Aven's Dream (5 page)

“I think I’ll be all right,” I laughed uncomfortably. “This isn’t New York City. I’m not going to get mugged. Besides, I’ve got him.”

I gestured to Darcy, and Will’s features darkened again, but only briefly. When he looked into my eyes and smiled, I completely lost my train of thought again.

“For the company, then?” he asked with disturbing charm. “I promise you, I won’t bite.”

When he flashed a persuasive smile, displaying his perfectly straight white teeth, my heart skipped a beat.

W
alking side-by-side with Will Kincaid, I wondered again what this beautiful—and he truly was beautiful in a stop-and-stare kind of way—stranger was doing wandering an empty neighborhood at night, walking me home no less. I hadn’t even thought to ask what he was doing here. I peered curiously at him as we walked. He was looking toward the woods, and the expression on his face made me nervous, like he knew something I didn’t. He turned suddenly and caught me staring. I looked down, my thoughts swimming again.

“How old are you?” I asked, stunned that the words had just popped out of my mouth.

I
was
curious, but I hadn’t meant to ask. It was just that he looked more like a college student than a high school student. Will laughed and looked away when I summoned the nerve to study him again.

“Nineteen.”

I gasped before I could stop myself. For some reason nineteen felt significantly older, even though I would be eighteen before the end of the school year.

“Shouldn’t you be in college?” I asked.

“I spent a year abroad,” he said easily.

“Oh,” I nodded, noting a faint accent that I didn’t recognize.

“How old are
you
?” he asked, smiling again.

I bit down on my lip, feeling regrettably
young
.

“Seventeen,” I said, looking up at him defensively.

Will’s expression turned brooding. Realizing that my questions were going to be met with questions, I decided to keep my mouth shut. A minute passed by in silence.

“Have you lived here long?” he asked conversationally.

“I just moved …”

“From where?”

He smiled when I looked at him, causing my heart to beat faster.

“Southern California. Irvine.”

“Do you miss it?” he asked curiously.

I paused.
Do I miss my old home
? I wondered. I had been trying to avoid thinking about it. How could I explain that I missed that part of my life, but I also
wanted
to leave it behind? Finally I sighed.

“I miss the beach. I practically grew up in the water …”
and covered in a thick layer of sunscreen
, I didn’t add.

“Laguna Beach?”

I nodded.

“Festival of the Arts is very impressive,” he said casually.

I stared, dumbfounded. That definitely wasn’t the first thing I expected someone in high school to recognize Laguna for.

“I loved Pageant of the Masters when I was a kid,” I murmured.

The truth was my parents had taken me to see it from the hill behind the amphitheater as paintings and statues were brought to life with live models, some of them painted in bronze or gold. I glanced at Will. He could very well have served as one of the statues—perfect and bronzed.

“Why did you move?” he asked.

“My dad’s a professor. He was offered a tenured position in Oregon, so … we moved.”

It was the easiest—the least painful—answer.

“And the rest of your family?”

I looked down.

“It’s just me and my dad.”

“Divorce?” Will asked, his tone again curious.

I shook my head and stayed quiet.

“Oh.”

His voice was soft, and when I looked up at him, Will’s expression was the same as it had been when I first saw him in class—melancholy. Without warning, Darcy strained at the leash, causing me to stumble as he lurched toward the woods. I felt goose bumps break out on my arms and caught Will scanning the woods. Without a word, we both began walking faster, and sooner than I expected, we were in front of my house. I paused. What would my dad think if I came back home after dark with a boy? I frowned.
Boy
. What a silly description of the person standing in front of me.

“Thanks for walking me home,” I said, trying to think of something more interesting to say, but nothing came. “I guess I’ll see you in class.”

He nodded.

“Until we meet again.”

It suddenly felt like I was in an old movie and had forgotten my lines. Suddenly Will’s manner of speech seemed too formal, too perfect, but it sort of matched everything else about him. Even his clothing—just a black shirt and faded jeans—seemed formal on him. I fumbled as he looked down at me in the same unnerving way, and before I could say anything else, he turned and was disappearing down the block. I stood, dazed, for a few more moments before rushing up the steps.

