She reached for her phone, envisioned dialing 911 if anything got weird. Then she thought of Bill and the other cops she knew and realized it was useless. Besides, Ander was just standing there.
The sight of his face made her want to run away and straight to him, to see how intense those blue eyes could get.
“Don’t call your friend at the police station,” Ander said. “I’m just here to talk to you. But, for the record, I don’t have one.”
“One what?”
“Record. Criminal file.”
“Records are meant to be broken.”
Ander stepped closer. Eureka stepped back. Rain studded her sweatshirt, sending a deep chill through her body.
“And before you ask, I wasn’t spying on you when you went to the cops. But those people you saw in the lobby, then later on the road—”
“Who were they?” Eureka asked. “And what was in that silver box?”
Ander pulled a tan rain hat from his pocket. He tugged it low over his eyes, over hair that, Eureka noticed, didn’t seem wet. The hat made him look like a detective from an old film noir. “Those are my problems,” he said, “not yours.”
“That’s not how you made it seem the other night.”
“How about this?” He stepped closer again, until he was only inches away and she could hear him breathing. “I’m on your side.”
“What side am I on?” A surge in the rain made Eureka retreat a step, under the canopy of leaves.
Ander frowned. “You’re so nervous.”
“I am not.”
He pointed at her elbows, jutting from the pockets into which she’d stuffed her fists. She was shaking.
“If I’m nervous, your sudden pop-ups aren’t helping.”
“How can I convince you that I’m not going to hurt you, that I’m trying to help?”
“I never asked for help.”
“If you can’t see that I’m one of the good guys, you’re never going to believe—”
“Believe what?” She crossed her hands tightly over her chest to compress her shaking elbows. Mist hung in the air around them, making everything a little blurry.
Very gently, Ander put his hand on her forearm. His touch was warm. His skin was dry. It made the hairs on her damp skin rise. “The rest of the story.”
The word “story” made Eureka think of The Book of Love. Some ancient tale about Atlantis had nothing to do with what Ander was talking about, but she still heard Madame Blavatsky’s translation run through her head: Everything might change with the last word. “Is there a happy ending?” she asked.
Ander smiled sadly. “You’re good at science, right?”
“No.” To look at Eureka’s last report card, you’d think she wasn’t good at anything. But then she saw Diana’s face in her memory—the way anytime Eureka joined her on one of the location digs, her mother bragged to her friends about embarrassing things like Eureka’s analytical mind and advanced reading level. If Diana were here, she’d speak up about how irrefutably good Eureka was at science. “I guess I’m all right.”
“What if I assigned you an experiment?” Ander said.
Eureka thought about the classes she’d missed today, about the trouble she’d be in. She wasn’t sure she needed to add another assignment.
“What if it was something that sounded impossible to prove?” he added.
“What if you just tell me what this is all about?”
“If you could prove this impossible hypothesis,” he said, “would you trust me then?”
“What’s the hypothesis?”
“The stone your mother left you when she died—”
Her eyes whipped up, finding his. Against the verdant forest, Ander’s turquoise irises were edged with green. “How did you know about that?”
“Try getting it wet.”
“Wet?”
Ander nodded. “My hypothesis is you won’t be able to.”
“Everything can get wet,” she said, even as she wondered about his dry skin when he’d reached for her moments ago.
“Not that stone,” he said. “If it turns out I’m right, will you promise to trust me?”
“I don’t see why my mother would leave me a water-repellent stone.”
“Look, I’ll throw in an incentive—if I’m wrong about the stone, if it’s just a regular old rock, I’ll disappear and you’ll never hear from me again.” He tilted his head, watching her reaction without any of the playfulness she expected. “I promise.”
Eureka wasn’t ready to never see him again, even if the stone didn’t get wet. But his gaze pressed on her like the sandbags tamping the batture along the bayou. His eyes wouldn’t let her break free. “Fine. I’ll give it a try.”
“Do it”—Ander paused—“by yourself. No one else can know what you have. Not your friends. Not your family. Especially not Brooks.”
“You know, you and Brooks should get together,” Eureka said. “You seem to be all the other thinks about.”
“You can’t trust him. I hope you can see that now.”
Eureka wanted to shove Ander. He didn’t get to bring up Brooks like he knew something she didn’t. But she was afraid that if she shoved him, it wouldn’t be a shove. It would be an embrace, and she would lose herself. She wouldn’t know how to break free.
She bounced on her heels in the mud. She could think only of fleeing. She wanted to be home, to be in a safe place, though she didn’t know how or where to find either of those things. They had eluded her for months.
The rain intensified. Eureka looked back the way she’d come, deep into the green oblivion, trying to see Magda miles away. The lines of the forest dissolved in her vision into pure shape and color.
“I can’t trust anyone, it seems.” She started to run back through the driving rain, wanting, with every step away from Ander, to turn around and run back to him. Her body warred over her instincts until she wanted to scream. She ran faster.
“Soon you’ll see how wrong you are!” Ander shouted, standing still where she had left him. She’d thought he might follow her, but he didn’t.
She stopped. His words had left her out of breath. Slowly, she turned around. But when she looked through the rain and mist and wind and leaves, Ander had already disappeared.
23
THE THUNDERSTONE
“As soon as your homework is finished,” Rhoda said from across the dinner table that night, “you’re going to email an apology to Dr. Landry, cc’ing me. And tell her you’ll see her next week.”
Eureka shook Tabasco sauce violently onto her étouffée. Rhoda’s orders didn’t even merit a glare.
“Your dad and I brainstormed with Dr. Landry,” she continued. “We don’t think you’ll take therapy seriously unless you’re held accountable. Which is why you’re going to pay for the sessions.” Rhoda sipped her rosé. “Out of your pocket. Seventy-five dollars a week.”
Eureka clenched her jaw to keep her mouth from dropping open. So they’d finally settled on a punishment for last week’s outrage.
“But I don’t have a job,” she said.
“The dry cleaners will give you back your old job,” Rhoda said, “assuming you can prove you’ve become more responsible since you were fired.”
Eureka hadn’t become more responsible. She’d become suicidally depressed. She looked to Dad for help.
“I talked to Ruthie,” he said, glancing down as if he were talking to his étouffée instead of his daughter. “You can manage two shifts a week, can’t you?” He picked up his fork. “Now eat up, food’s getting cold.”
Eureka couldn’t eat. She considered the many sentences forming in her mind: You two sure know how to handle a suicide attempt. Could you possibly make a bad situation any worse? The secretary from Evangeline called to see why I wasn’t in class today, but I already deleted the voice mail. Did I mention I also quit cross-country and don’t plan on returning to school? I’m leaving and I’m never coming back.