Wildefire (3 page)

For one haunting moment, seeing her reflection in Eve’s helmet, it had looked as if it were Ashline riding away on that motorcycle, a path of carnage and ill intentions in her wake.

When Ash arrived home after her meeting with Vice Principal Davis, the police cruiser was already waiting in the driveway. The female officer sitting inside the house with her parents looked alert and self-important, stoked at the prospect of finally being able to dispense some sweet justice. Ash couldn’t particularly blame her.

With Scarsdale, New York having one of the lowest crime rates in the country, the cops rarely saw much excitement beyond serving tickets to drivers who tried to beat the light, or chasing high teenagers through the woods behind the school. The opportunity to serve a warrant for the arrest of a “dangerous outlaw” like Ash’s sister was a welcome change of pace.

Of course Eve was nowhere to be found when the officer arrived. If Ash knew her sister, she was probably 16

halfway to Buffalo on her motorcycle by now. It could be months before they heard from her again—if at all.

After the officer departed, Ashline sat on the stairs with her knees hugged to her chest. Through the wrought iron balustrade, which felt like prison bars, she watched her father pull on his boots and her mother rifle through the closet. The Wildes, true to their endless fountain of good intentions, had decided to take the blue Rav4 to, hopelessly, search for Eve in the freez-ing rain. As terrible as it had been for the police to present them with Eve’s arrest warrant, it had been a bittersweet reminder that after three months without so much as a phone call or postcard, their delinquent daughter was still alive.

From this angle, under the hallway chandelier, Ashline could see how peppered with gray Thomas Wilde’s hair had grown over the last few months. Over the years, Ash had always remained oblivious to the gradual signs of aging shown by either of her adoptive parents. She even sometimes joked that since she and Eve had lived in the Wilde house all their lives, maybe they would inherit the good Wilde genes through osmosis. But in comparison to her father’s image in the large family portrait over the stairs, taken barely a year after the adoption, when Ash was only a toddler, it looked now as though the last fifteen years had finally ambushed the patriarch of the Wilde family.

Her father scooped his keys off the foyer table and 17

then fished around in the pockets of his khakis for the fourth time. “Wallet, wallet . . .”

“Dad,” Ash called down to him. “Back pocket.” She pointed to the lump on the back side of his khakis, and his panicked expression softened a few degrees as his hand settled on the billfold.

“You know, Ashline . . .” He slipped on his leather coat, which Ash had given him for his fiftieth birthday.

“We could use a third pair of eyes out on the road. Your grounding doesn’t have to start until afterward.”

Ashline’s hands tightened around the balusters.

“Thanks, but I’ll gladly opt for house arrest over ‘search party of three’ in the rain.”

Her father stepped over to the staircase so that they were face-to-face through the balustrade. “No one’s saying Eve hasn’t made enough mistakes for ten childhoods.

But she was always a good sister to you.”

There was some truth to that. Even after the poison of adolescence had set in and Eve had slowly grown carcinogenic to the people around her—her classmates, her friends, and eventually her parents—she had always retained her loyalty to Ashline. On days when Ash had returned home from school feeling trampled and down-trodden, she could always expect to find Eve in her bedroom doorway soon after. Some days Eve would even invade their mother’s liquor cabinet and have two mint juleps mixed and waiting for Ashline’s arrival home. The older they got, the more Ash could count on Eve to sense her moods from a distance, like a change in the wind.

18

That is, until Eve disappeared.

Ashline stood up. “Good sisters don’t leave in the first place. They don’t make their little sisters hang up missing-person flyers on every telephone pole from Brooklyn to Albany . . . like she was some sort of lost dog.” She started up the steps toward her room. “I’ll be damned if I do it again.”

“Ashline.”

Ash stopped. This time it was her mother, perched on the bottom stair.

“Ashline, please,” her mother repeated.

Ash opened her mouth to say no, but then she spotted the jacket clutched in Gloria Wilde’s hand. “What is that?” Ash demanded.

Her mother held it up. It was the orange and silver warm-up jacket that Eve had worn when she’d still been a gymnast. Ash hadn’t seen her wear it since she was thirteen, and it was at least a few years past fitting her.

