and all the colors seemed supersaturated. If winter had ever been here, this place didn’t remember it.
Koenig didn’t say anything, just rubbed his hand over his close-cropped hair. He didn’t look quite like the Koenig I remembered, this young guy driving us into the middle of nowhere in a civilian truck, wearing a shirt in department-store maroon. This was not who I’d expected to be putting my trust in at this stage. Beside me, Sam practiced a guitar chord on my thigh.
Appearances weren’t everything, I supposed.
The truck was silent. After a bit, Sam brought up the weather. He thought it was pretty smooth sailing from here on out. Koenig said he thought that was probably true, but you never knew what Minnesota had in store for you. She could surprise you, he said. I found myself pleased by him referring to Minnesota as a “she.” It seemed to render Koenig more benevolent, somehow. Koenig asked Sam what he was thinking of doing for college, and Sam mentioned that Karyn had offered him a full-time position at the bookstore, and he was considering it. No shame in that, commented Koenig. I thought about two-hundred-level classes and majors and minors and success quantified by a piece of paper and kind of wished they would change the subject.
Koenig did. “What about St. Clair?”
“Cole? Beck found him,” Sam said. “It was a charity case.”
Koenig glanced over. “For St. Clair or for Beck?”
“That’s something I ask myself a lot these days,” Sam replied. He and Koenig exchanged a look at this, and I was surprised to see that Koenig was regarding Sam as an equal, or, if not an equal, at least as an adult. I spent so much time alone with Sam that other people’s reactions to him and us together always seemed to come as a shock. It was hard to imagine how one guy could elicit so many different responses from other people. It was like there were forty different versions of Sam. I’d always assumed that everyone took me at face value, but now I wondered — were there forty different versions of Grace out there, too?
We all jumped when Sam’s phone rang from my bag — a bag packed with a change of clothing in case I shifted and a novel in case I needed to look busy — and Sam said, “Would you get that, Grace?”
I paused when I saw that the number on the phone wasn’t one that I recognized. I showed the screen to Sam as the phone rang again. He shook his head, puzzled.
“Should I?” I asked, tipping it in my hand as if to open it.
“New York,” Koenig said. He looked back to the road. “It’s a New York exchange.”
This information didn’t enlighten Sam. He shrugged.
I opened the phone and put it to my ear. “Hello?”
The voice on the other side was light and male. “Oh — right. Hello. Is Cole around?”
Sam blinked at me, and I could tell that he could hear the voice as well.
“I think you have a wrong number,” I said. Immediately, my brain processed what this meant — Cole had used Sam’s phone to call somewhere. Home? Would Cole have done that?
The voice was not perturbed. His voice was lazy and slippery, like a melting pat of butter. “No, I don’t. But I understand. This is Jeremy. We were in a band together.”
“With this person I don’t know,” I replied.
“Yes,” Jeremy said. “I have something I would like you to tell Cole St. Clair, if you would. I’d like you to tell him I have given him the best present in the world, and it took quite a lot of effort on my part, so I’d appreciate if he didn’t just tear the wrapping off and then throw it away.”
“I’m listening.”
“In eighteen minutes, the present is going to air on Vilkas’s radio spot. Cole’s parents will be listening, too, I’ve made sure of that. Do you have that?”
“Vilkas? What station is that on?” I asked. “Not that I’m saying anything.”
“I know what it is,” Koenig said, not looking up from the road. “Rick Vilkas.”
“That’s the one,” Jeremy said, overhearing him. “Someone has excellent taste. You sure that Cole isn’t around?”
“He really isn’t,” I said.
“Will you tell me something? When I last saw our intrepid hero Cole St. Clair, he was not in the best of places. In fact, I might say he was in the worst of them. All I want to know is, is he happy?”
I thought about what