Page 41 of Twelve
A photo of an airplane.
It may be more than a few days.I read the message that had accompanied the photograph silently and then a second time out loud. My mother loved me. I knew that. I’dalwaysknown that.
Someday, I’d stop expecting her to surprise me.
It was another hour before I went back to the contract. I picked up a red pen. I made some adjustments.
And then I signed.
Mackie kneaded his forehead. “Are you sure none of you wants to call your parents?”
“No, thank you.”
“Do you know who my father is?”
“My stepmother’s faking a pregnancy, and she needs her rest.”
Mackie wasn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole. He turned to the last girl, the one who’d successfully picked the lock mere seconds after he’d arrived.
“What about you?” he said hopefully.
“My biological father literally threatened to kill me if I become inconvenient,” the girl said, leaning back against the wall of the jail cell like shewasn’twearing a designer gown. “And if anyone finds out we were arrested, I’m out five hundred thousand dollars.”
Iarrived at my grandmother’s residence—a mere forty-five minutes from the town where I’d grown up and roughly three and a half worlds away—on the contractually specified date at the contractually specified time. Based on what I knew of the Taft family and the suburban wonderland they inhabited, I’d expected my grandmother’s house to be a mix of Tara and the Taj Mahal. But 2525 Camellia Court wasn’t ostentatious, and it wasn’t historic. It was a nine-thousand-square-foot house masquerading as average, the architectural equivalent of a woman who spent two hours making herself up for the purpose of looking like she wasn’t wearing makeup.This old thing?I could almost hear the two-acre lot saying.I’ve had it for years.
Objectively, the house was enormous, but the cul de sac was lined with other houses just as big, with lawns just as sprawling. It was like someone had taken a normal neighborhood and scaled everything up an order of magnitude in size—including the driveways, the SUVs, and the dogs.
The single largest canine I’d ever seen greeted me at the front door, butting my hand with its massive head.
“William Faulkner,” the woman who’d answered the door chided. “Mind your manners.”
She was the spitting image of Lillian Taft. I was still processing the fact that the dog was (a) the size of a small pony and (b) namedWilliam Faulkner, when the woman I assumed was my aunt spoke again.
“John David Easterling,” she called, raising her voice so it carried. “Who’s the best shot in this family?”
There was no reply. William Faulkner butted his head against my thigh and huffed. I bent slightly—veryslightly—to pet him and noticed the red dot that had appeared on my tank top.
“I will skin you alive if you pull that trigger,” my aunt called, her voice disturbingly cheerful.
What trigger?I thought. The red dot on my torso wavered slightly.
“Now, young man, I believe I asked you a question. Who’s the best shot in this family?”
There was an audible sigh, and then a boy of ten or so pushed up to a sitting position on the roof. “You are, Mama.”
“And amIusing your cousin for target practice?”
“No, ma’am.”
“No, sir, I am not,” my aunt confirmed. “Sit, William Faulkner.”
The dog obeyed, and the boy disappeared from the roof.
“Please tell me that was a Nerf gun,” I said.
It took my aunt a moment to process the question, and then she let out a peal of laughter—practiced and perfect. “He’s not allowed to use the real thing without supervision,” she assured me.
I stared at her. “That’s not as comforting as you think it is.”
