Scarlett walked toward her room. “Nope,” she called down the hall. “Good night!”
I love you.
I love who?
Who loves me?
She looked up “Anchor Beach” on her phone.
A power plant.
Where manatees go to stay warm in the runoff.
Smokestacks on the water.
White steam mimicking clouds.
A long stretch of beach.
Piers of wonky wooden planks.
She’d been there?
I’m going on a trip.
I love you.
I’m leaving.
Lucas
Lucas snapped a picture of Miranda when she came out of Ryan’s room. He’d been awake since too early, too eager for the day to start, and was on the couch teaching himself how to use his new camera.
“Not this again.” She shuffled toward the bathroom.
“Excuse me?” He studied the photo on the screen, liked the lighting but not the framing. He looked up—“Not what again?”—and found her blinking at him.
She tilted her head. “I had a boyfriend once. Took pictures of me all the time without asking me if he could. It was annoying.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Why are you up so early?” she said.
“We’re going to try to find that author today.”
“Yeah?” She scratched her head. “Did you talk to the police about all that?”
“Not yet,” he said. “We want to see if there’s anything to it first.”
She turned to go into the bathroom. “Well, good luck with that.”
Scarlett would be there any minute, so Lucas started to pack up a bag. Just his camera. The book. Some cash. He considered going out to the RV and getting the gun and bringing that, too. He could hand it to Scarlett, as a test to see if Scarlett also knew—
CLICK HISS.
Maybe they all did.
And if they did, why?
Had they been trained?
She texted that she was there and he went out and it was already too hot and he was overdressed in jeans and a T-shirt.
“Hey,” he said, getting into the car.
She wore a gray tank-top dress and had black sandals on, and he had the feeling that each time he saw her she was somehow a little bit more herself. Her knees were knobby and pale by the steering wheel. She handed him a clear pouch of some kind.
“This is it,” she said. “This is what I swallowed. I mapped it and it’s not that far from Tarpon Springs. We have to go there. Today.”
Lucas took the penny out and studied it.
I love you.
Flipped it over; it glinted.
Manatee Viewing Center: Anchor Beach “Do you remember it?” he asked. “This place?”
“I don’t. But I must have been there, right?” She shook her head. “Because why would I swallow something like that? It seems, I don’t know . . .”
He completed the thought: “Desperate.”
“Yes.”
“Which is closer?” he asked. “Tarpon Springs or Anchor Beach?”
“Tarpon Springs.” She nodded. “We’ll be there in time for lunch.”
They suffered through beach traffic, then followed signs for Tam pa, Sarasota, Orlando, and something about leaving town—something about the promise of other places—seemed to lift a weight the size of a large stone off Lucas’s chest.
He wished he’d told Scarlett everything when he’d told her about the tattoo.
Wished he’d told her about the gun.
Wished he’d told her about . . .
AVERY. THE RV. STANDING SO CLOSE. ON HER KNEES. ELBOWS TOUCHING. ELECTRIC.
No, maybe not that.
How had she learned how to drive?
Had he?
There was no point in asking; she wouldn’t know.
Her mother’s car’s rearview mirror was loaded up with junk. A string of shiny green shamrocks caught the light of the sun. A pair of fuzzy dice entwined with them. An air freshener shaped like an orange, with two green leaves, couldn’t do much to fight the smell of cigarettes.
They’d kept the windows down as long as they could, but when they hit the main highway, they had to close up.
She turned the radio on and scanned the stations and listened to a handful of songs for a few seconds each. “I don’t know any of these songs,” she said. “You?”
“No,” he said.
“Do you think we just never listened to music? Or did we somehow just forget that, too?”
“I don’t know.”
“And why do I know how to drive? It seems like if we could drive we could . . . leave. Or escape.”
“Maybe we didn’t want to escape,” he said. “Maybe we thought wherever we were was where we were supposed to be.”
“We must have.”
“Who have you told?” he said. “About Anchor Beach?”
“No one,” she said. “I thought we should go there first. I don’t trust anyone. Except you. Is that weird?”
He shook his head. “Not to me.”
“Who have you told?” she asked. “About the book. About Orlean.”