“Here?” Cassidy jumped back.
Paisley rolled her eyes. Her bob took on a silver sheen in the moonlight. “Or, I guess it could have been where Tor is standing.” Her smile was wicked as she began to trace a five-pointed star on the trampled grass.
I stared off at the fire. “Sorry, Wheelwright. It’s going to take a lot more than that to scare me,” I said.
She paused from her makeshift drawing. “Challenge accepted,” she said. I could tell she was getting annoyed that I wasn’t doing a good job of playing with her Ouija board.
“Can you stop that, Paisley?” Cassidy grabbed for the stick, but Paisley snatched it clear.
“Relax, Cassidy. Tor doesn’t mind, do you?” She finished another point on her star and drew a circle around the outside.
The name then clicked into place. “Roy McCardle. That’s the janitor’s son?”
“A-plus, Ms. Frankenstein.” She tossed the stick into the shadows. “Poor Roy McCardle was helping his daddy do some farmwork a couple years back. Riding at the front of the tractor when his pant leg got caught in the wheel. You know what happened then?”
“He died,” I said without emotion.
Her lips drew close to my ear. She smelled like Mom’s wine. “The thing sucked him straight down.” She grabbed me suddenly and shook. My heart jolted awake in my chest, but I kept my face placid. “And the machine ate his legs until they were bone before chewing up his intestines and leaving them as fertilizer.”
“You paint a vivid picture, I’ll give you that.”
“It’s more than a picture. I heard his daddy carried him all the way to the road looking for help while his entrails hung out of Roy like a leash dragging in the dirt. Then”—she paused, enjoying her story—“he died. Right there in his daddy’s arms.”
Cassidy fiddled with the tab, twisting it back and forth until it popped off and she tossed it over her shoulder.
“Not exactly party conversation, Paize.” Cassidy gave a nervous laugh.
“I bet his ghost haunts this field.” Paisley turned on the spot as though expecting the ghost of Roy McCardle to come gliding in from any direction.
Cassidy shoved Paisley gently. “Shut up and stop trying to scare us. You believe in ghosts, Victoria?”
The night was hot and my shirt was sticky. I was already salivating at the thought of a shower and wondering why I’d been stupid enough to come out here without my own car. “No,” I said. “I don’t believe in anything that can’t be explained through rational thought, and neither should you.”
Cassidy bowed her head and peered down at the can of beer she was holding between two hands. “I don’t know about that.” Her voice was small. “I believe in love.”
A short distance away, the fire blossomed to life, sending a tongue of flame up from the ground. I watched Adam, whose figure had been silhouetted against a navy sky, jerk back from the fire and shield his face. Trace flecks of orange and gold floated into the air and disappeared. Adam retreated farther from the blaze into darker shadows. Already, I felt I could mentally trace the lines of Adam with my eyes closed. From the v of muscle that winged out from the base of his neck to the pronounced curve of his brow bone. As if sensing me watching, he turned. His eyes scanned the dark surroundings for several seconds, at last landing on me. Adam. My Adam.
“It must be exhausting always thinking that everyone’s so much dumber than you, huh?” Paisley’s voice penetrated my thoughts.
“What?” I broke my gaze away from Adam. “Oh, yeah,” I said absently, although it occurred to me I was supposed to refute what she’d said. “I’m going to go sit in one of the trucks,” I said instead. “I think I’ve reached my outdoor quota for the month.”
I started off and had made it no farther than a couple of paces when—“What about your daddy, Tor? Ever seen his ghost?”
A column of ice wrapped its way around the base of my spine, causing me to stiffen. I didn’t turn back to face Paisley. Like a ghost, the image of my father was there the moment she spoke the words. The coroner had told me his death was instantaneous, that he felt nothing. But I could never shake the memory of my father’s face when I found him soaked, dead, and lying in the rain. His mouth was open; his eyes were wide and glassy, a look of shock that had been cast onto his face like a mold for me to find. What was left was evidence of an instant, at least one moment where he knew what was about to happen and he understood that the nature he loved so much was going to kill him. Barbed wire punched through my heart, sending fire through the nerves at my fingertips, which I folded into fists at my side.
“Because I heard he was ten times crazier than Old Man McCardle.” Paisley slurred her words. “Is that true?”