But then a cartoon spray of red blew out of the clean man’s right ear. And his face went from worried to peaceful and blank as if he’d fallen asleep while standing before her. Then he slowly dropped to his knees. He wobbled there a moment, rocking, and fell to his side in a soft heap of himself. Penny’s throat closed up as she turned toward the porch and saw Poppa standing there with his hunting rifle, still aimed. Penny couldn’t breathe, a strange rasping sound in her throat.
“Look what you did,” said Poppa. He lowered the gun and glared at her accusingly, as if she held the gun in her hand. “Look.”
Penny found sound—a deep wail, a thunderous scream from the ground beneath her that traveled up her legs and into her gullet. It exploded from her, scaring the birds from the trees, making the animals in the barn restless and afraid. She screamed and screamed and couldn’t stop, even when Poppa took the belt to her right there on the ground in front of the barn. The lashes were sharp and hot against her back and her thighs, a nasty, searing pain that only made her scream louder until everything went a blessed black.
Later when she came to, in the same place on the ground, Bobo was standing over her. The clean man and the beautiful car were gone, except for a long red stain on the ground where the clean man had fallen that was as big as Penny and still wet. She felt nothing, just an icy numbness.
“Come on,” Bobo said. “Get up.”
He had a chipped tooth and a slow way of talking. She struggled to stand and stumbled after him. Inside, he stripped off her shirt and ran it under the water from the faucet. He used it to dab away at her back, which burned like fire. But she didn’t scream or cry out from the pain. She used up most all the sound she had left. All that remained was a weak whimper.
Then he took off his sweatshirt and put it on her. It was way too big. He helped her into her cot and covered her with the blanket.
“Try to be good now,” he said. “They’re getting tired of you.”
They sky was growing dark outside and the air cool. Then he stood over her, watching; she tried to ignore him. She was always tense around Bobo; she never knew when he was going to be nice or be mean. Sometimes he was both. But tonight he just let her be, stood there a while like he was trying to think of something else to say.
“That’s going to be trouble—what happened today.”
Then he walked off. She didn’t sleep, just lay there thinking, listening as the whispering in the trees grew louder. They were trying to tell her something, but she didn’t know what. Finally, she got up from her bed and walked toward the window. She stood listening, the black space between the trees like a doorway she might walk through.
TEN
Merri and Wolf were not B and B people. Well, Wolf wasn’t. Mr. Adventure. He’d rather sleep in a tent in the woods, go to the bathroom in a chemical toilet, than socialize at breakfast with other travelers over fluffy flapjacks and fresh coffee. Merri always thought there was something nice about the whole enterprise, though. The quaint rooms in beautiful homes, a couple cooking in the kitchen, serving guests, telling stories, giving advice. There was a connectedness, a sincere friendliness to it that Merri found comforting. Kindness, courtesy, true warmth—it was disappearing all around, wasn’t it? Especially in the city. In elevators, on the trains, on the street, people didn’t even lift their eyes from the screens in front of them anymore. The world had become such a crowded, frenetic, and terribly lonely place.
She could have chosen the Hampton Suites off the highway that led up to The Hollows. It would have afforded her a certain amount of distance, some anonymity. Instead she chose Miss Lovely’s Bed & Breakfast, a charming little guesthouse off the main square. She pulled into the small, gravelly parking lot as she’d been instructed over the phone, shouldered her small tote, and walked toward the entrance.
“How long are you going to stay up there?” Jackson had wanted to know at breakfast that morning.
“I don’t know,” she’d answered. “Until . . .”
What could she say? Until she found Abbey. Or something that told her that she’d never find Abbey. “I’ll come home on Thursday nights to spend the weekends with you.”
He nodded, pushed his glasses up his nose. “Maybe we could come up on the weekends and help.”
Jackson, unlike Wolf, wanted Merri to go to The Hollows. He’d go with her if they’d let him. As much as he wanted Merri to stay, he wanted someone to be up there looking. Families don’t give up on each other, he’d said when they first came back to the city. We can’t just leave her. His words, the shattering of his voice, had stayed with her.
“We’ll see,” she’d said this morning, ruffling his bangs.
They wanted him to go back to life. Maybe it was unfair, unrealistic to expect him to do that. But it was even less fair to allow him to think that there was anything he could do for Abbey.
“Dad said you loaded the New York Times app onto your phone,” Merri said after she forced down a few bites of granola.
Jackson didn’t look up from his bowl, clinking his spoon against the edge.