Ransom River (20 page)

“You okay?” Seth said.

She nodded. “You have a big red mark on the side of your face.”

He touched his cheek and shrugged. He smiled. “He didn’t follow us.”

She stood up straight. She had a stitch in her side but felt crazily great.

And scared again. “He doesn’t have to.”

S
eth picked her up beneath the giant soft-swirl ice cream cone of the Dairy Queen. Rory slammed the door of the truck and he pulled back into traffic.

“What happened with Riss?” he said.

“She threatened me. Vaguely. In her borderline aggressive way.”

“With?”

“Trouble. A media backlash if I don’t let her…” She rubbed her eyes. “Exposure. Humiliation.” She breathed. “Or maybe I’m just losing it.”

“You’re not losing it.”

She looked at him. “No. I’m not. What does she want? More of me.”

It took twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours after Boone shit-punched Seth, and Rory left her cousin with a shoe print on his head.

When the bell sprang the kids at East River Middle School, Rory loaded her backpack at her locker, surrounded by noise. The energy on a Friday afternoon was like helium balloons ascending, a thousand at once. The walk home was a mile through flat suburban streets. Rory’s dad was in the Sierras for the Forest Service and her mom wouldn’t be home from the high school until after five p.m. The day was sunny.

Across from the campus was a lemon orchard, the trees dark green and heavy with fruit. A dirt path ran through the orchard, but that shortcut was
reserved for the cool kids. The dirt path was where wicked magic changed the rules of school. Get fifty feet into the orchard and the vice principal couldn’t touch you.

Rory never took the dirt path, though the thought thrilled and scared her. She would have been challenged before she walked three steps. Seth could take the path. He could let his jeans sag, let the dog chain drape from his pocket and his hair fall into his eyes, and get away with it. Seth moved between worlds. Even then.

Boone always took the dirt path. Riss hardly ever did. She usually stayed after school for performing-arts rehearsals or drill-team practice. Amber would pick her up later.

Rory took the sidewalk along Treacher Avenue at the edge of the orchard. She was a block from school when four girls walked out of the trees and surrounded her.

Chelly Stasio said, “We know what you tried to do with Boone.”

“What are you talking about?” Rory said.

Britiny Glover stepped toward her. “It’s disgusting.”

Linda Rich got behind her and grabbed her backpack. “You got your diary in here? You talk all about how Boone is your dream lover?”

Rory spun and tried to shake Linda off, but the fourth girl, Crystal Glass, shoved her.

She stumbled and they pushed her again, into the orchard.

“You’re a perv,” Linda said.

Rory knew she was in trouble, that if they maneuvered her deeper into the trees, she was toast on a stick. She didn’t want to be toast. She didn’t want to fight, because four against one was great odds, if you were the four. She didn’t want to run. Run, and she’d be known forever at school as a coward.

The girls were Riss’s followers. They sat at her lunch table. They walked to class together. Rory had no doubt that Riss had put them up to this.

Linda was the tallest and the loudest. She looked like some kind of sizzling firecracker. She simply walked forward and butted into Rory.

“Your cousin. Your own
cousin.
Eww.”

Rory pushed her. “Stop it. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You got him to go into the storm drain,” Linda said. “You tricked him in there and then you pulled down your pants, you perv.”

“That never happened. That’s a lie. Boone tried to steal Seth’s skateboard.”

Linda pointed at her. “Blame Boone—you wuss. Look at you. You’re about to cry. Crybaby.”

Rory’s face was burning. “It’s a lie, you dumbasses. And if you believe it, you’re idiots.” She thought,
Well, that makes me deader than dead to the popular kids.

Linda grabbed her backpack and wrestled it from her shoulders. Rory hung on to the strap. “Stop it.”

The other girls tore it from her hands. Linda danced back, unzipping it. She threw out Rory’s math book and lunch box.

“Don’t,” Rory said.

Linda found her English notebook. She waved it in the air. “Eureka. The mother lode.”

Rory reached for it. “Give it back.”

“Ooh. This must be really good stuff.”

Clutching the notebook, Linda turned and ran from the orchard. Chelly and Crystal ran after her. Linda laughed and said, “Let’s see her get an A in English class now.” Britiny took the backpack, flung it into the trees, and chased after them.

For thirty seconds Rory stood breathing hard, needles of humiliation prickling her skin.
Don’t cry.

She stumbled through the orchard and picked up her math book. Found her lunch box. Kept going, looking for her backpack, and heard a girl call, “Rory?”

She looked up sharply. On the sidewalk, Petra lay down her bike and ran into the orchard.

