Chapter 14
The afternoon snuck up quickly while Nora wasn’t looking.
She’d been too busy trying to untangle the knots in her head, each new element of this mystery tied up tight and suffocating, that she’d barely noticed time slipping away.
The mindless tasks Ruby had assigned her in preparation for lunch only served to send her further into her thoughts, the constant busywork preventing her from properly addressing her small but enigmatic grandmother about what she’d discovered.
Nora barely ate a thing. There was no room in her for anything other than questions right now.
Phil had left in the late morning, leaving only Ruby, Richard, Charles, Patty, and the twins for lunch.
After everyone had their fill, Nora tried to offer Ruby help with the dishes in the hopes of a moment alone, but it was Richard she found herself in the kitchen with instead.
By the time they’d finished tidying, Phil was back and looking for her.
“You good to go?” he asked Nora. He’d changed his pants. She eyed the mudless jeans suspiciously.
“Go?” she said, still catching up with the passage of time.
“Your car,” said Phil. “You still okay to show me where you crashed it? My tools are in the truck.”
“Right, no, I’m ready,” she said. But was she?
She might not be Phil’s target, but if it had been him in the woods that morning, she wasn’t convinced she was safe with him.
And “safe” was always her first priority.
But if she didn’t go, Charlie would have to, and she knew that outcome would likely be worse.
She’d have to do this. And, if she made it out alive, she’d confront Ruby when she got back.
Phil’s pickup sat waiting for them on the grass just outside the little red house, its paint scuffed, mud caked onto the wheels, years of overuse written across its exterior.
It looked ready to slough off its doors like a shedding snake and retreat into the wild.
If Phil didn’t kill her, Nora figured a ride in the rust-mobile might do the trick.
But at least it was running, which was more than she could say for her own car.
She swung herself into the passenger seat, trying hard to ignore the torn leather on the seats or the unknowable stains inexplicably spattered across the roof.
Phil slid in behind the wheel. “You remember the way?”
“I think so,” said Nora.
Phil nodded and turned his focus to the road, driving them to the outskirts of Virgo Bay and making a left at Nora’s cue.
They drove in silence for a while, Nora slipping back into the knots of her mind, when a sudden slam on the breaks jostled her forward and out of her thoughts.
Her seat belt locked, digging into her collarbone.
“What is it? What’s going on?” She looked around, eyes wild.
They were on the paved road she’d driven down on her way to town, nothing around but the mass of trees and rocks that made up the landscape.
She turned to face Phil, suddenly hyperaware of their proximity, of their isolation, of just how vulnerable she was, alone in the middle of nowhere with a stranger.
“You need to tell me which way to turn,” Phil said.
Nora barely heard him over the pulse in her ears. “Oh. Down there,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
Phil gave another nod and drove on. Nora watched his hands on the wheel, suddenly attuned to every detail around her.
His hands were cut and calloused, the profile of his face more weatherworn than it had seemed in the house.
There was something almost robotic about him; something in his stillness, his quiet, the calm in his manner.
All things that scared Nora, if only because she couldn’t manage any of them herself.
They slowed again, and Nora saw her poor wounded Civic come into view, a shiny black heap of abandoned metal on the grass.
In an act of cosmic mockery, two perfectly unflattened rabbits sat nearby, nibbling at the greenery around one of the car’s sedentary tires, basking in their driving hazard-y life choices.
“Gonna go out on a limb and say this is it,” Phil said as he pulled up behind the car.
Nora hopped out as soon as the truck stopped, relief flooding her the moment she felt fresh air on her cheeks.
There was something about being caged with someone who could maybe be an attempted murderer that did unhappy things to Nora’s already-delicate bowels.
The driver’s side door slammed shut and Phil rounded the truck with a red tin toolbox in hand.
“You have a saw in there?” Nora asked stiffly.
Phil looked at her blankly before turning to the car. “This is going to be a big job,” he said. “Can’t guarantee anything. I’m not a mechanic. But I’ll do what I can.”
