Wren paused as he looked down at the crayon-blue waters. “Was it good fishing?”
In anyone else, it would be sarcasm. Ledger wasn’t too sure about Wren. He was willing to put a lot of things in his mouth. He waited for his brain to bite down on the implication, but… not today. That was fair enough.
“You’ve never been out here?” he asked.
Wren raised an eyebrow at him and braced his elbows on the wall of the truck bed. “I’m not really a fish-and-game guy,” he said. “Oddly enough.”
“No fish,” Ledger said. “People have tried to stock it, but the fish just die.”
“Something down there?” Wren asked as he glanced at the lake.
“Industrial chemicals,” Ledger said. “It used to be an old quarry. You probably shouldn’t let children swim in it, either.”
He pulled his feet up under him and stood up so he could scan the shoreline. It took him a second, but…
“There,” he said, pointing to the weathered little building—hut almost—with the tar paper roof and the stumpy, half-rotted dock that stuck out partially into the lake. “That’s Bell’s cabin.”
“I’m surprised it’s still there,” Wren said. “It can’t be good for tourism. People want summer campsites, not kill cabins.”
“Nobody knew,” Ledger said. “Not about the cabin. It belonged to Mom’s family. I guess they still don’t. I doubt anyone has been there since Bell was arrested.”
He felt thatcatchagain, as if he’d snagged his thoughts on a broken nail or something. It pulled him up short for a moment as he tried to work out what it was. Now that he was paying attention, however, it was gone.
“When did Bell start?” Wren asked suddenly.
“Start what?”
“You know.” Wren scraped his thumb over his throat, from one ear to the other. He made a wet slitting noise as he did it.
Ledger thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “It had to be after he turned eight,” he said. That was the age that souls came on the market. It was wrong by modern sensibilities, but things that liked children’s souls weren’t modern or moral. “Definitely by twenty-five. That’s the earliest victims they could tie to him. Educated guess? About seventeen. He was in a car accident, his girlfriend died, and he got a shit-ton of money in the insurance settlement. Why?”
Wren started to answer. Then he shrugged whatever he’d been thinking off as he scrambled down from the truck.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s nothing to do with Earl, so it can wait.”
It probably could.
But thatcatchin Ledger’s brain still itched at him. There was something he couldn’t put his finger on. Maybe he could lure it out if he lulled it into a false sense of security by talking about something else.
“Might as well ask now,” Ledger said. “You won’t get a second chance. After this is over, I’m out of here, and I won’t be back.”
“You still owe me a date.”
“Come to Ithaca. The food’s better.”
“Not an option.”
Ledger felt his heart sink. The wave of disappointment was out of proportion to the relationship—what there was of it—they had. He grabbed another beer from the six-pack to give him something to do while he absorbed the sudden regret that had hit him.
It was still too early, but at least he wasn’t driving. Wren had been right about that.
“Ask,” he said as he crouched back down. “I’ll even answer.”
Wren scratched his neck.“Fifty years of health.”
“What?”
“That’s what your dad said. Fifty years of health for a teenager’s heart.”
