“It wouldn’t make a difference.”
“Still,” he said.
“Still,” I agreed.
The soft static shuffle between our words reminded me he was there, though, on the other end, and even that was a relief.
A floorboard creaked at the front of the house.
“I have to go,” I hissed, and turned the walkie-talkie off, slipping it behind a pile of books. I peeled the glove off and tossed it over the sink, then hurried to fill a glass of water.
But whoever was down here didn’t intrude, and a second later, I heard the front door squeal open.
“Hello?” I called.
No answer.
I tiptoed down the hall. Droog was standing on the mat, whimpering, her nose pressed to the window beside the door.
I brushed the drapes back and looked out at the shabby yard. A dense fog hovered over it, diffusing the moonlight, wiping everything from sight except the massive, stock-still figure two yards from the front door.
My heart leapt, and fear punched in my stomach before I placed the messy twist of auburn hair and the gentle slope of the figure’s shoulders.
Levi, I realized with relief. Just Levi.
But what was he doing? There was something eerie about his stiff posture. A breeze rolled toward the house, rippling through the grass and tousling his hair and bright yellow boxers.
He turned on his heel and started walking jerkily, like a mostly naked toy soldier come to life, around the side of the house.
I remembered the shiny purple bruise near his temple. He must be sleepwalking. I doubled back to the coat closet and grabbed a sweatshirt from it, then stuffed my feet into a pair of shoes and ran out the door.
Levi was already out of sight. I wrapped my sweatshirt tighter around me as I circled the house, scanning for him.
A strand of moonlight lanced through the foliage to catch the shocking yellow of his underwear, lighting it up like a neon sign.
He was already across the fence. On Wayne Hastings’s property.
I hissed his name, but Levi kept walking, vanishing into the shadow between two trees.
By the time I reached the forest’s edge, I’d lost track of him.
I hesitated at the fence.
A six-foot stretch of it had been toppled, laid flat to the ground, but all down the length of it, posts leaned wildly, were uprooted from the mud, and in some cases smashed to bits, the barbed wire strung uselessly across the ground between them.
Had Levi done this?
Had Wayne Hastings seen Levi do this?
A breeze gusted fog around me, and the hair on my arms lifted.
I stepped over the fence.
The woods were preternaturally silent. No cricket chirp or cicada song, no owls or foxes or possums skittering through the brush, and the leaves had started to curl, their edges blazing in the fiery tones of autumn.
I broke into a jog, mud and leaf-guts sloshing up my shins as I searched the dark spread of trees for a flash of yellow fabric or wisp of auburn hair.
“Levi!” I hissed again. The night swallowed my voice before it could dent the weighty silence. I kept running, calling out to him, until the hermit’s A-frame house sprang suddenly into view.
My stomach twisted and dropped, like a drill bit turning through me.
The mucky windows were aglow with amber light, except where the NO TRESPASSING signs and pictures of firearms the hermit had duct-taped to the glass blocked it. All the downstairs windows had deep cracks in them, and one had been boarded up with a square of plywood on which someone had spray-painted MURDERER in a neon yellow that gave Levi’s underwear a run for its money.
My stomach lurched at the sight of the word.
Wayne Hastings. The murderer who’d walked free, who’d been cleared of wrongdoing by an internal investigation, but whose every move since the accident had proven he lacked any regret, that he hated all of us.
“Levi?” The whisper barely came out.
I edged around the house, my gaze trained on the windows. A flurry of movement on the roof startled me, and I jerked back as my eyes lifted to it.
The green corrugated metal was barely visible, blotted out by the massive crowd of birds perched there.
Dozens, easily.
Silent, focused, all angled in the same direction, as if they were watching me. My gaze traveled up to the branches overhead, reaching toward the house.
More.
Birds everywhere. Hundreds of them, filling every crook and branch, a near-silent flutter of oily black wings.
All quiet. All watchful.
I thought of the cows at the substation, all lined up along the fence. What had Nick said? That cows grazed according to Earth’s electromagnetic field?
Those sharp beaks and beady eyes now all pointed toward me like a hundred accusatory compass needles. I glanced over my shoulder, but there was nothing back there except the shallow valley where the woods dipped.
Something snapped—a branch? The drop of a bullet into a chamber?—on the far side of the house.
A silhouette moving in a stiff, tin-soldier way shambled around the corner of the house.
“Levi!”
I bounded after him, tripping over a pair of padlocked cellar doors that jutted up from a disguise of fog and dead brush.
Of course this creepy man had a creepy cellar behind his creepy house. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were trip wires just waiting to catch me and Levi in nets.
I fought a shiver and hurried to the front of the house.