“Um, th-thank you,” Wren stammered.
Josie’s face was on fire. “I’m not saying that to try to get you to talk to me. I’m not saying it for any reason other than you need to know, okay?”
Wren nodded.
Turning her head so she could look her directly in the eye, Josie said, “I’m not going anywhere. I won’t leave you. I won’t kick you out. Doesn’t matter what happens. Doesn’t matter if you screw up. I’m here. Not because some legal document says I have to be. I’m here foryou. Because this is where I want to be.”
Tears glistened in Wren’s eyes. Her lips parted. A breath whooshed out. When she inhaled, her shoulders drew up toward her ears another inch. Josie could tell that she was bracing herself. Shoring herself up. In her lap, her fingers tightened around her sketchbook.
“I can’t,” she croaked. “Can’t talk about the kids at my old school but thank you for saying all those things.”
Josie stared at Wren, watching all the signals her body was giving off. Something in her gut tingled.
Can’t. Not won’t. Can’t talk about them. Not “I don’t want to talk about them.”
“Wren,” Josie said carefully. “Did something happen at your old school?”
“No, no. Of course not.”
“Whatever it is, you’re safe with me. You can tell me.”
The moment stretched on until the din of car horns and the swell of voices outside the vehicle became louder. As Josie waited for Wren to speak, her curiosity grew. Everything inside her became still, almost as if her body’s automatic processes had stopped, their resuscitation hanging on this moment. She had never wanted to know anything more than whatever Wren couldn’t talk about and she realized that if the girl didn’t confide in her, there was absolutely nothing she could do. She couldn’t take her to the stationhouse and interrogate her. She couldn’t obtain statements from every person Wren had known at her old school in an effort to piece together what had happened, and then use it to get Wren to confess her secret. She couldn’t offer Wren some deal in exchange for her sharing her story.
With dawning horror, Josie realized that if Wren decided never to tell her what was behind her reluctance, she could do just that.
Son of a bitch.
Parenting was like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane for the first time thinking that every skydiving video you ever saw in your life was enough to keep you from hitting the ground at terminal velocity, then realizing halfway down that deploying a parachute wasn’t that easy after all.
Wren’s lips parted. Josie leaned toward her, keenly aware of her own heartbeat fluttering in her chest.
Then Wren blinked and pointed at the road ahead of them. “Look! It’s a hot air balloon!”
Josie’s head jerked toward the windshield. Wren gasped in delight before she exited the car, leaving her sketchbook on her seat. Josie watched as a hot air balloon, checkered with bright colors and easily as large as the two-story homes around them, slowly descended from the sky. It moved at the speed of an elevator, gliding smoothly through the air. When its basket plunked gently onto the roof of a luxury SUV a few cars ahead of them, Josie let her head fall back against the seat.
The moment with Wren was gone. She was going to be extremely late for work and since she apparently owed some huge karmic debt, Turner was going to needle her about it for hours. Maybe even days.
“Good times,” she muttered to herself. “Good times.”
THREE
Josie stabbed at the icon that controlled the air conditioning in her SUV until it was on its highest setting. Air roared through the vents, but it didn’t feel as cool as it had when she had been driving Wren home earlier. Or maybe the suffocating July heat was just that bad. She and Turner had only spent a few minutes outside—long enough to ask a festival worker for directions—and sweat was already rolling down her back, pooling uncomfortably at the base of her spine. She glanced over at the passenger’s seat. The only indication that the heat was getting to Turner was the fact that he’d taken his suit jacket off, leaving him in a white, long-sleeved dress shirt and blue tie. He wore suits every day, like he was headed to court to give testimony. Didn’t matter what the weather conditions were or if they had to tromp through a mile of horseshit. She’d never seen him in anything else.
“Did that kid just say ‘glamping?’” Turner asked. “What the hell is glamping?”
Josie drove along a service road on the fringe of the festival grounds, following waist-high orange barriers that separated the road from a parking lot jam-packed with vehicles.
“It’s glamorous camping,” she muttered. “Like camping, only…fancy. I think.”
Turner said, “I don’t even know what that means.”
By the time Josie had arrived at the stationhouse, a call had already come in from one of their patrol units requesting detectives at the festival camping area. Two females. Unresponsive.
“Trinity and her fiancé, Drake, spent a weekend glamping in Vermont last year. They loved it.”
“Huh,” was all he said. “I didn’t peg your sister for a camping enthusiast.”
Beyond the parking lot, Josie spied a grassy area filled with RVs. “She’s not. Thus, the glamping. It was a tent but they had electricity and a private bathroom.”
