The Story Thus Far
Chapter One: Mallory Kalvornek and her lover Julie Hanson have returned to Bronning, Minnesota, for the first time in years to catch up with friends and family. Meanwhile, their old friend (and occasional sex partner) paramedic Nettie Hastings fights to save a life, her lover Hannah drops by with an unexpected surprise, Terry Wilder grapples with writer’s block… and two little girls living in a trailer park named Heather and Gina are being carefully observed by a hidden stranger.
Chapter Two: Mallory and Julie get together at Nettie’s home with Nettie and her lover Hannah, Nettie’s friend Terry Wilder, Terry’s teen daughter Halee, and Mallory and Julie’s friend (and occasional sex partner) Cindy. Gossip is exchanged, memories shared, and an unexpected attraction between Mallory and Terry Wilder reveals itself. Meanwhile, the mother of the two trailer park girls Heather and Gina goes out for a night on the town, oblivious to the presence of the man spying on her home.
Chapter Three: At Nettie’s place, Nettie and Hannah leave the others to indulge in a bit of romantic pleasure, while Julie and her old friend Cindy get it on with Terry’s teen daughter Halee. As for Mallory, she has repaired to Terry’s place for one of her occasional bouts of heterosexual action. Appetites are indulged, confidences shared. Meanwhile, Heather and Gina are abducted from their trailer home by a mysterious and very scary man.
Chapter Four: At Nettie’s place, four women and Halee Wilder greet the morning after an evening of lesbian abandon. Later that day, Mallory rejoins Julie, Nettie, Cindy and Hannah for a day of fishing. Halee returns home and spends the day upgrading her internet in preparation for promised to be a fun night of video chat sex with her girlfriend Bethany. Meanwhile, Grace and Heather are in the custody of the mysterious man, who seems to takes delight in terrorizing them.
Chapter Five: After their day of fishing, Nettie, Julie, Cindy, Mallory & Hannah engage in a five-woman sexfest inside a tent… and with the use of Cindy’s phone, their old friend and occasional bedmate Emma attends the orgy virtually. In the midst of their abandon, Nettie has a weird, vague memory flashback that leaves her shaken, but she conceals it from the others. Back home, Halee and her new love interest Bethany (Hannah’s daughter) are having long-distance sex via their laptops.
Chapter Six: Nettie has a heart-to-heart with Hannah about her personal demons. Later, she gets a call from Agent Bridgett Ramscone, who has an unsettling request: for Nettie to go through the documentation of her own childhood kidnapping — and the murder of her sister — as a possible way to gain insight into the abduction of Heather and Gina (who are still being emotionally abused by their kidnapper, but are also taking steps to escape). Nettie is shaken, but agrees to do what she can.
For a list of the characters from the story you are now reading, visit this page.
For a list of the characters from the previous two stories that you will encounter here as well, visit this page.
And now, dear readers, we make our way into the next installment. Read on…
by Rachael Yukey
So if you want to know
Where I’ve been hiding all these years
Follow the tears
Heaven and Hell, 2009
“Nettie. Nettie!”
A poke in her side. Anna swimming into hazy focus, the bruise on her cheek and the gash on her forehead standing out in sharp relief. A sick simultaneous feeling of burning heat and shivering cold. Huddled together on a moldy carpet, backs propped against the ruins of a cupboard. Wrapped in the blankets their captor had tossed at them, blankets that smelled of poo or maybe worse, warming their hands over a barely-working propane heater. Somewhere in the back of a fever-shrouded mind, the knowledge they’d both be frozen like ice statues if it wasn’t for that pathetic little heater.
“Nettie, you’ve got to wake up.”
“Hurts—”
“The doctor said you can’t lie down too much, remember?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Nettie, come ON.”
With a groan, the dark-haired girl shifts herself to a more upright sitting posture. She gulps in a lungful of air, the breath rattling audibly in her chest, and then doubles over in an agonized fit of coughing, lungs and throat aflame.
“Where’s Creepface?” she gasps.
“I dunno.” Anna’s face is pale, drawn. “I thought I heard him outside talking to someone a while ago, some lady. But no one came in.”