“I thought I’d bring it,” her mother said slowly. “In case she was cold.”

Ashline didn’t know if it was the way the jacket trembled in her mother’s hands or the pleading look that she gave Ash, as if Ash were the only one who could bring her sister back. But she walked down the stairs, opened the closet door, and pulled out her own winter coat. “Here.” She delicately replaced the warm-up in her mother’s hand with the wool peacoat. “This will probably fit her better.”

Her mother pecked her on the cheek. Ash was grateful 19

that her mother didn’t cry until she was out the front door and walking to the car.

Ash stood at the glass door for a minute, until the red taillights of the car disappeared beyond the trees that framed their yard. No doubt her parents would stop at every diner, gas station, and motel they could find within a fifteen-mile radius.

Just like last time, they wouldn’t find her.

Curled up in her bedroom window seat with the lights off, Ash watched the rain splatter against the glass. For the second time that day, the weather matched her mood precisely—first the freak afternoon snowstorm, and now this midnight thundershower. She left the window open just a crack so that the patter of raindrops against the leaves could wash over her. She hoped she could cull some sense of relaxation out of the white noise, be cleansed by it, but Eve’s absence and her own weeklong suspension loomed over her instead.

Isolation. Ashline knew that being confined to the four cranberry-colored walls of her bedroom for the next month wasn’t the end of the world. The truth was that even if she had her run of the town she would still be numbingly alone. What few friends she had retained from middle school she’d lost quickly during the brutal transition from freshman to sophomore year.

She’d been replaced like an old tube of mascara when the social tectonic plates had made their great shift.

Rich Lesley, despite all his visible egocentricity, had served as a much-needed bandage, bringing with him 20

an entourage of substitute friends in the form of his fellow tennis players and their plus-ones. But now the bandage had been ripped off with a single flick of the wrist—or, in this case, Lizzie Jacobs’s tongue—and the wound of loneliness had sprung open anew.

And when romances and friendships went to hell, weren’t you supposed to fall back on family? She scoffed.

If family was supposed to be her safety net as she walked the tightrope of life, then Ashline’s “support system”

currently consisted of two parents appalled by the life choices of their children, and a sister who was wanted for assault and battery.

Ash sighed and opened her window wider. Moisture spattered her face as the raindrops splashed through the screen. It felt good just to feel
anything
at this point.

Considering that she had knocked out one of Lizzie’s teeth, there certainly were worse fates than a school suspension and a substantial grounding at home, but the loneliness was settling in.

In hopes of finding someone to call—
anyone
—Ash scrolled through three quarters of her cell phone’s contact list before she resigned herself to the fact that all her

“friends” were mutual through Rich. They were unlikely to be sympathetic, and even less likely to pick up the phone at all. With a growl Ash heaved the phone across the room. It landed, skittered, and remarkably remained intact even as it crashed into her metal wastebasket with a defeated clink.

Soon her adrenaline levels faded, and Ashline’s eyes 21

fluttered closed. She hugged her knees to her chest and placed her head near the window as she drifted off, lulled to slumber by the kiss of the raindrops against her cheek.

She hadn’t been asleep more than five minutes when the sound of female laughter echoed in through the window from the front yard.

Ashline’s eyes shot open. “Eve?” she said aloud, and peered through the window. The rain still came down in a steady drizzle, but she could see a silhouette at the end of the driveway, obscured in the darkness of the trees.

“Eve?” she repeated.

But then she heard a chorus of giggles and discerned two additional shadows darting among the bushes that lined the front walkway. It was the excited chatter of girls reveling in the thrill of doing something illicit and enjoying it far too much. And as one of the girls stepped into the halo of light from the nearest streetlamp, Ash caught sight of her battered but unmistakable mug.

Lizzie Jacobs.

As her vision adjusted to the dark, Ash observed that Lizzie was carrying something—a field hockey stick—that she tossed playfully from hand to hand. If Ashline’s ears could be trusted, then Lizzie’s partners in crime were her teammates Gabby and Alexis.

They probably weren’t there to sell Girl Scout cookies.