My dad was in the kitchen, his expression unworried. He probably hadn’t even noticed it had gotten dark. He was listening to one of my favorite Radiohead albums while he chopped garlic.
How to Disappear Completely
was playing. Strange, I thought, since this was the first time it felt like anyone other than Sean had noticed me—in a good way—since we had moved to this place.

“Enough garlic?” my dad asked, fanning his hand over the accumulating pile.

“Plenty!”

I turned and opened the door to the back yard. The air had cooled considerably, but I had barely noticed during the walk back to the house with Will. An owl hooted from somewhere deep in the woods. Remembering the rabbit I had seen at the edge of the park, I irrationally hoped that he wasn’t on the menu. But then the owl had to eat, too.

Picking over the last of the herb garden left behind by our house’s former residents, I watched through the kitchen window as my dad chopped tomatoes for the sauce. When I stepped inside again, the smell of garlic hit me. I could hear the sizzle of oil from the saucepot on the stove, and I breathed in. Garlic made almost anything taste better—at least in my opinion. Still, my dad swore his students would drop his classes if he ate my sauce and then went to school the next day. That was why we always had it on Fridays. To give him the weekend to recover, he teased. I looked up from the counter and noticed he was watching me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked suspiciously.

“Good walk?”

“Yeah, sure. Why?”

“You look … happy.”

I hadn’t realized that I had looked
not
happy before, but then, my face rarely hid what I was feeling—even when I tried. I was like my mom that way.

“I’m just glad it’s Friday,” I said brightly, keeping my eyes down.

I turned away from him and opened the cans he had left on the counter before adding the tomato sauce to the simmering garlic and olive oil. Picking up the cutting board with the tomatoes, I nudged them into the pot with a knife before rinsing and chopping the herbs. My dad retreated into the living room with his book, and I added a healthy dose of pepper and other spices to the sauce before leaving it to simmer.

Pulling out ingredients for a salad, I began rinsing vegetables. My dad always walked over to Mrs. Hendrix’s house before dinner, and every time she said he was making too much of a fuss on her account, but I knew she secretly liked it—being picked up for a date.

As I finished up dinner, I thought over what Sean had said earlier about the party and Jason Everett. According to the girls in my English class, Jason was supposed to be every girl’s ideal, and I had to admit that he was good looking, except he had this look all the time, like he was judging people less worthy than he was. Plus, he was loud and seemed to enjoy the worship he got.
Conceited
—that was the word that came to mind when I thought of him. Overall, his presence had never made me anything more than uncomfortable. The truth was that up until Will Kincaid’s arrival in class I hadn’t really noticed any of the guys in school. Back home hadn’t been any different.

Setting the water on the stove to boil, I called into the living room for my dad to go pick up Mrs. Hendrix. A loud crash made me jump, and I felt adrenaline shoot through my bloodstream. The back door had swung open and slammed into the wall. The lock tended to stick, and the door never shut properly. It was another one of our new house’s quirks—and part of the reason I found myself lying awake at night listening to every creak and shudder, certain I was going to be victim of a small-town horror movie plot.

Darcy jumped up, barking madly and ran into the yard to investigate, and I closed the door behind him. He would scratch or whine at the door when he was done poking around. A few minutes later, my dad appeared with Mrs. Hendrix, and we sat down around the kitchen table. Taking a bite of the pasta, Mrs. Hendrix declared dinner a smashing success. But she said that every time she came over. As soon as everyone finished, I did the dishes while my dad went to light the fireplace in the living room.

By the time I joined them, Mrs. Hendrix had already brought out her tin of toffees. I smiled and took one. Even though they always stuck to my teeth, I never passed them up. I leaned back and listened sleepily while they talked. I was staring into the fire mulling over my strange run-in with Will Kincaid when Mrs. Hendrix mentioned something about the woods. I leaned forward.

