Death Thieves (2 page)

Nathan moved quickly to grab me and hold me. I allowed myself to all but collapse against him—allowed him to be the force holding me on my feet.

“It’s okay. I got you.” He smoothed his hands over my hair. “Don’t be pulling stunts like that though, right? It’d mess me up bad if something happened to you.”

“I don’t know what happened.” And I didn’t. It couldn’t have been a prank with Nathan acting so protective. Could someone really be lurking in the high cave? But no. Too impossible. I saw the face as we pulled in. No one ever came out. But we didn’t pass anyone on our way to the throat, and hiding places within the cave didn’t exist. The sheer walls made it impossible.

“I don’t know what happened,” I repeated. Telling him about the face again would sound lame. He’d think I was crazy, and that would be without telling him that I felt like someone had been following me for over a week and that sleeping at night had been close to unbearable due to the irrational fear that someone watched me. I shook my head. “I’m fine. Just tired probably.”

“Then let’s get going!” Shawn, Nathan’s best friend, cried out.

They all pulled out various cans from their backpacks and duffels. “Wild world reclamation project! Begin!” Tony shouted. They were smart enough to bring face masks so the propellant from the paint cans wouldn’t make anyone sick.

Over the many decades people had been going down into the cave, people had also been leaving their mark. Graffiti littered most of the stalactite and stalagmite formations. Nathan and his art class friends had bought a bunch of various-colored spray-paint cans and decided to paint the cave back to its natural beauty. I couldn’t miss the craziest art project I’d ever heard of. Which was how I found myself shimmying down the latticework of Mother Theresa’s house.

Nathan threw a can to me, my still-shaking hands making a clumsy catch. Then he got down to business. I spent more time watching Nathan than painting. He understood how to mix the browns and whites into something earthy and natural. I loved watching him work.

He was the reason Mother Theresa had grounded me for three months. She said it would protect my virtue and keep me from becoming a crackhead like my mother. She made lots of little jibes at me like that. Everything she did, she did to keep me virtuous and to keep me from creating little crack babies like my momma did. She even used the word
momma
, as if Winter or I would ever call our mother momma.

So when Nathan brought me home late one night, accompanied by the police for getting kicked off the roof of a family-operated motel in Parkland, she went into tirades on soul saving. She wouldn’t hear my explanation that we hadn’t been doing anything
bad
—no crack baby making or crack consuming. We were just throwing ice cubes off the roof.

Nathan emptied his first can and threw it into his duffel. He tossed me a wink and went back to work. So cute. I tried to focus on the flutter he caused in my stomach rather than the flutter caused by thinking about who might be at the top of the throat.
Just my imagination.
I repeated that phrase often while pretending to smile and enjoy myself. And when everyone had finished with the first room and moved on down the tunnel into the second room, I stood there alone for the briefest of minutes while I finished painting out the words “true love always” from the sidewall.

The tingling in my gut made me stiffen and suck in a stuttering breath. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck vibrated with the sense of someone’s eyes on me, I didn’t look back toward the tunnel leading to the throat, fearing what might exist there. I fled to the second room, rushing to the combined light of the others, hurrying away from the absolute knowledge that if I turned, that pale, passive face would be the only thing to see.

***

“Someone’s watching me.” I didn’t have to wait long for Winter to wake up. It was as though she sensed my need for her and so pulled herself from deep slumber. A perk of being twins. We couldn’t read each other’s thoughts, but emotions were so much more than thoughts. I’d have felt guilty about waking her up, but her alarm would have gone off in another eighteen minutes anyway.

She blinked several times before focusing on me. “Aunt Theresa was in her room all night. She didn’t follow you.”

“I don’t mean her. A guy. Our age. He’s following me. He looks like a ghost.”

“You don’t believe in ghosts.” She stretched and pushed back her covers.

“I don’t.” And I didn’t, not like other people perceived them, anyway. I believed the dead had better things to do than hang around living people rattling chains and wearing sheets. “But it wasn’t like poltergeist-ghost. It was like creepy-ax-murderer-stalker ghost.”

