43
Wyatt
“I told you why.” I try to act like everything is normal, like it’s not creepy at all. “He was a friend of my mom’s. She said to look him up. No big deal. If you don’t know anything about him, I’ll go.” I made like I was going to walk out.
I saw a flash of silver, a knife. Then, it was against my neck.
“Stop right there,” Carl’s voice said.
I did what I was told. I stopped. He signaled me to sit down on a dirty sofa. I sat.
“Now, listen you little punk.” Even in the dim light, I could see spit flying out his lips as he spoke. “We know you’re lying. Not just suspect. Know.”
“You couldn’t because there’s nothing—”
“Zach never went to school with your mother or anyone else around here. He came into town for a month or two. He did two things while he was here. One was work at the bar, and I think you know what the other thing was.”
Involuntarily, I nodded. He’d gotten Danielle pregnant. But why? Why would he come to town, specifically to meet one girl? Or maybe he left when he found out about her being pregnant. Except, judging from her diary, she’d never told him.
Carl nodded. “So you do know about Danielle.”
“Danielle’s dead. That’s all I know. I’m staying with a woman, her mother. You know that, of course.”
I was trying to play dumb, real dumb, but also, nice. Specifically, I was trying to be a kid you wouldn’t want to stab.
“She talks about Danielle all the time, so I got curious. That’s all.”
“That’s not all,” Henry said behind me. “The old lady, she wouldn’t have known about Zach unless Danielle told her. And Danielle wouldn’t have told her.”
Did these guys know Danielle? It sounded like it. “Okay, I found her diary. She talked about Zach. But the diary ended after she found out he skipped town.”
Now, I wondered, had he skipped town? Or had someone killed him? Had these guys killed him?
“I don’t know what happened to Danielle any more than you do. Any more than anyone does. Her poor mother . . .” I realized Mrs. Greenwood definitely hadn’t had anything to do with Danielle’s disappearance. “Her mother’s always crying about her, and I found the diary, so I thought this Zach guy might know something. That’s all. Obviously, if he’s d—gone, he doesn’t know.”
“We don’t care about Zach,” Carl said. “We want the daughter.”
“Daughter?” I tried to look confused.
“The daughter. The one you’ve been visiting. She’s hidden somewhere, and you know where she is.” Henry was there again, with his knife. They wanted Rachel. Would they really kill me to get to her?
I wasn’t telling them. I didn’t know what they wanted with Rachel, but I knew it wasn’t good. If they were looking for her because one of them was her long-lost grandpa, they wouldn’t have lured me here, and they wouldn’t be threatening murder.
I made my choice. I would do what I hadn’t done with Tyler and Nikki. I would be brave. They wanted Rachel for some bad reason, and I wasn’t going to let them have her.
I looked at Carl, felt the knife digging into my neck, and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I go out to ski with a girl named Astrid. That’s all.”
And then, I closed my eyes and waited.
But instead of the sound of a cut to the jugular, I felt a rough hand on my arm. Carl’s voice said, “Well, let’s see if you remember after a few hours downstairs.”
He grabbed me, opened a door I’d thought was a closet. Instead, there were stairs, leading to gray darkness. Henry took my other arm, and they frog-marched me down.