My niece continued her slouch. A few miles later, she muttered, “Where are we going?”
“To a farm out past Brown’s Road.”
She sat up a little. “Isn’t that the road where the bookmobile stopped that day?”
Frowning, I asked, “How do you know that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Because I’m not stupid, even if you think I am.”
What was she talking about? “What on earth makes you think I think you’re stupid?”
“Besides everything?” She made a rude noise in her throat. “Can we drive down that road? Brown’s?”
My knee-jerk reaction was to say no, and my mouth opened to say the word, but before I could say it, I remembered that this was, in fact, the plan I’d come up with last night. Rafe had made me promise I wouldn’t come out here by myself, and I wasn’t. Kate was with me.
“Fine,” I said tightly. “There’s nothing to see, but let’s have at it.”
And I turned onto Brown’s Road.
Chapter 19
Kate and I sat in my car near the same spot the bookmobile had parked less than a month earlier. Deeper in the shade, though, because it was getting hot. We were so far underneath a maple tree’s low-hanging branches that the car was probably invisible to the casual glance. Our activities, however, were far different than that of bookmobile day; my niece was looking through the windshield with no interest in anything and I was texting Rafe.
Me: On Brown’s Road with Kate. All fine, see you soon.
I hit the Send button and immediately turned the phone off, just in case he was paying attention to his own cell and shot off an immediate text of protest.
“There’s not much out here,” Kate commented.
She was correct. There was not. Well, not if you equated structures created by humans with “much.” On one side of us was a lovely northern forest of maples, beeches, and birches, a depth of green that reached as far as the eye could see. On the other side was a field that had once been cleared for farming, but had been abandoned years ago. Scrub trees and shrubs dotted the acreage and it wouldn’t be long before there was little difference between the two sides of the road.
Less than a hundred yards south of where we sat, the field came to an end and the trees closed in, filling both sides of the road. I studied the narrowing roadway and wondered how far it went before it petered out to nothing. The map function on my phone showed it going another half a mile, but my phone’s map had led me astray before.
“We should talk to those people,” Kate said. At my puzzled look, she pointed across the field to an old farmhouse.
I shook my head. “No. It’s—”
She cut me off. “Why not? Oh, wait. I know. It’s because all my ideas are stupid, right? Sure, you called them melodramatic, but I’m pretty sure that’s another word for stupid,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Mrr!” Eddie said from the back seat.
Over my shoulder, I sent him a glare that was meant to convey the message of “Cut that out because I don’t need you adding to my woes right now, thank you very much,” but the effort was lost on him because he’d turned around in the carrier and all I could see was his hind end.
I turned back around and faced my niece. “What I was going to say was that I looked up the ownership of that house and it’s under foreclosure. No one lives there, and hasn’t for over a year.”
“But maybe someone is living there anyway,” she persisted. “Someone could have broken in.”
“Do you see any signs of that?” I asked.
She peered through the windshield. “Well, no, but if anyone was hiding out, it only makes sense they’d try to hide all the signs.”
I wondered when kids learned about Occam’s razor. Not that I could remember when I’d figured it out. Last week, perhaps? “You’re right,” I said. “But if someone is hiding out there, I don’t want to walk up and knock on the door. Isn’t that when things start to go bad in horror movies?”
Kate shrugged, muttering, “Mom doesn’t let me watch stuff like that.”
“Wise woman,” I said, earning me a Look from Kate.
“Why, because this way I never know what anyone is talking about?” she demanded. “What is it with grown-ups? Don’t you remember what it’s like to be a kid? Always being told what I can’t do, what I have to do, what I should be doing?” She flung her hands about. “Mom and Dad keep telling me I need to act like an adult before I get treated like one, but how will I ever learn how to act grown up until they treat me like I have half a brain in my head?”
At long last, I was clueing into the fact that Kate’s frustrated anger didn’t necessarily have anything to do with her kindly aunt Minnie. “Kate, sweetie,” I said, “don’t you see? They’re treating you this way because they actually do remember what it’s like to be young.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said flatly. “If they remembered, they’d be . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Be what? Nicer to you?” I smiled. “Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.”
“It should!” she practically yelled.
I was torn between two competing reactions. The first one was to murmur sympathetic noises, to coo auntly endearments, and to give Kate a comforting hug. The second one, which was the wrong one, was to laugh out loud. Sadly, it was also the stronger reaction and Kate saw my mouth twitch.
“You’re laughing at me.” Her eyes narrowed.
I shook my head. “No, I’m not. Laughing, yes, but at myself, not you. See, I remember having almost this exact conversation with Aunt Frances the summer I turned seventeen.”
“Not sure why that’s funny,” Kate muttered.
It probably wasn’t, not to her, so I changed tactics. “Growing up is hard. You think you’re an adult because you’re so much smarter and more capable than you were a year ago. But you’ll think the same thing next year. And the next and the next. And about the time you hit thirty, you’ll realize it never stops.”
“Thirty?” Her eyes bugged out. “Mom and Dad are going to treat me like a kid until I’m thirty?”
That hadn’t been what I meant. Then again, she wasn’t ready to hear the truth; that parents tended to permanently think of their offspring as children, no matter how old they were.
“Let’s go for a walk.” I tied my car key to my shoelace and opened the car door, though walking hadn’t been my intention when we’d driven down here. At the time, I thought we’d take the car as far down the road as the road would go, see what we could see, then turn around and head for the raspberry patch. Now, however, I thought a walk in the woods might do Kate some good. Aunt Frances and I had taken lots of walks during my youthful summers, and I was finally realizing that those hadn’t happened by accident or because my aunt was such a friend of the outdoors. “Open your window a little, will you?” I asked. “Eddie could use the—”
“Mrr!!”
“—the fresh air.”
“You’re not supposed to lock animals or small children in the car during the summer,” Kate said.
Now why did her saying that irritate me? I took a deep breath, which didn’t do as much to calm me as I’d hoped, so I took another one. “The point,” I said, “is making sure they’re not in an overheated vehicle long enough to endanger their health. If you look at where we’re parked, you’ll note that the car is completely shaded by trees, and will stay that way until”—I looked up at the sky—“after lunch. And since that’s a couple of hours from now, I can’t come up with any likely scenario putting Eddie in danger.”