would stay with her. It was nice not to be alone anymore.
About forty minutes later Red was about to transfer the clothes from the washer to the dryer when D.J. stopped her. He’d gone into the front room for a while after their talk. Red hadn’t wanted to intrude so she sat on the bench in the laundry room with one of the two books she’d packed. The cover of The Blue Sword, which had been loved to death even before this trip, was hanging by a tattered edge.
For a little while she pretended she was at a Laundromat, reading while she waited for her clothes, and that when she was done she could go to a diner and have a greasy burger and more fries than she could eat and a chocolate milkshake.
Then D.J. came in and said, “Would you come up front, please?”
He led her into the front room, which was as neatly polished and organized as the kitchen. Three large bookshelves overflowed with books—some titles had been stacked on the floor in front of the shelves. The floor was hardwood, like the kitchen, and worn to a loving patina. A couch and two chairs were clean but used—no plastic furniture covers here, Red thought. It looked like a room where guests were welcome, where kids had jumped on the cushions, where life had been lived.
The windows were all boarded up except for one, as D.J. had told her. This one had curtains that hid the shutters from the inside. The shutters had narrow slats that made it possible to peek out onto the road below.
“Look,” he said.
The sun was going down outside—the days were getting shorter, after all—and the patrol was out again. This time there were six of them instead of three, and they moved with more purpose. Red watched them systematically checking each house, looking for signs of life. One of the men walked up on D.J.’s lawn and flashed a light toward the house.
Red flattened herself against the wall beside the window just in time. She didn’t know if her silhouette was visible through the shutters but she wasn’t taking any chances. Once the light moved away she went back to her viewpoint.
“Nobody ever goes in that one,” one of the other men called from the street. The group was moving down the road, inspecting the other homes.
The first man said, “Really?”
He was tall and very thin (which made Red mentally dub him Toothpick) and his hair was shaggy and he wore a denim jacket with his denim pants and had a bandanna tied around his neck like a robber’s kerchief.
He looked, Red thought, like a refugee from The Outsiders (which was not a film she would normally watch but her eleventh-grade English teacher had done a Book vs. Movie term and that was one of his selections).
His flashlight (which was really bright, bright like a policeman’s flashlight) was on the ground now, and he appeared to be peering at something there very intently.
Footprints, Red thought. Even though it hadn’t rained, there would still be signs that someone had disturbed the grass—especially if you knew what to look for.
Toothpick bent over and picked something up out of the grass. Red couldn’t see what it was—the slats of the shutters blocked her view of his hand. The object was small enough to go into his pocket, whatever it was.
He cast a thoughtful look at D.J.’s house.
“He’s going to come up here,” Red said under her breath. “He’s going to walk right up to the front door and look around and then he’s going to find something that will make him want to break the door down.”
But instead Toothpick followed his compatriots, though he did look back once at D.J.’s house again.
“So he’ll come back another time,” Red said.
D.J. stood a few feet away, watching her. “Did you see the larger patrol?”
Red nodded. “It’s really not safe to travel at night through here.”
She dreaded the thought of this group coming upon herself and Sam and Riley in the woods, asleep and vulnerable. Before they could go any farther forward, Red