“So do you,” he said, his wispy voice somehow adding an unreadable weight to his words. “What are you doing all the way out here in Virgo Bay anyway?”
“Our dad—”
“Your father left,” said Oliver. “Perhaps you ought to hurry up and do the same.”
“I don’t understand.” Exasperation forced its way from Nora’s throat. “Why won’t you help us?”
Something in those dark eyes shifted. The apathy Nora had seen in them seemed to ebb into an out-of-place softness that unnerved her even more. Then he picked up his book with a shake of his head, burying his eyes in its pages. “You’re mistaken. There’s no one here who would wish to do you harm. The sooner you stop thinking as much, the better.”
“I’m pretty sure I—”
“You’re wrong,” Oliver said, with the kind of finality that made Nora wonder for a very brief moment if she was. “And I can’t help you.”
“But—”
“I can’t help you.”
“Can’t, or won’t?” Nora said, but the words hung unanswered in the air, joined only by the crackling fire.
At this point Nora’s seed of annoyance had fully bloomed. He must have at the very least had some thoughts on the subject, some hints or information or suspicions about the people he knew best. And yet, he was content to sit there dismissing Nora’s fears, a feeling she knew all too well. But this time those fears had something very real to back them up, and yet she was still being patted on the head and told to calm down.
Not only was her investigation being actively stymied by this crotchety old guy, but she couldn’t help but be a little offended by his utter lack of interest in his long-lost great-grandchildren. This could have been a touching introduction if nothing else, butinstead he’d chosen to be an unapologetic ass. Just for that, Nora decided he was just as likely to be a murderer as the rest of this dysfunctional town, or at least that he made for a criminally bad host. She stomped up to her feet.
“Fine. We’re leaving. Sorry to take up some of your endless time, you’re clearly busy. Hope we get to have a proper family reunion one of these days, but if not, it’s probably because we’re dead and you could have prevented it.” With that she marched indignantly out the door.
Back in the woods, the sky was doing something. There may have been rain, though it was just as likely sunny. Nora was too frustrated to notice. She had been so sure, so convinced that that sinister house in the woods held the answers to her brother’s case, but instead all it held was a crabby old man with poor housekeeping skills and a complete unwillingness to help.
“So…wow,” Charlie said as they shuffled across the muddy path, pulling Nora from her thoughts.
“What?”
“You really hated that guy, huh?”
“No,” said Nora. “Well, yes. Maybe. It doesn’t matter. We’re no closer to figuring out who’s trying to kill you, are we? That was a waste of time, and I don’t know how much of that we have.”
“Still,” said Charlie. “It was pretty badass.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, a bit weird and intense too, don’t get me wrong, but you didn’t take his cranky bullshit, so that was cool. And did you see his eyes?”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you dropped the bomb,” said Charlie. “You know, ‘who here could be a killer’ or whatever. His eyes did this weirdthing where they went all wide for a second and flicked off to the side. He definitely knows something.”
Nora stopped walking for a moment. In truth she hadn’t noticed. She had been too fired up, her fuel a steadily burning frustration, to catch the nuances of her great-grandfather’s facial expressions. Which wasn’t like her. But Charlie had caught them. Which wasn’t like him. She would have plenty of time to overanalyze that later. But if Charlie was right in what he saw and his interpretation of it, then there was something Oliver knew that Nora needed to know too. She could have kicked herself if her hamstrings were more flexible and she wasn’t worried about slipping in the mud. She had spent so much effort imagining the man in the hidden house was up to something almost otherworldly in her head. When she’d finally managed to work up the nerve to face him, she had quickly written Oliver off as a cranky old guy who had grown so derisive towards the world that he’d decided to shun it as soon as he could. To her he was now capable of nothing more than biting comments. But if he was hiding something, then that put him in the same category as everyone else in town: suspicious as fuck. She wasn’t done with Oliver, Nora decided. She would just have to be smarter about it next time.
She was still half lost in the M. C. Escher drawing of her mind when the forest around her changed. It was a subtle shift at first, the air holding an almost-hollow quality, a small flock of birds fleeing a patch of the woods just visible from the path. Nothing that should have raised alarm, and nothing that likely would have raised alarm to anyone who wasn’t already in a constant state of alarm. Then came the sound that a part of Nora had somehow known was coming. The blast tore out of the same patch of woods the birds had flown from. Nora’s mind’s eyeflooded with visions of a bloody Charlie crumpled beside her. It all happened so quickly, she barely knew she was moving. Like her race to the cliff’s edge, Nora was mostly a fast-moving body at this point, her thoughts somewhere a few seconds behind. They caught up just as she and Charlie hit the ground in a painful heap of sharp elbows and knees. Above them, the bark of a tree exploded, shards of sawdust raining down.
“Gun?” Charlie asked as soon as he’d regained the capacity to speak.
“Gun,” Nora confirmed. Based on the destruction to the tree above them, very likely a hunting rifle built to take down prey. Which was exactly what the twins were now. But Nora didn’t say any of that. Instead she dragged herself across the mud and fallen leaves on her elbows, leading them in an army crawl away from the shooter. Though, of course, that was of little use. Bullets, it turned out, were harder to avoid than falling tree limbs. And Nora hated the fact that she had the personal experience to make that comparison. The torrent of shots kept coming, each closer than the last, until one fired from right beside the twins.
Without thinking, Nora dove to cover her brother with her body and buried her head in her hands, waiting for the final bullet to strike, but the shot never came. She removed her ineffective hand shield and looked up to find Patty standing over them, rifle in hand, its smoking barrel pointed skyward.
“You kids okay?” She lowered a hand, offering it to Nora, who regarded it with the same level of disgust she’d view a rotting trout.
“The fuck?” was all Nora could manage.