Winter went to the window to look out past our curtains. I didn’t dare follow, fearing if I looked, he’d be there—his eyes wide and his face the ashen gray of the undead. “No one’s outside.” She turned to me with her arms folded over the red “Drug-Free” T-shirt she always wore to bed. Sometimes I wondered if by wearing that shirt, she was labeling herself so everyone would know she had nothing in common with our mother. “Maybe he’s the parole ghost, haunting you for breaking out last night.”

“You’re so not funny. I had to go last night. It was a good cause. We’re reclaiming the wild.” I willed her to come away from the window—which she did, as though pulled by my thoughts.

“You’re off ground in another two weeks. You couldn’t reclaim the wild then?”

“The art club had it already planned. They weren’t going to change their plans just because Theresa’s a Nazi.”

“Theresa isn’t a Nazi.”

I narrowed my eyes at her and jabbed a finger her direction. “You’re going Stockholm on me, aren’t you?”

“No.” Her turn to be defensive. “Stockholm syndrome is for people being held hostage, not for people whose relatives are providing food and shelter for them.”

“You
are
going Stockholm.” I couldn’t believe she’d gone over to the dark side, defending Mother Theresa. She’d accused me of having the Stockholm syndrome once, back when we were ten and living with the McCoys. She’d heard the phrase mentioned by a teacher at school and applied it to our situation with the couple who acted nice enough when other people were around, and not so nice when it was us alone with them. She felt like I saw too much from their point of view and had forgotten that they often failed to feed us. She’d begged me to get us out of there.

For whatever reason, the state never left us with nice people for very long and forgot about us when we were with people who were at best neglectful, at worst . . . far worse.

“I am not. It’s us and just us. Wonder twins forever.” She put her fist to mine and smiled. “Wonder twin powers . . .”

“Activate.” I finished the phrase and dropped my hand.

“Anyway,” she said, turning to the closet to rummage for clothes. “We’re not in a hostage situation. You’d save us from that if we were—like last time.”

I joined her at the closet, looking for something to change into so the signs of mud and errant spray paint could be hidden away until they could be washed without Theresa noticing. “Yep. I’ll save us. And you’ll save everyone else.” It always worked that way. I’d get us out of a home where we were either being starved or beaten or treated like slaves or worse.

After we were out of danger, Winter spoke loudly of our mistreatment. She complained to anyone who would listen, until the state would be left with no other choice but to investigate the foster home. That way she knew she protected whatever child might have come after us, protected them from what is worse. For us, it seldom actually came to the worse part—the real blessing of being twins. We recognized the signs and banded together to keep worse at arm’s length until the case worker, Alice, would come in her Civic with the missing arm rest and rusted passenger door to pick us up.

There were times when I went to great lengths to get Alice’s attention. Sometimes it meant breaking the law so the police would get involved. That always got her attention, but I had to stop doing that because Alice threatened to split Winter and me up. Keeping family units together was hard enough without me making it so no one wanted us. The one thing we had going for us was being twins. The state hated to separate twins. I resorted to simple phone calls and the threat we’d run away. We never actually ran. Runners
always
got split up. They hated runners more than they hated lawbreakers.

Alice didn’t like me much, but she loved Winter. Everyone loved Winter, which explained why she made captain of the cheerleading team, why she was the lead-role in every single play. Everybody loved her. But no one loved her as much as I did. I’d go to the ends of the universe for my sister.

Changing clothes turned out to be slightly painful. The blood from my cuts fused my jeans to my leg. I felt bruised and battered everywhere.

“You look worse than I’ve ever seen you.” Winter winced as I eased out of my jeans.

“That’s saying something considering—”

“Considering you’ve got a hickey on your neck.” Winter pointed.

My hand automatically went up to feel if she was right at the same time I denied making out. “I totally do not! He only kissed me goodnight, on the lips, nothing more!” But when my hand went to my neck, I felt a slight lump there. The spot felt tender as my fingertips traced the perimeter of the lump. “Oh.” I groaned and dropped to the bed, cringing with the motion since there were bruises all over me. “I fell through the throat and bounced into the wall. Lots of rocks were sticking out. I guess one of them got me here, well, I mean, they got me
everywhere
. They used me as a punching bag.” I met her eyes. “But it definitely
isn’t
a hickey.”

