Of the Trees(30)
“Sure,” she agreed, settling back into her seat. “And then you can tell me what’s going on.”
Her dad pulled into the local pizza place. There were only a handful of cars in the parking lot. It was impossible to find the place empty. Someone was always gathering there. It was the usual hotspot for the town’s volunteer firemen and ambulance personnel. Their respective stations were less than a mile away, and so it must have been the easiest place to pull into. Even as Cassie was unbuckling, the ambulance pulled alongside them. Three guys and one girl, all dressed in navy blue, jumped from the various doors. A collective groan went up as their radios chimed, a voice cutting through the static to dispatch them to their next call.
“I’ll run in and pay,” one of the younger guys said, dashing through the door that Cassie’s dad held open for him. He thanked him as he went through, throwing a twenty-dollar bill on the counter with a rushed, “Keep the change!”
Cassie stood to the side, letting the young EMT with the swinging, brown paper bag rush past her. The rest were already in the ambulance, waiting to pull out. Just as the man holding the bag of grinders pulled the ambulance door open, a female voice sighed before saying, “Just once I’m gonna eat this sandwich when it’s still hot,” and then the door slammed shut. The ambulance pulled out, lights flashing and the slow whine of the siren warming up. The noise started as a single tone—a high pitch squeal—that sang out and then tumbled over itself into a rhythmic alarm.
“Poor guys,” Patrick murmured, waving at the retreating vehicle.
“Poor whoever they’re going to see,” Cassie added. The sirens petered off in the distance, muffled completely when Cassie let the door to the restaurant swing shut behind her.
They ordered slices from the ready-made pies, and Cassie let her father finish his first slice, mushroom and pepperoni, before she started.
“What’s going on, Dad?” Cassie asked bluntly. He picked up his next slice of pizza, folded the crust between his fingers, and took a bite. Patrick chewed slowly, not looking across the table at his daughter until he had swallowed. He looked around, his voice low when he finally answered.
“The eyes on the side of the school,” he started, faltering when Cassie caught his eye. He paused again, looking hesitant.
“Dad, c’mon,” Cassie urged. He gritted his teeth and put his pizza back on the greasy, paper plate in front of him.
“It wasn’t paint, Cass,” he murmured. “It was blood.”
Everyone knew by the next morning. A low current of excitement and fear pulsed through the school. Whispers sprang from the corners.
“Pig’s blood.”
“No, I heard sheep!”
“Real, human blood. My cousin told me a Red Cross was broken into.”
The speculations were wild and endless, but the strangest thing was that no one seemed to know who had done it.
In a small town like theirs, it was hard to keep secrets. Everybody knew everybody, and that included the little old ladies in the corner market and the elementary school kids playing kickball in the park. If you messed up, someone saw, and that person typically already had your mom on speed dial and knew what time would be best to get a hold of her.
Even the more subversive acts—the vandalism or teenage drinking, even the occasional baggie of pot that got hidden in the lockers, even the things no one wanted the parents to know—your peers knew anyway. They may not rat you out or get you in trouble, but someone always knew who was behind it.
Cassie knew about the time Aaron Phillips had freaked out, shoving his lunch bag (containing his experimentation with pot brownies) into his best friend’s gym locker because he heard there may be locker checks. Will Nonken had smelled like chocolaty pot all afternoon, and everyone knew why, but no one told on Aaron. When Lessie Madison got drunk before last year’s prom, showing up with blood-shot eyes, Miss Browning shoved sunglasses at her and told her firmly to keep them in place that night. Everyone knew; no one cared.
But no one knew who the local artist was. A few people had been asked. Ami Henderson would have been a safe bet—she was an amazing artist, and her bag was always spattered with fresh paint—but Cassie heard her asked in the halls. She had denied it, shaking her head and shrugging in confusion when asked who she thought it was.
The eyes lingered. They had been scrubbed from the side of the building and off the stalls in the girls’ lavatories, which is why the police had them cordoned off, but still, they lingered. Cassie found them drawn in red sharpie on the desks in her chemistry class. A couple of freshman had inked each other’s biceps with crude versions of them. The mirrors in the gym bathrooms were all decorated with eyes, just at eye level too, so that Cassie couldn’t look into the mirrors without the red orbs getting transposed over her own.
The whole incident left the school feeling slightly unhinged, manic in a way. There was a low undercurrent of energy pulsing through the student body, leaving them all feeling displaced because no one knew what to do with it.
Laney had been acting strange. She didn’t seem fazed when Cassie told her the paint was actually blood. She had stiffened slightly, her shoulder bunching with tension, but then she let out a breath and nodded, accepting it. But it was more than just her casualness about the blood spattered on the side of their school. She was retreating, pulling away, or shutting down, and Cassie couldn’t understand why. Or maybe she could, and she just didn’t like it.