“No one’swrongabout the tourists. They walk all over everything we have, and—”
“Oh, comeon.” Sadie rolled her whole head. “I hate the tourists, too, but Aunt Greta is right. This town sucks without its ghost stories. We don’t have anything else to keep us afloat anymore. No coal mine. Just tourism. And yeah, maybe there should be some stricter guidelines about what the tourists are allowed to touch and where they can go, but there’s nothing we can do about it. I know you don’t like her, but Addamsville was dying before Aunt Greta turned it into a giant tourist trap.”
I crossed my arms and looked out the window as the Goldmine passed by. Sadie didn’t say anything else until we were back on the path up the bluffs.
“And you left the Chevelle out here in the open.” She pulled to a stop so I could get out. She handed over the car keys, flashlight, and my phone. “You better tell Dad about this part, too, so he can be properly upset.”
I raised my arms. “Mom left the Chevelle by the woods overnight, too!” If it was impervious to fire, some bugs and dirt weren’t going to hurt it.
Sadie had already rolled up her window and started toward the trailer. I was glad she hadn’t heard me; bringing up Mom’s disappearance was too harsh, and I regretted it as soon as Isaid it. I should have brought up Dad, instead. That he didn’t deserve to be upset about this. He didn’t deserve to scold me for this when he had no idea what was going on in our lives, and what he’d done. But Sadie wouldn’t listen to it. She always sided with Dad.
I found the Chevelle in the foliage, cleared some leaves off the hood, and climbed inside. My phone clung to the last of its battery, and there was one unread message from early this morning. From Artemis.
I’m sorry. You’re right, I don’t understand. But we need to get that footage back.
She still thought we were on speaking terms? She was so naive sometimes, like she thought she could get whatever she wanted as long as she was polite.
But Artemis knew what was going on. One of the few who did, and the only one willing to help me.
I replied:
Yeah, we do.
Let that be an acceptance of her apology. I started up the Chevelle, said sorry to the dashboard for leaving it outside in the woods all night, and drove back up to the trailer. By thetime I got there, Sadie had thrown my backpack and coffee thermos out the trailer door, and Artemis had sent me another message.
Also, Tad Thompson can suck eggs.
I laughed.
13
Ikept my head down at school and walked through the soreness of my ankle until it faded. No getting to class late, no extra-long bathroom breaks to calm down, no trampling freshmen in the hallway, even when they made passing jokes about me getting caught by theDead Men Walkingcrew and I had to breathe through my nose and count down from ten until the red in my vision went away. There’d been no other fires, no injuries, no deaths; the firestarter had either been temporarily spooked by all the people in the mine or it was smart enough to bide its time.
Rivera had been right; the storyhadgotten out quickly. It was worse for Artemis than it was for me, ironically, because people expected me to do something like that, but fromArtemis it was shocking. She avoided me at school, either because Greta had told her to, or because she didn’t want to prolong her misery.
The rising excitement about the homecoming parade came as a bit of a blessing, since it took at least a little of the attention off me. I liked homecoming okay. It meant more people out in the streets, but at least they were the residents of Addamsville and not tourists, and it was one of the few days of the year they didn’t seem to mind if there were Novaks among them. This year it was a relief. To be forgotten would be better than being feared.
And to be forgotten would be especially nice this year, because Dad was coming home.
He’d been sentenced to seven years but had only served three and a half thanks to Indiana’s good-time credit. Probably he’d schmoozed someone. My memories of him before he got arrested—when he took Sadie and me to Hal’s to get ice cream, when he taught me to drive, when he sat with us and Mom on the bluffs and looked out across Addams Lake—were overshadowed by the new memories of visits to a concrete room with a table and plastic chairs, us explaining what we’d been doing for the last month and trying not to bring up how much the town hated us. Sadie had eagerly awaited those visits. I had dreaded them, because there was always a chance I would get angry and say something to Dad that would hurt him, and the guilt wouldweigh me down even more than before. It seemed like cruel irony that he could cause us so much harm and I could still feel horrible for feeding even a little bit of it back to him.
When the seventh-period bell rang, I bolted for the Chevelle, keeping an eye out, always, for any of the eyeless dead, and escaped the parking lot before the three o’clock rush. The drive took longer than usual, and when I got there, Sadie’s car was parked in its normal spot, by the raspberry bushes along the treeline.
The trailer sat on the lot where Aberdeen House had once been, our plumbing jerry-rigged to the Aberdeen well and septic tank. The generator out back was already grumbling away, and a light was on in the kitchen window at one end of the trailer. My heart beat hard. I wanted to scream obscenities. I wanted to cry.
Instead I got out of the car and yelled, “PAPA BIRD SAYS WHAT?”
A heartbeat later, the front door of the trailer crashed open and Dad yelled back, “COME HOME, BABY BIRDS!”
I met him halfway to the door. He had to lean back to lift my feet off the ground, and he swung me around once before setting me back down and squeezing me hard enough to make breathing difficult. It was the first hug I’d gotten from anyone since the last time he’d hugged me, and I held on tighter, and I hated him, and I loved him.
“You weren’t so heavy last time,” he said.
He let me go and held my face. He smelled like shampoo and aftershave. His hair had been recently cut, probably by Sadie. There was gray at his temples where there hadn’t been before, and more lines on his face than I remembered from the last time we visited him. He was a handsome guy, my dad, not especially tall or bulky, because you don’t need to be when you’re as charming as he is. But there was something different now in his eyes and his shoulders; where there once had been a glint of Novak mischief, now there was only weariness.Good,I thought, and reveled in that weariness.Good.
He took my hands in his and pulled them up, raising an eyebrow at my gloves.
“It’s just so people don’t ask questions.”
