Yes, Nola clicked.
Another window opened. The words Black House appeared in a stenciled military font.
Nola’s eyes narrowed. Her stomach churned. Sir, what the hell were you doing here?
19
Zig was thinking about the pencils.
“Can I see the photo again?” he asked, steering the car off the highway and blowing past the wooden sign for Wonderly Square. Where Nature Smiles for Five Miles.
Roddy turned the tablet toward Zig, the glow lighting his face in the dark car.
The photo was from outside the funeral this morning—of young, beefy Staff Sergeant Buddy Adcock, curled on the ground in agony, a pen protruding from his knee.
During the entire ride home, Zig had been thinking about this photo. When he first saw it, he couldn’t help but stare at Buddy’s face contorted in pain . . . at his mouth wide open in midscream, a spiderweb of spit forming a tightrope between his top and bottom teeth. At Buddy’s knee, there was an unmistakable Rorschach blob of blood soaking through his slacks. But right now, Zig was focused on the bottom corner of the photo: the half dozen colored pencils littered across the asphalt.
Naturally, they were Nola’s. She took her pencils everywhere. So for them to be scattered in such disarray . . . Buddy had hit her fast, caught her off guard, most likely as she was coming out of the building. It was a bad sign.
As the Army’s Artist-in-Residence, Nola had spent years racing into war zones—Libya, Iraq, even that massacre when ISIS beheaded those three Marines outside of Raqqa in Syria. She stayed alive because she wasn’t easily surprised. She didn’t get caught off guard. And yet . . .
In the photo, a stray chocolate-brown pencil had bounced off the concrete path, sitting askew in the grass. A yellow pencil was right beside it. To leave her tools behind . . . Nola must have raced out of there at full speed, like she was scared of what else was coming. Zig had never seen her scared before, never seen her panic or make mistakes before. To anyone else, those pencils were just pencils. For Nola, who processed everything through her art, they were a lifeline.
“This isn’t just another case for her, is it?” Roddy asked. “There’s something personal she’s chasing.”
Or something personal that’s chasing her, Zig thought, tugging the steering wheel and trying to think of the last time Nola ran from anything. And then this thought as he stared at Roddy: that nothing was more personal than family.
“Today seems like a day that if you painted it, it’d be dark red,” Roddy said, taking a look out the window as they turned onto Zig’s block. “Y’ever have that, where a day seems like it’s red, or blue, or some other color?”
Okay, Roddy was obviously weird. But it was more than just being weird. Even if you put aside his awkward stare, the way he overshared, and of course the way he said every damn thing that came into his brain, there was still something . . . Zig didn’t have a word for it yet, but he could feel it, lurking there, like Roddy had another layer that he kept hidden. Was Zig being paranoid? Of course he was. But right now, if he wanted to keep Nola safe, his best bet was to keep Roddy close and keep an eye on him.
“Mr. Zigarowski, do you know that woman?” Roddy added.
“What woman?” Zig asked, again glancing down at the photo.
“Not there. There,” Roddy said, pointing through the windshield, up the block, toward Zig’s house.
Zig squinted through the dark, assuming Roddy had misidentified Mr. Munoz, whose wife died last year, and who often lingered outside people’s homes, hoping to make chitchat while he was walking his dog.
Zig couldn’t have been more wrong.
Sitting there on his front porch was a thin brunette, studying her phone like she was being quizzed on it. At just the sight of her—he hadn’t seen her in a year, maybe longer—something needled at his throat. His rib cage clenched like a fist around his heart. Not her. Can’t be.