She looked at me, green, green eyes.
“Three months later, I was playing Follow the Screams with Leaf in the woods and I saw something in the Roman Luck house, saw someone moving. I got closer. I peeked in the bay window and there he was, sitting on the green sofa in the music room, reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee, a pile of clothes in the corner, dirty plates on the floor. Pa had been living there, the whole time. The whole time. He hadn’t even come home to see his new baby.”
Long pause.
“And then . . . ?” I asked softly.
“And then he saw me at the window, on my tiptoes, my eyes looking over the sill. He didn’t smile at me. Didn’t say my name. Run along. That’s all he said. Run along.
“I told Leaf about him. And Leaf told Mim. Pa left after that, left like Roman Luck, gone in the night. Gone for real. Gone for good. Autumn and Martin Lind and the murder, that was storytelling, all storytelling. But I did see a man in the Roman Luck house. I didn’t lie. Not about that.”
Wink got to her feet, slowly, and walked over to the hayloft opening. I followed. She looked out into the dusky evening light. The twins were on the roof of the farmhouse again, throwing apples at Peach on the ground, who easily dodged them even though she was laughing her head off.
WINK READ THE last chapter of The Thing in the Deep that night, and I stayed to watch her do it. I needed her to finish the book. I needed the end. When she was done she closed the book and went over to the far wall. She reached up on her tiptoes and set it on one of the dusty wooden crossbeams.
“I’m not going to read that story again,” she said. “I’m done with it, Midnight. Forever.”
Dad once told me that the most honorable thing you can do in life is forgive. I didn’t believe him at the time, and maybe I still don’t. Honor came from defeating foes in battle. From going on long, noble journeys to help those in need. From vanquishing evil and protecting the innocent.
Didn’t it?
I left. I walked to the Blue Twist. Alone. I stripped and jumped in naked.
Night sky above.
Cold, dark water below.
I let myself sink down, down, down to the smooth river stones, down into the blackness, until the river ran over my head, and my hair fanned out like flames.
Wink wasn’t a villain.
She wasn’t a hero.
People aren’t just one thing. They never, ever are.
Wink was flesh and blood.
She was bad.
And she was good.
She was real.
And at least I was finally going to get to know her now. The real her.
The real living and breathing and thinking Wink.
MY PARENTS CAME home from their convention and tromped out to the Gold Apple Mine and demanded I return to civilization, just like they did before when I was out at Grandpa’s cabin. But I stood my ground this time, I just kept gutting the trout I’d caught earlier. My mom looked at my bloody hands and flinched, but I was stoic just like Anton Harvey, I was the spitting image. I told my parents I loved them but that living with them was no longer an option, catching fish and sleeping on the ground and being alone a lot was what I’d been built for, this was who I was, and doing the other things, being their little angel, it made me unhappy, and being unhappy made me mean.
My dad muttered something about knowing it all along, I’d had Anton’s eyes as a baby, I’d looked right at everyone in the same direct way and my dad knew it would come to this . . . though of course he hadn’t, the liar. My mom cooed and coaxed and when that didn’t work she sadly put her head in her hands, but I’d seen her do the same thing after spending the day with Grandpa, when he was alive, and she always bounced back just fine, so I wasn’t worried.
I watched their car as it left, and then stared at the ruts it made in the grass for a while.
They’d be back.
But until then I was going to enjoy the silence, every last peaceful, solitary splash of it.
It was almost sunset. I got my sleeping bag off the wooden mine floor, threw it on the grass, under the stars, so close to the river that I fell asleep with my fingertips in the water.
I TOLD THE Yellows about Poppy. I told them she was alive and living by herself out at Gold Apple Mine, and that she just wanted to be alone. I told them the letters were clues, but they’d been written by Wink, not Poppy—Wink left me clues so I could follow the story to the end, like Thief, when he plays Five Lies, One Truth with the old woman on the Never-Ending Bridge. I told them the séance had been a hoax, and Wink had been behind it all.
The Yellows disbanded.