“Come on, little man, let’s get those ties off you.”
Everett jumped up and twisted around. There was a quick snap, and one hand was free, then the other.
“All right, Son,” his dad was saying, but Everett had already spun back to wrap his arms around his waist. He felt solid and real, strong and warm. But not quite as big as Everett remembered. Not a giant. Just a man. He sighed, “All right,” into Everett’s hair and hugged him tight.
“Jones,” his mom snapped, her voice cracking like a whip. “What the . . . ?”
Everett opened his eyes to see his mom still on the couch, blood dried in a fan of trickles down her face. She was hurt. He let his dad go and dropped down to hug her. “Mom, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she reassured him. “Don’t you worry about me. Are you hurt anywhere?” He shook his head.
His dad clicked his tongue. “Sorry, Lily. I can’t do anything about the cuffs unless—”
His mom gasped sharply, cutting off his words. “Jones, you’re bleeding! He shot you!”
When Everett saw the bright-red stain blooming over his dad’s sleeve, he was on his feet again.
“Merely a flesh wound,” he said with a wink for Everett, but he winced a little when he tried to lift his arm. There was a hole in the fabric of his shirt. From a bullet.
Everett gulped hard as his stomach rolled, but he shook it off. “Dad, what are you even doing here?”
“I wanted to see my son, of course.” When Everett just stared at him, brain spinning, everything jumbling up like a clog in his mind, his dad sighed and sagged a bit. “I was leaving the state, but my motel was only thirty miles away, and I just thought . . . well, even if I only get to see you drive by on your way to school, that’d be something. Right?”
Everett didn’t want to cry in front of his dad. He didn’t. But after all the horrible and scary and awful things that had just happened, this drop of brightness overwhelmed him. It was too much, and everything inside drew tight and painful as Everett’s throat closed.
Because his dad really had wanted him. Not just the notebook. He’d wanted Everett too.
“Jones,” his mom said. “You need to call for . . .” But her words faded and then died out. “Wait, are those sirens?”
“Yes.”
Everett glanced back and forth between them, torn between being worried about his mom and wanting to really look at his dad. His hair was longish, curling a bit like Everett’s in waves that covered his ears and reached his collar.
“Jones,” he heard his mom whisper as she stood up. “You actually called the police?”
“Sure. Anything for my boy.”
“But that means . . .”
“Yeah, I should probably find a back way out of here while I can.”
“You’re leaving?” Everett croaked past the lump that was choking him half to death.
“Sorry, little man.” His smile creased his eyes into bright crescents of warmth. He had scruffy stubble, but he somehow looked healthy instead of disheveled. The deep tan probably helped. Everett imagined him on a beach in sunglasses, smiling at the waves.
His gaze dropped to the wet blood on his dad’s light-blue shirt. “There’s a back door in the kitchen,” he suggested softly. He was sure Mom would protest, say that Dad needed to face the consequences of his actions, but she only blew out a deep breath and tipped her head toward the doorway.
His dad threw his good arm around Everett’s shoulders and pulled him in tight. “Lead the way, Son.”
When his mom stepped ahead of them, Everett moved forward, and then he saw Mendelson and yanked back. The cop wasn’t moving, maybe not even breathing. His ruined face was a smash of different wounds, blood coating his skin. But he was breathing, because a bubble of blood swelled from a crooked nostril. It popped, and the next one slowly began to form many seconds later. So he wasn’t dead, but he looked close. His mom kicked the gun even farther away, sliding it toward the kitchen.
Everett was holding tight to his dad and watching his mom’s cuffed hands ahead of him when she jerked to a stop at the kitchen doorway. The sirens were drawing nearer, not close yet, but not far, and they needed to keep moving.
“Mom—”
“Don’t look, Everett,” she ordered. “Jones, you keep him with you.” Then she peeled off to the right, away from the door.
Everett looked, of course, and his mom was bent over a puddle of blood. He spied a man’s arm, and legs in a pair of jeans, but then his dad was guiding him to the doorway.
“How will you get away?” Everett asked, worried that his cracking voice sounded like a whine to his dad, who was somehow still joking and cool even though the patch of blood had soaked through more cotton.
“Don’t worry about it. I left the car in another driveway, but . . . Well, let’s just say it’s not in my name anyway. So I’ll hike out. No worries.” He said no worries, but his eyes darted nervously toward the door. “Speaking of, I’d better be going.”
“Yeah.” Everett followed him out when he opened the door. The sirens were louder now. “Bye, Dad,” he said, trying to be strong and calm, but his dad laughed at that, and swept him into a huge hug.
“I love you, Everett. Take care of your mom. I’ll be in touch.”
“I love you too,” he said, which seemed like an odd thing to say to someone he didn’t know, but it felt true. It felt like he loved him.
And then he was gone, slipping straight back from the house and angling the opposite way from how Josephine and Everett had escaped. Everett watched him as the whine of the sirens grew more piercing.
“He’s breathing!” his mom yelled. “Alex is still breathing!”
Everett spun around and stumbled over the threshold, rushing back into the house. He still couldn’t see much of Alex Bennick past his mom’s back, but he did see a bloody knife in a pool of horrible red next to her foot.
“Everett, go sit on the couch, keep your hands up. When the police get here, yell to them that it’s safe and we need an ambulance. Don’t go near Mendelson.”
Everett didn’t think. He wasn’t scared. For the first time in forever, he wasn’t scared at all. He raced into the living room as he heard car doors slamming out front. He dropped to the couch, and he raised his hands.
Then he heard his mom begin to cry in quiet, choking sobs, and he finally felt safe to cry too. His mom and dad had saved him. And they would all be okay.
CHAPTER 37
“Are you seriously working at a party?” Lily asked as she strolled beneath the trailing edge of the weeping willow and into the shade beneath.
Alex lay in a cheap lounger he’d brought over, a tattered spiral notebook in his hands. “You already put me to work at a party, remember?”
“It seemed like you’d be a natural DJ.”
She bent down to give him a kiss on the cheek, then dropped into the chair next to him. They were taking it slow to keep things steady for Everett, but after three months of dating, they weren’t actually hiding things from anyone.
“Any trouble with that scar lately?” she asked when his hand settled on his stomach.
“No, that last surgery made a huge difference. I’m right as rain.” He wasn’t right as rain; he’d never grow back the missing lobe of his right lung, and he’d never get his cousin back either, but he was starting to seem more like his old self.
His uncle, thankfully, often forgot that his only child had died. Lily hoped that made it easier for him. The rest of the town was reeling from losing two people who’d grown up there, and they wrestled with the truth of who’d done it. And still, there was no sign of the long-missing girls lost to so many families.
Lily tipped her head back to stare up through the swaying leaves of her new backyard tree. “How’s the book research coming?”
“There’s a lot to dig into. I leave for Omaha in eight days, and I don’t feel close to ready.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re barely recovered, and you shouldn’t be traveling this soon.”