“Hi,” he greeted me right back.
Did he sound weird, or was I imagining it? What I knew I wasn’t imagining was his stiff gait as he made his way over, hands clenching open and close at his sides. His head was just a little too down.
I glanced at Amos and saw that he was frowning as he took in his dad too.
“You okay?” I asked the moment he stepped inside the garage.
“In a way, yes,” he said in what was definitely a weird and tight voice that alarmed me even more.
I stood up. “What’s wrong?”
He raised his head then. The fine lines branching from the corners of his eyes were deeper than normal as he said, “Aurora… I need to talk to you.”
Someone meant business busting out my first name like that. “You’re scaring me, but okay,” I said slowly, glancing at Am. He was looking at both of us warily.
Those gray eyes were on me as he took my hands, very, very gently. “Let’s go inside.”
I nodded and let him lead me across the yard and up the stairs to the deck. It wasn’t until we were going in that I realized Am was following behind. Rhodes must have just then noticed it too because he stopped.
“What? You’re scaring me too,” the teenager said.
“Am, this is private,” he said seriously, that terribly sober expression still on his face.
“Ora, you don’t care, right?”
What was I going to do? Say no? Tell him that I didn’t trust him? “It’s okay.” I swallowed before eyeing the man who had talked me into going back to his room to sleep in his bed last night. “You’re not going to break my heart or anything, right?”
Rhodes tilted his head to the side, and his throat bobbed, scaring me even more. His eyes though were totally stricken. “For what it matters, I don’t want to.”
I balked.
His shoulders fell. “It’s not the way you think,” he went on gravely.
I felt sick, and he sighed.
Rhodes scrubbed at the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, angel. I’m screwing this up already.”
“Just tell me. What’s wrong? What happened?” I asked. “I’m not kidding, you’re scaring me. Both of us.”
“Yeah, Dad, tell her.” The kid made a sound. “You’re being weird.”
Rhodes shook his head and sighed. “Shut the door, Am.”
The kid shoved it closed and crossed his arms over his chest. My hands were starting to shake just a little as fear rose up inside of me as I tried to think of what he could possibly be this freaked out about. I’d seen him go face-to-face with a bat. He’d been up like twenty feet in the air with no problem. Was he sick? Did something happen to someone?
Rhodes blew out a breath and looked at the floor for a second before lifting his head and saying, “Do you remember me telling you a while back about those remains a hiker had found?”
I suddenly went cold inside. “No.”
“The day you picked up that eagle, I told you,” he reminded me gently. “There were some articles in the paper after that. People were talking about it in town.”
That didn’t sound familiar at all.
Then again, any time that conversations about missing people came up, I usually tuned them out. Any hope I’d had of having closure, of having answers, had died a long time ago. Maybe it was selfish, but it was easier for me to keep going, to not get weighed down by those cement blocks of grief, by not focusing too much on cases too similar to what had happened to my mom. For so long, I’d barely been able to handle my own pain, let alone taking on anyone else’s.
Some people came out of trauma with thick scar tissue. They could handle anything. They had been through the worst and could take any kind of hit because they knew they could survive.
On the other hand, there were people like me, who survived but with thinner skin than before. Some of us ended up wrapped in an organ even more delicate than tissue paper, with bodies and spirits buoyed only by our will to keep going. And coping mechanisms. And therapy.
“This hiker was out and came across some bones. He happened to be a trauma surgeon and thought he recognized… some of them as human. He called it in, and the authorities took what he found.”
“Okay…”
Rhodes licked his lips and squeezed my hands a little tighter. “They matched the DNA.”
A memory of that time about three years after my mom had gone missing, when remains had been found and they’d thought it might be her, filled my head. We’d been so disappointed when, after I’d provided DNA samples, it had come back that it wasn’t a match. A few years ago, the same thing had happened. A search party trying to find a missing hiker had come across a hand and a skull partially buried, but nothing had come of it either. The remains had been of a man who had gone missing two years before that. That had been the last time I’d had any hope of ever finding her.