“Because we’re both prisoners?” I ask, remembering his words from long ago.
He stares at me for a long time, his dark eyes hardening, hiding his pain.
“Yes.”
“You could leave, you know,” I suggest hesitantly. “You could run away. If you hate it so much here, I mean.”
Dare stares into the distance, his eyes so very dark. “And where would I go? There’s nowhere I could go that the Savages wouldn’t find me.”
He’s so bleak as he climbs to his feet and reaches down to help me up. Our ride back to Whitley is silent.
When we roll back through the gates, Richard is waiting.
His car is parked halfway down the driveway, and he’s leaning against it, waiting for us like a tall, coiled snake….a snake poised to strike. My heart pounds and leaps into my throat and I’m frozen.
“Go to the house, Calla,” my uncle tells me, his eyes hard and focused on Dare, and they contain a strange gleam, something that turns my stomach to ice.
“But…it was my idea!” I tell him quickly. “Dare didn’t want me to go alone.”
Richard turns to me, his face oh-so-cold, and Dare nudges me.
“Just go, Calla,” he says quietly.
Richard is satisfied by that, because Dare is being submissive and my uncle shoves him into the car. “You know you’re not to leave the house, boy,” he snaps, a vein pulsing beside his eye. He slams the car door far harder than necessary.
I watch them drive up the driveway, I watch Richard yanking Dare into the house, and I can’t stand to follow them and hear what I know I’ll hear. I dash into the back doors, into the kitchen, and I throw myself in Sabine’s arms.
She listens to me cry and when I’m done, she calmly looks at me.
“We’d better go get those scooters, child.”
She walks up the drive with me, and we push them back, and I ask her a million questions.
“Why does Richard hate Dare? Why is he so mean? Why isn’t Dare supposed to leave Whitley?”
Sabine listens but she doesn’t answer until long after we’ve put the scooters away and returned to the kitchen.
“Things aren’t what they seem, little Calla Lily,” she tells me. “It’s time that you wrap your young mind around that.”
No amount of prodding will get her to say more, and when I go to bed that night, all I can think about is Dare and his dark eyes staring at me as that car disappeared down the driveway.
When the screaming starts, I close my eyes against it, trying to tune it out, because when I hear it, all I can do is imagine those beautiful dark eyes filled with pain. It crushes me, and I sleep to escape it.
Chapter Eight
Price Funeral Home and Crematorium
The Oregon sky hangs misty and cloudy and dark. I watch the lightning stretch from one end of the horizon to the other, illuminating the darkness, exposing the night. It casts a purple light upon everything, and the world seems mystic.
I hold Dare’s letter in my lap because it’s precious. He seldom writes to me and when he does, I save them.
Dear Calla,
This one says.
How are the dead people? Whitley is the same. I’m practically living with dead people too, you know. Eleanor is close to 200, or at least she looks like it. And Sabine, God. Who knows how old she is?
I’m sending a picture of Castor and Pollux. They were swimming in the ocean and Pollux caught a fish. Someone on the beach thought he was a bear and started screaming. It was the funniest thing ever. Castor hunts for you when you’re gone, and he sleeps next to your bedroom door, until I make him come with me.
See you this summer,
Dare
His words are etched on the paper, scrawled with a nonchalance that is typical of Dare. Somehow, he makes me miss Whitley, even though the estate is huge and scary and everything there feels wrong. But Dare is there, and my dogs are there. I miss Dare during the winters, although I’d never have the guts to tell him.