Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (26 page)

I dropped Jack’s hand,turned to the side,and threw up. 

Jack patted me on the back, and I kept throwing up, again and again. And when there was nothing left I still threw up, the dry heaves racking my body and making me shake like the leaves on the trees that hid the dead boy’s body from the light. 

Finally,finally,I straightened.I walked over to the creek, put my bare knees on its muddy banks, and splashed cold creek water on my face. I rinsed out my mouth. And then went back to Jack, and the body. 

“River is out of control, Jack. It was him, in the attic. I’m sure of it.He’s dangerous.To me.To you.To everyone. So . . .so here’s what is going to happen.You are going to go to the café, or the library, and stay there until I come for you.I don’t want you to be involved in any of this.I’m going to Sunshine’s. I’m going to use her phone, and call the police station in Portland.” I ran the back of my hand over my forehead. My face was cold, but whether it was from the cold creek water or the clammy throwing up I’d done, I didn’t know. 

“Go back to town,” I said, when Jack just stood there, watching me and not moving. 

“Aren’t you coming too?” he asked, and his voice was sweet and serious and concerned. 

I shook my head. “I going to wait here for a few minutes.I don’t want anyone to see us walking back into town together. I don’t want anyone to know you’re involved with . . . this.” 

Jack stared at me a second, nodded, and then he was gone. 

The mourning doves cooed. A crow cawed from the top of a tree. The shadows danced around as clouds passed in front of the sun.The boy’s whole body was in dark now. I wanted to help him. I wanted to move him so he looked more comfortable, I wanted to— 

“Hey there.” 

For a second, a wild, mad second, I thought it was the dead boy talking to me. I thought he’d come back to life. I thought I’d gone insane.I put my hand on my heart and leaned over and stared at the dead boy’s mouth and eyes, waiting for them to move. 

And then the back of my neck prickled. 

I turned around. 

A boy. A not-dead boy. Standing not ten feet away in the darkness underneath the closely packed trees. Fourteen, maybe, but still taller than me.Vaguely familiar. Did I know him? He was skinny, all bones and elbows and legs. And his hair. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, and red. Red like the sea in the morning, sailors take warning. Fire red. Blood red. 

He was wearing black cowboy boots and fitted, expensive-looking black jeans, and a plain white T-shirt. His eyes were green, and wide open, and surprised. 

He nodded at the body.“Yes, ma’am. It’s quite a si . . . quite a sight,”he said,his voice cracking halfway through. He had a southern accent, but not Deep South. McMurtry south. Texas, maybe. “I stumbled upon it while watching the trains go by.That’s how I got here. By train. I like to watch them. Ride them sometimes.” 

I stared at him and tried not to shake. Tried not to panic.“How long have you been standing there?” 

Please don’t let him have heard that stuff about River, oh god, please,
I thought. Even though I’d already planned to tell the cops, and it didn’t matter anyway. 

“Only for about five seconds, ma’am. I live in Echo. I started for town, to get help, but then I saw you and the other kid coming, so I just hid in the trees until I knew what you were about.”He held out his hand.“The name’s Brodie.” 

“I’m Violet.”I shook his hand.It was skinny,but tough. His fingers gripped mine . . . and let go.“So your name’s Brodie? I don’t think I’ve . . .Have I seen you before? Did you just move here?” 

He nodded, fast. His red hair parted at the movement and the tops of his ears broke through.They stuck out a bit and made him seem even younger.“I’ve only been in Echo a few days.” He reached down and picked up something at his feet. It was a black cowboy hat. He slapped the hat on his head,and some of the red disappeared in a flash,like a lightbulb going out.“I’m from Texas.” 

I’d seen that hat before.The kid, sitting on the swings, when Daniel Leap killed himself—he’d been wearing a hat like that. 

The clouds shifted, and the sun broke through again. The dead boy’s face was back in the light. And I realized I’d just been having a get-to-know-you conversation with a kid from Texas with my toes twelve inches from a corpse. 

“Yeah, Texas, right . . .”I said, barely noticing, because all I was thinking about again was River, and turning him in, and what they would do to him, and what it would do to me. “I’ve got to go make a phone call, so I . . . I can’t talk right now.I’ve got to go home and make an important phone call . . .” 

“Would you mind if I came with,ma’am?”Brodie took his hat back off and held it at his side. “You’re going to call the cops,is that right? Well,I can wait with you and then tell them what I saw. I’d like to help you out. You look a bit peaky,to be honest.I’ve seen a dead boy before. There are lots of dead bodies in Texas. So I don’t mind so much.” 

