Her father said, “God, kid, you’re giving me a headache.” He looked over at her mother. “No wonder we have to go out.”
No wonder.
“One day it will be your turn to have fun,” her mother said on their way out the door, her cheek soft, just the faintest hint of perfume.
“When?” Sadie had asked, and the front door had closed on the sound of their laughter.
When will it be my turn? Sadie wanted to know now, suddenly afraid that she may have missed it.
You signed up for this, she told herself. You agreed to the terms. You knew you could never have him.
I didn’t know what it was going to be like! she wanted to yell. What he was going to be like. How could I have guessed—
“Oh, yes,” Plum moaned.
—that I would fall in love with him?
Or that he would hate me so completely.
Sadie closed her eyes and wept.
A little while later Plum stroked his head and whispered, “Sleepy time for my big boy” into his ear as though he were a baby or a dog, which seemed demeaning to Sadie.
Ford didn’t mind anything now. He relaxed and repeated “Sleepy time,” like a macaw. “Can you set an alarm for an hour?”
“Sure,” Plum said, unnecessarily giving him a kiss on the lips.
Ford’s arms came around her. He held her to him and kissed her back, deeply and passionately. Sadie ached with envy and desire.
“Sleep,” Plum whispered in a soothing voice.
He turned onto his side and she lay in the curve of his body, her head pillowed on his shoulder, and Sadie had to bite her lip from crying out. Ford kissed her hair and said drowsily, “Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Because it amuses me,” Plum told him.
Ford chuckled as he dozed off, but Sadie didn’t think Plum was joking.
CHAPTER 28
They slept until the cock-a-doodle-do! of an alarm woke him. He groped for it, knocking things off the night table, turned it off, and opened his eyes.
He was only partially alert, and Sadie sensed deep disorientation, not just because it was pitch black in an unfamiliar room but because he’d expected something entirely different. Bunk beds? she thought she registered. Brown plaid comforters? The old room he shared with James, she realized. But the air was wrong, and aside from the familiar alarm, the sounds were wrong too—
The next instant he was completely awake, aware that he was in Plum’s apartment, his mind vibrating with the thought It’s too quiet.
There, in the dark, it hit them both simultaneously. It was too quiet. Not here, now, but in the message James left for Ford right before he was killed.
There were no trains, no buses, no horns on the message. Cali hadn’t been able to hear a word of the message Ford left for her from the same place at nearly the same time, but Ford could hear every word of James’s message perfectly. Because there was no background noise at all.
Which meant James didn’t leave the message from the playground at Happy Alley, Ford thought. And that he wasn’t killed there.
Then where? Sadie asked before remembering she should stay quiet. Why had he ended up at the playground? On the merry-go-round?
Ford was too distracted to notice her voice among the different sounds in his mind, too busy rooting around the destruction of the day before, trying to make sense of the confusion. He remembered the events of the previous night and saw he was alone in bed but shouldn’t be. He glanced at the clock and saw it was seven. Hadn’t they gone to bed at ten? How was that—
Ford scrambled to his feet, pulling aside one of the blinds and getting a face full of daylight. It was seven in the morning. Crap. Lulu was going to be terrified, his mother—he couldn’t even imagine. He crossed to the wall and pushed buttons until the blinds went up, thinking, Crap crap crap.
The bedroom door opened with a click, and Plum peeked in, wearing nothing but a transparent robe and a smile. “What are you doing up, puppy?” she asked, grabbing the end of the black boxer briefs he was about to put on. “Go back to bed. I just ordered breakfast, it should be here in ten.” She sighed. “God, your body is great.”
Ford, naked, towered over her, shaking with rage. “What the hell is wrong with you? I told you to set the alarm for an hour.”
She looked at him innocently. “But you didn’t say which hour, so I picked one. I hate having breakfast alone.”
He stared at her. “Do you ever think about anyone but yourself?”
Plum let go of his briefs and took a step back. “You’re joking, right?
“How would I be joking?” He stepped into his underwear. “I asked you to do one simple thing—”
“I don’t understand what’s so important.” Plum retreated around the bed and bent to pick up the book and bear wind-up toy he’d knocked off the nightstand.
Ford yanked his pants from under the bed. “I was such an idiot. I knew you’d toyed with James. Why should I think you’d take anything seriously, even a simple request to set an alarm?”
“You don’t know anything about my feelings for your brother,” Plum said, her voice tight with emotion.
Ford was too busy looking for his socks—by the wall, Sadie whispered—to notice the intensity in Plum’s tone, but Sadie heard it.
“I think you should go,” Plum said. She was clutching the toy, almost desperately, and with her mass of hair she looked small, like a young girl.
“We’re in complete agreement there.” He turned around, looking for his shirt.
Kitchen, Sadie whispered, wanting to get him out of there.
He stormed into the kitchen and threw on his shirt, not bothering to button it.
Plum followed him and got busy straightening things, opening and closing drawers. “If it was so important, you could have set your own alarm. All phones have them.”
“Everything is so simple for you,” Ford said and headed to the front door. “How nice that must—”
He stopped. His mind settled. A beautiful, crisp image in glittering dots of brown, gray, and orange flashed together, his room with James, bunk beds, plaid comforters, early morning, his own voice saying, “Man, there’s a reason we don’t have real roosters—”
“Cock-a-doodle-do” had been the alarm on James’s phone, Sadie realized. It could have just been a coincidence, she heard him think, but the next moment he’d whipped out his own phone and started dialing. The song “Frosty the Snowman” started to play from the bedroom.
It was James’s alarm that woke him. James’s phone was here.
“That’s my brother’s phone,” Ford said, holding his up, now getting James’s voice mail message, “James. Message. Bye.” Sadie felt a stab of grief and caught a flash image of Ford dialing James’s phone over and over after his brother’s death just to hear the voice. Sadie hated the raw pain inside of him, hated being powerless to ease any part of its sting.
Plum’s chest was heaving. “I’m calling security.”
Information and connections began flooding Ford’s mind, making Sadie dizzy. Image after image layered one on top of another like a huge glittering machine.
“It was here,” Ford said, tugging together the silence from the message and the presence of the phone. “He must have been killed here.”