She held her leg up almost over her head for him to get a better view. What he saw was a bunch of strings of something tied around her ankle. “Looks amateur to me. Don’t give up the drawing anytime soon.”
“Jerk,” she said, her foot dropping and giving him a push away from her. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Take your phone and stay close,” he said. “Be back in thirty minutes tops. If I have to come get you, you’re getting your butt beat.”
“You wish,” Rene said, dancing out of the way but putting her fists up as if she wanted to box with him. He squinted at her and took a few steps back. She slid her phone into her pocket, flicked the light switch off, up again and then off. Her way of clapping her hands for him to move out of the room. Then she put her athletic slides on her feet and bounded down the stairs ahead of him, into the kitchen, then out the back door.
He grabbed his sub from the fridge and headed to the docks where the fishing poles from earlier still leaned. One hook still held a worm shriveled and motionless. He didn’t know if that mattered, nor did he care enough.
It was about killing time at this place.
He tossed the line in, set it down, then pulled the white paper away from his sub.
Before he was done with the last bite, Rene texted she was on her way back and returning to her room to draw.
“Where is your sister?”
He turned from where he was reeling the line back in from the water to see his parents standing before the dock he was sitting on with his feet dangling.
How had so much time passed?
“In her room.”
“No,” his mother said. “She’s not. I just checked.”
“She told me she was going to her room.” He picked his phone up. “Ninety minutes ago. She went for a walk, then texted she was on the way back, then to her room.”
“So you don’t know if she actually returned?” his father asked.
Fuck!
He jumped up. “No. I just thought she did.”
“Rory!” his mother yelled and turned to rush toward the house.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m sure she’s just sitting outside. Did you text her?”
It’s what he was doing right now. How the hell could he just have forgotten she should have come back? Or not even gone to check on her.
His mother was calling Rene. “She’s not answering. I don’t even hear her phone.”
Rene always had her phone on loud and annoying so that you knew when she got a text or a call. Never really a call.
“Start looking around,” his father said.
“She went for a walk,” he said. “She wasn’t even gone ten minutes before she said she was on the way back. It couldn’t have been far.”
“I can’t believe you let her leave alone,” his mother said. Her eyes were wide in a panic, her hands shaking while she gripped her phone.
“She’s been doing it for days,” he argued.
Why were they blaming this on him when they’d been allowing it?
But the pounding of his heart, the sweat slicking his palms, the prickling at the back of his neck, and the urge to run harder than he ever had charging down a football field for the winning touchdown, told him something was very wrong.
The three of them were in the front of their rented cabin standing in the road and yelling his sister’s name.
“I’m going to walk down this way,” his mother said.
