The Dark Light (2 page)

I paused. What could I say? That Pete was probably off drinking again, infecting the world with his soul-sapping outlook on life, when he’d known I’d had to work? Or that I’d arrived home from school to find Jay alone again at the house with the door unlocked? And Onaly Crossing less than a ten-minute drive on the highway . . .

“I just don’t like leaving him alone with—”

Mrs. Baker put her hand to my arm. “He’s welcome here, Mia. Anything you need. Any time. Just call.”

I offered her a relieved smile. “Thanks.”

Jay burst into the hallway with Stacey Ann glued to his side. “Ready,” he said.

I grabbed him in a headlock, then marched him through the yard to the car. Rusty started on the first turn.

“That isn’t why it starts, you know,” said Jay, his feet up against the dashboard.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I replied, innocently.

“That stupid tapping thing you do. It’s just a
car
.”

I revved the engine, grinning ear to ear. “Hasn’t failed me yet.”

“Yet,” said Jay. He waved to Stacey Ann as we pulled away.

By the time we arrived home, I was ready to call it quits. Only homework waited on my desk. Jay had other plans. We’d no sooner entered the kitchen than the Wii was out of his pack.

“Hold on one minute,” I said. “Homework.”

“Did it at Stacey Ann’s.”

I’d heard that one before.

He tossed a piece of paper onto the kitchen table. It was a detailed pencil sketch of our house. Memories flashed as soon as I saw it. It was the same assignment I’d had when I first moved to Crownsville. I remembered it clearly.

My art teacher, Mrs. Shankles—Cankle Shankles—had instructed us to draw our homes. I’d sat in the yard with my sketch pad. A few lines here, a few lines there. Porch. Windows. A couple of bushes, a couple trees. How easy was that?

But Cankles had been far from impressed. “You haven’t tried, Mia,” she’d said. “There’s no detail. No
life
. I know you have more in you.”

I don’t think she ever realized how deeply I took those words.

I’d hid my grade from Pete, not that he’d been remotely interested. Then I’d taken my sketch pad back to the yard. I’d sat. I’d looked. I’d tried to
feel
the house and its land. Over the next two hours, I’d drawn it again. And Mrs. Shankles had been right; there was so much more to see. The wraparound porch sank to the right. The warped white siding had faded to gray. The green paint on the shutters was chipped. The walnut tree. The gravel driveway. I’d never noticed how much detail there was here. But from then on, I saw it. From then on, I stopped thinking about Grandma and Des Moines and started living in Crownsville.

I looked at Jay’s drawing. He’d already noticed what had taken me so long to see.

“That’s awesome, Jay,” I said proudly, but tactfully. Jay wasn’t big on fuss. “You should go to art camp this summer.”

Jay was rifling through the snack drawer, completely unimpressed. “Art camp?” he blurted. “Too busy with baseball, Mia.”

I laughed. Jay was a kid who knew exactly where he was going in life. I often wished I was more like him.

I waited at the kitchen table, the picture in my hand as Jay headed up to his room. There was a lot I didn’t get about the world, but nothing shocked me more than what had happened to Jay. Jay’s mom was my dad’s second wife, and Jay had lived with them until Dad bailed again and the wife took revenge on him by dumping her four-year-old son with Pete! I mean, where do these people come from? At least Jay had our dad for a time, I guess. I wouldn’t have known the guy if he’d hit me over the head with a mallet.

So, though Jay was my dad’s kid and, therefore, not actually Pete’s blood, Pete had taken him in too, and I’d gained the brother I’d always wanted. Don’t get me wrong. Pete was pretty much useless. But he had saved Jay from a life without family, and he’d given me a family in the process.

I placed Jay’s picture on the table, then headed for the shower to wash the scent of Mickey’s fried chicken out of my
hair. I’d barely settled in to study when the sound of Pete’s truck brought me to my bedroom window.

Pete stood in the driveway, takeout bag in one hand, six-pack in the other. He looked out over the moonlit cornfields that bordered our land. His shoulders were back, his chin was up, and though I couldn’t see his face, I knew his gaze swept those fields.

I frowned. It was so unlike Pete, who invariably stumbled when he arrived home this late. I quickly scanned the cornfield. There was nothing there. Yet Pete remained fixated on the horizon. I remembered the light and the shadow in front of Rowe.

