The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,23
are visiting for a field trip. No fire exits. It’s an old building.”
“There it is.”
“So that’s my future,” Tean said. He slumped back in the seat, looking incredibly satisfied with himself. “Ending my days as a mummy who gets incinerated on top of a pile of orphans. I hope you’re happy.”
When Jem offered the Egg McMuffin again, Tean accepted it and took a huge bite.
Progress, Jem thought.
After that, the stakeout passed relatively quietly. Because Mormon congregations were organized geographically, and because those geographic boundaries were so small in Utah, most of the families on Hannah’s street walked to church. When Hannah and Caleb emerged from their home, holding hands and turning toward the sidewalk, Jem and Tean agreed to a division of labor. Tean slipped out of the Mercedes and followed Hannah on foot, while Jem stayed behind to watch the house. A typical Mormon worship service lasted three hours—divided into three hour-long parts—and by the time families started walking back home, Jem desperately needed to pee. He left Tean in the car, jogged south to the Sinclair, used the bathroom, and bought as many TastyKake snacks as he could carry at one time. When he got back to the car, Tean needed to pee, and Tean brought back a bag of unsalted, unseasoned sunflower seeds and a bottle of water.
“Good choice of snacks. They didn’t have any raisins or prunes?” Jem said. “Or fresh fruit? Or unsweetened shredded coconut?”
“What?”
“Or, you know, like a box of instant corn mush?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind. You’re hopeless.”
They passed the day that way. Like the day before, they saw nothing that might have constituted someone keeping watch on Hannah, and although her only trip had been to church, Tean was confident he would have spotted someone who didn’t fit in. Jem thought that was another clue that whoever was following Hannah might be closer to home than she realized, but he didn’t say this to Tean.
The spring day warmed up enough that they rolled down the windows, but after that it was perfect. Sometimes the air smelled like pine and sagebrush—Tean—and sometimes it smelled like roses and something else, another plant.
“Hyacinth,” Tean finally said.
“What?”
“You’re smelling the hyacinth in the flower bed right over there.”
“How did you do that?”
Tean just smiled and shrugged.
On his next trip to the Sinclair, Jem bought a pack of cards, and they played War, Slap Jack, Speed, Nerts, and Egyptian Rat Screw. When they got hungry, Jem searched on his phone and walked the mile and a half to the Whole Foods, and he brought back chicken salad and crackers and a huge loaf of rye. When Tean started in on the likelihood of contaminated rye and death by ergotism, Jem threw crackers at his head until he shut up. All in all, Jem thought it was about a perfect day.
Dark fell over the valley. Porch lights came on, and a soft yellow glow glazed the inside of the windows. When the evening mountain breeze picked up, Jem got cold, and they rolled the windows up. Then the smell of Tean—that wild mixture of sagebrush and range grass, which had to be a cologne or an aftershave even though Jem couldn’t imagine where Tean had gotten it—filled the small Mercedes, and Jem started losing: War, Speed, Slap Jack. It was getting too dark to see the cards, but mostly, he just couldn’t keep his mind out of the gutter.
He was thinking about how the pink polo had slid askew across Tean’s shoulders, about the hint of collarbone and chest hair, and he almost missed it.
On Hannah’s street, half a block up, a light flashed in a car. It was there and then gone, and Jem immediately recognized the illumination from the screen of a cell phone. In that moment, though, Jem spotted two figures sitting in the car.
“Hey,” he whispered.
Tean froze.
“Look,” Jem said, indicating the car where he had seen the light.
“I don’t see—”
Then the light flashed again.
“Frick,” Tean said.
“Does that car look green to you?”
“Maybe. It’s hard to tell in the dark. Maybe it’s blue.”
“I think it’s green.”
They watched another five minutes, but the car remained dark.
“When did it get there?”
“Maybe when you had your nose buried in the bag of Cheetos, trying to lick up all the dust.”
“Maybe when you were drawing that diagram of a seal’s penis.”
“That wasn’t—it sounds bad when you take it out of context!”