I make the last turn and the heat hits me. It boils off the motel in an acrid wave, drying my eyes and cracking my lips, burning the mist away. I shove past knots of onlookers, knocking phones out of hands, taking an elbow to the corner of my mouth and not caring, not even feeling it. I trip over a canvas hose and lurch back up, coughing hard, lying to myself as hard as I can.
Maybe Bev tried to reheat her pizza in the toaster again. Maybe a guest stubbed their cigarette out on their mattress. Maybe it was just regular bad luck, rather than a Beast with a taste for Gravely blood.
It’ll be fine. Everything’s okay.
Then I make it around the last car and see that nothing is okay, that it might never be okay again, because the Garden of Eden is burning.
The Garden of Eden is burning—flames blooming from the rooftop, shingles melting and oozing into the gutters, guests huddled beneath shiny emergency blankets—and I don’t know where my little brother is, and it’s all my fault.
Someone is shouting at me. I ignore them, squinting through the smog, blinded by the blue strobe of police lights and the sting of smoke. I’m looking for that brass number 12, that not-quite-a-home, that one safe place—but it’s gone. There’s nothing but a gaping hole where our door used to be, a black throat spewing smoke. The window is gone, too, the sidewalk glittering with glass. Flames lick over the sill to lap at the eaves.
I run. A hand grabs my shoulder and I bite it, quick and vicious. The hand disappears. I taste someone else’s blood.
I’m yelling now, my voice swallowed by the hungry roar of the fire, close enough to feel the bite of cinders through my jeans. They get me right before I dive through the hot maw of the door.
I don’t go down easy. It takes two volunteer firefighters and a state trooper to pin me and get the cuffs around my wrists, and even then I’m still kicking and clawing, because once I stop fighting I’ll start screaming.
I should have gotten him out of Eden. I should’ve known a lucky penny and a mad Warden weren’t enough to keep him safe. It’s only now, thrashing on the hot pavement, that I realize how much I still trusted Arthur Starling. He failed my mother, but I never really believed he would fail me.
“Let me go, let me go, where is he? Did you get him out?”
They don’t answer. Someone steps through the smoke and stares down at me with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, and of course Constable Mayhew would be here. Of course the two worst moments of my life would be overseen by a saggy old man dressed like an extra from the set of a direct-to-DVD Western, his ten-gallon hat held up by the sheer density of his eyebrows.
I laugh at him, and note distantly that it sounds like sobbing.
He points at me with the waxed tip of his mustache. “This her?” It takes me a dizzy second to understand that he isn’t speaking to me.
He’s speaking to the man just behind him, a hulking figure in a sharp black suit. His face is unpleasantly familiar; I remember those eyes staring at me from the slanted surface of a rearview mirror.
It occurs to me that not every Beast comes crawling out of Underland. That some of them live up here, and walk around in expensive suits and pencil skirts.
That Arthur didn’t fail us, after all.
“Yes, sir,” the man says earnestly. His accent is local but overblown, a step away from caricature. “I saw her acting funny this evening. She dropped this.”
He hands the constable something small and square, and Mayhew squints down at it. It’s an old-fashioned matchbook with something written across the front in blue cursive. I can’t read the words by the flare and flicker of the firelight, but I don’t have to. I already know what they say.
My Old Kentucky Home.
TWENTY-FOUR
It’s nine miles to the constable’s office in Mudville, but it feels like more. The sheriff’s office gets bigger and shinier SUVs every year, but Mayhew’s car smells like hot piss and cigarettes. The AC dribbles from the vents. My hair is gummed against my cheek, clotted with soot and blood, and my shoulders are wrenched backward in their sockets. Already my fingers feel staticky and dead. One of the troopers suggested they might uncuff me for the ride over, pity on his face, but Constable Mayhew gave him a long, grim stare and said, “Not this one, Carl.”
After two miles I announce that I have to pee. Mayhew ignores me. A mile later I tell him I’m going to puke and beg him, with an artfully choked voice, to slow down and open the door. He doesn’t even bother to sigh.
After that I focus on scooting close enough to the door to yank on the handle, wondering how bad this is going to hurt, until he says, tiredly, “The child locks are on, Opal.”
I let go of the handle. “Look, I just want to know if Jasper, if he was—” I press my forehead against the window, hard. “Do you know if they got any kids out of the motel?”
For a minute I think he’s going to revert back to ignoring me, but eventually he grunts, “No.”
I catch my own eyes in the rearview mirror, red-rimmed and wild, and look quickly away. The last few miles pass in silence. Bad thoughts keep trying to bubble up—like the last thing I said to him was go to hell—but I don’t let them make it to the surface.
The Muhlenberg County Detention Center is a low sprawl of concrete jammed between a U-Pull-It junkyard and a Waffle House that doubles as a Greyhound stop. I feel like it ought to be dim and bleak inside, but it’s all white tile and bright canister lights. It looks several decades newer than the high school.
There’s a woman with bleached highlights sitting at a kiosk. The constable sets a plastic baggie on the counter and she takes it without looking away from her desktop.
“Is that my phone?”
Neither of them look at me. My phone buzzes against the counter.
“Excuse me, that’s mine—give it to me—”
Constable Mayhew tips his dumbass hat to the receptionist and hauls me away by the elbow. My tennis shoes squeal across the floor. “Who’s calling? Can you see the name? Please!”
Mayhew pulls harder and I go limp, dangling by one elbow while he swears through his mustache. “Just tell me who it is, I’m begging you. There’s a fire and I don’t know if my brother made it out.”
The receptionist looks away from her computer long enough to observe my ash-streaked clothes, my scorched eyes. She glances down at my phone with the expression of a saint performing a reluctant miracle. “Somebody named Heath Cliff? Like the candy bar?”
I sag, shoulders shrieking, heart shattering. “Can you check my missed calls? Please, I just need to know—”
“Come on, Opal, time to go.” Mayhew hooks two hands under my armpits.
The receptionist is scrolling, acrylic nails tapping on my screen. “Just Heath, again and again.” She clucks her tongue. “He’s got it bad,hon.”
“Can you check my texts? You know how kids hate to call—”
The receptionist is flicking over to my texts and Mayhew is giving himself a hernia trying to lift me when the glass doors bang open.
It’s Bev. Reeking of smoke, glaring through smeared ash like an avenging angel with a buzz cut. Charlotte trails anxiously behind her, offering a pained smile to the receptionist.
Bev stops halfway across the hall and crosses her arms. She rakes her gaze across us with scathing deliberation, and if I had room to feel another ounce of emotion, I would be terrified. That motel was her life and livelihood, her home,gone because I decided to punch the wrong person in the teeth. I wonder if Constable Mayhew can get me behind bars before she murders me in cold blood.
Bev asks, slowly, “Would somebody like to explain to me just what the hell is going on here?”
The constable drops me and puffs out the concavity of his chest. “Ma’am, I’m going to ask you to leave the premises. I’m investigating a crime.”
“Well whoop-de-do, Constable. I’m investigating why you handcuffed one of my guests rather than handing her over to the EMTs.”
I meet Charlotte’s eyes behind Bev’s back and manage a single, strangled word. “Jasper?”