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Kami curled on the stretcher, shudders wringing her body, her teeth chattering hard, and her head hurting worse and worse with every chatter. “Someone pushed me in the well,” she told her mother.
“Did you see who, my darling?” asked Mum, who was not usually given to endearments.
Sergeant Kenn was asking Jared the same question, though he was not calling Jared “darling.” Actually, it didn’t sound like he liked Jared much. “If you weren’t there, how do you know someone pushed her?” Sergeant Kenn asked.
“Well …,” said Jared.
“And what were you doing, running through a strange town at night?”
“I was jogging?” Jared offered.
“Without your shirt or your shoes?”
“Uh,” said Jared.
The injustice forced Kami to sit up, even though Mum tried to make her lie back down. The EMTs chose this moment to load her in the ambulance, talking about taking her to the hospital in Cirencester.
Kami waved her hands at them furiously. “Stop!” she ordered. “Stop it, all of you! Jared didn’t push me down the well.”
Jared was leaning against the well and away from Sergeant Kenn, arms crossed defensively over his bare chest. He looked hunted, as if he did not realize Kami would take care of things.
“He would never do something like that,” said Kami. “And he didn’t kill his father.”
There was a hollow silence. Jared looked smaller to Kami suddenly, leaning against the well with his wet head bowed, shivering in the night air.
Kami tried to go to him, but the effort made her dizzy. Her mother pushed her down flat on the stretcher. Then she was strapped down and loaded into the ambulance, despite her protests. “Mum, stop them,” Kami begged at last. “I have to stay with Jared. I have to tell them—”
Mum betrayed her by climbing into the ambulance after her and taking one of Kami’s cold hands in both of hers. The ambulance door shut, so Kami could not even see what was happening to Jared. Then her mother bent forward as if she was about to tell a secret.
“Kami, sweetheart,” she murmured, her bronze hair falling like a veil between Kami and the rest of the world. “I know you’re hurt and you’re scared, but you have to listen to me. Whatever you do, never, never go near that boy again. It is not safe.”
Kami turned her face away. “He didn’t push me,” she said. “He didn’t.”
Chapter Seven
You Are Not Safe
When Kami woke the next morning, the walls of the hospital ward, white and spotless as her hospital sheets, seemed to be mocking her. The minutes stretched on and on, but at last her dad came. He slipped in the door past a nurse, saying, “Kami, I know all the other kids are throwing themselves down wells now, but your mother and I have a firm policy of no danger sports until you’re eighteen.”
The nurse gave him a startled look because of the perfect English and the Gloucester accent. Jon Glass, born and raised in the Vale, gave her an amused look back.
Kami’s grandfather Stephen had been the wandering soul and the last member of the Glass family, who had been farming in Sorry-in-the-Vale for years. He had sold off the farm, but he’d kept the family home, even while he spent years wheeling and dealing in Japan, where the economy was booming. He brought his Japanese wife to the Vale for a visit as they went through Europe. She was going to have a baby, and he’d thought that she should have a holiday. They stayed for the rest of their lives, which for him was less than a week. With him dead and her only asset the house, Megumi Glass was stranded in a tiny English town where everyone found her alien and suspect.
“Have mercy, Dad,” said Kami. “Tell me you’re here to rescue me before they break out the Jell-O.”
“I even brought you clean clothes.” Kami’s dad held out her headband with the tiny pair of gold spectacles attached to one side.
“You are a god,” Kami told him.
“All I ask in return is your eternal reverence and worship,” Dad said. “Also, it would be nice if you did the ironing occasionally.”
Getting out of the hospital and into the car made Kami’s headache worse. She rested her head against the car window for the first part of the drive, watching the green fields roll by and be replaced by hills, curving gently on all sides. On the hill farthest away from them, as their car began the gradual drop down, was Aurimere House, witnessing her return.
“Dad,” Kami asked, “what do you know about the Lynburns?” She watched him carefully, expecting something like the fear on Mum’s face at the very mention of that name.
Instead her father glanced back at her, unconcerned. “Not much,” he said. “The twins were a few years older than me.”
This was a detail that nobody else had mentioned. Kami could not believe she had been pestering everyone else in town when her father had been willing to offer up information all this time.
