Daniel frowned. “You know him better than me, what do you think?”
“We could go back now and lock it. I need to put this worthless folder back anyway.”
“No. Judd might be hanging around. I couldn’t put the keys away because he was there, but I need to get them back before someone realizes they’re gone. We can’t risk using them in the morning to get back into Crete’s office and check everything.”
I reached out to take his hands. “I’m sorry,” I said. We stood there for a minute, not looking at each other. “Do you want to stay?”
He gave me a halfhearted smile, squeezed my hands, and released them. “Nah, Lucy,” he said. “Get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I was skittish going in to work the next day and terrified that someone would notice. I’d been up much of the night trying to prepare coherent responses to any questions that might come up. I repeated them until they felt true. Any trace of confidence evaporated when I saw Crete sitting on the bench outside Dane’s, watching my approach.
“Sit down a minute,” he said. “I need to talk to you.” I sat. “Judd called me last night, said he caught you fooling around up here with Daniel.”
I had an answer ready. “It’s nothing serious,” I said. “We’re just friends.”
“We can get into that later,” he said. “What I wanna know is why you were here.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We didn’t plan it. I couldn’t sleep, I came out for a night swim. He was here.”
He stared me down. “So he didn’t ask you to meet him. You showed up and here he was?”
I nodded.
“You mighta kept him from robbing the place.”
No. No. No. Something had tipped him off. It had to be the drawer, left unlocked, like Daniel had thought.
“The spare keys are missing, and only somebody working the boathouse’d know where I keep ’em. Looks like he got into the office but didn’t make it into the safe.”
I shook my head, my brain scrambling to catch up and figure out how to fix this.
“That can’t be it,” I said. “He’d never steal from you. He didn’t say anything about it.”
“He lied and said he came up here with you. That whole family’s full of liars and thieves. I only hired him as a favor to his old man. We grew up together, you know, before he got busted. He thought his youngest was gonna be different, make something of himself.”
“He probably just meant we came up here together from the river. We were on the patio. I was with him the whole time.”
“I had to fire him, Lucy. And I don’t want you around him anymore. You don’t need to be messed up with trash like that.”
I’d gotten Daniel fired. My stomach churned all day, and when I finally got hold of Daniel on the phone that night, he sounded a thousand miles away.
“I’m not mad,” he said for the tenth time, though he sounded mad when he said it. “I’m glad you’re okay, and I’m glad Crete thinks you had nothing to do with it. It could’ve turned out a lot worse for me, too. He could’ve pressed charges.”
“But you’re still leaving.”
He groaned. “Like I said, I need a job to help pay for school, and I won’t find anything else around here. Especially if Crete tells everybody I stole from him.” He lowered his voice, making it harder for me to hear him. “The last thing I want to do is leave you here alone, with everything that’s going on. Once I find a place in Springfield and get some money coming in, I’ll be back to visit. I can help you figure things out. But I don’t want you stirring up anything while I’m gone, okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. I wouldn’t be able to tell him what I was doing, because it would only make him worry and nag me. It was easier to let him think I’d wait for him before making another move. Though if he believed that, he didn’t know me at all.
“I would’ve been leaving in another month anyhow,” he said. “Even if this hadn’t happened.”
“I know.” It hadn’t seemed real, though. His departure had been far away, with infinite possibilities existing in the time between. Any number of things could have changed his course, kept him with me. That was wishful thinking. How could I expect him to give up his plans and stay in Henbane when I couldn’t wait to leave myself? And he wouldn’t have stayed, even if I’d asked. He would have gone to school, like he was going now. Better, maybe, to get it over with. Better for him to move forward with his life. And for me to move forward with mine. Rule number four, don’t let a boy get in the way of rules one through three.
CHAPTER 20
LILA
I’d been staying at Carl’s house for three weeks, and he had finally admitted that he wasn’t going back to his job in Arkansas. He was looking for something local but hadn’t had any luck yet. Now that I was more comfortable moving around the house, we had started eating supper together every night at the dining room table. Tonight he’d heated up some biscuits and deer-sausage gravy that Birdie had brought over at breakfast. I hadn’t wanted to eat it the first time I’d seen it puddled on my plate. But like everything else Birdie made, it tasted better than it looked. And I was hungry. Each time nausea swelled in my throat, I thought about the thing in my belly and ate to quiet it. When I ate, the nausea went away, and I could pretend everything was fine.
After dinner, I took the dishes to the sink to wash them, but Carl told me he would do it later. Now that I was no longer an invalid, I felt uncomfortable with him waiting on me. I wondered, as I did every day, how much longer I could stay here. I couldn’t stay forever. We stared at each other, not sure what to do with this moment when I was not quite a houseguest and not quite something more.
“Wanna listen to some music?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. He led me to the living room, and I sat on the sofa while he fiddled with the stereo. All the windows were open, and a box fan pulled in the evening air. Carl sat down next to me and took my hand in his as we listened. The recording was scratchy, the song haunting, a duet with some kind of guitar in the background.
“That was my parents,” Carl said when it was over. “They met singing at church. They used to sit out on the porch and sing. Just old mountain songs and such. Dad played banjo.”
“It was beautiful,” I said. “Are all Ozark songs so fucking tragic?”
He chuckled. “I guess I never thought about it, but yeah. Most of ’em. Love songs, especially.”
He put on another album and I felt myself relaxing, almost to the point of falling asleep. I wondered if the tiny creature inside me was already stealing away my energy, strengthening itself against my will.
“Do you like it here?” Carl asked, squeezing my hand.
“Henbane?” He’d asked me that before, and I remembered not wanting to insult his hometown.
“Here,” he said. “This house. With me.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I want you to stay here.”
“You do?”
He nodded. I smiled but didn’t answer. If Ransome had been telling the truth, Crete would leave me alone as long as I kept quiet. Maybe he’d find someone else to exploit, someone who’d consent. I wondered what I’d do if he brought in another ignorant girl like me. Would I be able to stomach knowing what was happening to her and not say a word?
I slept alone in Carl’s mother’s room—the room I was dangerously close to thinking of as mine. He hadn’t made any move to sleep in the room with me, not counting the first night, when I awoke to find him dozing in the chair. Probably he still thought of me as a convalescent, which was just as well because I was in no condition to be intimate with him. I laid my hand below my navel to see if I could feel anything different, but there was no shape, no movement, nothing except my own familiar skin. Maybe it was all in my head, a crazy notion born from Gabby’s suggestion. I didn’t know for sure that I was pregnant, and there was no sense saying anything to Carl until I knew.
That night my dreams were dark and clouded, full of dead ends and treacherous paths that led me right back where I’d started. I startled awake to a flurry of shadows across the walls and floor. Outside the window, between me and the moon, I saw a torrent of bats. The thought of them spilling from a crack in the earth filled me with unexplained dread.