But my mind was a million miles away and I didn’t answer. And when I started walking back to town, Brodie just followed me. The part of me that could still notice things noticed this. But what difference did it make? He seemed like a nice,polite kid.What difference did it make if he came with and told his side of the story to the cops too? 

We took the back roads when we reached town, so we could skirt the main square. I didn’t want to explain to anyone why my legs were covered in mud, why my hair was dripping with creek water, why I looked sick, why I was walking next to some kid named Brodie. I was certain that if one person stopped and asked me what was wrong, I would open my mouth and confess everything.The glow. River. The Devil. The dead boy. Everything. 

Brodie probably asked me where exactly we were going on the way home, and I probably told him, but I already couldn’t remember. 

Everything was silent at the Citizen. I went to the shed,but Luke wasn’t painting.The guesthouse was quiet. When I put my ear to the door and listened for sounds of breakfast being made, coffee sizzling in the moka pot, eggs frying in the pan,Neely and River fighting,there was nothing. 

I stood in my backyard and shivered. There was a bad feeling in the air, like a storm brewing. Except the sky was clear. The sun was bright, and the air was warm.
Something
was making my skin crawl, though. Something was giving me the feeling that I was being watched. 

I looked around. No one. No one was anywhere. “I don’t know where anyone is,”I said.“It’s . . .strange.” Brodie just smiled and shrugged. 

I started to waver. I walked toward the Citizen’s front steps and considered crawling back into bed. Forgetting what I saw. Forgetting the dead boy, his hair clotted with blood.Forgetting Daniel Leap slicing the razor across his throat. Forgetting it all. 

But then I looked at Brodie, with his red hair and his hat and his ma’ams and his sweet Texan drawl. 

He’d seen the body too. 

There was no forgetting. No covering it up. 

“Just stay here,” I said, not being all that polite and not caring.“I’m going to go to the neighbor’s and use the phone. It’s easier if you stay here. Okay?” 

Brodie tipped his black hat at me and then pointed at the ground by his feet, as if to say
I’m glued to this spot.
 

I took a deep breath. And started walking down the road.To Sunshine’s house. 

Sunshine wasn’t outside, sitting on her swing.
She must be sleeping too,
I thought. I wondered what the hell time it was in the morning. Sunshine was an early riser, like Luke,and I didn’t really know what early morning people did, when they got up and when they ate breakfast or how they spent their early morning time. I had never been one of them, except for the times serious boys woke me up at the crack of seven a.m. to show me dead bodies by the railroad tracks. 

The front door of Sunshine’s house was open.I knocked on the screen, but didn’t wait for a reply. I stepped inside. 

I saw Sunshine’s parents. Sam and Cassie stood beside each other in the living room—Sam was lost-looking and corduroy as usual and Cassie was black hair and glasses. They were staring at something on the floor. 

The thing on the floor was Sunshine. She was lying on her stomach, and she was bleeding. Blood oozed from a slick dent near her temple, dripped across her face, and pooled on the floor beside her. 

Sunshine saw me. She opened her mouth. She was trying to say something, but the only thing that came out was spit, and more blood. She coughed, and blood sprayed between her teeth. 

“Maybe you need to hit it again,”Cassie said.“Look,it’s trying to move.” 

Sam had a bat in one hand.I hadn’t noticed.
Why hadn’t I noticed that bat? When did Sunshine’s bookish parents get a baseball bat?
Sunshine’s fingers reached out and touched my bare toes, and I wanted to help her, I wanted to help her, but I couldn’t move. I was stock-still and frozen, trying to scream but making no sound and Sunshine wasn’t moving at all anymore and Sam’s bat had blood and matted hair on it, and why hadn’t I seen it when I first came in, Sunshine, blood, bat, I was shaking and screaming a silent scream— 

And Cassie finally saw me. 

She smiled. Her eyes had a funny, staring, dead-boy-bythe-tracks look in them.“Hello,Violet.Do you want some tea? We’ve had quite a morning.A rat got into the house. But Sam has killed it with his bat. Look at it there, by your feet. Isn’t it disgusting? It’s probably carrying rabies. Sam is going to take it out back and burn it. Violet, you look upset. Is something wrong?” 

