Burn(23)

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re just lucky most of my stuff is still in here.”

Malcolm looked in the small cavity behind the seats of Nelson’s truck. The entirety of Nelson’s belongings barely even matched Malcolm’s, carried in the bag he’d run with, though now minus a hat.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Why’d you run?” Nelson demanded.

Why did you? Malcolm wondered. Nelson had followed him without a pause, had raced away in the truck like the road was on fire.

“Because,” Malcolm said.

“Not an answer.”

Once more something about the other boy startled Malcolm into telling the truth when he knew he really shouldn’t.

“Because I didn’t want to have to kill them.”





Seven


FROME—THE TOWN, her town—was convinced Deputy Kelby had been murdered. His car had been found, parked near the diner where Jason worked, but he had, so far, not returned to the home where his elderly mama had spent the last three days crying for him, if maybe not as hard as one might expect. Kelby’s logbook was more than two weeks out of date, so that was no help, and he’d told no one where he was going or what he was doing on the night he vanished.

Sheriff Lopez was pulling his hair out. He’d even talked to Jason briefly, as a quick add-on to an interview with Al when Jason was at work the next night (in a clean shirt). Lopez asked Al if he’d seen Kelby park his car, Al had said no, had called to the back, “You see him, Jason?” and Jason had only had to lean out a door and truthfully say, “No, I didn’t see him park the car.” Lopez had quickly moved on to those citizens of Frome who had way more reason to have a grudge against Kelby than skinny Jason Inagawa.

Town feeling was that Kelby’s body was probably buried somewhere deep in the forest that enclosed Frome on every side. Someone had finally had enough of Kelby’s hateful nonsense and put him out of his—and no doubt their—misery.

Only one person came close to suspecting anything near the truth.

“Tell me again how you fell?” Gareth Dewhurst asked his daughter over dinner.

“Against the counter,” she said, wincing at the pain in her jaw. It was bruised and obviously swollen. She hadn’t slept after getting home the night it happened (how could she? She might never sleep again) and made sure to rise before her father, listening for him to start downstairs for breakfast. At which point, she dropped herself to the ground as hard as she could, calling out.

He’d come running in, helped her up, taken her to the doctor, who’d confirmed her jaw wasn’t broken, though she was likely to lose another one of her back teeth. She’d been off school since. Jason had delivered her homework each day. He told her what the town was thinking, and she told him to try not to panic, that it was an accident, that Kelby was going to kill him, that there was no evidence anyway since Kazimir had . . .

Well, that was the other thing. She’d been at home three days and the whole time, her father, perhaps suspiciously, perhaps not, had never given her a single chance to be alone with the dragon. The one time she’d tried to sneak out at night, she’d found her father in the kitchen, reading a newspaper by lantern light.

“Can’t sleep?” he’d asked.

“No,” she said. “Bad dreams.”

He hadn’t looked up from a newspaper she knew for a fact he’d already read over dinner that evening. “And what might a girl like you be having bad dreams about?”

“Mom,” she’d said, which was true, actually. She’d dreamt her mother had been swallowed by a dragon, though a more familiar red than the blue still working their back fields. She wanted her mother so much right now, somehow even more keenly than she had in the two years since her death, if that was even possible.

Her father hadn’t said anything to this, just let her go back to bed after a glass of milk, but she hadn’t tried to go out again since then.

And now this, the third day in. “Tell me again how you fell?”

“Just clumsy, I guess.” She’d made them both baked beans, as it was about the only thing she could comfortably eat.

“Tripped over your own feet?”

“Must have.”

“And bashed your face against the counter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nearly breaking your jaw and losing a tooth.”

“I must have swallowed it.”

“But making no discernible damage to the countertop itself.”

“Solid oak.”

“Solid oak,” he said quietly. He took a bite of beans, then he stood and walked his plate to the sink.

Where he raised his fist and smashed it into the counter, easily breaking a board out of the top and cracking another. “Except it’s not, is it?” he said, not looking at her. “We’re not people who can afford solid oak anything.”

She swallowed, forgetting the pain of it until she was halfway through. “Daddy—”

“Do I really want to know why you’re lying to me, daughter?”

She was surprised that it was a serious question. She saw him itching his fingers together, for all the world like he wanted to hit something again. Not her, but something specific.