“Anna—”
“What?”
“I dunno.” Whatever she’d begun to say was already gone, fluttering at the edge of her subconscious and vanishing into the ether. So cold—so hard to think.
“Nettie, we have to get out of here.”
“To where?”
“I don’t know! I don’t even know where we are, and I know the door is locked. But you need to go back to the doctor. And he’s going to keep hurting us, Nettie, I don’t think—”
Tears swim in Anna’s eyes, but Nettie sees it through a foggy haze, as if from far away. Fading, focusing, fading—Anna’s voice again—
“Nettie! Nettie, oh God please wake up—”
“Wake up, damn you.”
Nettie was startled into consciousness by the sound of her own voice. Every muscle was rigid, her knuckles pressed against eyelids screwed tightly shut. Dropping her hands to the arms of her chair, she released her breath and opened her eyes.
The imagery on her laptop screen had not changed. Anna’s still, pale face, glazed-over eyes staring sightlessly to the heavens. A deep laceration on the upper right forehead, a fading contusion on the left cheek. A fresh-looking bruise to the left mandible, which was angulated slightly, clearly displaced—when had that happened?
Flipping the laptop screen closed, Nettie reached for her phone.
Bridgett picked up on the first ring. “Got something, Nettie?”
“There was a second.”
“An accomplice, you mean?”
“Yeah. Looking at those pics and reading the case report did bring back a few things. We never had eyes on her, at least I didn’t, but Anna and I both heard Brentshaw talking to a woman, a couple of times. I remember hearing them talking from another room of the trailer, and Anna telling me about hearing them outside.”
“How sure are you?”
Nettie closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. “I can’t say it’s a hundred percent. I was damn sick, Bridgett. I have memories of just fading in and out, talking to Anna one second and her screaming at me to wake up the next. Literally anything I remember has a very decent chance of just being a goddamn fever dream. But this—it seems fairly clear.”
Shifting in the chair, she pulled herself upright to soothe her aching back. “Besides, even if there was an accomplice, I don’t know that we can even begin to guess who it might have been. This is a very cold trail, Bridgett.”
“I know it. Anything else?”
“No memories in particular, but a few observations about the case report details. I doubt like hell it’s anything you or the FBI people haven’t thought of.”
“I’d like to hear it anyway.”
“So—Anna and I were found in an abandoned trailer three miles deep in the woods, roughly fifteen miles from home. Let’s say we double that; call the radius thirty miles. I mean, the perp isn’t gonna want to go too far down the highway with two captive girls in his vehicle. He gets pulled over, he’s fucked.”
“That’s the assumption we’ve been operating under,” Bridgett agreed. “Most people have no idea what a thirty mile radius even means in terms of ground to cover. It already borders on unmanageable; anything bigger is just hopeless. But where are you going with this?”
“Well, the area we’re looking at now is just as full of back pastures, untillable woodlands, abandoned iron mines, you name it. Junk, debris, and unused dwellings all over hell and gone. Is there even a procedure for trying to investigate all the possibilities?”
Bridgett gave an audible sigh. “Not a good one. The FBI is using satellite imagery to try and narrow down potential sites, with an eye towards anything that gives any indication of having been accessed recently. Obviously that’s so far from perfect it’s laughable; just for starters we have no idea how many sites might be completely obscured by tree cover. But there’s no way we can stomp that much ground. Let’s add to that the fact that every site we can view is on someone’s land. It’s not reasonable to ask for warrants to investigate every single possibility. There has to be some kind of process of elimination, and anything they pick is going to be arbitrary to an extent.”
Nettie chewed on the inside of her cheek. “What about that trailer park they were taken from? Forbes, Minnesota—it’s like the ghetto comes to fairyland from what I can see. A mobile home park literally in the middle of the pine forest, a fair number of vacant lots, not a single trailer newer than the eighties, half of them unoccupied—from the satellite photos in the case file, I can see two bare trailer frames that no one ever bothered to remove from the lots. Can I assume all the empty trailers have been searched, not to mention the vacant house over by that scrapheap half a mile away?
“That all got checked within the first few hours, Nettie.”
