“I’m not interrogating anyone,” she said.
It was kind of weird being in a car with David. No one had a car at Ellingham. They had been in all kinds of places and spaces together there. They’d lived in a small dorm house together, cozy little Minerva, with its fireplace and old sofas. They’d been in each other’s rooms, eaten meals together, seen each other from dawn to dusk. They’d occupied closets together, slept in a ballroom, and crept side by side through tunnels and hidden spaces underground.
So a car should not have been a big deal. And yet, she found herself staring at his profile as he drove, one hand on the wheel, the other casually dangling partway out the window. The air knocked his wavy hair back from his forehead. He’d gotten a bit of a tan on the road, an uneven one.
Here was the thing about romantic feelings—the sensation was incredible, like a warm flood through every highway and byway of her body. Every good chemical she could produce turned up, like some kind of bountiful harvest. But the feelings and the chemicals blocked out everything else. They dulled logic and sense and focus. They made everything else seem kind of irrelevant and time started to move jerkily—too fast, then too slow. And they came on with no advance
warning, like now, watching him drive. Everything went loose, and all the orderly thoughts in her brain were now just a bag of parts. She wanted to lean over, to kiss him on the soft hollow of his cheek, to pull over and forget going to see Susan. Susan could wait. They could go into the woods. . . .
“You’re staring at me,” he said, not turning his gaze. “Are you about to bite my face or something?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Thought so.”
She took a long gulp of thick air and told herself to get it together. David was smiling a knowing smile, like he knew precisely what was going on in her head.
They drove past Liberty High, with its giant blue billboard.
“They should get a bigger sign,” David said. “That one is too subtle.”
“I can barely see it,” Stevie said.
“Small towns really love their high schools. They seem to scream about them. Why do you think that is?”
“People love to scream.”
“That’s probably it,” he said, turning to her with a wolfish grin. “I know I do.”
Focus, she told herself. They were almost there.
Susan Marks lived in the center of town, on one of the side streets off the main road. They parked by the library and the green. Barlow Corners was quiet but not completely still. There were a few people going in and out of the shops. There were people in the Sunshine Bakery with coffee. Stevie
followed the map on her phone, which guided them through the painfully quaint lanes that trailed back behind the main drag. The roads here were one lane only, with tidy little Victorian houses groaning under the weight of flower baskets, decorative flags, and wicker porch furniture. Susan’s was the last one on this particular lane. She had fewer flags, but many more flowers and shrubs.
A woman with sharply cut gray hair was on her knees in a flower bed in front of the house. As Stevie and David turned down her path, she rose and dusted off her knees. Susan Marks was in her midseventies, and despite a little stiffness as she stood, she had the look of someone who did an hour of yoga a day to warm up for the second hour of yoga she did each day.
“Stevie,” she said. She had the firm, commanding tone of someone who was used to doing roll call. “And you are?”
“Her assistant,” David said. “The one that asks the stupid questions.”
“Watson, huh?”
“That’s me,” David replied, smiling.
“It’s going to be a hot one today, so I wanted to finish up some of this weeding early. Come on in.”