Page 76 of Hideaway Whirlwind
I scrunch my nose, breathing through my mouth as I dig through the broken glove compartment, looking for any identifying information Mom might have left behind. Though her leg had healed from Storm’s bite, who knows what other ailments she must have suffered. She probably wouldn’t have even lived long enough to make it back to the desert—if there’s even anything to go back to.
“I still can’t figure out why she didn’t attack you on your own,” I say. “Or at least try to slip past you into the cabin while we were asleep. It doesn’t make sense.”
I can think of a million ways I would have done things differently to get my daughter back. Leaving meat out in the woods filled with tranquilizers for Storm to find so she wouldn’t be a problem. Picking the lock on the door or slipping through a window, then slitting the adults’ throats while they slept. Or perhaps setting fire to the cabin, then sniping off the adults when everyone ran outside. Forget the cabin altogether. I would have gone to Sydney’s school—
Elliott shrugs. “Why did she join the cult in the first place? Why was she ok with what they did to you? Why didn’t she snap out of it after the compound was raided and her husband died? Nothing about her makes a lick of sense.”
“True.” I’ll never understand how someone could get sucked into all of that and abandon their family, especially since Mom and Grandpa had always been so close.
Bingo. I find a thick, soggy notebook with a pen pushed into the spiral. In between Mom’s crazy rantings about punishing me and her horrifying, detailed plan of how and when she and my sister were eventually going to join Pazcart on Zeraxy is a timeline of the years she spent searching for me. The two fellow Zeraxists who’d survived the explosion and escaped with her bothsadlydied shortly thereafter from their injuries, disrupting the plan to find Sydney and marry her off to one of them so they could restart the cult with the next generation of “warrior” children. It was only by my sheer misfortune that she spotted me walking the kids home from daycare after my shift at the restaurant the night Elliott came to rescue us.
She lost us somewhere along the Arizona–New Mexico border but was able to find us here, thanks to the massive letters on the side of Elliott’s truck. At first sidelined by the freeze, once she tracked us to Goldie’s house and then to Russell’s property, it still took her over a week for her infection induced fever to break and for her to be strong enough to explore far enough away from her car to find Elliott’s cabin, where we were never, ever alone or vulnerable enough for her to take me one on one.
Her appearance with her knife really was her desperate last-ditch effort. She’d have been dead within a few days, tops, even without slicing her arm open after dramatically and foolishly punching through the bathroom window, if we hadn’t helped speed up the process.
Serves her right.
Elliott squats beside the open passenger door with a black garbage bag of everything inside the car that we will burn and bury in a separate section of our land. “You want to keep that?” he asks, pointing at the notebook. “I heard sweet little serialkillers like to keep tokens from each kill.”
I giggle and chuck the disturbing notebook in the bag. “Only you would call a serial killer ‘sweet’ and ‘little’.”
“You two give me the heebie-jeebies,” Russell says with an exaggerated shiver as he shoves one of Mom’s nasty dresses into the bag. But then he winks and says to Elliott, “Good for you, brother.”
Elliott
I wait until just after dark to hitch the stolen car to my blue Bronco to tow it to Henry’s junkyard, where he’ll strip it for parts and make it disappear for the right price.
“Where’d you get this?” I ask Henry, kicking the tires of the nineteen-fifties era travel trailer, its coral and turquoise paint peeling from its scuffed metal siding.
Henry leans a shoulder against the side, crossing one foot over the other. “It belonged to Sheriff Gibson’s parents and has been sitting ‘round back of his place for the last twenty or so years. Now that he’s retired, he and Sheila are packing up and moving to be nearer their daughter.”
A new dream starts to take form as I circle the twenty-one-foot-long trailer, then stick my head inside while Henry watches me quietly. “Needs a bit of work,” I say, “but it’s not in too bad of shape.”
“I’d be happy to give my favorite customer a fair price,” he says with a grin.
“How much we talkin’?”
After the deal is made for what will be my most expensiverestoration project to date, considering I’ll need to get a bigger truck to haul it, Henry says, “I thought you said you were retiring from the road. Something ‘bout your eyes?”
“Thankfully, my wife’s eyes work just fine.”
“Wife?” He lifts his gray brows, combing his fingers through his long beard. “First kids, now I found out you’re married?”
“Technically, we’re not married yet.” I slide the black and silver filigree reception invitation that Layla and Violet were able to design and print in no time flat—the best and quickest wedding planners this side of the Mississippi river—from my jacket pocket and pass it to him with a grin that takes him by surprise, rare as it is. “But we might as well be. Hope to see you there.”
* * *
Birdie, the kids, and the dogs stand with me in the yard as we watch the hired tow truck driver, Jovan, back the trailer up our driveway, close to the shed.
“What is it?” Birdie asks me with Kendall on her hip.
“A travel trailer.” By the light of our phones, I give them a short tour of the moth-eaten interior, bedecked with original birch cabinetry, rusty appliances, and seafoam green everything. After one too many sneezes and complaints from the kids about the musty smell, we pile outside. Hands in my pockets, trying to get a read on Birdie’s contemplative expression, I tell her, “I was thinking maybe you might like to help me restore it once the kids and I are done with the dirt bikes. We could take out the couch and put a couple of mattresses in the back. Add an awning and more storage.”
There’s a twinkle in her eye when she asks, “What for?”
“You know all those family trips we talked about taking when we were back at the motel?” Though I’ve driven through every state except Hawaii and Alaska, I rarely stopped long enough to explore. I quite like the idea of seeing everything anew through Birdie and the kids’ eyes.
Birdie’s voice takes on a teary quality. “Yeah, I remember. Seems like ages ago.”