“Dammit. I got nothing, Bridgett. You could check out any female relatives or associates of Brentshaw’s, but I don’t think it’s anything you can hang your hat on.”
“No, not really.” Bridgett’s voice was contemplative. “Let’s switch gears for a second. Something I always found interesting associated with your abduction: you were found because a 911 call from a cellphone was traced to your location. The caller never spoke, but the line stayed open for a while and the operator could hear muffled voices, along with various other noises she couldn’t identify. Do you remember anything about that?”
Nettie hesitated. Ever since she’d read that part of her case file, there had been something drifting around her subconscious, a monster lurking behind her temples seeking its way into the sun. Finally she took a deep breath. “I didn’t know about it till I read the file just now. But reading it triggered something; I’m just not sure what. It’s almost like—like—this is gonna sound dumb. But it’s like something my subconscious doesn’t want me to know about. Does that make any sense at all?”
“More than you might think. But that aside, cell phones were just starting to become common in those days, and smartphones were barely a thing. The account was one of those cheap Nokia phones with the prepaid plans they used to sell at WalMart, and the phone was never found. The only reason the call wasn’t dismissed as a prank and hung up on is because there were kids missing, and the 911 operators were on the alert for anything unusual. The lady who took the call sent it up the chain instead of hanging up and having another jelly donut, which is damn near miraculous. Otherwise, you’d never have been located.”
Nettie’s fingers drummed on the arm of her chair. “That’s what I got out of reading it. We weren’t found because some smart agent made the right deductions. Brentshaw must have got careless, left his burner phone lying around, then Anna or I got hold of it and managed to get a call in. Obviously not something we can duplicate. Dammit.” She realized that her voice was becoming strident, and drew in a steadying breath.
“Nettie.” Bridgett’s voice was gentle but firm. “Do not work yourself into a state over this. The odds aren’t in our favor here, and we knew that going in. I contacted you because we had to try. How long have you been staring at those files now?”
Nettie glanced at her watch. “Five hours, give or take.”
“Put ‘em down. That’s a direct order from your supervising agent. Get yourself a meal and a hot bath, and look at them again in the morning.”
“Bridgett, those girls are still out there—”
“And you’re not going to glean anything from those files that will help them in your current state. Hell, the odds are against you coming up with anything at all, and we both know it. Get some rest, and then start fresh.”
Nettie rubbed her eyes. They felt gritty; overused. “All right, you win. If I think of anything else, I’ll give you a shout.”
“Sounds good. And I’ll pass what you said about a female accomplice to the FBI people. Who knows, that might even be the lead we’re looking for.” She didn’t sound optimistic.
***
An hour later Nettie lay on her couch, hair still damp from the shower, an untied bathrobe wrapped around her otherwise nude frame. I have a real house now, with a way better bed—and my go-to spot is still on the couch, naked, with music blasting. Her lips curled upward in a weary smile. Metal from a bygone age blared forth from the speakers, Black Sabbath circa 1972. Ozzy Osbourne declaring that try your hardest, you’ll still be a loser.
The tidal wave of memories from that year in Dickson washed over her again, but this time she let it rush past, allowing the undisciplined swirls and eddies of random imagery to sweep across her consciousness, enough to momentarily blot out the present.
But maybe not so random. There was a focal point, and it was Black Sabbath, her gateway drug to the world of all things heavy. An afternoon in the Hansons’ living room, Mallory Kalvornek over to spend the night, practicing songs for her student band on Uncle Jason’s keyboard. One of them was a Sabbath tune, wasn’t it? Yes—”Computer God”! A later, leaner, more muscular Sabbath, with Ronnie James Dio on vocals. She’d asked to hear the song again, and Mallory had played the whole album for her. Dehumanizer. Fucking beast of a record.
“Wow, Jamie. You sure have a lot of Black Sabbath records.” The solemn dark-haired girl stands before a shelf full of vinyl, finger tracing the spines.
“I have more on CD.” The lanky teenager, her chestnut hair swept back in a careless ponytail, moves to a lazy-susan media shelf, turns it, and splays her fingers across a half-dozen jewel cases. “There are a few from the 90s that were never released on vinyl, and a couple others I just haven’t been able to find in record stores. But sooner or later vinyl’s going to make a comeback, and a bunch of stuff will come out then. Wait and see.”
