Jared shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. "Me, either. But I'll look, too." He shook his head. "I can't believe this."
They crossed the park toward the woods that bordered the houses leading to Cass Minter's, lost in their separate thoughts, breathing in the heat and the dryness and watching the dust rise beneath their feet in small clouds.
"Maybe your mom will think twice before she goes out with him again, once she learns about Spook," Nest said after a minute.
"Maybe."
"Does she know about last night?"
He hesitated, then shook his head. "No. I didn't want to tell her. Bennett didn't say anything either."
They walked on in silence to the beginning of the woods and started through the trees toward the houses and the road. From somewhere ahead came the excited shriek of a child, followed by laughter. They could hear the sound of a sprinkler running. Whisk, whisk, whisk. It triggered memories of times already lost to them, gone with childhood's brief innocence.
Nest spoke to Jared Scott without looking at him. "I don't blame you. You know, for not telling your mom. I wouldn't have told her either."
Jared nodded. His hands slipped deeper into his pockets.
She gripped his arm impulsively. "Next time she leaves you alone to baby–sit, give me a call. I'll come over and help."
"Okay," he agreed, giving her a sideways smile.
But she knew just from the way he said it that he wouldn't.
CHAPTER 6
Nest and her Mends spent the long, slow, lazy hours of the hot July afternoon fishing, they laughed and joked, swapped gossip and told lies, drank six–packs of pop kept cool at the end of a cord in the waters of the Rock River, and gnawed contentedly on twists of red licorice.
Beyond the shelter of the park, away from the breezes that wafted off the river, the temperature rose above one hundred and stayed there. The blue dome of the cloudless sky turned hazy with reflected light, and the heat seemed to press down upon the homes and businesses of Hopewell with the intention of flattening them. Downtown, the digital signboard on the exterior brick wall of the First National Bank read 103°, and the concrete of the streets and sidewalks baked and steamed in the white glare. Within their airconditioned offices, men and women began planning their Friday–afternoon escapes, trying to think of ways they could cool down the blast–furnace interiors of their automobiles long enough to survive the drive home.
On the picket lines at the entrances to MidCon Steel's five shuttered plants, the union workers hunkered down in lawn chairs under makeshift canopies and drank iced tea and beer from large Styrofoam coolers, hot and weary and discouraged, angry at the intransigence of their collective fate, thinking dark thoughts and feeling the threads of their lives slip slowly away.
In the cool, dark confines of Scrubby's Bar, at the west edge of town j ust off Lincoln Highway, Deny Howe sat alone at one end of the serving counter, nursing a beer and mumbling unintelligibly of his plans for MidCon to a creature that no one else could see.
It was nearing five o'clock, the sun sinking west and the dinner hour approaching, when Nest and her friends gathered up their fishing gear and the last few cans of pop and made their way back through the park. They climbed from the old boat launch (abandoned now since Riverside had bought the land and closed the road leading in), gained the heights of the cemetery, and followed the fence line back along the bluff face to where the cliffs dropped away and the park began. They wormed their way through a gap in the chain–link, Jared and Robert spreading the jagged edges wide for the girls, followed the turnaround past the Indian mounds, and angled through the trees and the playgrounds toward the ball diamonds. The heat lingered even with the sun's slow westward descent, a sullen, brooding presence at the edges of the shade. In the darker stretches of the spruce and pine, where the boughs grew thick and the shadows never faded, amber eyes as flat and hard as stone peered out in cold appraisal. Nest, who alone could see them, was reminded of the increasing boldness of the feeders and was troubled anew by what it meant.
Robert Heppler took a deep drink from his can of Coke, then belched loudly at Brianna Brown and said with supreme insincerity, "Sorry."
Brianna pulled a face. She was small and pretty with delicate features and thick, wavy dark hair. "You're disgusting, Robert!"
"Hey, it's a natural function of the body." Robert tried his best to look put–upon. Short and wiry, with a mischievous face, a shock of unruly white–blond hair, Robert eventually aggravated everyone he came in contact with–particularly Brianna Brown.
"There is nothing natural about anything you do!" Brianna snapped irritably, although there wasn't quite enough force behind the retort to cause any of the others to be concerned. The feud between Robert and Brianna was long–standing. It had become a condition of their lives. No one thought much about it anymore, except where the occasional flare–up exacerbated feelings so thoroughly that no one could get any peace. That had happened only once of late, early in the summer, when Robert had managed to hide a red fizzie in the lining of Brianna's swimsuit just before she went into the pool at Lawrence Park. Mortified beyond any expression of outrage at the resulting red stain, Brianna would have killed Robert if she could have gotten her hands on him. As it was, she hadn't said a word to him for almost two weeks afterward, not until he apologized in front of everyone and admitted he had behaved in a stupid and childish manner–and even that seemed to please Robert in some bizarre way that probably not even he could fathom.
"No, listen, I read this in a report." Robert looked around to be sure they were all listening. "Belching and farting are necessary bodily functions. They release gases that would otherwise poison the body. You know about the exploding cows?"
"Oh, Robert!" Cass Minter rolled her eyes.
"No, cows can explode if enough gas builds up inside them. It's a medical condition. They produce all this methane gas when they digest grass. If they don't get rid of it, it can make them explode. There was this whole article on it. I guess it's like what happens to milk cows if you don't milk them." He took another drink of Coke and belched again. With Robert, you never knew if he was making it up. "Think about what could happen to us if we stopped belching."
"Maybe you should give up drinking Coke," Cass suggested dryly. She was a big, heavyset girl with a round, cheerful face and intelligent green eyes. She always wore jeans and loose–fitting shirts, an unspoken concession to her weight, and her lank brown hair looked as if no comb had passed through it any time in recent memory. Cass was Nest's oldest friend, from all the way back to when they were in second grade together. She winked at Nest now. "Maybe you should stick to tomato juice, Robert."
Robert Heppler hated tomato juice. He'd been forced to drink it once at camp, compelled to do so by a counselor in front of a dozen other campers, after which he had promptly vomited it up again. It was a point of honor with him that he would die before he ever did that again.
"Where did you read all this, anyway?" Jared Scott asked with benign interest.
Robert shrugged. "On the Internet."
"You know, you can't believe everything you read," Brianna declared, repeating something her mother frequently told her.
"Well, duh!" Robert sneered. "Anyway, this was a Dave Barry article."
"Dave Barry?" Cass was in stitches. "Now there's a reliable source. I suppose you get your world news from Liz Smith."
Robert stopped and slowly turned to face her. "Oh, I am cut to the quick!" He looked pointedly at Nest. "Like I can't tell the difference between what's rebable and what isn't, right?"
"Leave me out of this," Nest begged.