“I know they stole a lot of weapons. They want people to be afraid of them.” He shook his head. “Maybe they want to get their hands on military weaponry.”
“My grandma wouldn’t know anything about that. And even if she did before, when she was a pilot, she wouldn’t know now.”
Wolf opened his palms wide to her. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else it could be. Unless you can think of something she may have been involved with.”
“No, I’ve been racking my brain since she disappeared, but there’s nothing. She was just—she’s my grandma.” She gestured out toward the fields. “She owns a farm. She speaks her mind and she doesn’t like being told what to think, but she doesn’t have any enemies, not that I know of. Sure, people in town think she’s a little eccentric, but there’s no one who doesn’t like her. And she’s just an old woman.” She clasped both hands around the coffee mug and sighed. “You must know how to find them, at least?”
“Find them? No—it would be suicide.”
She tensed. “It’s not for you to decide.”
Wolf scratched behind his neck. “How long ago did they take her?”
“Eighteen days.” Hysteria worked its way up her throat. “They’ve had her for eighteen days.”
His attention was plastered to the table, troubled lines drawn into his brow. “It’s too dangerous.”
The chair slammed against the floor as Scarlet bolted up. “I asked for information, not a lecture. I don’t care how dangerous they are—that’s just one more reason I need to find them! Do you know what they could be doing to her right now while you’re wasting my time? What they did to my father?”
A slam echoed through the house and Scarlet jumped, barely catching herself before she tripped over the fallen chair. She glanced past Wolf, but the hall was empty. Her heart hiccupped. “Dad?” She bolted into the foyer and thrust open the front door. “Dad!”
But outside, the drive was already empty.
Thirteen
Scarlet sprinted into the drive, the gravel biting into her feet. The wind kicked at her curls, throwing them across her face.
“Where did he go?” she said, tucking her hair into her hood. The sun was fully over the horizon already, flecking the crops with gold and filling the drive with swaying shadows.
“Perhaps to feed your birds?” Wolf pointed as a rooster pecked his way back around the side of the house, meandering toward the vegetable patch.
Ignoring the biting gravel, Scarlet jogged around the corner. Oak leaves spun on the wind. The hangar and barn and chicken coop all stood silent in the buffeting dawn. There was no trace of her father.
“He must have been looking for something, or—” Scarlet’s heart skipped. “My ship!”
She ran, ignoring the rocky drive, the prickly weeds. She nearly plowed into the hangar’s door but managed to grasp the handle and yank it open just as a crash shook the building.
“Dad!”
But he was not inside the ship, preparing to fly off with it as she’d feared. Instead, he was standing on top of the cabinets that ran the length of the far wall, reaching into the overhead cupboards and tossing their contents onto the floor. Paint cans, extension cords, drill bits.
An entire standing toolbox had been tipped over, flooding the concrete with screws and bolts, and two metal cabinets on the back wall stood wide-open, showing an assortment of military pilot uniforms, coveralls, and a single straw gardening hat shoved into a corner.
“What are you doing?” Scarlet strode toward him, then ducked and froze as a wrench sailed by her head. When a crash didn’t follow, she glanced back to see Wolf gripping the wrench a foot from his face, blinking in surprise. Scarlet spun back. “Dad, what—”
“There’s something here!” he said, yanking open another cupboard. He snatched up a tin can and tipped it over, mesmerized as hundreds of rusted nails crashed and clanged on the floor.
“Dad, stop! There’s nothing here!” She picked her way through the mess, more aware of rusty sharp bits than she had been of the jagged rocks outside. “Stop it!”
“There is something here, Scar.” Tucking a metal barrel under one arm, her dad hopped off the counter and crouched, working the plug out from the hole in the top. Though he was also barefoot, the jumble of nails and screws didn’t appear to bother him. “She has something and they want it. It’s got to be here. Somewhere … but where…”
The air filled with the pungent fumes of engine lubricant as her dad tipped over the barrel, letting the yellowish grease gurgle and spill out over his mess.
“Dad, put it down!” She grabbed a hammer off the floor and held it overhead. “I will hit you, I swear it!”
He finally looked at her with that same haunted madness. This was not her father. This man was not vain and charming and self-indulgent, all the things she’d admired as a child and despised as a teenager. This man was broken.
The stream of oil became a light drizzle.