“It’s awful, Aaron. The newspaper said it might have been a pack of wild dogs on the loose, but I’m afraid for my poor Angel.”

Mrs. Hendrix’s voice caught in her throat as she looked over at Angel, who was curled up in my dad’s chair. I watched uneasily as my neighbor fidgeted, her eyes clouding over. She looked ahead unseeingly, preoccupied by some distant memory.

“I was just a young girl then, and town was much different. Before the fire, folks never locked their doors. Then they began finding the animals … and that poor young man from the Thompson house.” She stopped and shook her head as though to erase the memory of something distasteful. “I suppose it’s silly to bring up old stories. It was a long time ago. And those of us who were alive back then are too old to go digging up the past.”

I shot a look at my dad as Mrs. Hendrix kneaded the blanket he had set on her … like she was afraid to let go of it.

“Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m ready for some tea and then bed,” my dad said with an exaggerated yawn.

He nodded to me, and I took his cue and went into the kitchen to put on the kettle and find the chamomile tea. I listened as he tried to reassure Mrs. Hendrix, telling her that he was sure it was nothing to worry about. But she continued to sound rattled about whatever it was she had read in the paper that had brought up some obviously unsettling memories from her childhood. I tried to imagine Mrs. Hendrix as a young girl, but I couldn’t quite do it. I made a mental note to find a copy of the paper. The kettle whistled, and I had just poured three mugs of steaming water when I heard a mournful howl from the back yard.

I groaned and hurried to the door. I had forgotten Darcy. Again. Opening the door, I noticed a small scuff mark where the doorknob had banged into the wall several times in the past few weeks. My dad kept saying it was on his list of to-do items to get the lock fixed, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. After all, he joked, it wasn’t like Winters had a skyrocketing crime rate.

Across the yard, Darcy sat staring up at the trees, but he came reluctantly when I called him. The night air smelled damp, and a blast of cold air made me want to run upstairs and wrap myself in my blanket. Instead, I carried the mugs of tea back to the living room. Mrs. Hendrix looked like she had recovered, but the mug shook in her hand as she took it from me.

Returning to the kitchen to get my mug, I skipped my usual milk and sugar, burning my tongue as I sipped the hot tea. Distracted, I listened while my dad and Mrs. Hendrix talked about gardening. Then, as soon as I finished my tea, I rushed into the kitchen and deposited my mug in the sink before returning to the living room and giving Mrs. Hendrix a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Her finely wrinkled skin had the texture of cloth that had been handled many times over several decades, and I wondered, as I looked into her watery blue eyes, what it was like to be that old—to look back across an entire lifetime. Pecking my dad’s cheek, I turned toward the stairs with Darcy right behind me.

The newspaper lay on the entryway table as I passed. I tucked it under my arm as my dad helped Mrs. Hendrix with her coat. In my room, I locked the door behind me, switched on my desk lamp, and opened the paper, scrutinizing the headlines.

Spike in Wildlife Deaths Baffles Authorities

A spate of unexplained wildlife deaths—ranging from several deer to the rarely seen but impressive predator, the mountain lion—has puzzled local wildlife experts and law enforcement.

The deaths came to a head last week when a dairy farmer found the body of the large cat (Felis concolor) at the edge of his property. Wildlife experts were called to perform an examination and cited tissue damage as their preliminary finding.

“I can’t say I’m disappointed the cat never made it to my herd, but still I bear no ill will toward these creatures,” said Bill Davis, owner of the property. “They help keep nature’s balance. Honestly, I can’t think of anything that could have done what happened to that cat. I won’t get the image from my head for a long time to come.”

Before the creature was found, local officials at the Department of Game and Wildlife had recorded a spike in the percentage of reported deaths of large game—mostly deer—in the region. Hikers and hunters stumbled on most of the remains. The department has performed several necropsies, but the results have remained inconclusive, according to Alfred Montague, head of the regional office.