“You don’t have to convince me. But how are you going to convince Aunt Theresa you weren’t making crack babies?” She smirked. “Because it
really
looks like a hickey. It looks like someone squashed a tomato against your neck.”

I went to the mirror to check it out. “No, no, no!” No amount of cover-up would
ever
cover it up. “Would a turtleneck look suspicious?” I stretched my neck to inspect the bruise better in the mirror.

“With Theresa? Everything looks suspicious.” Winter rummaged on her side of the closet, which looked a lot more organized than my side, until she pulled out a light blue blouse with a high ruffled collar. “Try this on.”

I smiled gratefully. “And what about tomorrow?”

She laughed. “You can try the turtleneck then. Maybe you’ll be abducted by aliens today, and you won’t ever have to worry about tomorrow.”

Winter finished getting ready and talked while I stared at the wall, feeling the energy drain from me with every passing moment.

“Mr. Williams says I have a good chance at the acting scholarship from UW.”

“That’s great.” Keeping my tone light took effort. How would
I
ever pay for school? My grades weren’t bad, but they weren’t anything to applaud, either. There were government programs, but I wanted to shake off the need for government assistance as soon as I turned eighteen and Theresa put me out of the house.

“You should apply for a scholarship, too.” Winter’s words echoed my own thoughts as she wriggled her head through the top of her shirt.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, whatever. You’re the smart one, not me.”

Winter took her turn to roll her eyes. “No one thinks of the actress as smart. I could never get a biology scholarship, but you could.”

“Whatever.”

She made noise in her throat that sounded like those voice exercises before a performance. “You’ve played dumb for so long, I’m starting to worry you believe you
are
dumb.” She flattened down the little static frizzes of hair all over her head. “Anyway, we should go to Seattle and check out the campus sometime in the next month, once you’re done with being grounded.” She turned to face me, forcing me to open my heavy eyes and smile back at her beaming face. “A scholarship would totally rock, wouldn’t it?”

“Definitely. And it’d be nothing less than you deserve.”

“And I, um, need to borrow some money from the pot of gold.” She looked at me, her eyes filled with apology.

Of course she brought up the scholarship first because she knew I was a sucker when it came to her going to school. “For what?”

“I want to take a few acting classes—outside of school drama class. I really think I could be a lot better with a little direction. And then, when I audition for the scholarship, the professional classes might make me stand out.”

“How much?” Because Winter had tons of after school activities, she couldn’t ever get a job. But I worked washing dishes and mopping floors at a dodgy little dinner just off the main highway. The pot of gold was for any just-in-case situations where we found ourselves on our own. We hid the money inside a hole we’d made in the closet floor that we kept covered by padding and carpeting.

“The classes are sixty dollars an hour, and there are six one hour classes.” She had her smile turned all the way up, though not bright enough to erase the shame in having to ask. She hated borrowing from the pot, knowing I worked hard to keep it full. Though honestly, working was a relief. It got me out of the house several days a week—even when Theresa grounded me.

“Yeah sure. Go ahead.”

She hugged me tight. “I’ll pay it back when I get my first job.”

I waved her off, yawned, and groaned. “I’m too tired to shower and go down for breakfast.”

She tucked in her shirt and stomped her feet into her tennis shoes. “That happens when you’re out all night. Hey, go back to bed. I’ll tell Theresa you feel sick.”

“I already promised not to make you lie for me.”

“Not a lie. Every time you go without sleep, you
do
get sick. It’s a verifiable fact. Besides, you cover for me all the time.”

This statement was not strictly true; Winter never did anything wrong. But I covered her in other ways, like providing money for acting classes so she didn’t have to ask Theresa. Theresa and Paul were living off their retirement, which wasn’t much. Asking for anything felt akin to mugging a homeless person.