Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(90)

How much does the guy know, Luke wonders, besides the fact that Marty ordered him to watch over his home for the day?

As worry knits his expression, the guy stares past Luke, and that says his worry’s got nothing to do with Luke and everything to do with the subject of the question.

“She went off on her own, didn’t she? And Marty told you not to let her.”

“Something like that,” the guy grumbles. “She went up to the lake. Said she’d only be gone for a half hour.”

“How long’s it been?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“What’s she driving?”

“My Camaro.”

Lake Patrick is a quarter of the size of Nacimiento to the south, and it’s hardly a tourist destination even on the weekends, so he’s not surprised to see the guy’s battered white Camaro is the only car in the parking lot next to the boat launch on a Monday. And he’s not surprised to see Charley walking the narrow crescent of gravelly beach, which, like the lake itself, seems to appear out of nowhere amid the tinder-dry golden hills.

At the sound of his cruiser, she looks up, drops the stick she’s holding in her hand.

Only now does he realize how little real shelter his last-minute mission gives him. When their eyes meet, all the anger and embarrassment of their fight comes rushing back. She looks better, more well rested. But it also looks like her new store of energy has allowed her to retreat deeper inside herself after applying a thicker skin.

“Hey,” he says.

The same thing he said to her when he almost touched her in a sudden, unplanned way.

It wasn’t intentional, but she blinks and looks to the sand. Is she trying to avoid that little memory, too?

All things considered, hey is a pretty hard word to avoid, and if they actually end up speaking to each other again, maybe they’ll have to agree to just let that little moment between them go.

Or maybe he’s reading too much into this, into her. Maybe that little moment meant far more to him than it did to her.

“So I have some news,” he says.

“I’m listening.”

“It’s not Bailey. I haven’t heard anything from him yet.”

“OK.”

“It’s Graydon. They’re buying the resort.”

She’s so startled she seems to forget the tension between them.

“For what?” she asks.

He repeats what Mona told him moments before, putting special emphasis on the detail about the mayor’s office, because that makes the whole thing seem more real.

She doesn’t say anything for a while. Just stares out at the placid black water reflecting the few strands of cloud overhead. She’s pondering this news in some faraway place in her head, but she hasn’t asked him to leave, so maybe she’ll invite him to join her there in another second or two.

“Thanks,” she finally says, then turns her back to him and picks up her stick again.

“Thanks?”

“Yes. Thank you for bringing me this information. It’s very helpful. I will be resuming my treatment now.” She drags the stick through the gravel and sand at her feet.

“Oh, don’t be a . . .”

“A what? A woman who can remember two days ago?”

“Did it ever occur to you I might be afraid of you getting hurt?” he asks.

“Did it occur to you before you said all those shitty things to me?” she asks.

There’s some method to whatever she’s doing with the stick in the sand.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“None of your business. You’re out, remember?”

“Look, we were both a little out of line that night.”

“Oh, is that what you’ve decided, Dad?”

“Oh my God. I went to San Francisco State, for Christ’s sake. It’s not exactly a bastion of the patriarchy, all right? Can you stop talking to me like this?”

She turns, and for a second, he’s afraid she might throw the stick at him. “You called me Burning Girl, asshole, after a whole day of trying to prove you weren’t the guy you were in high school.”

“You know, maybe, just maybe, you could stop bringing up the way I was in high school every time I do something you don’t like.”

“Act different and I will.”

“All I did was say things you didn’t want to hear.”

“No, you had a meltdown. You had a meltdown because for three hours I was stronger than you were.”

“Stronger than I was? You were stronger than a speeding truck! Give me a break. So I freaked out. What do you expect me to do? Ask you to rob a bunch of banks with your bare hands?”

“I gave you a break, and you were a dick.”

“Well, that’s not when I had a meltdown, by the way.”

“So we agree it was a meltdown and not you being the voice of mansplainy reason?”

“Call it whatever you want. The point is, I didn’t freak out when I saw what the drug can do. I freaked out when you said you were going after a serial killer. Because I don’t want you to get hurt. And I don’t want you to get hurt because I . . .”

Shut up, fool.

At least it’s not Reggie’s voice this time. It’s his own.