Junie couldn’t have known. She was just a girl, for all that she looked like a woman wearing robin’s-egg-blue eye shadow and Mom’s rouge and lipstick, her breasts barely contained by a ruffled yellow crop top that she must have stolen from my closet. I hadn’t had the courage to wear it, and here she’d chosen it for dress-up. She didn’t know Ricky and Ed weren’t playing. Where was Ed?
Ricky shifted, pushed off from the wall. “Screw going to the grocery store, little sister. I’ll tell you when you can leave.”
“The police are coming,” I lied, frantic to run forward and grab Junie. I felt around for the truth. “They know what you and Ant and Ed did to Maureen and Brenda.”
“I didn’t have nothing to do with Maureen,” Ant said from his chair by the bedroom door.
I bit back a sob. I’d been right.
Ricky took three strides over to Ant and smacked him so hard that Ant’s head bounced off the wall. Ant covered his bleeding nose, and his eyes watered, but he didn’t say a word, didn’t fight back.
“You keep your effing mouth shut, Dehnke.”
I lunged across the room and grabbed Junie. She started shivering as soon as I touched her, but she wouldn’t take her eyes off Ricky. He spun to face us.
I slid my hand into my purse and gripped the knife’s hilt, tasting the salt of fear-sweat on my lip, knowing even as I held the knife that I’d never have the courage to use it. I needed to think of some other way to get us out of here.
I thought of the bottle of pills in my purse. I’d been a fool, a child, to think I could trick Ed Godo into anything. My only hope was to get Junie out of this cabin before he showed up, and I’d need Ant’s help to do it. Ricky had left the building, anyone could see that, but Ant might still be in there somewhere.
“Ant, what were you planning to do out here with Junie?” I asked, inching toward the cabin door, pulling Junie with me.
A flutter of guilt attacked his face, like I’d hoped it would.
“Nothing,” he mumbled.
“Well, you better let us go,” I said. A crunch just outside the cabin made my heartbeat thud in my wrists. Was it Ed, returning? He wouldn’t toy with us, like Ricky had. He’d simply kill us. “If you do, I’ll tell your mom you did the right thing. I promise.”
“You’re never getting out of here,” Ricky said, stepping between Ant and me.
I shoved Junie behind me and dragged the knife out of my purse, holding it like a machete. Ricky didn’t know I was too chicken to use it. “You’re gonna let me and Junie go.”
Ricky laughed his dry, dead-leaf laugh. “Think I’m afraid of your kitchen knife after what Ed taught me?” His eyes lit up right before he leaped forward and punched me in the same shoulder I’d damaged falling in Nillson’s house. The knife clattered to the ground, followed almost immediately by my purse.
The Anacin bottle rolled out.
“Now we’re cooking with Crisco,” Ricky said, smiling at the bottle on the floor. “Time for the real men to play.”
He picked it up and screwed off the lid.
Junie’s gasp pulled my attention. Her fear had been replaced by something else. Anticipation?
“You can’t ever change men like them,” she said to me, echoing what Dad had said. Had she been there? “Women always try, but some men are born bad.”
She couldn’t know there was poison in the bottle. She couldn’t possibly. Even if she’d dumped out all the pills before I’d found her in my room, even if she’d studied each tablet, how would she have known what was what? I’d always thought she’d inherited Mom’s features, but right now, she looked so much like Dad that it unnerved me.
“Give me that bottle, Ricky,” I said, turning back to him. “It’s full of poison.”
He held the open bottle near his mouth, teasing. Then he laughed again, but it wasn’t his corn-husk heh-heh. It was a bloody chuckle, one signaling he was ready to fight. “You think I’m not as big a man as Ed? That it? You saving the Anacin for him because you don’t want me to have it?”
He swiveled to face Ant. “Tell you what, kid. You be my poison tester. You swallow one first.”
“Crap on you,” Ant said, sullen. I could tell he was scared, though.
“Take it, you chickenshit,” Ricky said, walking over and shoving the bottle under Ant’s nose. “Take it or I’ll kill you.”
“I don’t want to.”