Panic(73)

“What’s Bishop got to do with it?” she asked sharply, cutting him off.

“Everything,” Dodge said. He drained his Coke glass of ice, enjoying the burn on his tongue. “He wants you to be safe.”

Heather looked away again. “How do I know I can trust you?” she said finally.

“That’s the thing about trust.” He crunched an ice cube between his teeth. “You don’t know.”

She stared at him for a long second. “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll do it.”

Outside, at the edge of the parking lot, the trees were dancing in the wind. Some of the leaves had already begun to turn. Gold ate up their edges. Others were splotched with red, as though diseased. Less than three weeks until Labor Day and the official end of summer. And only a week until the final showdown. After saying good-bye to Heather, Dodge didn’t go home straightaway, but spent some time walking the streets.

He smoked two cigarettes, not because he wanted them, but because he was enjoying the dark and the quiet and the cool wind, the smells of autumn coming: a clean smell, a wood smell, like a house newly swept and sprayed down. He wondered whether the tiger was still loose. It must be; he hadn’t heard anything about its capture. He half hoped he would see it, and half feared he would.

All in all, the conversation with Heather had gone easier than he’d expected. He was so close.

Rigging the explosion, he knew, would be the hard part.





MONDAY, AUGUST 22





heather

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE TIGERS’ ESCAPE, HEATHER was so anxious she couldn’t sleep. She kept expecting Krista to show up with some court order, demanding that Lily return home. Or, even worse, for the cops or the ASPCA to show up and haul Anne off to jail. What would she do then?

But as more days passed, she relaxed. Maybe Krista realized she was happier with her daughters out of the house. That she wasn’t meant to be a mother. All the things Heather had heard her say a million times. And although the cops floated in and out, still trying to locate the second tiger, still patrolling Anne’s property, and the ASPCA showed up to verify the conditions of the other animals and make sure they were all legal, Anne wasn’t clapped in handcuffs and dragged away, as Heather had feared.

Heather knew, deep down, that her situation at Anne’s was temporary. She couldn’t stay here forever. In the fall, Lily had to go back to school. Anne was floating them, paying for them, but how long would that last? Heather had to get a job, pay Anne back, do something. She kept clinging to the hope that Panic would fix it: that with the money she earned, even if she had to split it with Dodge, she could rent a room from Anne or get her own space with Lily.

The longer she stayed away from Fresh Pines, the more certain she became: she would never, ever go back there. She belonged here, or somewhere like it—somewhere with space, where no neighbors were crawling up your butt all the time and there was no shouting, no sounds of bottles breaking and people blasting music all night. Somewhere with animals and big trees and that fresh smell of hay and poop that somehow wasn’t unpleasant. It was amazing how much she loved making the rounds, cleaning out the chicken coop and brushing the horses down and even sweeping the stalls.

It was amazing, too, how good it felt to be wanted somewhere. Because Heather believed, now, what Anne had said to her. Anne cared. Maybe even loved her, a little bit.

Which changed everything.

Three days until the final challenge. Now that Heather knew how it would go down—that she would only be called on to lose in the first round of Joust, to Dodge—she felt incredibly relieved. First thing she was going to do with the money was buy Lily a new bike, which she’d been eyeing when they took a trip to Target the other day.

No. First she would give Anne some money, and then she would buy a bike.

And then maybe a nice sundress for herself, and strappy leather sandals. Something pretty to wear when she finally worked up the courage to talk to Bishop—if she did.

She fell asleep and dreamed of him. He was standing with her on the edge of the water tower, telling her to jump, jump. Beneath her—far beneath her—was a swollen rush of water, interspersed with bright white lights, like unblinking eyes pasted in the middle of all that black water. He kept telling her not to be afraid, and she didn’t want to tell him she was terrified, so weak she couldn’t move.

Then Dodge was there. “How are you going to win if you’re scared of the jump?” he was saying.

Suddenly Bishop was gone, and the ledge under her feet wasn’t metal, but a kind of wood, half-rotten, unstable. Boom. Dodge was swinging at it with a baseball bat, whittling away the wood, sending showers of splinters down toward the water. Boom. “Jump, Heather.” Boom. “Heather.”

“Heather.”

Heather woke up to doubleness—Lily whispering her name urgently, standing in the space between their beds; and also, like an echo, a voice from outside.

“Heather Lynn!” the voice cried. Boom. The sound of a fist on the front door. “Get down here! Get down here so I can talk to you.”

“Mom,” Lily said, just as Heather placed the voice. Lily’s eyes were wide.

“Get in bed, Lily,” Heather said. She was awake in an instant. She checked her phone: 1:13 a.m. In the hall, a small fissure of light was showing underneath Anne’s bedroom door. Heather heard sheets rustling. So she’d been woken too.