He gave the car a thorough once-over before hunkering down under the crumpled hood.
Nora felt her anxiety simmer into uneasiness and then, as more time passed, turn into restlessness.
If Phil was going to hurt her, he didn’t seem in much of a hurry about it, and she couldn’t get any closer to answering her questions about Ruby from way out here.
But there was something else she’d wanted answers about, another knot in her mind that she’d double tied and left at the back.
“Do you get out into the woods around Virgo Bay much?” she asked, then immediately realized that if it had been Phil out there this morning, she had walked right into a confrontation with a killer without meaning to. Thankfully Phil just kept on poking around under the hood.
“Not too much these days, but I played in there a bit as a boy,” he said.
Nora exhaled. If it was him, he didn’t seem about to own up to it, and she was definitely not going to press. She quickly got to her point. “There’s an old building of some kind in there. A house, I think. It seemed…I think it was inhabited. I just wondered who lives out there.”
This time Phil’s head peered over the hood of the car. He didn’t look at Nora, really; if anything he seemed to be looking through her. “Like I said, I haven’t been out there much in a long time.”
“But it’s such a small town,” Nora said, perplexed. “And you’ve lived here your whole life, right? Surely you’d know who’s living in the woods.”
“Well, I don’t,” Phil said, his tone the most animated Nora had heard it. “Now, you want me to fix your car or what?”
Nora took a step back in spite of herself, the uneasiness his tone triggered in her tingling down her knees.
Then it hit her. Phil himself could be the resident of that strange house in the woods.
It would explain how he’d found the twins so easily that morning, it would explain why his truck was so beaten up and painted with mud.
And surely, even in a town like this, a man of Phil’s age didn’t still live with his parents, but if he didn’t live with Pickles or at the farm with Vic and his family, or in one of the little clapboard houses around Patty, he had to be somewhere.
Nora studied the top of his head, as though it would tell her what parts of his story were true and which were lies.
Then he looked at her for another moment.
“You’re not from around here,” he said. “You have no idea what the wilderness holds in these parts. What harm could come to you out there. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay out of the woods.”
* * *
They returned home an hour later, Nora not dead.
Phil had decided he’d work on the car the next day when he’d have more hours of sunlight.
The weather had begun to turn sometime before they began their journey back into town, fat clouds rolling in.
By the time they pulled up at the little red house, speckles of rain were dotting the truck’s grubby windshield.
Nora waved a tight goodbye and hurried into the house as Phil drove off.
Inside, the fire was warm, Charlie curled on the couch in front of it like a cat, belly up, leg twitching slightly. Somehow he’d managed to nap while Nora was receiving threats from their hot but sinister cousin.
Ruby came down the stairs a moment later and tipped her head in greeting. “He’s been like that for over an hour,” she whispered, indicating Charlie with her chin. “Should I be concerned?”
Nora shook her head. Of all the things in the world she had to be concerned about, and there were always many, Charlie napping wasn’t one of them.
Charlie Bird was not a man of many talents, less due to inadequacy than a total lack of effort, but he’d always excelled at naps.
One time in senior year he left school at lunch, planning to grab a few quick winks and be back for fifth-period biology.
He didn’t wake up again until after breakfast the following morning.
Just to be absolutely certain, Nora approached her brother and shoved a hand under his nose. A steady rhythm of air hit her knuckles. He wasn’t dead, he was just Charlie.
“He’s fine,” Nora said. “And there’s really no need to whisper.
Charlie’s slept through…” She thought back to the figure with the knife in their room last night and shook it away.
“One time when we were little, I fell out of bed and broke my arm. Mom and Dad called an ambulance. The whole street woke up from the sirens and the flashing lights, but Charlie didn’t realize anything had happened until he saw me in a cast the next morning. ”
“Lucky boy,” said Ruby. “I can hardly remember the last time I slept through the night.”