“I like Dehumanizer a lot,” says Nettie. “That singer they have—uh, what’s his name?”
Jamie giggles. “It’s not that simple. Ronnie James Dio wasn’t their only singer. He’s not even the first! That was Ozzy Osbourne. Then—”
“Yeah, you played one of his records for me!” Nettie blurts.
“One of his solo albums, sure. But he started out in Sabbath. He was on the first, uh, eight albums I think. Then they got Dio for a couple albums in the early eighties. Dehumanizer is actually from the second time he was in the band, in the nineties. They recorded with like three other singers in between.”
“That’s just freakin’ complicated,” Julie Hanson puts in. She and Mallory are nestled on the love seat against the opposite wall of Jamie’s attic bedroom, arms wrapped around each other.
Jamie tosses an amused glance over her shoulder. “If you think that’s whacked out, ask me about Deep Purple some time.” Her attention returns to the girl by her side. “Wanna hear some of it?”
Nettie nods her head vigorously. “Sure!”
“Okay—” Jamie pulls a record from the shelf, shaking the inner sleeve carefully from the cardboard jacket. “Black Sabbath Volume Four. It’s from 1972, and I think it’s the best one with Ozzy.” She holds out the sleeve, record still contained within, an inviting smile on her face. “C’mere, Nettie. I’ll talk you through putting it on.”
As the dark, brooding strains of the opening track permeate the room, Nettie and Jamie turn towards the love seat, two sets of eyebrows arching at the sight of Julie and Mallory locked in a passionate kiss, each with a hand down the front of the other’s pants.
Jamie’s eyes widen in alarm, darting to Nettie and back again. “Hey, whoa, girls, it’s not just—”
Mallory disengages her mouth from Julie’s, a shuddering exhalation exploding from her at what looks to be a truly intense wave of pleasure. “Relax,” she murmurs. “She’s been initiated. Nettie, why don’t you take Jamie over to the bed and show her what we taught you?”
The dark-haired girl smiles up at the uncertain teenager at her side and takes her by the hand. The teen hesitates, then allows herself to be led to the bed.
“You’re wrong, Jamie,” mumbled the lightly dozing woman on the couch. “Sabotage is the best Sabbath with Ozzy. But Volume Four is pretty fucking righteous.” In her sleep, Nettie smiled.
***
A noise in the dark. Music, but not the dark, distorted, ominous sludge of Black Sabbath. Carnival sounds, a calliope, or maybe the music blared by the ice cream truck guy—and when did Bronning get a friggin’ ice cream truck?
Phone. It was the goddamn phone. Dragging herself up from the murky depths of deepest slumber, Nettie scrabbled around on the end table, fingers finally closing on the offending device. She forced her eyes to focus on the screen. Hannah.
She swiped the green button. “Hey.” Even the single syllable came out shaky and slurred.
“Oh, honey, were you asleep?”
“No biggie. Christ, what time is it?”
“About seven.”
“PM?” Nettie ventured tentatively.
“Antoinette, are you okay?”
“Yeah, just kinda out of it. I lay down on the couch maybe half an hour ago. Must’ve passed out.”
“Damn, I was hoping it’d been longer than that. Like, maybe you slept all afternoon.”
“Well, that was the plan,” said Nettie. “but Ramscone had a case she wanted me to look at. It ate up a good chunk of the day.”
“I thought you were free to tell them no.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to.” There was an edge to Nettie’s voice.
“Don’t snap at me, Antoinette,” Hannah’s tone was also a bit chilly.
Nettie’s breath whooshed out of her. “Sorry. It’s kind of a shitty case, and it’s time-sensitive. Long story. I’ll probably be working on it some more tomorrow.”
“Don’t you work an ambulance shift tomorrow night?”
“I’m a big girl, Hannah. I’ve got this.”
Hannah blew out her breath audibly, and Nettie cringed. Here you go again. Keep this up, and Hannah will be gone like all the others.
