He turned and looked back the way he’d come from. Over the swells of the land he could see the convertible half a mile back. The young man had twisted around to stare at him. His face was a tiny white circle in the sun.
You can’t get away from me. It’s not even worth trying.
“Please,” Owen said.
You know what I want. You know what I’ll do to you if I don’t get it. I can still make it worse. I can keep you in the soup as long as I want to. Take a few minutes to think about it. Our friend isn’t going anywhere.
The voice went silent.
There was no sound but the low rumble of the quad’s engine and the ringing of blood in Owen’s ears.
When he breathed in, he could still taste the air inside the coffin. Like the smell when a rat died in a wall somewhere in the house, and there was no way to find it to get rid of it. He looked at his hands. They were clean and dry, but he could still feel the thick liquid coating them, dripping through the gaps between his fingers.
He slid off the quad and sank to the ground next to it. He crossed his arms and gripped his own shoulders and began rocking forward and back at the waist. He hadn’t done that since he was very young—kids at school had teased him to death for it—but here it was, back again. He didn’t fight it.
*
When he rolled the quad back up to the convertible and cut the engine, the kid didn’t say anything. He only stared at Owen, his eyes wary.
Owen went around to the passenger door. The claw hammer was there in front of the seat. He leaned down and got it, and when the kid saw it, a kind of nervous hope seemed to fill his face. Like Owen had found a tool to help him with after all. Then the kid met his eyes and saw what was there, and he drew away like a chained-up animal. He made sounds that weren’t quite words—or if they were words, they might have been please and no. His bound-together feet slipped out from under him and he thrashed his body around.
Owen stood above him with the hammer down at his side.
“I don’t mean it,” he said.
*
He rode back up to the spot two days later, when Grandpa went into town for brake pads. The convertible was gone, and where the young man had bled, there was only a scoured patch of ground. A good bit of the desert topsoil had been raked up and taken away.
Three months had passed since then. Every night at bedtime, the Gravel Man visited and made the girls in Owen’s memory come to life. It was always good—there was no denying that—but whenever the nice feelings faded and he was alone again, the same thoughts always came to him. They circled like ghosts in the dark of his bedroom.
Where was all this going?
What was it for?
To those questions, the Gravel Man never offered any answers.
PART TWO
BETA
This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.
—GEOFFREY CHAUCER
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was raining when Holly Ferrel arrived at Amarillo Children’s Medical Center. The car pulled under the overhang at the entrance, and two of the three men with her—the two seated on the passenger side, front and back—got out fast. From her position in back, Holly couldn’t see their heads, but she knew they were sweeping their gazes over the geography surrounding the hospital’s entry. She could see their hands ready to go under their suit coats for the sidearms holstered there. She could see their posture, tense and wired, the embodiment of her own anxiety.
One of them gave the roof a double pat with his fingertips; only then did the driver put the car in park.
“Clear,” the driver said to her. He said it the way a ticket taker at a movie theater might say “Enjoy the show.” Every step in the process was routine—to him and to her. It’d been going on for weeks.
One of the others came around and opened the door for her. The two of them followed her as far as the entrance, then took up positions outside as she went in. She liked to tell herself the fear stayed outside with them. That it was like an overcoat she could hang up at the door and not think about again until it was time to go home. Some days it almost worked.
Sixty seconds later, and five stories up, Holly passed through another door. An engraved steel sign beside it read ONCOLOGY.
She didn’t go straight to her office. She nodded hello to the nurses on duty at the station, crossed to the north-wing hallway, and went to the third doorway on the right. The door was wide open. Even before reaching it, she saw the dim room inside strobing with familiar light. She came to it, leaned in, and knocked on the frame.
Ten feet away, Laney Miller looked up from the video game on her laptop. Her eyes brightened.
“Hi, Holly.”
Laney’s voice, soft and raspy, reminded Holly of a teenaged girl who’d just spent a week singing lead in the high school musical. For a second the awful math swam into Holly’s thoughts: the odds against Laney ever doing that. The odds against her becoming a teenager at all. Holly buried the notion before her face could register it.
She crossed to the bed, leaned down, and kissed Laney’s forehead beneath the pink knit cap that kept her scalp warm.