says if there were some way to get to you, he would.”
Deni looked at the words again. “Yeah, that really hurt. There is some way, and I know it, because I tried it. He just doesn’t want to.”
“Come on — that may not be true.”
“Oh no? Read the rest.”
Aloud, Mark read, “ ‘I guess our wedding isn’t going to come off like we planned. But if it’s meant to be, I guess we’ll wait for each other. I really miss you. Hope this will all be over soon, and we can get together again.’ ”
She blinked away the tears threatening her, determined not to cry in front of Mark. Mark sat down on the curb, resting his wrists on his knees. “Well, I can see how you would be disappointed, but he might have written it in a hurry. He also may have been a lot more emotional about this than it seems.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, I’m serious. You know how guys are when they’re emotional, and instead of talking more, they talk less? Like they’re afraid any extra words will get caught in their throat, and they might start crying like a wimp? Well, maybe he was writing like that. Afraid if he got too emotional in the letter, he’d get real emotional in real life, and maybe he was in the office and didn’t want anyone to see him like that.”
Mark’s eyes were sincere. She wanted him to be right. She took the letter back, and scanned it again. Was there hidden emotion there? Some kind of necessary restraint? “Do you really think that could be it?”
“Sure, I do. I bet you get another letter in a few days, and you’ll see. He’d probably been wishing he could talk to you all this time, saving up all the stuff he wanted to tell you about his experiences with the outage. And let’s face it, it was pretty exciting stuff. When the post office opened, he probably rushed to get it all down. It’s kind of like he had to get all that out before he could get down to feelings. Those’ll come later. You’ll see.”
It made sense. Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. The pain in her heart gave birth to hope. “He is like that. I mean, he kind of has a one-track mind. He does always blurt out everything he’s saved up whenever we talk.”
“See? That’s all it is, Deni.”
She blew out a sigh and sat down next to him. “I feel like a bratty schoolgirl who hasn’t gotten her way.”
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m sure he loves you and misses you like crazy. He’d be insane not to.”
The sweet words took her by surprise, jolting her heart. Her lips softened into a smile. “Thank you, Mark.”
“I’m just saying, you’ve agreed to marry the guy. He’s gotta know how lucky he is. No way would any guy in his right mind just blow that off. Trust me, he’s thinking about you constantly.”
Drawing in a deep breath, she held his soft gaze for a moment before he looked away. Smiling, she folded the letter back up. She hadn’t thought that anyone could make her feel better about this — but Mark had done it. “You’re a good friend, Mark.”
He smiled. “Yeah, well, tell that to the neighborhood lynch mobs.”
As they resumed their ride, Deni wished she could return the favor and make him feel better too. But the neighbors’ disdain for him was obvious. There was no way to sugarcoat that.
fifteen
THE GNOMES WERE STILL IN LACY FRYE’S YARD, THOUGH THEY looked older and more fragile. The high schoolers across the street used to have names for them, and occasionally one would get stolen and turn up at a pep rally or a football game, or on the principal’s desk. Usually the perpetrator returned it to its yard the next day. Who would want to keep it, after all?
Poor Lacy. She must have been constantly embarrassed.
Deni and Mark pulled into the driveway. They rolled their bikes with them up the sidewalk to the front door. Mark knocked. A woman in a cotton housedress answered the door.
“Yeah?”
Deni recognized the woman. She was the one who was always out tending the haphazard garden.
“Mrs. Frye?” Mark asked.
“Yes.”
Deni spoke up. “I’m Deni Branning, and this is Mark Green. We went to high school with Lacy and were wondering if she still lives here.”
Her mother turned back and yelled over her shoulder. “Lacy! For you!”
Deni looked at Mark. They’d hit pay dirt.
They heard footsteps coming down the stairs, then Lacy came to the door. Her eyes were dull as she regarded her visitors.
She had changed. In high school, she had dyed her dishwater blonde hair black, but now it was bleached to a platinum color. Her gold roots had grown out about an inch, giving it an interesting two-tone color. She was skin and bones — not the hard-work kind of skinny, but the kind that accompanied sickness.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Lacy, do you remember us? Deni and Mark from high school?”
“Yeah, I remember. What do you want?”
Her tone was hostile, suspicious. For a moment, Deni wondered if she’d ever been rude to the girl. She probably had, back when her head was bigger and she thought more of herself than she should.
“We were wondering if you still hung around with Jessie Gatlin,” Mark said.
Lacy’s expression tightened. “Why do you want to know?”
“We’re worried about her,” Deni said. “My family found out that her four children have been living by themselves since right after the outage. Jessie’s disappeared, and we think something might have happened to her.”
Lacy peered at them from between her long bangs. “How do you know she wants to be found?”
Deni stared at her. “We don’t. But she has a responsibility to her children. If she doesn’t want them, we need for her to designate a relative that we can get in touch with. Do you know where she is?”
Lacy glanced back over her shoulder. Her mother was listening from a few feet behind her. “I haven’t seen her since before the outage.”
Deni wasn’t sure she believed her. She glanced at Mark and saw doubt on his face as well. She turned back. “What was she like the last time you saw her?”
“What do you mean, what was she like?”
“I mean, was she still on drugs after the outage? Was she withdrawing?”
Lacy glanced back again, then stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind her so her mother couldn’t hear.
Now maybe they’d get somewhere.
“It was bad,” Lacy said in a quiet voice. “She woulda gnawed off an arm for a fix.”
Deni tried not to linger on that image. “We found syringes in her purse. What was her drug?”
“Crank,” Lacy said.
Just as Deni had thought. Crank was one of the street names for heroin. Besides her acquaintance with a classmate who used the stuff, she’d done some research on the drug for a speech class in college. Heroin was one of the most difficult drugs to detox from.
“So, let me ask you this,” Mark said. “If she was addicted to heroin when the outage happened, and she couldn’t get anymore, what do you think she did about it?”
“Same thing the rest of us did,” Lacy said. “She spent whatever cash she still had on getting what she needed, and then she ran out. And like the rest of us, she was out of luck.”
“What happened?” Deni asked. “Did you get sick?”
“Sick isn’t the word,” Lacy said. “It’s painful and miserable. Your
bones and muscles hurt, you vomit, you can’t sleep, and you think you’re going to die. Nothing better get between you and the needle.”
“How long does it last?”
“A week really bad. Some of the symptoms go on for weeks. Months, even.”
Clearly, Lacy was still in bad shape herself. “You said you found syringes?” she asked, desperation tightening her face. “Did she have any dope?”
If she had, Deni knew Lacy would have done whatever it took to get her hands on it. “No,” she said. “We didn’t find any.”
Lacy shrugged. “Figures. Nobody has any.”
“So the outage basically saved your life,” Mark said.
“Or ended it, depending on how you look at it.”
Deni tried to imagine what that meant. Did Lacy really feel that her life as an addict was more real than this one? How sad. She hoped Lacy could stay away from drugs long enough to think rationally again. “Jessie’s kids say she hasn’t been seen since two weeks after the outage.”
“Sounds about right. She probably had some dope on her or was able to get some for the week after the outage. After that, with no transportation to bring the stuff in, the dealers were running out, and there was no cash to pay for it. She probably got sick.”
“Do you think she would have put herself in harm’s way to get more heroin?”
Lacy started to laugh. “Of course. She would have sold her body … one of her children … all of her children. Those cravings, they control you, and a lot of people I know were in dire straits when the drugs weren’t coming anymore.” She studied their faces, then flipped her stringy hair back. “You know, people like you think they’re so much better than us. But you’re not.”
“I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Yes, you were. You’re judging me just like you’re judging her.”