“What’s wrong with ten o’clock?”
“It screams,I’m a tired middle-aged mom who needs to be in bed at a reasonable hour. Real criminals schedule secret meetings in the middle of the night.”
“And you know this how?”
“Give me that,” she said, snatching the phone and deleting the last part of my text.Tonight. 1am.
“Technically, that’s tomorrow,” I pointed out.
Vero rolled her eyes at me, then added:Turn your phones off and come alone. If I even smell a cop, we’re done.
Vero and I left Cam and Mrs. Haggerty in front of the TV with firm instructions to stay inside the house and keep the doors locked. I gave Cam twenty dollars in cash and asked him to keep an eye on the house until we got back.
We drove Vero’s Charger to the meeting. It was more reliable than my minivan, faster if we needed to make a quick getaway, and Riley and Max weren’t likely to recognize it since they hadn’t seen it before.
The farm where police had found Ike Grindley’s burned car was nearly an hour from South Riding—far enough from both Loudoun and Fairfax’s jurisdictions to seem removed from the Dupree case and remote enough that we wouldn’t have to worry about being spotted. Vero avoided the highways, sticking to the lesser-traveled county roads, until we eventually turned down a long gravel drive between two neglected farm fields.
Vero took the rutted road slowly in the dark. She turned off the headlights, navigating the bends by moonlight. It reflected off a ramshackle barn in the distance, and she parked in the shadows behind it.
She killed the engine and looked around before grabbing her backpack and getting out of the car. We closed the Charger’s doors as softly as possible, but the sound was drowned out by the rustle of wind through acres of high, brown grass. The sky above us was coal black and spattered with stars. It would have been beautiful if I hadn’t been so terrified of being caught there.
Vero turned on her phone light and scanned the overgrown field, pausing over a patch of scorched earth at the center of it. “This is definitely the place. That must be where the police found Ike’s car.”
“Should we be talking to Riley and Max in the open like this?” The rural location had seemed perfect a few hours ago, but now that we were standing in the middle of it, it felt too exposed.
Vero’s light cut a path through the weeds and we followed it to the front of the barn. It was a rustic, wooden shed-like structure. No locks, no lights. The massive door screeched on its hinges as she hauled it open and peeked inside. We both shrieked and ducked, covering our heads as a flurry of bats flew out.
The inside smelled like damp metal and moldering hay. Vero aimed her phone into the cavernous spaces, grabbing my hand when something scurried to avoid the light. A length of rotting rope hung ominously from the rafters and a disconcerting assortment of rusted tools had been left leaning against the splintered walls. Vero nodded a little too rigorously and swallowed when her light landed on a desiccated pile of fur and bones that I was pretty sure had once been a rabbit. “Yep, this is exactly how I pictured it.”
“Pictured what?”
“Our untimely demise. Maybe you were right. This was probably a bad idea.”
We backed slowly out of the barn, freezing at the sound of tires on gravel.
“Shit, they’re early,” Vero whispered. “What do we do?”
“Turn off the light!”
We scurried around the barn just as headlights fanned over the landscape. Vero dumped out the contents of her backpack, and we crouched in the weeds, scrambling to put on our wigs, ski masks, and gloves. Vero fluffed the ends of the blond nylon waves that protruded from the bottom of her mask, then she turned to me and fidgeted with my thick, dark curls. The wigs had been purchased from a novelty store in an Atlantic City casino. We looked like Cher and Farrah Fawcett preparing to rob a convenience store. I slapped her hand away. An electric engine hummed somewhere close before finally falling silent.
The headlights cut off. A car door opened, then another.
Vero and I peeked around the side of the barn. Riley’s tiny green Prius was parked at the edge of the field, its mud-spattered hubcaps glinting in the moonlight. Riley held his cell phone in the air. We ducked back behind the barn as a bright white light shot past the side of it.
“Hello?” he called out. “Is anyone here?”
“The barn is open,” Max said. “Maybe they’re inside.”
Their footsteps rustled through the grass. The barn door creaked.
“Hello?” Max’s voice echoed from the rafters as she shined her phone light through the opening. The beam sliced through the structure, then the walls, penetrating the aged wooden slats and casting daggers of light around us. “Come out where we can see you. We want to hear your story.”
Vero and I peeped through the cracks as Riley followed Max into the barn.
“We must have beat them here,” Max said.
“It was a good call, coming early. We can record the intro whilewe wait for them. I can edit it when we get back to the dorm. Turn off your light and stand over there.” Riley kept close to the door, aiming his phone light at the center of the barn, directing Max deeper inside it.
