He steered her toward the back wall so they wouldn’t be in full view of the neighbor in the brown house, and they both pressed themselves close to the siding near a window. For a long while they just breathed, settling their hearts, until Everett finally nodded.
“I’ll look,” he whispered, braver now that his heart was pumping hard. He eased his face just far enough over to see into the house with one eye. “Kitchen. It looks empty.”
Josephine popped up next to him to look too. “Lights are off.”
They tiptoed to the next window to look, then dared to slide around the side of the house. Every window showed dark and unoccupied rooms. A few minutes after they arrived, they were at the side door. The wooden interior door stood open, and only a storm door protected the home.
He reached for the handle.
“You’re not going in, are you?” Josephine whispered.
“We’re only twelve,” he responded so softly he could barely hear it himself. “They can’t arrest us, right?” But then he thought of everything he’d seen on the news about people of color and the police and shook his head. “You should stay here,” he said to Josephine. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Oh, I’m not dumb enough to go in there.”
He eased the door open, wincing at the faint squeak of hinges. His mom never left anything unlocked, but he knew it was common practice for other people. He slid inside and froze to listen but heard nothing except his own terrified pulse and his brain screaming at him to stop stop stop and get out right now.
Trying to ignore his sudden need to pee, he took a couple of steps toward the living room, wincing at the crackle of old linoleum beneath his shoes. The kitchen still smelled of bacon and a faint hint of dish soap. But even serial killers had to wash dishes, he figured. Still it was a warning of how near he’d come to crossing paths with someone in this house.
When a floorboard creaked beneath him, he winced and held his breath until he saw stars in his eyes. Nothing happened. No sound of anyone else.
Once he caught his wind again, he moved on, stepping as lightly as he could. He crossed the threshold onto carpet and found himself in a big rectangle of a room packed with shelves and an easy chair and lamps and even a piano.
The giant cube of an ancient TV hulked in one corner, large enough to have pictures perched on top of it. Everett headed straight for the pictures.
A young man standing on a lawn in a graduation cap. A small child held in a woman’s arms. The third picture seemed to be the older guy he’d seen in the license photo, though he was much younger in this snapshot, his arm around a dark-haired boy about Everett’s age.
“Everett,” Josephine called in a stage whisper.
He spun to find her head stuck in the back door and waved her off.
“This isn’t okay,” she hissed.
He picked up a Polaroid picture of Alex Bennick with two young boys, one a teenager and the other a bit younger. The man smiled hugely in the picture, and the teenage boy smiled along, but the younger kid looked blank. Everett stuffed the picture into the pocket of his jeans.
“What are you doing?” Josephine demanded.
“Shh.” He moved on to a framed picture of a couple getting married a long time ago. In the ’70s or ’80s, he’d guess. He thought it was the same man, Alex Bennick, but what had happened to his young, curly-haired wife? Had he killed her? She was a blond white woman like all the girls on the bulletin board.
“Ev, come on,” Josephine said, “we should—” Her words broke in half like cracking ice when a soft thump vibrated through the ceiling just above him.
They stared at each other, mouths frozen open in matching horror until they raised their faces in unison to stare up at the ceiling. A faint plop of water pinged somewhere nearby. A dozen heartbeats passed. Then another plop of water. A faucet leaking, maybe. Or just noisy pipes above them.
And then a door squeaked open somewhere on the second floor. A footstep creaked, weight settling onto old wood over Everett’s head. He thought of those girls, their smiling faces, their pale, dead bodies. That wasn’t the sound of plumbing or popping joists. Someone was in the house.
The old man.
The murderer.
Everett’s hand spasmed, and the frame dropped to the floor with a hard crack. Mouth agape, he looked toward Josephine one more time, just a split second of shared fear, and then Everett broke into a mad dash, scooting around an ottoman, a stack of books, a little silver dog sculpture, racing for the kitchen and the door she held open to the cement steps outdoors.
The door smacked shut behind them, sending them sprinting across the lawn toward the welcome shelter of those skinny green trees.
But that wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t far enough. “Go, go,” he urged as they kept flying past the brown house and out across the field.
Josephine pointed left, and they veered over to follow the closest fence line instead of running at an angle across the field, and Everett was immediately thankful for her quick thinking. Staying close to the fence would keep them out of view of whoever might be looking out.
They were far beyond the sightline of Alex Bennick’s house by the time they dragged to a painful, panting walk at a barrier of wire fence.
“Did he see us?” she wheezed.
“I didn’t even . . . look back.” He paused to lean over and pull air into the fire of his lungs. “Did you?”
She craned her neck to look as far past the brown house and the trees as she could, but the Bennick house was no longer visible. “I don’t see anyone.”
After taking a few minutes to recover, they scooted through the wire and began to trudge along the last of the plowed field toward the cow pasture and the little group of trees beyond it.
“Was it him?” she finally asked. “The old guy?”
Everett had no idea. Or actually he had a few ideas, and they were all awful. “I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”
“Well, thank God for that.”
Josephine drew the towel from her backpack again and looped it around the barbed wire before turning her narrowed eyes on him. “That wasn’t safe, Everett.”
Nodding, he slipped past the threat of tearing metal and grabbed the towel to pull it tight for Josephine. But he didn’t meet her gaze. It hadn’t been safe, and now he felt awful to have risked it, especially with her along.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered as they walked with the fence line toward the little stand of trees.
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know.” There was something wrong with him, maybe. Regret rolled over him. But the answers felt so close, and if he could figure it out, he could do something really good.
“Maybe we should stick to online research. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to identify DNA if we find something, right?”
“Yeah.”
“No more stupid stuff, okay? I’m serious. Promise me.” His body flushed at that, because she didn’t seem mad; she just seemed worried. And no one ever worried about him except his mom. Shame settled over him with smothering heat.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I promise.”
She glanced back over her shoulder several times, but the house stayed hidden behind a slight rise. “What if he saw you?”
He wasn’t sure what to say to that. Because what if he had?
CHAPTER 13
Lily was entirely out of sorts, and she had been for the whole morning. She’d gotten only a few hours of sleep after last night’s drama, but once Everett had gone to school, she’d shooed away the black cat and dumped the torn-up cards into the rusted grill.
She needed to throw the whole damn thing out at some point. She wouldn’t dare set food onto the grill for fear of cooking up a new form of tetanus, but it had worked for the task of destroying evidence. She felt like the smoke still clung to her, marking her with guilt.