It lands with athudthat shudders through my body. “Beck!”
She slams the rock again.
The window snakes into a spiderweb of cracks.
She slams the rock one more time.
The window shatters.
And Beck Horne just reaches in and removes the skewer. As my jaw hangs open, she throws the skewer over to me like it’s nothing. She unlocks the car.
“Beck!” I say. “That’s her only method of travel!”
“If she’s not a murderer, I’ll drop her my info.”
“She’s going to think—!”
“She’s not going to think anything,” Beck says. “If we look inside and run.”
There’s no way Ivy or Natalie didn’t hear that.
We have maybe a minute at most.
“I’ll check the front, you check the back,” I say.
I barely register the actual interior of the van as Beck climbs back there. It’s got wood paneled walls, deep blue linens, shelves full of plants and mementos, and a table for a workspace. Fairy lights and Tibetan prayer flags hang from one side of the van to the other. But I focus on the front, leaning in to check under the seat, the mid-console. Glass brushes against my flesh through my shirt, stinging but ignorable. All I have to be aware of is wetness. I can’t leave blood at a crime scene.
Nothing under the seat. Only masks, ChapStick, cords, and individual bags of granola bars in the mid-console.
I go around to the other side.
Nothing under the passenger’s side. The glove box full of registration, a manual, paper maps, medical records. A bag of weed in a ziplock. The most compact copy ofCatcher in the RyeI’ve ever seen.
Nothing.
“It’s all normal shit back here,” Beck says.
We need to get out of here.
“What the fuck?!” someone calls from outside.
Ivy’s voice.
My vision goes blurry as the panic rolls through me. I can barely feel my fingertips as I sift through the detritus. So much sensation runs through me that it’s like I’ve been caught in the mud when I need to run.
We have only seconds.
“Em, we gotta go,” Beck says.
But something overtakes me, causing the flustering to fade. An intuition I’ve never felt before.
I open the sunglasses compartment.
A phone drops out.
A phone wrapped in a Lisa Frank case with a SHOP USED sticker on it.
My heart drops to my shoes.
