“What? Do I look that bad?”
Casey laughed and began her sit-ups.
“You know,” Death said. “You really aren’t very nice to me.”
Casey counted under her breath.
“You treat me like I wanted to take your husband and son.”
Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.
“The accident wasn’t my fault, remember. I just came when I was called.”
Twenty. Twenty-One. Twenty-Two.
“Fine. Ignore me. I’ll be back when you’re ready to be friendly.”
Casey squeezed her eyes shut. When she counted to two hundred, she opened them. Death was gone.
Casey went through a set of hapkido forms and took a long drink from the pump. She could hear tractors in the distance, but couldn’t see anything other than clouds of dust billowing into the sky. After washing her face she went back into the shed to consider how she might be able to get in contact with either Wendell or Davey. She’d have to be careful. As she’d said to Death, getting in touch with those guys so soon after they’d been involved with the police wasn’t ideal, but Casey needed to know what had happened. Had they turned her in? Had they gotten in trouble? Were the guys she’d knocked out—or Gun Man—in custody?
While Casey considered her options, she took out Evan’s photos and studied them, memorizing faces. If she ran across any of the people, she wanted to know it. She could put names to these faces, with Evan’s notes, but wouldn’t recognize the drivers on the manifests.
The sound of a vehicle coming up the lane broke into her thoughts, and she shoved the photos back into the bag, rolled up her makeshift bed, and stashed them both in one of the five-gallon buckets. She darted to the corner closest to the opening of the door and eased into it, waiting.
Gravel popped under the tires of the vehicle as it slowed and then stopped. A door opened and shut, and Casey balanced herself, her weight on her back foot.
“Hello?” Bailey stuck her head in the door, her dark hair and pale skin even more disconcerting in the daylight. Her lips were painted as black as her hair, and her eyes stood out between thick liner.
“Oh.” Casey relaxed and stepped out from the corner. “Bailey.”
“Hey.” Bailey looked around at the shed, toward the space where Casey had been sleeping. “Where’s your stuff?”
“I didn’t know who was coming.”
“So you cleaned it up.” Bailey assessed her. “You don’t take any chances, do you?”
“I try not to.”
“Dad let me drive the car to school today. He and Mom are both at work. I thought you might want a shower. And maybe some real food.”
“Bailey, you don’t have to—”
“Come on. If you’re going to be sticking around you might as well not stink.” She grinned. “My sister’s at college, and she left some clothes. Mom won’t notice if they’re gone.”
“Just like they don’t miss you at night?”
Bailey laughed. “Exactly.”
“And doesn’t anybody miss you during the day? Like your teachers?”
Bailey shrugged. “I called in. Said I was my mom, and that my daughter wasn’t feeling well today.”
“Bailey, you shouldn’t—”
“Hey. My choice. Don’t give me a lecture.”
Casey shut up and retrieved her bag from the bucket, following Bailey to a blue Honda Accord. “Won’t you draw attention to the shed by driving back here?”
“Nah. I checked the fields before I turned in the lane. No one’s within a couple miles.”
Casey walked around to the passenger door and hesitated. Just being in the vicinity of another car made her heart race. She closed her eyes, concentrating on her breathing.
“You all right?” Bailey looked at her over the top of the car.
“It’s just, the accident, you know, it makes me—”
“Freak out? Sure, I get it. I thought about bringing bikes, but there’s no way to ride one and pull another one, so—”
“It’s fine. I’ll get in in a minute.” Casey gritted her teeth, and opened the door.
Bailey kept up the chatter the whole way into town, and had the radio turned to a top forty station so loudly she had to raise her voice. “You like pancakes? I make good pancakes. Sausage, too. Or we have that bacon that’s already cooked and you just have to warm it up. Or I could make eggs. Or cereal. We’ve got lots of that. How about toast? You could have cinnamon toast. Unless you want lunch? It is about lunchtime, actually, so we could have that. You want to stop at McDonalds? Or Taco Bell? Or maybe you’d rather have something from the house? I can make mac and cheese, or we have leftovers from last night. Lasagna. Or a sandwich. We have all the stuff to make sandwiches. Even that Amish Baby Swiss cheese.”
Casey’s stomach rumbled, whether from excitement or apprehension, she wasn’t sure. The long list of food was rather overwhelming, as was the volume at which it was delivered.
Bailey suddenly stopped talking and pulled a cell phone out of her pocket. She slid it open and began punching keys at a rate faster than Casey could keep track of. Casey prayed silently that nothing would pull out in front of them, and that Bailey could keep at least one eye on the road.
Bailey closed her phone and set it on the seat beside her. “Martin. Wondered if I’d picked you up yet.”
“He knows?”
“Sure. They all do. Martin and Johnny wanted to come, but I thought that would look weird, if we were all gone.”
“Sheryl probably thought you shouldn’t come.”
“Yeah, well, she’s got her reasons.”
Bailey’s phone buzzed again, and she snatched it up, laughing. “Martin says he looks forward to seeing how well you clean up.”
Casey hoped she lived long enough to do it. Weren’t there laws about this sort of thing? That you needed to actually pay attention to the road while driving?
Besides fearing for her life, Casey kept her eye out for traffic, thinking that in her present state she would be a source of interest, even if people didn’t recognize her. They might also wonder why a school-age girl wasn’t actually in school, but there was nothing she could do about that. She pulled down the sun visor to get at the mirror behind it, and blanched at the sight of her hair and face. The fact that Death was now in the back seat didn’t faze her. The fact that the rest of the seat was filled with bagpipes was a little more disturbing.
“You keep asking to die,” Death said. “What better chance do you have than with a teenage girl who texts while she drives?”
Casey blew her bangs off her forehead and ran her fingers through the rest of her hair, wincing at Death’s blast on the bagpipes, which sounded like a dying whale.
Bailey glanced over, then reached into the back seat, putting her hand right through Death’s leg and scrabbling around where the bagpipes lay. Casey clutched the dashboard as the car swerved dangerously toward the side of the road.
“Here.” Bailey tossed a baseball cap into Casey’s lap. “You can wear this till you get inside.” She looked at her fingers, clenching them into a fist and blowing on them.
Rather than a ball team, the cap advertised a seed company. “You wear this often?”
Bailey wrinkled her nose. “It’s Dad’s. He has tons of them. Guys from the different places give him free stuff all the time, so we’ve got more crap than we know what to do with. Hats, pens, tablets, money clips—like who uses those—even T-shirts. Not that I wear them.”
Casey pushed back her hair and put on the hat. Not great, but at least a little improvement.
“Niiiiice,” Death said, giving Casey a thumbs up in the mirror.
Casey flipped up the visor.
“That’s our place,” Bailey said, turning a corner. “White farmhouse down there.” She pointed to a homestead about a quarter of a mile ahead.
“And all of this is your land?”
“A lot of it. We own over a thousand acres, and work about nine thousand more.”