With a shout of glee Lizzie pranced up to the Wildes’

mailbox, an old wooden bird feeder that Ashline’s mother had refashioned with a hinge door and repainted in pastels.

22

Lizzie wheeled around, and the club end of the hockey stick struck the mailbox with a sharp
crack
that resounded across the yard. Channeling all of her rage from being knocked out twice in the same day, Lizzie made quick work of the refurbished bird feeder. Again and again her weapon came down, splintering the wood. Finally Lizzie launched a fierce kick that separated the mailbox from its post, and the already devastated bird feeder crashed to the driveway pavement.

Gabby joined Lizzie in dancing around the fallen mailbox, but Alexis lingered back.

Ash undid the clasps holding the screen window in place and pushed. It swung up and out, and she leaned out the window as far as she could without falling to the bushes below. If she filtered out the whisper of the rain against the leaves, she could just make out what the girls were saying.

Alexis kept looking frantically in the direction of the road. “Let’s get out of here,” the redheaded freshman pleaded to her friends. “The neighbors probably heard that.”

“Oh, grow some balls, Lexi,” Gabby said. “My mom just texted me to say the Wildes came by the inn looking for Eve. Nobody’s home here.”

Lizzie tipped her field hockey stick up on to her shoulder like a soldier cradling her rifle. “I haven’t even begun to claim my revenge yet,” she said. “The Wilde girls brought this on themselves.”

23

“Ash and Eve both deserve the worst,” Alexis agreed, tugging nervously at her hair. “I just want to make sure I don’t get booted off the team if we get caught. And besides, their parents live here too.”

“Their
parents
,” Lizzie snapped, “clearly raised two out-of-control self-entitled daughters from hell. They should be grateful that my dad is a dentist and I don’t need to sue.”

She stepped forward and prodded Alexis roughly with her finger. “This is a mandatory team bonding experience, and if you bail now, I’ll make sure Coach glues your ass to the bench this season. So what’s it going to be?”

After a period of silence during which she glanced between the two older girls, Alexis shrugged in consent.

“Okay, okay. Let’s just get in and out before the police show up.”

With that the girls disappeared out of Ashline’s view, vanishing somewhere in the direction of the garage. Ash cast a hesitant look at her cell phone, where it had landed next to the wastebasket. The smart thing would be to call the police. But curiosity overpowered reason, and this coupled with an intense desire to defend her house from the would-be intruders, so she picked up the phone, flipped it to silent, and dropped it into her pocket.

Ash ditched her moccasins and tiptoed out of the room, letting her socks mask her footsteps. Before she headed down the stairs, on a whim she grabbed a bottle of aerosol hair spray from the bathroom, wielding it in front of her like a gun.

24

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she could hear the faint sound of giggling from the side of the house.

Across the living room three shadows flickered past the windows, accompanied by a faint grating as one of the girls dragged her hockey stick along the siding. They were heading toward the backyard.

As soon as Ash heard their footsteps travel across the stone patio, she ducked behind the kitchen counter so they wouldn’t catch a glimpse of her through the slider door. She wasn’t ready to forfeit her element of surprise just yet. The motion-sensitive lights in the backyard buzzed on, projecting two silhouettes through the window and onto the back wall; so somebody had remained on the side of the house.

On her hands and knees Ash crawled across the floor until she reached the door that opened out into the side yard. With one hand perched on the doorknob and the other still clutching her can of hair spray, she gave herself a once-over and realized that her rabbit-covered pajama bottoms and pink tank top weren’t doing much to up her intimidation factor. Nothing she could do about that now . . . and getting caught should be enough to startle the mischievous girls.

Ash counted to three and marched out into the yard with cool intensity. The murmur of the heavy drizzle against the grass buffered the creak of the opening door, and for a few seconds Alexis remained oblivious to the angry girl crossing the yard toward her. She sat at the 25

picnic table, a can of spray paint in one hand and her field hockey stick across her lap. She wore a miserable pout and was visibly sickened, either by the thought of spraying graffiti on the wall in front of her or because she was now soaked to the bone outside instead of tucked into her safe, dry bed.