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“I hate to put an end to the good time we’re all having.” Mat stood. “But we need to hit the road.”
“Butt just ate,” Lucy reminded him.
“We’ll take our chances,” he snapped.
Easy for him to say, Nealy thought less than half an hour later as she tried to clean up the mess from the baby’s latest episode of motion sickness. For the first time since her escape, she yearned for the efficient White House staff that took care of every kind of domestic unpleasantness.
By the time the baby was bathed, her car seat was swabbed down, and they’d found a discount store where Nealy could buy a few clothes to replace those she’d lost, it was dark, Marigold was screaming again, and Nealy had begun to feel as frantic as the baby. “We need to find a doctor! There’s something wrong with her.”
Lucy gave up trying to distract her sister with a Beanie Baby walrus. “Butt doesn’t need a doctor; she’s scared of doctors. She’s hungry and she’s tired, and she wants out of her car seat, and she needs her bottle. That’s all.”
Marigold held out her arms toward her sister and sobbed with frustration.
Nealy sat down in the empty passenger seat. “I think we should stop at the campground we saw advertised on those billboards.”
“I’m not stopping,” Mat said. “We’re driving through the night. One of us can sleep while the other takes the wheel.”
Although he sounded determined, she suspected he knew his plan wouldn’t work but hadn’t gotten around to accepting it. “We won’t be able to sleep with the baby screaming,” she said reasonably. “If we stop now, we’ll get plenty of rest and we can make an early start.”
His sigh was as long-suffering as Lucy’s. “We should be halfway through Ohio by now. We’ve barely crossed the West Virginia border.”
“But we’re having such a good time.”
The corner of that steelworker’s mouth quirked. “All right, we’ll stop. But we’re pulling out at daybreak.”
Hoolihan’s Campgrounds was a small RV park, with not more than a dozen vehicles angled in among the trees. Mat backed into the spot they’d been directed to, turned off the ignition, then got up to retrieve another can of root beer from the refrigerator. Within seconds, he’d left her alone w
ith the children. Even though she knew that was why he’d let her come along, she resented his hasty exit.
Lucy gave Nealy the frantic baby. Nealy waited for her to follow Mat outside, only to watch the teenager make her way to the sink and fix her sister’s bottle. When she was done, she took the baby back.
“I’ll give it to her. She doesn’t like you. You’ll make her get sick all over again.”
And then she’ll die. . . . The awful, illogical thought flew through Nealy’s mind. “I’ll—I’m just going to take a little walk.”
Lucy was feeding the baby and she didn’t respond.
The night air felt like velvet as Nealy stepped outside. She gazed around and saw that the campground was set in a small clearing beneath a rim of foothills faintly visible in the moonlight. She heard the muted sound of a radio coming from the next campsite, smelled an old charcoal fire. Dim yellow bug lights mounted on crude poles threw spots of weak illumination over the gravel road. She walked toward it, only to hesitate. Something was wrong, and it left her feeling unbalanced and disoriented.
Then she realized what it was. There were no soft footsteps behind her, no quiet murmur of voices whispering her whereabouts into a two-way radio. For the first time in years, she was by herself. Contentment seeped through her, right down to her bones.
She’d barely gone ten yards, however, before a familiar voice intruded on her solitude. “Already running away from our happy home?”
She turned to see a dark figure sprawled at a picnic table set into the trees. He was sitting backward on the bench, leaning against the table with those long legs stretched out and the root beer can in his hand.
Even as she felt herself drawn to him, she realized she knew nothing about him other than the fact that he disliked children and worked in a steel mill. There were questions she needed to ask, ones she hadn’t been able to pose around Lucy.
“Am I likely to get myself arrested for being with you?”
He rose and began to walk beside her.
With his height and muscular build, he might have been Secret Service, but he didn’t feel safe like the agents she was used to. Instead, he felt like danger.
“What makes you ask that?”
“For a man who wants to travel quickly, you did a good job of keeping us off the turnpike.”
“I don’t like turnpikes.”
