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“What is it, Bru?” Kev prodded, his voice cautious.
“Petrie,” Bruno said hoarsely. “The cop, from Portland. He did genetic tests on those guys I, ah, fought, outside the diner. He says they’re my…” His voice caught on the word. “My siblings.”
Silence met his announcement. Every second of it burned like a lit fuse, crawling closer to that stick of dynamite that was himself.
“Jesus,” Sean murmured. “I thought our problems were weird.”
Kev twisted to stare at Bruno. “You know he’ll have my signal triangulated, right? He’ll pinpoint your location, if he hasn’t already.”
Bruno stared, still helpless.
“Why in God’s name did Julio give my number to a cop?” Kev muttered. “What was he thinking?” He turned to Bruno. “We’re barely a half hour from Cray’s Cove. Petrie is going to know that, real soon. There’s enough about all of us in the files for him to figure out where we’re going. You can’t go to Tam’s. You have to go a different direction.”
“They don’t know about Rosaline Creek,” Bruno argued.
“It’s just a matter of time,” Davy said. “Forget air travel. Get a car, get out of the state before the net falls.”
“Find that jewelry box, or you’ll be solving your mystery and conducting your love affair from inside a jail cell,” Kev finished.
“Manhunt?” Bruno stared around at them. “I can’t just disappear,” he protested. “I can’t do that to her! I have to see Lily!”
“No, you don’t.” Con’s voice was hard.“If you give a shit about her, you don’t. Man up. Do the hard thing. If nothing else, you’ll draw them away from her. And if she’s worth a damn at all, she’ll understand. We’ll look after her for you.”
Bruno’s whole body clamped like a fist around a scream of frustration. “Don’t give me your McCloud do-the-hard-thing macho bullshit,” he snarled. “I have to talk to her.”
He pulled up Aaro’s number again. The line was busy. Still. Jesus wept. Aaro was a pathological loner, socially challenged, completely uncommunicative. All the sudden, he’d decided to be chatty.
Bruno slunk down still deeper into the seat, and just repeated the call, at ten second intervals. Obsessively.
* * *
“No,no. With the pinkies. Work them into the outside bits…yeah, like that, and then…turn the whole thing inside out. Excellent!”
Rachel held up the correctly inverted cat’s cradle stretched out between her two hands, and beamed triumphantly. Lily grinned back, tickled that she’d remembered the sequence of knots she hadn’t done since the fifth grade. She used to do Jacob’s Ladder, too, but that attempt had turned into a snarl of shoelace that had them both giggling.
They’d reached a small hospital on the outskirts of the next town in good time. Val had been out the door with Tam in his arms, loping towards the door of the Urgent Care entrance before Lily even got her seat belt unbuckled. By the time the rest of them had gotten Rachel’s shoes and jacket onto her and trooped inside, Tam and Val had long since disappeared into the ER’s inner sanctum.
And at that point, there was nothing left to do but find a row of benches, hunker down, and think of ways to keep Rachel occupied. They’d left in far too much of a hurry to think of toys, books, dolls, puzzles, and kids’ TV shows streamed on a smartphone did not hold Rachel’s interest for more than a few minutes. Zia Rosa was no help, sitting there with her eyes squeezed shut, muttering prayers. Aaro was even less help, surprise surprise. He paced around their benches like a chained wolf, muttering savagely into his cell. “…of course not…if you ladies hadn’t insisted on haring off to Seattle…oh, for Christ’s sake…nobody’s blaming anybody for anything! …yeah, just get back here! We’re sure as hell not going anywhere…”
The floor show had been for her to devise, so Lily picked a lace out of her shoe, and started teaching Rachel to play Cat’s Cradle.
Aaro was on the phone with Edie for the second time, trying to explain the fastest route to Rosaline Creek. It was clear from the tone of his voice that the stress level did not help their mutual comprehension one little bit. A nurse walked in, carrying a clipboard. She was a young, dark haired woman in green scrubs, pretty in a fresh, scrubbed sort of way. She scanned the room with a thoughtful frown, and her eyes settled on them. “Are you the folks who came in with Tamara Steele?”
Aaro stopped pacing and snapped his phone shut. “Is she OK?”
The woman glanced down at her clipboard. “She’s stabilized,” she said, her voice careful. “We’re doing all we can.”
Rachel’s hands dropped into her lap, still tangled with her shoelace cat’s cradle. She burst into tears.
Lily pulled Rachel onto her lap. Tucked the curly black head under her chin so that waving fuzzy black fronds tickled her nose. “It’ll be OK,” she whispered to Rachel. Wanting so badly for it to be true.
But who better than she knew how untrue it could be? Rachel knew too. All of them did, even Aaro. She didn’t know Aaro’s story, but she didn’t need to. She knew he had one. She could feel it, vibing off him. All of them knew about stories with bad endings.
Just then, Zia Rosa concluded her cycle of prayers and opened her eyes. They widened as she saw the nurse. “Ehi!” she burst out. “But you are the nice lady from the baby store! How are you?”
The nurse looked blank for a moment, and then her face lit up. “Oh, wow! Yes, it’s you! How nice to see you again! What a coincidence!”
“And how are little Hayden and little Phillip?” Zia’s face lit with a sentimental smile. “I met her at the baby store in the mall,” she explained to Lily. “With her twins. Boy and girl. Sweetest littlebimbi,looked just like Bruno and Magda when they were little. My goodness, you didn’t say you were a nurse, too! You must be a busy woman!”
