gusts. Peg had not in her life known this desire—a want that felt so much like need—to hurt someone the way she wanted to hurt this man, to beat him bloody with her fists and make him crawl away in shame. She suspected that to slink away was something Lance Squire would never do; he seemed, to Peg, incapable— inhuman, she realized, that’s what he was, and she cried it then: “You’re inhuman! You bastard! You inhuman bastard!”
Which is what she was screaming when Lance stepped back. He took one step away, as if he’d become aware of a terrible smell, something coming from her that made him instinctually retreat. He dropped his chin, narrowed his eyes to slits, glanced around the room as if to check that there was no one to see when he pounded her one. Then he fixed on her, this dishrag of a girl hollering at him as if that blue vein was going to pop right out of the middle of her forehead. Lance said, “Where’s my son?”
Peg stopped yelling.
Lance said it again, every word a stress of its own. “Where. Is. My. Son.” He reclaimed the offense, gave her a fraction of a second to answer, and then laced in: “You’re the one who took him today, you little piece of shit. You tell me where my son is, and you tell me now!”
He was only a few paces back, but her movement was so unexpected he didn’t even have a chance to reach out and grab her before she was gone. She spun, somehow her hand already on the screen door handle, and was out and down the steps and running for the barracks before it slammed again behind her. She ran for her room, then realized Jeremy’s keys were still in the pocket of her shorts and switched course mid-sprint, veered down the hill toward the north parking lot, where she jumped into Jeremy’s boat of a car and drove out of the Lodge and up the hill toward Eden Jacobs’s house in a decidedly more reckless manner than she’d perhaps ever done anything in her eighteen precious, law-abiding years.
Lance saw her run for the parking lot. He heard a big old engine turn over and saw the car itself come over the rise on its way up Island Drive, and it didn’t take much—even for Lance, even after consuming the majority of a case of beer and whatever else he’d put away while no one was there to see—to figure out where she was going. His own car keys were still on his belt. He tore out the door not five minutes behind her.
Peg burst into Eden’s living room with all the gumption that a girl of her sort possessed, which is to say that she knocked hard and waited, her face contorted in anguish, for Eden to open the door. Eden and Squee appeared to be in the midst of a game of cards, which was spread out on the coffee table, and Eden had something cooking in the kitchen for dinner. Peg entered with urgency, urgency instantly drenched with pity: Why, she wanted to know, couldn’t this child just be left alone to eat his dinner and play a bloody hand of rummy? And now that she was there, she didn’t know what to say. Squee had to get out, they had to get him away, hide him, but she’d have to explain why, wouldn’t she? What was the answer to that question—why? Squee had to get away because Lance was coming for him. Lance was coming for him, and he was shit-faced drunk, and he’d probably just beat up or raped or done something horrible to a nineteen-year-old girl who was stubborn and stupid enough to stand there in broad daylight and sneer as if it was Peg who’d done something wrong.
Eden stood waiting for Peg to form words. “Would you like to come in? Sit down?” she said finally, and that managed to jump-start Peg.
“We’ve got to get the boy away from here!” she cried, and Squee looked up at her from the couch. He’d been trying to pretend that this wasn’t anything to do with him, this crazy girl bursting into Eden’s living room, that she had to do with something else entirely. Eden turned to make sure Squee was still where she’d left him, then spun back to Peg, who was spewing out the words now as fast as she could think them. “Something’s