“Hannah, I am so sorry,” she said. “The case I’m working on has me a little upset, is all. It’s not very pleasant. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”
“Can you talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Okay—just promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”
All the old knee-jerk reactions were there; the urge to tell Hannah to mind her own goddamn business was almost overpowering. Nettie suppressed it with a herculean effort. Don’t blow this, you dumb bitch.
“I promise. And Hannah—I really am sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”
“Mmmmm—I like the sound of that. What’ve you got in mind?”
“Dinner at the best place in Johnstown this coming weekend, followed by some tongue exercises that will blow your mind.”
Hannah snorted laughter. “I’m pretty sure the best restaurant in Johnstown is fucking Applebee’s.”
Nettie laughed too, the tension in her gut easing. “I think we can do a little better than that.”
“It’s a date. Go back to sleep; we’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Night, Hannah.”
Rolling off the couch, Nettie stood indecisively for a moment, contemplating whether or not to toss down a couple of drinks before bed. In her mind’s eye she watched the amber liquid pour smoothly into the glass, enjoyed the life-affirming gurgle. Felt the smooth, slow burn down the back of her throat. Wallowed in the fuzzy-minded bliss that followed.
Then her eyes filled with tears. Face it, toots. You’re morphing into a full-blown, five-alarm alcoholic. And you sure as fuck aren’t going to help find those girls waking up tomorrow with a soggy brain.
Angrily shoving the phone into her pocket, she stalked to her bedroom, slamming the door behind. She could feel herself fading away again almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, then a stray thought jolted her momentarily back awake. Mallory’s right. You have to talk to Hannah. You can’t keep this inside anymore.
Nettie slipped into unconsciousness on a tear-soaked pillow.
***
Heather Dulcey stalks the periphery of their enclosure, pushing experimentally on the aged timber of the walls. Thus far, it’s proven to be far more solid than it looks.
“What’re you doing, Heather?” Gina’s voice is plaintive, but steady for perhaps the first time since they were taken.
“Trying to find a way out.”
“What—what if he comes back and catches you?”
“He’s been gone all afternoon. What are you afraid of, anyhow? That we’ll get in big trouble if he catches us? We’ll get grounded or something? C’mon—help me with this!”
Gina seems to ponder that for a long moment. Then she rises, makes her way to the opposite end of the wall Heather is currently probing, and begins pushing against the siding boards.
***
“There was no reason to call in a goddamn scene flight,” Jason Hanson was saying. He and his wife Lisa lounged in matching recliners, their daughter Victoria taking up the entire loveseat, legs splayed out and back resting against the arm. Julie and Mallory were side by side on the couch.
“So we get out there,” he went on, “and the local firefighters have this thirteen-year-old girl trussed up like a chicken on a backboard. Her parents were off trying to chase down the horse that threw her, instead of tending to their injured kid. Her only complaint was neck pain, and I use the word neck in the loosest possible sense. She was so fat she didn’t have one.”
“At thirteen,” Julie was shaking her head.
“At thirteen,” Jason agreed. “She was so neckless they couldn’t get a C-collar on her.”
“How much do you think she weighed?” Victoria wanted to know. Vicky favored her mother; an oval face framed by hair that would have been light brown, had it not been dyed a flaming shade of pink.
“Oh, she knew it off the top of her head,” said Jason. “Three hundred thirty. She’d had a well-child like two days prior.”
“Ouch,” said Julie. “If I was a horse, I’d probably have thrown her too.”
“So anyway,” Jason went on, “I asked if she knew her weight. She had it right on the tip of her tongue, and then she says: ‘I know, I’m a little chubby, but it’s Covid weight. Everyone put on weight during Covid, right?’”
A chuckle went around the room. “Sounds like that kid put on everyone’s Covid weight,” Julie observed.
Jason sobered. “It’s gotten radically worse just in the decade and a half I’ve been doing this,” he said. “The obese adults are one thing, but it’s the kids that always get me. Where the hell are mom and dad while little princess is stuffing her face with an entire box of snack cakes in one sitting?”
“Working,” said Lisa. “The kids are all latchkey these days.”
