The Quarry Girls(81)

What was it Ant had said about Ed? With Ed, I don’t have to think at all. Same general thing Dad said about Jerome Nillson in high school. Except where was Ed?

“Hey, Heather,” Ricky said, like he’d been expecting me.

“Junie, get over here.” My voice was a croak.

A dozen feet separated her and Ricky from me. She took a shaky step forward, her movements wooden.

Ricky flexed, standing straighter. His hair was greased, styled like Ed’s, and the mustache he’d been growing was gone. His bowling-ball-hole eyes were sunken deeper than usual, like he hadn’t been sleeping. He wore his Pantown Panthers baseball shirt, cutoff shorts.

He looked like Ricky, but he wasn’t Ricky.

The boy who’d proudly shown me his train set, who’d brought Mrs. Brownie over every day for weeks when I was too scared of life to leave the house, who called me Head so we didn’t have to carry around the weight of pretending I was whole?

He was long gone.

“Junie Cash,” Ricky growled, “you’ll ignore your sister if you know what’s good for you.”

She stopped and grinned at him, Mom’s favorite coral lipstick speckling her teeth. Beneath the terror in her stretched lips, I recognized the bones of the smile we’d been practicing all summer.

“I was just telling Ricky that if they wanted to have a party out here at the cabin,” Junie said to me, her eyes locked on Ricky, her voice disconnected from her body, “I could cook for them. I’ve watched you cooking for the family, I told them, and so it would not be that much different for their friends. I told them I just needed to go to the store, to get some TV dinners.”

She turned that horror smile on me. “Do you want to go to the store with me, Heather? To get some TV dinners for them?”

Her raw fear, and even more so how desperately she was working to hide it, made me want to weep. She’d probably sneaked out here on her bike, thinking it’d be fun, like make-believe only better, dodging not only her nagging sister but also the secret agent in our living room. Creeping out past both of us to meet her crush at a cabin in the woods. Her grown-up crush who liked her red hair because it reminded him of his first girlfriend, and who’d abducted redheaded Beth McCain, and who’d killed the waitress in Saint Paul who I was willing to bet was also a redhead.

Junie couldn’t have known. She was just a girl, for all that she looked like a woman wearing robin’s-egg-blue eye shadow and Mom’s rouge and lipstick, her breasts barely contained by a ruffled yellow crop top that she must have stolen from my closet. I hadn’t had the courage to wear it, and here she’d chosen it for dress-up. She didn’t know Ricky and Ed weren’t playing. Where was Ed?

Ricky shifted, pushed off from the wall. “Screw going to the grocery store, little sister. I’ll tell you when you can leave.”

“The police are coming,” I lied, frantic to run forward and grab Junie. I felt around for the truth. “They know what you and Ant and Ed did to Maureen and Brenda.”

“I didn’t have nothing to do with Maureen,” Ant said from his chair by the bedroom door.

I bit back a sob. I’d been right.

Ricky took three strides over to Ant and smacked him so hard that Ant’s head bounced off the wall. Ant covered his bleeding nose, and his eyes watered, but he didn’t say a word, didn’t fight back.

“You keep your effing mouth shut, Dehnke.”

I lunged across the room and grabbed Junie. She started shivering as soon as I touched her, but she wouldn’t take her eyes off Ricky. He spun to face us.

I slid my hand into my purse and gripped the knife’s hilt, tasting the salt of fear-sweat on my lip, knowing even as I held the knife that I’d never have the courage to use it. I needed to think of some other way to get us out of here.

I thought of the bottle of pills in my purse. I’d been a fool, a child, to think I could trick Ed Godo into anything. My only hope was to get Junie out of this cabin before he showed up, and I’d need Ant’s help to do it. Ricky had left the building, anyone could see that, but Ant might still be in there somewhere.

“Ant, what were you planning to do out here with Junie?” I asked, inching toward the cabin door, pulling Junie with me.

A flutter of guilt attacked his face, like I’d hoped it would.

“Nothing,” he mumbled.

“Well, you better let us go,” I said. A crunch just outside the cabin made my heartbeat thud in my wrists. Was it Ed, returning? He wouldn’t toy with us, like Ricky had. He’d simply kill us. “If you do, I’ll tell your mom you did the right thing. I promise.”

“You’re never getting out of here,” Ricky said, stepping between Ant and me.

I shoved Junie behind me and dragged the knife out of my purse, holding it like a machete. Ricky didn’t know I was too chicken to use it. “You’re gonna let me and Junie go.”

Ricky laughed his dry, dead-leaf laugh. “Think I’m afraid of your kitchen knife after what Ed taught me?” His eyes lit up right before he leaped forward and punched me in the same shoulder I’d damaged falling in Nillson’s house. The knife clattered to the ground, followed almost immediately by my purse.

The Anacin bottle rolled out.

“Now we’re cooking with Crisco,” Ricky said, smiling at the bottle on the floor. “Time for the real men to play.”