Page 16 of Bitter Falls

I slip out of bed and hold a finger to my lips as I slide on my house shoes. Vee smiles at me, a warm and lazy kind of smile, and burrows into the pillows like she intends to stay. I open the door and listen. No sounds in the house yet. I hurry down the hall and into the living room, and I’m just entering the code for my window again when I hear the bright chime of Sam’s alarm going off.Shit shit shit.I nearly miss the buttons, I’m going so fast, but I manage to get it right, and I rush back to my room and shut and lock the door. I can hear Mom and Sam getting up.

“You have to go,” I whisper to Vee. “Now. Now!” I pull her up to a sitting position, and she winks at me, yawns again, and jams her bare feet into the boots she left on the floor. Her hair has dried all crazy, but she doesn’t seem to care about that. She puts her dirty clothes in the duffel bag. I open the window. She dumps the bag out and sits on the sill and looks at me, dangling her feet like a little kid.

“Can I come back tonight?” she asks me. I shake my head. “Oh, come on now, girl. That was fun, wasn’t it? And I was nice. I didn’t take no advantages.”

“Vee, if my mom finds you here, she’ll freak the hell out. You’re supposed to be in a foster home! You can’t just...run away.”

“Yes, I can. You send me back there I’ll do it again.” Her smile fades. I see that cool distance in her eyes, the same as I saw back in Wolfhunter when she was in jail. Vee’s complicated. And I know she’s got the death of her mom to deal with, and she’s probably doing that the bad way, with drinking and drugs. My mother will absolutely kill me if I don’t tell her about Vee being here.

But I’m still not sure I will.

“Come back tonight,” I tell Vee. “I can wash your clothes for you, maybe.” I have no idea why I’m making that offer, but I’ve already said it and it’s too late, and Vee’s smile makes me go weak inside.

She kisses me. It’s fast, and hot, and then she’s rolling backward out the window and springing up like a gymnast. She hits the ground running. I quickly shut the window and try to catch my breath. I feel like I have a fever.

Someone taps on the door. I flinch and rush over and unlock it. I fling it open. “What?” I sound bitchy. I’m just scared. “I’m up!”

It’s Mom, and she doesn’t look pleased. “You left towels all over the bathroom floor,” she says. “You know better, Lanny. Clean it up. Go. Now.”

I was afraid that she’d seen Vee running from the house, that somehow she justknew, like I was wearing a neon sign or something. But it’s not that at all.

I rush to the bathroom. It’s a wreck. Vee left shampoo bottles in a mess, wet towels on the floor. I take the towels to the laundry machine, then come back and clean up the spills. By the time I’m done it looks okay again, and I’m calmer. A little.

“Sorry,” I mumble to Mom as I head into the kitchen. “I think I was sleepwalking.”

“Really.”

“Maybe I was just really tired.”

She doesn’t buy it, not for a second.

I told Vee to come back.

Oh God.

This isn’t going to work. Not at all.

6

GWEN

In the morning I make it official: I write a letter, using the format approved by the state of Tennessee, to remove my kids from the Norton Independent School District, and I enroll them in the Tennessee Virtual Academy. Both Lanny and Connor seem relieved, and so am I. I’ll make arrangements to pick up the contents of their lockers later, and that’ll be it. I think about calling a real estate agent, but I know I need to think about this and talk to the kids. Decide as a family. My impulse is to move on from Stillhouse Lake, but something the kids have been angry about in the past few years is that I run from things. I do it to keep them safe, but I understand their frustration. If we’re moving this time we have to decide it together.

Meanwhile, I’m glad the kids are safer now, but it does make my job harder. I’d planned to take off for Knoxville today and interview the mother of the missing young man I’d been hired to locate, but even though Lanny insists (of course) that she and Connor can stay by themselves while Sam’s at work, I don’t buy it. So after letting them log into their new virtual schools and get their assignments, I order them into the car with me.

Road trip.

They’re not thrilled, which is annoying but typical; they’ve both reached the age where anything I want or need them to do is a horrific burden, but I know that beneath that facade they’re actually okay with it. Lanny’s subdued after the weirdness this morning; she warms up once we’re in the SUV and heading out on the road—with doughnuts, of course—and commandeers the sound system to play her own driving soundtrack, which I allow because it makes life easier and my daughter actually has decent taste in music.

Connor asks me about the case I’m working on.

“It’s a missing college student,” I tell him. “His name is Remy.”

“Hisname,” my son repeats. “I thought only women went missing.”

That’s troubling, but I can see why he’d think so. The big media blitzes almost exclusively happen for missing children, teen girls, and adult women. White and pretty, preferably. It’s rare to see the major networks covering a missing young woman of color as a priority.

And almost never young men of any race, even though they can and do go missing too.

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