“Maybe we’re both cracking up,” I said to myself. But I wondered if I wasn’t the only one to have seen something strange that night.

T
he next morning, I found Pete staring at the phone on the kitchen table. He looked like he hadn’t slept.

“Where were you yesterday?” I asked.

“Omaha.”

Better not to ask. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know the details.

I headed for the fridge. Two twenty-dollar bills were pinned beneath the magnet on the door. Right away, I knew they were mine. I always gave something toward the housekeeping fund and Pete always gave it back. Whatever Pete’s problems, he had money. I didn’t know where he got it, and I didn’t ask. All I knew was that there was food in the fridge, and that Jay got
everything he needed. He also got a lot of what he wanted.

Making no comment about the cash, I grabbed a yogurt and a spoon, then returned to the table. I sat across from Pete, hating that I was about to sound like a broken record. “Only, you didn’t tell me you’d be out,” I said. “Jay was here alone when I got back from school. He’d left the door unlocked. I had to call the Bakers. Again. You know how things are right now.”

Pete didn’t look up. “Shotgun’s in the closet,” he muttered.

Yeah. Like I’d blow some guy’s brains out. Would Jay? Maybe. I didn’t know which was a scarier thought.

I pushed the yogurt aside. “I need to talk to you about this weekend.”

Pete looked up. He had the brightest blue eyes of any man I knew, but that morning they were definitely gray. His hair was dark, like mine, but it was so greasy that it appeared to be black. He’d probably once been a good-looking man. He still was, I guess, just disheveled, a little battered around the edges. He certainly looked older than thirty-eight. Right now, he looked about seventy.

“The guys are heading to the lake,” I said, “but I can’t go if you’re not here for Jay.”

“I’ll be here.”

Far too easy.

“I mean
really
here for him—not just present in some form or other.”

“I’ll be here,” he said. “We’ll do something. Bowling, maybe.”

Pretty sure I’d heard right, I subtly sniffed for booze, but came away with coffee.

“Then I’ll tell Willie,” I said. It sounded more like a question than a statement.

I took my uneaten yogurt to the sink, all the time keeping one eye on Pete should he keel over from what, for him, was an overabundance of humanity. He’d gone back to staring at the phone. There were two crumpled lines in his forehead. They only appeared when Pete was deep in thought.

“Is everything okay?” I asked, wondering what had brought on this strange mood. Maybe he’d lost money, maybe he’d been in a fight.

“Another kid disappeared yesterday.”

Wow. Pete caring about something other than his drinking buddies.

“I heard,” I replied. “Onaly Crossing. Why do you think I’m so freaked about Jay? I mean, seriously, Pete. Onaly’s ten minutes—”

“In Crownsville.”

I spun back from the sink.
“What?”

Pete again looked up. His eyes sparked with an emotion I couldn’t pin down. When the muscles in his jaw tensed, I recognized it as anger.

“Last night,” he said. “Alex Dash.”

That couldn’t be right. “Alex Dash from Jay’s
class
?”

“Do you know any others?”

The Dashes ate at Mickey’s every Thursday—today. I pictured them in their usual booth by the window. They always got the chicken special, family style. Four pieces of white meat, all you could eat of the dark. Mashed potatoes. Green beans. Cinnamon rolls. They always seemed so happy. . . .

My stomach turned, the news slowly sinking in. “Two in one day. The kidnapper must have come here from Onaly. What about the other kid, Pete? What did he do with him?”

Pete didn’t offer a theory. He pointed to the phone. “Sheriff Burkett called late last night for volunteers. We’ve been scouring the town, the river, the Ridge. There’ll be a real search now that the cops have rolled in.”

I’d heard the phone ringing late last night but had just thought it was one of Pete’s cronies trying to lure him back to the bar. Now I remembered the patrol cars on the corner of Birch and Main. Maybe they’d known that the kidnapper was cruising our streets. Thank God I’d sent Jay to the Bakers’. It was far too easy to imagine him here alone. The door unlocked. Jay, as always, oblivious to everything but his Wii. Over the sound of his game, he wouldn’t hear some psycho inch into the house, checking the kitchen, grabbing a knife. . . .

My skin cold, I pictured Jay in Alex’s place, locked in some guy’s trunk. “I should stay home and help search.”