Vicky glanced over at Julie. “I’m trying to even imagine what Mom and Dad would do if I started packing it on like that, or if you had.”
“Probably lock up everything in the house that wasn’t a fruit or vegetable,” Julie replied.
Mallory shrugged. “It’s not like there was ever a junk food problem in this house, anyway. Or even a convenience food problem. I remember being amazed at first at how good I ate when I was here. At home we were mostly eating microwavables. Then I come here, and Julie’s dragging me into the kitchen yelling, ‘come help me cook!’”
“You got good at it, too,” Lisa observed.
“So, what about the overweight horse-girl?” Vicky inquired.
“Actually, that was interesting,” said Jason. “I knew right off she didn’t need a thirty thousand dollar helicopter ride; ground transport to a local facility was fine. But once we’re on scene, we can’t leave her with a lower level of care. So we rode to the local hospital with the ground ambulance crew, and had our pilot meet us there.”
“I didn’t know you could do that,” said Mallory.
“Oh, I’ve done it a handful of times. Hell—I did a transfer with Nettie a couple of years ago. She brought a guy from a dinky local hospital to an airfield and—well, long story, but there were complications that made air transport a problem. Nettie already knew it, too. The first thing she said was ‘maybe I should just take him by ground’.”
“And you couldn’t leave him with the ground crew,” said Julie.
“In that case,” said Jason, “we probably could have got away with it. Nettie has the same critical care endorsement I’ve got. Not a whole lot of ground medics do. But it covered all of our asses for myself and the flight nurse to just go along for the ride, so that’s how we did it. It was kinda fun to work with Nettie for a couple of hours. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her in action.”
“Is she good?” said Vicky.
“I offered her a job,” Jason replied.
Mallory chuckled. “Not surprising. Remember how when you were in medic school she read way ahead in your textbooks, then actually explained stuff to you?”
Jason grinned. “Believe me, I do. Nothing like being shown up by a precocious fifth-grader.”
“I wonder why Nettie didn’t take you up on that job offer for flight,” Julie pondered, “since she has the certs for it. It’d pay better, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” said Jason. “It’d expand her scope of practice, too. Lots of stuff we have on the helos that ground transport doesn’t. We even have some bases up in her area, and I’ve reached out to her every time there’s been an opening. But she always gives me a polite ‘no thank you’.”
“That seems kinda weird,” said Vicky. “Why wouldn’t she want a better job?”
“You guys still don’t get it?” Mallory put in, her voice soft and contemplative.
“I think I do,” said Lisa.
“I guess I don’t,” said Jason.
“It’s about Anna,” said Mallory. “It was always about Anna. I remember her talking about that once; just about the only time I remember her ever mentioning it directly. Part of her has always believed that if there’d been an ALS ambulance right there at the beginning, her sister could have been saved. She’s staying on the ground, in a rural area with long transport times, because of Anna.”
“She’s probably wrong about that,” said Jason. “I remember the conversation, now that you mention it; all of us except Vicky were here.”
“Well,” said Lisa with a smile, “Vicky was, in a way.” She ran a hand across her now perfectly flat belly.
“I remember you telling her it was possible,” said Julie.
“And it is,” said Jason. “Just not likely. I admit to softening it a bit when she asked; what else was I gonna do? She was eleven. But based on admittedly incomplete information, I think Annamarie was in irreversible shock when they picked her up. You could have had a helicopter right there the moment they pulled them out of that trailer, and it most likely wouldn’t have mattered.”
Vicky was staring at her hands. “That really sucks. I never got to meet her.”
“None of us knew her all that well,” said Jason. “We didn’t really know Nettie either, not until she came to live here. You have to realize: my sister Clarice has some, um, monsters in her attic, and the man she married was pretty much the same. They met when they were undergoing inpatient psychiatric care. When they both had breakdowns after what happened to the girls, I was the least surprised man on the planet.”
“Whoa, I never knew Nettie’s folks had mental problems even before the kidnapping,” said Julie, eyebrows lifted.