“I can’t find my pack,” Rory said.

Petra knew something had happened, but she said, “Let’s look.”

They found it in a sticky patch of mud. Rory wiped it off and slung the pack across her shoulders. She swallowed the lump that clogged her throat.
Don’t cry.

And don’t tell. Telling would do no good. Her mom would turn purple, and her dad would phone Aunt Amber—she could hear the phone conversation, the black storm in her dad’s voice, yet another warning that Amber needed to
lay down the law
to Riss and Boone.

It would backfire. Rory’s parents would fight her corner. They’d go Conan the Destroyer on anybody who hurt their only child. But when the backlash came, they wouldn’t be around.

She pulled the cuffs of her sweatshirt over her hands and wiped them against her eyes. No, telling would only deepen her problems. A hard breath caught in her chest. She would just have to hold it in, all of it.

She walked with Petra back to the sidewalk. Across the street on the soccer field at school, the drill team was practicing. Riss had stepped out of line and stood at the fence, staring at her.

“Let’s go,” Rory said.

Petra picked up her bike. Rory climbed on behind her and hung on, all the way home.

I
n her third-grade classroom at West River Elementary School, Petra was writing on the blackboard. The chalk broke and her nails hit the slate. At the sound, the kids squirmed and said, “Eww.”

She brushed chalk dust from her hands. “Ooh, indeed. You know what that sound is? It’s a horse’s hooves raking the ground. The horse that belongs to the Headless Horseman.”

She picked up
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

But before she could read from it, a car alarm rang. The classroom overlooked the parking lot, and twenty small heads swiveled to see the culprit.

“Class. Back here.” Petra made a spinning motion with her finger. And she glimpsed a Camry with its flashers blinking.

Dammit.

A minute later she was speed-walking across the parking lot. She raised her key fob and clicked the remote. The alarm kept blaring. She clicked again. The lights were having a seizure. She jogged up to the driver’s door and hit the remote one more time.

The alarm shut off. The lights stopped flashing. The car looked fine.

The voice behind her was low and chesty, a big man. “Alarms are so sensitive. Sit on the bumper, they go off.”

She turned. A guy in a suit straight out of
Mad Men
stood behind her. Out of
Mad Men,
if he’d been blown up into one of the balloon animals for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

A dark SUV crept nearer in the parking lot. Balloon Animal was wearing dark glasses and enough hair gel to grease a seal.

“We need a word, Miss Whistler.”

She backed up. How did they know her name? She turned, and another man was standing there blocking her path. She glanced toward her classroom. She couldn’t tell whether anybody inside was looking.

Balloon Animal walked toward her. He could barely fit between her car and the one next to it. When he brushed the door she expected him to squeak like rubber.

“You’ve got a problem,” he said.

“Stop,” she said.

He kept approaching. “I’ll do whatever I want.” His face was grim. “This problem you got, it’s called Aurora Mackenzie.”

Seth and Rory cruised in his truck through a flat commercial zone of mattress showrooms and used-car dealerships. On the car lot, windshields shone with the sun, prices painted in red
wow-kapow
letters across the glass. Rory held her phone to her ear and talked to her law school professor David Goldstein. She spoke for a minute and thanked him. Hung up.

“He’s found a criminal attorney who’ll see me today,” she said.

“Where?” Seth said.

“Century City.”

That was a forty-five-minute drive over the hill, across the San Fernando Valley, and down the Sepulveda Pass to the busy business corridor in west L.A.

“I’ll drive you to the meeting,” he said.

“This isn’t your problem.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Don’t you have work today?”

His smile was low and chilly. “I am working.”

“On what?”

“Conspiracy, fraud, perverting the course of justice. If the Ransom
River PD screws with you, I’ll read ’em the entire penal code and sprinkle the charges over the department like confetti.”

“Who’ll be the client?”

He grinned, still chilly, and looked at her.

“Me? No. I don’t want to be used as a front for a vendetta.”

His face turned stung and uncertain. “That’s not what I’m after.”

“I’m not bait, Seth.”

“Duly noted.”

“Sorry.” She was fuming. She forced herself to calm down. “I feel like I’ve been rubbed raw with sandpaper.”

“I know.” He drove in silence for a minute. “So Riss is pissed off that you were chosen Hostage for a Day. What happens if you ignore her?” he said.

Rory ran a hand through her hair. “Doesn’t work.”

She’d tried it when she was twelve, after Riss’s posse roughed her up in the orchard and stole her notebook. She went back to school and pretended nothing had happened. And the next day, she was called to the office.