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Silence from the passenger seat, and then Eddie stretched. “Where are we?”
“About to take the exit.”
He ran his good hand through his hair, rubbed it over the short beard he’d grown. “Jesus, did I sleep the whole way?”
“Most of it. You were tired.”
He looked out the window, watching the scenery go by. He was wearing dark gray sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, tennis shoes on his feet. He had lost weight in the last three months—most of it muscle. He hadn’t been able to train with an arm broken in two places, the bone smashed by a bullet, and his running regime had been replaced by walks. Some of his walks lasted for hours.
Now, with his arm just out of its cast and sling, he wanted to train again, though the process would take time. It didn’t matter to me that Eddie had lost his army bulk, that he was slimmer now, that he had let his beard grow in. To me, he was still beautiful.
“I don’t feel anything,” he said. “Do you?”
“No.” I signaled and pulled into the turnoff. “Maybe soon.”
Eddie shook his head. “We would have felt it by now. Felt something.”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said.
We turned off the interstate. There was a four-lane road with a sign for Coldlake Falls—and just past the sign, another turnoff onto a narrow two-lane road with no sign. Atticus Line. This was where we’d taken a wrong turn that night in July.
Eddie and I said nothing as I sped past Atticus Line, leaving it behind us and taking the main road into Coldlake Falls.
Eddie took my hand and kissed the back of it, his beard scratching my skin.
“We should park somewhere,” I said.
He laughed softly. “You’re never going to stop suggesting that.”
“One of these days, you’ll give in.”
The last three months had been hard. John Haller had shot Eddie, and Kal Syed had shot John Haller. They’d had to do surgery to put Eddie’s arm back together. Haller had died within an hour without saying another word.
We didn’t know why Haller had done anything he’d done—if it was true he’d killed his daughter by accident, if so why he’d left her body by the road, why he’d filed a missing person’s report after so much time, why he’d come to Rose’s place to kill us. We didn’t know why he’d done something so obviously crazy, something he wouldn’t get away with.
Haller had no criminal record and no history of strange behavior, though he’d had a decades-long drinking problem that all of his friends knew about. His autopsy had shown that what he told us was true—he was suffering from a form of brain cancer that had been diagnosed only weeks before he died, much too late, and as a result was going to kill him. His final act of shooting at us was ascribed to the cancer affecting his impulse control and causing violent tendencies.
Eddie had come out of surgery, and a few days later we’d gone home and the story was over.
I cared for Eddie the best I could in our little apartment while he recovered. I lost my job at the bowling alley, but I got a new job as a receptionist at an accountant’s office, where the hours were better and all I had to do was look pretty and answer phones. I was good at both of those things. I was also good with numbers, as it turned out, so with my boss’s help I had started a bookkeeping course at night school. When I finished a few months from now, my boss wanted to hire me.
Eddie wanted to go back to work. His boss loved him—we got our new car through the garage—but it was impossible to fix cars with one arm. So his boss had moved Eddie to a manager job, dealing with bills, suppliers, hiring, and advertising. Eddie was a novice, but he was smart and he was willing to learn. Lately, Paul had started talking about having Eddie take over the entire business when he retired in a few years.
Eddie hadn’t had any nightmares for the last three months. But sometimes he had shadows behind his eyes. It haunted him that he had never known his mother, and it haunted him even more to know what she had become after she died. In life, she’d been troubled and trying to turn her life around—but in death, thwarted of her chance at life, she had become something else, an entity that wanted other young people to suffer the same fate she had. The smiling young woman in the photographs had taken so many lives, and she had tried to kill me. Eddie wrestled with that. There was no easy answer.
We drove into town, passing the hospital where Rhonda Jean had died, passing through downtown. Eddie read aloud the directions I had written down, and they took us to a spot just past the center of town where a small church stood. Behind the church was a cemetery, a peaceful stretch of green.
As I parked, we saw a familiar blue car in the parking lot. Two teenage girls were leaning on it.
“You’re late,” Beatrice Snell said.
“You said noon,” I replied. I looked around. “Did we need all of the subterfuge? You really think someone might be following you?”
Gracie shrugged. “You can’t be too careful. Let’s take a walk. We have lots to tell you.”
The trees were in full color at this point in October, wild yellows and flaming reds. It was a perfect day, with the smell of damp leaves beneath our feet as we took the first path into the cemetery. “All right, we’re here,” I said as Eddie walked beside me. “Go.”
“First of all, Trish Cho,” Beatrice said. “From everything we can tell, she’s perfectly fine.”
