But I eyed the dark thicket of trees, the shadows growing blacker as the rain came down. “Pete. She’s going into the woods.” I realized then how close we were to the flap in the fence that Ruby used as her own private entranceway. It was around that bend a little ways, wasn’t it? Maybe London had her own private way in, too.
“Do you know what’s through those woods, Pete?” He’d been here before, tons of times. He knew the only thing out there was the reservoir.
“She’s not going in the woods,” Pete said. “She’s walking home. Her house is just over there.” He pointed, but at nothing. It was too dark to point at much of anything.
“She’s going in. Look.”
He stopped the car on the slick road and looked back. We both did, though there was no light on anywhere to catch her.
“It’s a shortcut,” he said at last.
“Wait here,” I said, before he could stop me.
I was running then, running through the rain and skidding in the mud in my sandals and scrambling over the gulley and into the trees. I was pushing through branches and stumbling over rocks, and there wasn’t a piece of me that wasn’t sopping wet and dripping.
The waterfall of rain from my forehead to my chin kept me from seeing all I could. Even so, I was able to make out London slipping into the dark pocket of a sagging fence, her feet the last two pieces of her to vanish. I watched her go in and not come out.
I went to the fence and saw what I knew would be there, glistening as black as oil on the horizon. The reservoir, which London had come out of just this spring. The reservoir, where I should have known she’d been spending her nights.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I CAME BACK
I came back out of the woods after a while. When I returned to Pete’s car, he didn’t comment on how drenched I was. He opened the door for me and said, “Find her?”
I shook my head.
“Women,” he said. “Tell them not to do something, they do it anyway.” When I glared at him, too soaked to respond, he added, “Ruby used to wander off doing crap like that all the time. I’m used to it.”
He jammed the gas and took us back the way we’d come. “You think she’ll be home when we get there?” he asked.
“Yeah. But you know what, Pete? Maybe I shouldn’t go there yet. Maybe we should go into town for a while. I should call her first, or wait for her to call me.” I was thinking how she hadn’t texted. She’d told me to spend time out of the house but hadn’t yet said it was okay to return.
“Can’t chicks ever make up their minds?” Pete mumbled. But he still coasted us on into the center of town, following my instructions without too much more protest.
I pulled out my phone to make sure it still worked. It seemed perfectly fine—and no longer overloaded with messages—so I texted Ruby.
u ok?
I didn’t wait for a response before sending another: ok i come home?
Nothing.
Near the Green, Pete turned off the engine and muttered to himself, but he was still doing what I said. Then he opened his mouth and I thought he’d shoot out something perverted, but he kept his eyes up in the vicinity of my face and said simply, “Anything for Ruby’s sister.”
It was all very heavy and hypnotic, like I’d been the one to bewitch him, but I couldn’t take credit, and, fact was, Pete never needed any bewitching. He’d follow my sister anyway, always had. It was thanks to whatever she’d done to him all those years ago, and ever since he’d walked around barely able to dress himself, caught up in the idea of her, even when she told him for the hundredth time to please go away.
“Pete, why? Why are you like this? What’d she do to you?”
“Who do you mean, Ruby?”
I nodded.
She’d broken his heart, that was a given. Maybe she’d done it with one hand, crushed it into a tight little ball. Maybe she’d done it fast, while it thumped in her palm, then ripped it out to keep in the back of her dresser and all this time he had no idea.