“Sure. Just give me a minute to toss my overnight stuff in the washer.”
He sidestepped away from the doorway so she wouldn’t see the movie sticking out his pants and hurried to his room. Behind his closed door, his face warmed with a renewed flush of humiliation when he extracted the DVD from his waistband, thinking he should take it out to the garage and bury it at the bottom of a trashcan.
Instead, he went to his dresser and pulled the bottom drawer off its runners, dropping the movie into the hollow space beneath it.
Just in case he needed more fatherly advice.
CHAPTER 9
After she’d returned home from church and switched into a pair of running shorts and a sports bra, Mallory headed outside to go jogging. Mr. Fish had mentioned a series of dirt trails in the woods behind the neighborhood, and the sunny afternoon looked like a perfect time to familiarize herself with the area.
She left the yard, cut between the homes in back of her own, and found herself at the rear half of the block. A small path cut from the street into the forest. Leaving the pavement behind, she turned right and began jogging through the woods under a thick ceiling of lush tree branches.
Packed tight beneath the footfalls of countless travelers and worn flat by the abrasive touch of speeding bicycle tires, the ground along the path created a smooth tunnel-like passage beneath the trees. Forks branched from the main trail every so often, but on all sides a dense net of plant life blocked her view of anything beyond.
The close-knit greenery gave her a sense of isolation that she found perfect for clearing her thoughts, a calm she used to ponder the new developments concerning her old classmate, Derrick Nolan. Until last night, Derrick had always seemed unattainable to her, a person she could only dream about. Maybe all that was going to change?
Rounding a small knoll, her train of thought switched tracks, and she found herself wondering what Rebecca’s son, Tim, might be like. What if he proved an even better find than Derrick? It would certainly put a positive spin on the moving experience to find a cute guy waiting for a girlfriend.
Who knows? It could happen.
Lost in thought, it took her a second to notice how the dirt path had diminished to nothing more than a game trail. The forest leaned in on both sides.
Crap, I must have taken one of the forks.
She slowed down, about to turn back, when she caught sight of something beyond the trees to her left.
An old barn.
Mallory walked off the trail, pushing aside a curtain of ivy to get a better look.
Blackened by fungus and age, the enormous building sat at the far end of an overgrown field, looking dilapidated and on the verge of collapse. A towering concrete silo stood behind it, its dome top peeking over the barn’s sagging roof like an archaic observatory.
“Cool,” she whispered.
She glanced around, making certain the property was abandoned, then waded through the weeds until she stood before the ramshackle structure. She craned her head upward to take in the sight.
This close, the barn blocked out the sun, and its worn timbers hid in the shadows.
She rubbed her arms to dispel the electrifying chill that arose from her nerves at the thought of seeing a face appear in one of the building’s open windows.
To the left sat the fire-gutted shell of a two-story farmhouse, half-hidden by trees. To the right, a collection of tin henhouses dotted the weeds, all surrounded by the drooping remains of a rusty barbed wire fence.
She noticed spray-paint graffiti decorated the silo’s base with the names of those who’d visited here and felt the need to leave their mark, but none of the writing could keep her gaze from returning to the open front doors of the barn.
Mallory stepped up to the threshold and stopped. She panned her gaze from one side of the open main chamber to the next, sweeping the scene from the dusty floor to the high, hole-speckled ceiling.
She took her first tentative step forward, moving inside as if entering a forbidden tomb guarded by malevolent spirits.
Wide horse stalls took up most of the space to each side of the lower room, their wood walls dotted with insect burrows and rot. High above a wheeled rope and pulley hung from a rusty track along the central crossbeam. It appeared someone had added a new rope to the old contraption and turned it into a ride of some sort, using the wheeled runner to slide back and forth between the two open haylofts at either end of the building.
Uncertain whether the upper levels were safe or not, Mallory stuck to the ground level. She picked her way through the rubble littering the floor, occasionally kicking over a fallen wall panel to see what lay beneath it or prodding at suspicious bits of trash and mentally reconstructing how they had gotten into the barn.
The shadows deepened the farther she went, wrapping her in a cool embrace.
At the rear of the building she found a wooden storage bin in the far right corner. An open metal chute jutted from the wall directly above the bin—probably connected to the silo, she guessed—and inside the opening she discovered a host of writing scrawled across the sheet metal in permanent black marker.
Jennifer Johnson sucks dog cocks!
Go Green: Smoke weed.
HB loves JD
After making sure she wouldn’t step in anything gross, she climbed into the empty bin and stepped up to the chute for a closer look. She peered into the dark.
The rectangular passage extended upward at an incline into blackness, with the far end barely visible in the murk. The messages appeared to continue for the full length of the chute, hundreds upon hundreds of them, no doubt left by local teens over the years.
Mallory scanned the writing closest to her, sometimes having to guess at the words where one note overlapped another. She read proclamations of love, giggled at dirty jokes, and frowned at the occasional racial slur or homophobic remark. Drawings accompanied many of the notes, and they sometimes included phone numbers or web sites. She spotted peace signs and swastikas, hearts and skulls, naked cartoon people drawn with oversized boobs or gigantic penises.
She read almost two dozen messages before spotting a familiar name among the clutter: Tim Fleming.
Mallory’s eyes widened.
The last part of the name was scribbled over by the thatch of doodle-lady spreading her legs, but Mallory was sure she had the name right. The last half of the message reappeared on the other side of the drawing, and her brow furrowed when she put the two together, whispering the words aloud.
“Tim Fleming… is a dickless faggot.”
Mallory stared at the message, cringing with disgust. She read it again and recalled her meeting with Rebecca. The woman seemed nice enough, but that didn’t mean her son would be the same. Obviously he wasn’t too well liked by someone. And she had already agreed to hang out with him later in the day.
She looked up, into the chute, searching the messages a little farther inside.
And found another bearing Tim’s name.
Tim Flemwad is a pussy.
She looked to the left wall.
Tim Flemwad takes it up the ass.
To the right.
Tim Flemwad licks shit.
She counted twenty notes with Tim’s name, but the ink was faded and scratched, written over in some parts. The freshest-looking message lay just out of reach, but what little she could see of it told her that it promised to be the juiciest bit of info yet.