“Is he missing?”
Emory shook his head and scanned the rearview mirror where the black caravan carried on like a funeral march.
Missing implied they wanted Ivan back because hearts ached for those who’d never come home. Ivan would know. How manygirls had been plastered up on posters because of him? “MISSING,” read bolded letters from desperate families, and Ivan the Butcher more than earned his epithet. He claimed those girls’ lives then took their stories to his grave.
“No. He’s dead.”
Amelia’s lips pursed and eyes darted across the dashboard as if chasing a thought.
“I’m sorry. Mirabelle made it sound like he was still alive. I must’ve misunderstood.”
“You didn’t. Mirabelle could stand over his rotting corpse and still not believe he’s dead.”
“What was his name?” Amelia asked, too intrigued by the topic for Emory’s liking.
“Ivan,” he reluctantly replied.
Like his dad, Emory believed to name evil was to conjure it. Ivan’s name was a malediction, and his brand of evil particularly heinous. Amelia didn’t know that, though her outsized reaction of worried eyes and knitted brows might have suggested otherwise.
“You know him or something?” Emory chuckled to lighten the mood.
She shook her head. “No.”
Liars overcompensated. They said too much, reacted too big. Amelia did neither but still sheltered something worth protecting. If he pushed, she’d deny, so Emory filed that away for a revisit once he paved clearer in-roads.
“Enough about him,” he said. “Tell me about you.”
“What about me?”
“Whatever you want to tell.”
“You mean the things you don’t already know from keeping tabs?”
Emory sucked in a sharp breath. Another battle of wills, was it? He readied the calvary for all-out war, but Amelia’s words were empty of the accusation that could’ve been there.
“It’s a joke,” she assured with a pretty smile. “A bad one, but maybe you shouldn’t tell people that you keep tabs on them.”
“Sounds like you’re telling me how to do my job.”
“Sounds like someone needed to.”
Emory laughed, oddly enchanted as the girl doled out jabs sweetened with humor.
“Fair enough,” he said. “So, what’s Amelia Havick’s story?”
She shrugged and eyed him with the last vestiges of apprehension.
“There’s not much to say. No adventures unless you count college in Eugene. That’s the farthest I’ve been from home.”
“You regret not going farther?”
“Not really. That place was good to me. I used to go to the library, to this secluded spot by the reference books no one reads. I’d study, write, daydream. It overlooked the woods, and the fog rolled in whenever it rained. It felt safe, peaceful. I think of it sometimes when I can’t sleep.”
Emory soaked up the sound of her voice—timid in some ways, bold in others; calm and captivating. Mirabelle claimed he and Amelia were alike, and if he’d just come in easier, he’d see it too.
He sweetened on her with a stomach flip and an exchanged glance where she regarded him more gently too.
“I like that,” Emory said. “I grew up in Northern California. I miss the coast, the redwoods.” He gestured to the arid landscape. “This isn’t my scene.”