Jason snorted. “It’s not like I was gonna tell you about it at that age. And later, I guess it just never came up. But yeah—there was some very not-good shit, long before the girls were taken. After Clarice went to Bronning to move in with Darell, she kind of kept the rest of us at a distance. We saw the girls maybe once or twice a year.”
“And it wasn’t much better than that after Nettie went home,” Julie chimed in.
“Well, for one thing, their marriage was over by then,” said Lisa. “they never did move back in together.”
“I knew hardly any of this at the time,” said Mallory, her face drawn. “It’s a good thing Nettie came here. God knows how she would have ended up otherwise.”
“I think we did a good job,” said Lisa, her face brightening a little. “It wasn’t easy, but I’m really glad we did it. She’s come a long way since then.”
Mallory and Julie shared a look, their thoughts reflected in each other’s eyes. Before departing Bronning that morning, they’d had a small glimpse of the deep pain beneath the surface of Nettie’s outward demeanor.
“She seems cool,” said Vicky. “Too bad she doesn’t live closer.”
“It’s okay—you’ve got me for the summer. What could be better than that?” Julie was grinning.
Vicky rolled her eyes. “Oh, great. I get to spend three months fending off my bitchy big sister.”
“This is the best thing that ever happened to you, kiddo,” Julie declared. “I’m back, and just when you’re old enough that I can show you all the fun stuff.” She glanced toward Jason and Lisa with a glint in her eye. “We just have to wait till the parental units are asleep—or lock ‘em in the root cellar, whichever seems easiest.”
Lisa smiled. “As if we didn’t know about all the stuff you were getting up to at the time.”
Mallory and Julie both snickered. “But did you?” said Mallory. “Did you really?”
“What I always wondered,” said Jason, “is how much of your spending money got funneled into Elaine Spencer’s hands to buy vodka in Reggie’s liquor store.”
Julie choked on a swallow of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, spluttering into her hand.
“Wait, what?” Vicky demanded.
“You knew about that?” said Mallory.
“Of course we knew,” said Lisa. “And we also trusted the two of you not to get too stupid. So long as you were just hanging out at Lake Norman with Emma and Cindy, walking instead of driving, we figured it was harmless teenage stuff. It wasn’t like those idiots doing up on meth and hot-rodding their pickups on the back roads.”
“And I knew from bitter experience,” said Jason, “that if teens get too many restrictions slapped on them, they start acting out in ways that are dangerous for realsies. You girls were pretty responsible. I won’t say I didn’t worry, but not enough to wreck your good time.” He shrugged. “It’s not like I was a pillar of virtue at that age.”
“Well,” said Julie, eyes turned to the ceiling, “there was the time that—” she shrugged. “Um. I guess it wasn’t all that much. Come to think of it, we really were kinda boring, Mal.”
“Soooo great,” said Vicky. “You’ve come back to teach me all the ways to be boring In Dickson. I can’t wait.”
Mallory burst out laughing. “Kiddo, the ways to be boring in Dickson are many, varied, and never-ending. What we need to do is bring you out to Colorado for a few weeks. Spend a day or two in Denver. I think it’s a physical impossibility to get bored in Denver.”
“I don’t know,” said Julie. Her eyes were on the ceiling again. “We’ve been back in Minnesota for all of three days, and I don’t think I’ve had this much fun in years.”
“You know,” said Mallory, “you might just have something there.”
***
With a loud crack, the partially rotted siding board gives way. Unprepared, Heather pitches forward, cracking her forehead a good one on a stud. “Ow!” she blurts. Gina, who’d been lending her weight to the effort, falls sideways, landing against Heather and knocking her to the concrete floor.
Momentarily dazed, flabbergasted at their totally unexpected success, Heather stares disbelievingly at the four-inch opening between the floor and the next board up.
“Yes!” she exults.
Gina studies the opening with somewhat less enthusiasm. “We can’t fit through there, you know.”
“Maybe not,” Heather agrees. “And I don’t think we’ll be able to break the boards above it, either. But look how busted up the cement is, down here on the edge! Maybe we can work some of it loose and crawl under.” Shifting her body around, she kicks at the cracked chunks of concrete floor, looking for one with a little bit of give. It only takes a few seconds to find it.
Soon to come: Chapter Eight!