As Marty drives, Charlotte studies the pill in her palm.
Up close and in broad daylight, she can see the wrongness of it, the lumpiness that suggests it didn’t come off a factory assembly line. In Dylan’s office, she’d been distracted by too many things to notice the strangeness of the pills or the cheapness of their packaging.
“Take it,” Marty says. “Soothe an old man’s nerves.”
“You’re not that old,” she says.
“Come on, Charley. You don’t want me busting in on your old high school bully with guns blazing, do you?”
“I don’t want to waste a pill over something that’s probably not true.”
“What? You got big plans for the rest?”
“We’ve been over this.”
“Not really. I mean, I get it. It’s important. What they can do. Maybe they could help people in the right hands. Only problem is, the hand that gave it to you doesn’t seem like one of those hands.”
“I’m having a hard time believing Luke Prescott is in on this, Marty.”
“You had no idea Dylan was in on it, did you? And you still don’t really have any idea what it even is.”
Ouch.
“Fine.”
She swallows the pill as if it were an Advil and turns her attention to the road.
They’d arrived in darkness early that morning, after which she’d slept until noon, occasionally roused by the sounds of Marty moving about the house, having low conversations with guys who’d dropped by throughout the morning, other sober men he’d enlisted to help protect her. “I’ve kept their secrets. It’s not asking much of them to return the favor,” Marty told her. Each time she woke, this thought comforted her enough to send her back to sleep.
By the time she’d woken up for good, the only one in the kitchen was Marty, hiding his sleeplessness behind a cup of coffee and a warm smile.
It’s just the two of them now as they drive the winding road from Marty’s property to the valley floor. To call his house a mobile home wouldn’t do it justice. It always looks freshly painted, and he long ago added redwood decks on all sides, a vegetable garden, and a row of poplar trees around the perimeter that give a watery luminescence to the dry, grassy hills surrounding his property.
“Marty, I don’t want it to sound like I don’t appreciate what you’re doing.”
“It doesn’t. Now that you took the pill.” He gives her a cockeyed grin.
“No matter what happens, you don’t have to put your life in danger for me.”
“I know. I don’t have to do any of the shit I do. Except, you know, shit. And eat. And sleep. And drink water. I do stuff ’cause I want to. ’Cause it matters to me.”
Because you matter to me, is what he’s saying. She reaches across the gearshift and squeezes his knee briefly to let him know he matters to her, too.
The Hickman place is in the opposite side of the valley from Marty’s, on Lowell Drive, a serpentine street that branches off from State Mountain Road 293. It hugs the inland base of the mountains that stretch all the way to PCH, so there are more trees here than around Marty’s place, and they dapple the large, unfenced lots and their tiny houses with deep pools of shadow. In another hour or so, the sun will disappear behind the Santa Lucia Mountains even though there’s hours to go before dusk.
The old Hickman place, a ranch-style house with a gently sloping roof and a front room that juts out onto its unkempt front lawn, is a ghost of its former self. It used to be one of the nicest homes in town, built and owned for as long as she could remember by the family who started the local drugstore on Center Street. But the store’s gone and so are the Hickmans, including their daughter, Emily, who’d made it a point to invite Charlotte to all the pool parties she had in high school, parties where Charlotte remembers feeling fairly welcome and not too openly stared at. Probably because Luke wasn’t there drumming up contempt for her among the other guests. While the oak tree out back is just as impressive as it used to be, and the view beyond just as beautiful, the aboveground pool is long gone, and so’s the tall cast-iron fence to which the family used to tie strings of blue-and-pink balloons.
At first she assumes the man who appears on the stoop can’t be Luke Prescott. He’s too tall, too broad. But of course, she’s comparing him to the high school version, which is nuts.
He’s got the same military-grade buzz cut that makes his sandy-blond hair look like it’s painted on his skull. But his face is wider now, his features more evenly balanced. That constant squinting expression, which always made him look like he was getting ready to say something biting and sarcastic even on those rare occasions he wasn’t, is gone now, and she can’t help but wonder if there were other things she read into his personality based on ephemeral aspects of his physical appearance.
Or you’re cutting him too much slack because this new body of his is something to see. And how’d things go the last time you got distracted by a man’s looks?
Luke gives them a stiff wave and an even stiffer, more awkward smile.
Marty rolls the window down.
“You sure you don’t want come in, Marty?” Luke asks.
“Sure as Sam.”
“Who’s Sam?” he asks.
“It’s just an expression.”
“It is?” Luke asks.
“No,” Charlotte says, stepping from the truck. “It isn’t.”
Marty shoots her an angry look, but it shows her how nervous he is. He really does believe Luke might be some sort of threat, and he’s not sure this is the best way to handle it.
“We’ll be fine,” Charlotte whispers, then gives him a peck on the cheek.
It was a deliberate strategy, surprising Luke in the middle of the day at home like this. Marty insisted on it. And it’s clear Luke is bothered by her sudden arrival. But who wouldn’t be? It’s the inside of his house that’ll tell her the most.
How lived in is it? Is this stay, this new job, temporary?
Like all crazy conspiracy theories, there’s no surefire way to disprove Marty’s idea that Luke might be some sort of secret agent, part of a vast conspiracy that includes Dylan Thorpe and the pills. But the state of Luke’s life might offer up some helpful bits of evidence.
“Charley,” he says with a respectful nod, avoiding her stare.
“Luke,” she answers. “Place looks different.”
“You and Emily were friends?”
“She invited me to some of her parties. We weren’t besties or anything.”
“I see.”
“Believe it or not,” she adds, “I actually got invited places back then.”
She never believes people when they claim their angry words just slipped out. But in this instance, these angry words did, in fact, just slip out. But she managed to hold back the punch line, which would have been something along the lines of Despite your best efforts, you jerk.
“We didn’t have any parties,” he says, but he’s looking at her feet, and his flaring nostrils suggest embarrassment and nervousness.
“That’s not what I meant. I wasn’t talking about your family, I . . .”
“I know what you meant.”
A bird cries somewhere in the distance. A San Francisco–bound jetliner has begun its descent over the valley, and she’d rather stare at it for the remainder of the day than spend another awkward moment on this scraggly front lawn.
“So Marty says you didn’t have much time to see me. What, are you just passing through or something?” Luke finally asks.
“Something like that.”
“You got time for a beer?”
“I got time for a Diet Coke.”
“You always were big on Diet Coke.”