Sam looked up then. He took one look at me and raised the bat in the air. “I told you there’d be more than one, Cassie. Rats come in hordes. Get out of the way. I’ve got to kill this one too— 

He swung the bat, and I ducked. The hard wood bounced off my temple and I stumbled backward. I didn’t fall, but there he was swinging again,and god,I didn’t want to leave Sunshine, but I could hear the bat cutting through the air and— 

I ran. I ran out the door, stumbled, ran down the steps, stumbled again, ran past the woods, past the ocean, down the driveway, and straight toward Citizen Kane. 

Brodie was waiting for me. He was standing by the fountain. He saw me running and didn’t seem surprised, didn’t seem surprised at all.He was stroking the dirty nude fountain girls with one hand and smiling. 

“How is Sunshine?”he asked, nice and slow, as I came to a stop in front of him, sweating and sick and so damn scared.“Is the little slut dead yet?” 

And then he looked at me,
right
at me, and winked. 

I 
jumped back, so fast my feet slipped in the gravel and I fell. My palms skidded across the small rocks and maybe it hurt but I couldn’t tell,because I was already 

up and running again,running toward the Citizen,to the safety of the Citizen . . . 

He caught me on the steps. 

Brodie grabbed me, hard. “Maybe we should introduce ourselves again. The name’s Brodie.” His skinny fingers gripped my left elbow. He jerked me back to the ground. “And you must be Violet.” 

He let go of me, as if he knew I wouldn’t run. And I didn’t. 

“What do you want?” I asked in a quiet voice. “Who are you?” 

Brodie began to dance. He flipped his cowboy hat off with one hand. His boots tapped on the driveway and his red hair flew about his head.And then he stopped,just as fast as he’d started, and looked at me. “I am the Cowboy Puppet Master. I am the Texas Butcher. I am Anarchy. I am the Devil. I am River and Neely’s younger brother.” His voice had changed. It wasn’t fast and kind of eager and enthusiastic. It was low. Too low for a boy his age. And he spoke in a slow, languid drawl now, dragging out the words as if reluctant to let them go, like a miser with his gold. 

Brother.
Brother.
 

He stepped toward me. His eyes had changed too. They were narrow, as if from squinting in the sun. And cocky. Those cocky, narrow eyes. They were familiar. 

I moved back. He laughed. It was a hoarse sound. A hoarse,
familiar
sound. 

I’d heard that laughter before. 

In the Glenship attic. 

I smelled smoke, and gas, like I was still back there, with Gianni and Jack. 

“Not going to let me come near you, then. Right. Because River told you about the glow. Both of my brothers have big mouths, but of the two I think River’s is the biggest.You?” 

I didn’t answer. 

I thought when Sunshine fainted, I was scared. I thought when I saw the Devil over River’s shoulders,I was scared.I thought when I saw Jack tied up in the attic,and the dead boy by the tracks, and Sunshine bleeding from the head, and Sam with the bat, I thought I couldn’t get more scared. But that was only the beginning. The beginning. And the middle. All leading up to the red boy in front of me. 

This was the end. 

Brodie laughed again.“Hey, you don’t need to worry. I don’t glow like River.Not by touching.I need to draw blood, you see, to plant my ideas. I call it
sparking
. The spark. Because that’s what I do. I sow sparks like a farmer sows seeds in a field. Except the seeds I sow are in people’s minds.” Brodie paused. His narrow eyes softened and became almost dreamy. “And if I wasn’t such a violent youngster, I probably wouldn’t have figured it out, not for years. And wouldn’t that have been a shame? Look at this.” 

Brodie slipped his hand into his boot and pulled something from it, a thin, four-inch piece of silver with a pearl handle. A knife. 

I’d seen that knife before,cutting up an apple to give to a little kid at
Brief Encounter
in the town square. 

“I got this made special,” he said, waving it in front of my eyes. “I call it the scraper. I liked to use it on my girlfriend. She was a sweet thing, sweet as sugar with sugar on top, and innocent as a day-old colt. I liked to cut her, just a little, and watch her cry. It passed the time.” 

He slid the knife back into his boot. 

“You look like her. My little Sophie. Blond hair, pale skin,drippy fear in your drippy blue eyes.I’ll be damned if we didn’t just meet and yet I’m talking away as if we’ve known each other for years. I think it’s because you look like Sophie. Hmmm . . . I would like to cut you sometime. Watch you cry. I think you’d like it. I
know
I would.”