More will go up.
Even though I was already sure that Riley must still be missing, I find myself gripping the crumpled poster a little more tightly. “They?”
The girl stares at me, blankly.
“You said ‘They’ll just do it again.’ Who? Who’s they?” I guess those dregs of loyalty really do exist because there’s a harsh edge to my voice that I can’t otherwise explain.
“Just . . . people. People from school.”
“So they what? Go around trashing someone who’s missing and everyone’s fine with that?”
“Someone who’s . . . ?” Confusion fills her eyes and then shifts to something else as a blush creeps across her cheeks. “You thought they were saying Riley was . . . that he . . .” She shakes her head. “They write on the posters around the movie theater because I work there. So that I’ll see them. They mean the word for me.”
She stands in front of me, small and dark, and as her blush bleeds away, she raises her chin a tiny fraction of an inch.
There’s something in that tiny fraction that I almost envy. She doesn’t apologize for the word or what other people say. She stands there, chin raised, like it doesn’t matter what they—or I—think.
And it doesn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t.
Whether it’s true or not, that word—and what it represents—shouldn’t be an insult.
A deep male shout comes from the direction of the theater, breaking the moment. “Skylar—there are customers!”
When she doesn’t immediately move, the voice booms out, again. “Skylar! Customers!”
She turns and runs, pigtails bouncing, and I’m left alone, holding a ruined poster.
Three
AUNT JET CATCHES UP WITH ME A FEW STREETS LATER. BY that time, I’ve counted eleven other posters, none of them defaced. Some have ribbons or homemade cards pinned beneath them. One sits above a small stuffed lion—the local high school’s mascot. I’m standing there, staring at that silly lion, when Aunt Jet pulls her whale of a car up to the curb.
She leans across the passenger seat and pushes open the door. “I’m so sorry, Mary Catherine,” she says. “I told them I had to leave at five, but they’re so short-staffed, and I just couldn’t . . .” She cuts herself off and shakes her head as she looks at me, eyes wide. “Wow. You look so much older. So grown up.”
Between social media and the occasional video chat on birthdays and holidays, my appearance really shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, but maybe there are some things that pictures and video can’t capture, because as I stand there on the curb, I can’t help but notice how much older Aunt Jet looks herself. She and Dad are twins—born thirteen minutes and three seconds apart—but you’d never guess it. Dad looks young for his age. In fact, few people realize he’s old enough to be my father. Aunt Jet, on the other hand, has streaks of gray in her long red hair, and there are faint lines around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes. Lines I don’t remember seeing when I last visited. She’s still beautiful, though. If possible, the lines and hints of gray actually make her more so.
I don’t make any move to get into the car, and Jet’s gaze slides to the poster behind me. Her thin shoulders rise and then fall as she lets out a deep breath. “I was going to tell you.”
“When?”
A woman with a stroller waves to my aunt as she walks past. As her gaze shifts to me, it fills with barely suppressed curiosity.
I debate walking away, but I don’t exactly love the idea of people in town talking about my poor aunt and her difficult American niece. I’ve had enough people talking about me over the past few months to last a lifetime.
With a sigh, I toss my bags into the back of the Buick and then climb into the passenger seat.
Despite the heat, my aunt is wearing a sweater over a pair of burgundy-colored scrubs: her unofficial uniform as a personal care assistant at one of the local nursing homes. It’s broiling inside the car, and I can feel my own clothes sticking to me in seconds, but she doesn’t put the air-conditioning on. Given how old the car is, I’m not sure the air-conditioning even works.
I stare at her expectantly, waiting for an answer.
“Your father and I talked about it,” she says as she signals and pulls away from the curb. “We thought it would be better to wait and see what happened before telling you.”
“You mean he thought.” It really shouldn’t surprise me. My father doesn’t like things that are unexpected or unpleasant. Things that are unexpected or unpleasant tend to distract him from his work. Which is, I suspect, one of the reasons I’ve been sent here for the summer.
Aunt Jet flexes her hands around the steering wheel. She’s always hated confrontations. Big ones, little ones, ones that exist only in her head—they all set her on edge. Silence fills the car, heavy and awkward. “It wasn’t just your father,” she says finally. “There are things he’d rather I not talk to you about, but holding off on telling you about Riley was a decision we made months ago, together.”
“Okay, but you’ve known I was coming for the past two weeks. Didn’t you think I’d see the posters when I got here?”
Her cheeks flush. “We were wrong—I was wrong—and I’m sorry.”
“What other things doesn’t Dad want you talking to me about?” I ask as the other part of what she said sinks in.
The look Aunt Jet shoots me makes it clear she thinks I should already know the answer to that. And I do, actually. I was just curious about what she would say. “No talking about the family legacy,” I say, imitating the crisp, slightly fake-sounding voice my father uses in interviews. “No filling my daughter’s head with nonsense about old houses and strange gifts.”
Aunt Jet shoots me a small, tight smile. “Something like that.”
So, basically, the same stuff my dad has been fighting with Aunt Jet about since I was twelve.
“The posters say Riley’s been missing since March.” A little of the anger creeps back into my voice; I can’t help it.
Aunt Jet loosens her grip on the wheel and then reaches out to touch my hand. I pull away before she can make contact. I want to stay angry—I have a right to be angry—and people have a very hard time staying angry when my aunt touches them.
Jet places her hand back on the wheel. “They think he got lost in the woods outside of town. He went walking there a lot, apparently. There was a late snowstorm the day he went missing. It made searching hard.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” I shake my head, recalling how fascinated Riley had been with the forest around Montgomery Falls the summer we spent together, how much time he had spent trying to map them. “Riley knew those woods. Really well.”
“You’ve never been out there in the winter,” says Aunt Jet, not ungently. “Things look different. It gets dark early and stays dark until late, and the snow plays tricks on people. Even without getting caught in a storm, it would have been easy to get disoriented. And there aren’t that many cell towers outside of town. You’d be surprised how spotty coverage gets.”
I guess it’s a fair point. Montgomery Falls really is a tiny speck in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. Even when Riley used to drag me out on hikes, we’d lose service if we ventured too near the logging roads or went the wrong way.