shirt at the small of his back. “I’m looking forward to the end of all this.”
I drank down my water. “Won’t be till Eddy gets home, I guess. And who knows how long they’ll keep it up after that. It’s the most paranoid thing I’ve ever heard of, thinking an old man’s going to start mumbling about his unregistered guns in his sleep.”
Scooter shook his head slowly. His gaze drifted up to the second-floor landing, then returned to bore into me. In a lower voice he asked, “Is that what they told you?”
He sat down in a kitchen chair, then leaned forward to tug the gun from the back of his pants and set it on the table. His face was so young, but those wire-rimmed glasses gave him an owlish look. With his pale skin and high-and-tight haircut, he had the earnest look of a missionary. I said nothing. I could only hold his gaze and wait for him to go on.
“Now’s a good time to get out, Jill,” he said. His voice had grown so quiet that the low syllables bumped against each other like marbles, but his meaning was clear enough. “Remember what I said to you about Randy.”
Fear prickled at the back of my neck. “What’s going on?”
“If I knew I’d tell you. I figured you knew more than I did. You live here.” He glanced up at the landing again. “I don’t think they trust me enough anymore to say. But I know they’re not watching the property twenty-four-seven because they’re worried over Eddy. That never even came up.”
I felt panic tightening my chest as I pictured TJ fast asleep in the laundry basket beside the bed, clad only in a diaper and a thin white undershirt, and the keys to the Jeep in the pocket of Cade’s dirty jeans. I had waited much too long to make my escape plans, as if this moment would never come, when all along I knew it would. “Well, what did they say?” I demanded. “How much time do I have?”
“It has to do with getting retribution for Elias, that’s all I know. If I knew details none of us would be here now. Maybe I would have turned him in already.” At the sight of my fearful gaze he lowered his voice to a conciliatory whisper. “I’m sure they won’t do anything till after your kid gets his ear thing done. Cade loves his son and all. I know he’s planning to be around for that. But if I were you I would go straight to Randy’s from there. I wouldn’t mess around.”
“Have you said anything to anyone? The police?”
“No, they wouldn’t do anything. There’s plenty of people up here who make that same kind of noise. I’d get thrown under the bus for it, and they’d think it was nothing special. Except Cade always wants to be the special one. That’s the one difference, I guess.”
I sat down wearily in the chair closest to his and rested my temple against my hand, gazing out the window at the Jeep. Crescents of moonlight reflected off the curve around its headlights, a sharp glint against the darkness. If only it weren’t for TJ. I wished desperately that I could call upon my mother to get us out of here, give us shelter, frame up the step-by-step plan to untangle our circumstances. But that was nothing more than an idle wish. There was only me.
“I understood it at first,” said Scooter. “When the government isn’t just, people ought to rise up. But the cloak-and-dagger stuff, it doesn’t feel right. It isn’t the way to honor Elias. He was a soldier. He fought in a uniform. He didn’t deceive anybody.”
In my life I haven’t felt a great deal of regret, but I felt it then. It was like a dissolving in the pit of my stomach, a sense of waste and lost time. The seam of my shorts felt damp from Cade, and again I pictured him dozing upstairs, peaceful and complacent with no right to be so, draped half over my side of the bed. As the regret moved through me I felt it trailed by a fresh burst of anger: at what a stooge he had made me, how easily I had mistaken his ambition for character, and how now I would have to scrap this life and cobble together a new one, again—but this time with a child who deserved better. The thoughts twisted together into a