Shit.
I flicked the bike’s headlight off and ran after her, hissing as quietly yet forcefully as I could, “Droog! Get back here!”
She was old, starting to go blind. I hadn’t seen her run like she was chasing something in years, and my stomach twisted as I watched her cut through the grass toward the barbed wire fence separating our property from his.
Droog was too fast—I wasn’t going to catch up to her—but my eyes latched on to the tail end of her blue leash, and I had to act fast.
I dove onto it, stomach smacking the ground, hands grappling for the fraying rope. I hauled her back as I got to my feet, but she kept pulling and crying, desperate to get to whatever she’d seen.
And then I felt the crawling on my neck, that watched prickling, and I knew what she was looking at.
Even after all this time, I still responded to the sight of him with needling dread, with hot cheeks and itchy skin.
The hermit stood at the edge of the woods, just inside his fence. He looked exactly how he always did: tall and wide shouldered, scraggly gray hair that tangled around his neck and a night-shrouded face like a skull with weathered, leathery skin stretched tight over it. Even his teeth, long and gapped, unsettled me, and if all that weren’t enough, he was wearing his trademark denim overalls, like he was some kind of 1930s ax murderer—a look the most brazen, irreverent kids at Splendor High had been known to replicate for Halloween.
His eyes were the worst part. Cold and dead in a way that made me feel skinned alive as he looked at me through the deepest part of the night.
There was a rumor he only left his house after midnight. There were a lot of rumors about him, and having lived an acre from him for the past five years, I could confirm a lot of them.
He did only come out after dark, to walk the length of the fence, or rumble off in his too-loud truck down the access road, long after most places in Splendor had closed their doors for the night.
Art loved to flip him off, which made me nervous, given that the man carried a gun at all times and had posted handwritten signs up and down the fence promising he’d use it on trespassers.
That was one of the rumors too: Kids at school, the popular ones especially, had braggy stories about sneaking onto his property and being chased away with gunfire. They whispered about finding human hair in the grass, and dried blood on trees. They said he was a cannibal, that he was supreme priest in a blood cult of one, that he hung dead rabbits on posts to worship the devil or maybe just to scare people off.
And outlandish rumors aside, everyone knew he’d been the one who assaulted Eric Palladin at the Drink Inn and broke his collarbone, even if Eric’s family hadn’t pressed charges because Eric would’ve gotten busted for the fake IDs he’d been selling out of his old Volkswagen bus.
The man was a blight no one liked to think of, and even if none of the rumors were true, my blood still would have gone cold at the sight of him there, too close, too dead-eyed.
Because this man, whose name was a curse I’d never spoken aloud, was a murderer.
Wayne Hastings.
The man who’d destroyed this town once, and even now, five years later, haunted it with a hateful vengeance.
The man who’d caused the accident.
He jogged his rifle against his shoulder like some soldier on the front lines, and I dragged Droog backward a few feet, then turned and ran in through the back door as fast as I could, as if I could escape him, as if I could escape everything that had happened since the day he’d ruined my life. I didn’t even slow when the doorknob sent a shock through me.
TEN
MOM CAME FOR US at school. Dad was already at the hospital.
Arthur and I sat in the back seat of the Plymouth Voyager, asking questions she couldn’t answer.
What happened?
An accident. That’s all I know.
Is he hurt?
That’s all I know.
We could have asked what two plus two was. We could have asked anything, but Mom had stopped knowing anything, other than that her oldest son had been in an accident.
He hadn’t wanted the job at the steel mill. That was what I kept thinking as we sped through the two-way stops on the country roads surrounding the high school, headed out toward a hospital in the suburbs.
I’d bet anything that was what Mom was thinking too: Mark hadn’t wanted the job.
He’d wanted to take a year off and paint, build up his portfolio to apply to art schools. He needed something good to make up for his terrible grades. He was as spacey as Arthur or Mom, but had neither Arthur’s ability to bullshit his way through presentations and essays nor Mom’s interest in academia.
He’d inherited her curiosity and her readiness to daydream, and Dad’s gentleness and willingness to talk to just about anyone, but his artistic ability was his thing. What people talked about when they talked about Mark.
Mom had begged Dad to let Mark take a gap year, out of school and without a job. She’d spent four years hearing from his art teachers that he really had something, getting pamphlets to expensive art schools sent home with notes that Mom and Dad should really consider investing in his future, and sometimes even e-mails from the teachers at those fancy art boarding schools, working artists who’d seen my brother’s work in nationwide competitions and wanted to recruit him.
Maybe Mom wanted to make up for what they couldn’t afford to give Mark, or maybe she wanted to make up for everything she’d given up herself to raise her family.