Pete shook his head. “You get off to school, Mia. You need to keep up those grades. You’re gonna have college to think about soon.”

College? I couldn’t think of anything but Jay, the Dashes, and the Thursday night chicken special.

“What do we tell Jay?”

Pete sighed. “Principal Shankles is calling an assembly this morning.”

Cankle Shankles—
the art teacher who’d taught me to open my eyes. I couldn’t think of a better person to break the news to those kids.

I patted Pete’s shoulder on my way out of the room. Now that the initial shock had worn off, I was touched that he’d been thinking about things like taking Jay bowling, my grades, college. . . . I turned back at the door. “About this weekend, Pete.”

Pete made a small smile and that handsome face appeared, eradicating his usual weariness.

“You go to the lake, Mia,” he said. “I won’t let Jay out of my sight. I promise.”

* * *

Only the arrival of the president himself could have knocked Alex’s name off the lips of the students at Crownsville High.

“They’re talking about a curfew,” Willie announced. “For
everyone
. Us too!”

We were camped in the cafeteria with our boy buddies, Kieran and Seth. Seth’s family lived next door to Willie’s, so they often shared rides to school. He was also totally besotted with Willie. I couldn’t picture them ever getting together; it’d be too twisted, a bit like dating your brother. Besides, they weren’t what you’d call a great physical match. Seth was a little shorter than me, maybe five-five, five-six. On the other hand, Willie, our reigning queen of volleyball, at six-one, with long black hair, always made a statement.

Willie and I had been friends since my first day of school in Crownsville when we’d been teamed together during Music and Movement to depict winter. As the other teams had melted their way through summer and frolicked through spring, Willie and I had been struck with a hysterical fit of the giggles. Immediately banished to “time-out corner,” it was a friendship formed from solidarity. Not much had changed since then.

After hearing her news, Seth all but collapsed in his seat. He covered his head with his hands, his eyes on Willie, as always. “Curfew? But this guy’s after
kids
.”

“If it is a guy,” said Willie. “It could be a child slavery ring.”

“Or one screwed-up psycho who’s clearly not interested in us. They’re not putting me under curfew. No way.”

“The cops obviously know something they’re not saying,”
added Kieran. He leaned back in his seat. “I wonder if anyone’s mentioned it to the new kid.”

Willie bolted upright, and a smug grin inched across Kieran’s face. Willie’s reaction was exactly what he wanted.

“Excuse me,” she said, cupping her ear for news. “New kid?”

“Started this morning,” Kieran replied.

As far as gossip was concerned, Kieran was the worst kind of fishwife. He was known around school as the Skunk, on account of a patch of gray on the side of his black hair. He touched the patch whenever he was about to spill a juicy secret, just as he was right now.

Intrigued, I leaned in to him. “Which grade?”

“Ours,” said Kieran, “though Raquel Somers said he looked older. Apparently, he’s related to the Crowleys. He’s staying with Old Man Crowley down by the river.”

“In that old shack?” asked Willie. “Crowley’s completely insane. And here I was thinking no one could have a family worse than Mia’s.”

I blew her a kiss.

“You should take him cookies, Mia. Welcome him to the Dysfunctional Families of Crownsville Club.”

“We’ve already reached our membership quota,” I replied, then quickly changed the subject: “Is this curfew going to affect the lake this weekend?”

Willie threw up her hands. “I forgot to tell you about the lake!”

“That’s what I love about you, Willie,” said Kieran. He waved at the neighboring table of freshmen who were now staring at us. “Understatement.”

“The lake’s off,” said Willie, and stuck out her tongue. “Andy can’t get his dad’s boat, which means none of his group wants to go. They’re heading to the Ridge instead.”

I didn’t miss the look that passed between Kieran and Seth.

“So what’s that got to do with us?” said Seth.

“I don’t know what it’s got to do with
you
,” Willie replied. “But it means the rest of us are Ridge bound too.”

“Because Andy Monaghan says so?”

“Because Mr. Monaghan and Ms. Mia have to hook up before he graduates. It’s fated. The stars are aligning. This is the time when they finally get together.”

I looked at Seth and shook my head. “She’s delusional.”

“Or right,” Willie replied. She pulled from her bag a dog-eared paperback, one of the many soppy romances she devoured on a regular basis. “Meant to be,” she said, and waved the book,
Destiny’s Dilemma
, beneath my nose.