I swallowed. I couldn’t believe Uncle Chris and I were having this conversation.
“Uh,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Uncle Chris said, grinning at me. “I was kind of suspicious of that boyfriend of yours at first, but I think maybe he’s a positive role model for Alexander.”
I tried not to glance at the burnt spot in the living room carpet. “Maybe. Or maybe Alex straightened up because he’s so worried about you, Uncle Chris, and that murder charge against you.”
“Oh, that,” Uncle Chris said with a shrug. “I didn’t do it, so I’m sure it will all get straightened out soon. It was nice of your mom to post my bail.”
His naïve belief that the charges would be dropped and everything would work out because he was innocent was sort of astonishing for a man who’d spent so many years in prison. Granted, he’d spent those years in prison for a crime he truly had committed (although the penalty had been far too severe, especially for possession of a drug that was now legal in many states), but surely he must have met a lot of people in there who’d been convinced they were innocent. How could he have so much faith he’d be exonerated?
I guess that was just Uncle Chris. He was a truly positive person. No wonder my mom felt so bad about not coming forward and telling the truth about Mr. Rector. He was a slimebag who preyed on those who weren’t able to defend themselves.
Like the dead.
“Hey, what boats did your dad and that boyfriend of yours go to get?” Uncle Chris asked.
“Oh,” I said. “For, uh, John’s business. His boats got destroyed in the, er, storm, and my dad says he knows a guy who has some other boats John can use.”
“That’s nice,” Uncle Chris said. “I hope your mom and dad get back together. He makes Deb really happy. And I think that John fella makes you happy, too, am I right?” His eyes glinted at me teasingly.
I smiled back at him. “What would make you happy, Uncle Chris?” I asked.
He grinned in that sweet, slightly childish way of his that never failed to tug on my heartstrings.
“If everyone I loved was happy, of course,” he said, as if it should have been obvious.
It was kind of funny that right as he said this, the doorbell rang.
I uttered a curse word I’d picked up from spending way too much time in the company of Frank and Kayla. Uncle Chris looked at me in surprise. “Piercey!” he said, shocked.
“Sorry.” My heart began to drum inside my chest. I heard rapid footsteps in the hallway.
“It’s Chief of Police Santos,” my mother said, her face a mask of concern. “I saw him on the front porch from the window.”
“There are cop cars all up and down the street,” Alex said, skidding into the kitchen right behind her. “Po-pos here to take us to the big house.”
“You don’t know that,” Mom said to him.
“Oh, yeah? Why else do you think they’re here, Aunt Deb? To help you clean up your lawn after the big storm?” Alex’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Yeah, that’s a special service the Isla Huesos police chief offers to all the attractive new divorcées on the island.”
“Mom,” I said, my heart in my throat. “I think we need to borrow your car.”
“How’s that going to work?” Alex demanded. “Chief Santos parked in her driveway. And don’t think he didn’t do it on purpose to block us from getting her car out of the garage. Are we supposed to ram him?”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed. I looked at Alex. “How did you guys get here? In your car?”
“We walked,” Alex said. “Your genius boyfriend had Frank slash all my tires to keep me from going out after Coffin Fest, remember?”
“Oh, right,” I said. That had worked really well, since Alex had gone out anyway and gotten himself killed.
“This is crazy,” Mom said, as the doorbell rang again, this time accompanied by a knock and a deep voice saying, “Dr. Cabrero? We know you’re home. We need to ask you a few questions about your daughter.”
“I’m going to open the door and invite him in and explain the whole situation —”
Both Alex and I had glanced down at the diamond at the end of my necklace. It was the color of onyx. “No!” we cried simultaneously.
“Go out the back,” Uncle Chris said.
I looked at him, startled. I had almost forgotten he was in the room, he’d grown so quiet. Go out the back were the first words he’d said since my mom and Alex had said it was the police at the door.
“What?” I asked him, confused not so much by the words, but that he, my sweet, beloved uncle, was the one saying them.
“The two of you,” he said, pointing first at Alex and me, then at the backyard. “Go out the back way. The wall’s too high to climb, but I saw some bikes by the gate back there. You could get on them, then peddle towards the cemetery. The cops won’t be able to follow you. There’s a big tree down across the middle of the road. They’re still trying to find guys with enough chain saws to cut it apart since it’s too big to lift.”
I stared at him. He meant the tree that had fallen on top of Mr. Mueller.
Alex shook his head at his father pityingly. “Dad, you of all people should know you can’t run from the po-po. Besides, I told you, the driveway is blocked by their squad cars.”
“But we can still get bikes around them,” I said.
“Sure,” Alex said. “But they’ll see us.”
“Not if I create a diversion and distract them,” Chris said. “In prison, we had a name for when we did that.”
Alex and I widened our eyes at him. “What was it?”
“Well, prison riot,” Uncle Chris said with a shrug. “That was the most accurate term for it, although we did try to think of a better one.”
“No,” my mother said, looking outraged. “This is wrong. Christopher, you are not going to —”
“You’d better go,” Uncle Chris said, lifting my tote bag — which I’d left sitting at the bottom of the stairs — and handing it to me.
The thumping on the door had become more fevered. Now I heard the chief of police say, “Dr. Cabrero, I have a search warrant. I don’t want to break down your door, but if you don’t open it, I will.”
“Go,” Uncle Chris said, and pushed us towards the backyard.
Alex faced his father, flabbergasted, but finally grabbed his backpack from the chair over which he’d slung it. “Don’t do anything stupid to get yourself thrown back in jail, Dad,” he said.
“Why would I do that?” Christopher asked, looking genuinely puzzled.
Alex shook his head, wearing an expression that clearly read, This is going to be a disaster.
“Christopher, wait,” I heard my mom call as she raced after her brother, who’d gone striding towards the front door.
I didn’t stick around to see what was going to happen after that. I grabbed the front of Alex’s shirt and dragged him through the French doors and across the back porch, down the steps and around the side of the house, towards the back gate and the bicycles Uncle Chris had said he’d seen.
“This is never going to work,” Alex was muttering. “They’re going to see us. And what about your necklace? There’s obviously a Fury out there. For all we know, it could be Chief Santos.”
“It isn’t him,” I said. I was surprised to see my bicycle sitting beside my mother’s. Somehow she’d retrieved it from the cemetery, where I’d left it locked up, or the police had returned it after I’d gone missing. “My necklace never turned black around Chief Santos before.”
“Well, maybe he’s a Fury now. Maybe they’ve possessed everyone on the entire island except us, like some kind of plague. Oh, hell no.” Alex looked down at the two bikes, mine and my mother’s. “I’m not riding a girl’s bike.”