Quite Contrary (42 page)

We were. The driver came back out of the motel and didn’t give us a second glance as he climbed into the bed of his pickup truck. Leaf filled bags rustled as he pawed around under them, and the shape he pulled out and slung over his shoulder was obviously the chained up young woman wrapped in even more tarp. She didn’t struggle as he carried her into Room 18.

I felt faint pressure on my foot, and then a much firmer drag as Rat caught the hem of my skirt. When he’d climbed up to the level of my hip, I turned and walked out of the parking lot to stand on the sidewalk and stare at the street.

“We’re near your home, Miss Mary, but I don’t know how to get you there. The way should be obvious, and it’s not. I think it’s closed to you.”

I knew how to get home.

I crossed the street, and as a minor miracle Scarecrow seemed to already understand crosswalks and stoplights. At least, she didn’t stray, sticking close while I crossed and crossed again. Peaceful Candy Store. Yeah, that’d do.

I couldn’t recall ever being in a store that just sold candy before. How many types of candy were there to sell? Apparently, more than I’d ever dreamed. The whole store was painted white. Racks of plastic tubes dispensed taffy. Did anyone eat that much taffy? Little plastic statues under the counter’s display glass must have been made of chocolate. I honestly did not recognize a single name on the chocolate bar rack.

“Hey, welcome to candy heaven. They should have named this place that. I don’t know why you’re still wearing your Halloween costume, but you are so cute in it!” the woman behind the counter gushed.

“Grab some of the chocolate bars,” I whispered to Scarecrow. I was betting she’d ignore Scarecrow like Joseph did.

Well, not quite, but close enough. “That toy is amazing. Japanese, right? Imported? And the pet rat is so cute!” the clerk gushed some more.

I had to make some pretense of this. “What’s a divinity?” I asked, pointing past the glass cover of the counter. It was a good question. Were those little white cubes cookies or brownies or what? They looked like they’d been dusted with donut sugar.

“Really hard to make,” the young woman bubbled. “Even if you make them wrong they’re so sweet you won’t care. We have to bake them ourselves, and they’re never the same twice. You want one, but don’t try feeding it to your rat. He’ll go into a diabetic coma. I’m serious, not joking.”

“I’ll have to go get some money before I can try, but maybe I will!” I said. That seemed like a good enough reason to bow out. I stared at the little white blocks over my shoulder while I slipped back out the door.

Scarecrow, subtle as a lump of wood, was already standing right outside holding two handfuls of candy bars. She must have grabbed them and walked right out. Well, no arguing with success, and I didn’t know how to shoplift either. I at least pulled her around the side of the building so I wasn’t visible through the glass before I grabbed the haul out of her hands. I sat down against the wall to rip one open.

This stuff wasn’t even American. There were umlauts in the name, and one of those cursive ‘S’s. Eh. Chocolate was chocolate. I tore off a big bite with my teeth.

Okay, chocolate was not just chocolate. This stuff was rich. It tasted sweet and chocolaty and creamy on the tongue like no chocolate bar I’d ever eaten. I chewed and swallowed, took another big bite, and when I’d swallowed that, shoved the rest of the bar into my mouth and tore open another. My mouth drowned in this chocolate taste, and I didn’t care. It tasted good, yeah. Best candy I’d ever had by a mile. Who cared?

I threw the half-eaten bar down on the sidewalk. I threw all the bars down, and pushed myself back to my feet. That had been stupid. Gorging on stolen candy bars wasn’t going to kill my story.

“Miss Mary?” Rat asked with exactly the right anxious tone, considering what he’d just seen me do.

“Shut up, Rat,” I ordered.

He shut up. Scarecrow followed me back across the street twice. Why was I bothering with street lights? There was hardly any traffic.

Nothing seemed to have changed in the motel parking lot. I angled across it towards room 18, and as I got closer I saw it. A dark line along the edge told me the door wasn’t quite closed. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

We hadn’t been gone long, and things had happened in a hurry. A lot of them had happened on the bed, then moved off it. At least, the sheets were twisted up and scattered around the bed, and the pillows had been thrown across the room. Most of the chains were still on the bed. Of the chains that weren’t, some had left visible dents where they’d hit the walls. Most importantly, the driver and his captive had disappeared. There wasn’t even any blood. If there had been, I’d have smelled it. I knew that smell now.

Scarecrow peeked her head past the door behind me and asked, “Do you think we should be in here?”

“He’s not coming back.”

That was enough for Scarecrow. She walked right in and started prying a broken chain link out of the wall by the bed.

The guy sure had been in a hurry to die. His dirty brown suitcase sat unopened on a dresser. His wallet and keys sat beside it. I couldn’t drive, so his car key didn’t do me any good, but I scooped up his motel room key just in case, then pried open his wallet and pulled out the cash. Twenties, tens—well over a hundred dollars. How much? I didn’t care.

“What’s that under the bed?” Scarecrow asked.

Not a good question. But I didn’t smell blood. Scarecrow was on her hands and knees on the far side of the bed, so I peeked under this side. The bed frame was low, really low. I could fit my hand in, but not my arm. That black shape—“I think it’s his gun.” I thought about that. Rat could go get it, but, “—I don’t want it anyway.”

I straightened back up, which gave Rat an excuse to crawl the rest of the way up to my shoulder. “Come on. Maybe we’ll come back later, but right now I’ve got some money and I want real food.” The chocolate was already making my stomach crawl.

I locked the door behind us and wandered around to the motel office. I could ask where there’s a restaurant. The little bitty brightly lit room was empty, so I slid the glass door open and banged the bell on the counter.

Nothing happened.

While nothing happened, Rat crawled down my arm and reached out to snag a road map off a display rack. Those were standard in motels, right? Like the little ‘Welcome To Peaceful’ pamphlets next to it. The sign over this place had been Peaceful Inn, right?

Rat started to unfold the map, but he needed three legs to hold onto my sleeve. I helped him, but road maps are always a pain in the butt. Scarecrow helped me, and we spread out a map of most of the middle of the US.

It was the first real map I’d seen since getting lost, but—“This doesn’t give me a clue where we are now.”

“We could be anywhere. This town isn’t marked,” Rat said.

Of course.

Nobody’d answered. I banged the bell on the counter harder. Still nobody answered, but a middle school girl slid the door from the street open and looked inside. She held a little boy smaller than me by the hand, and they had the exact same black hair, so he must have been her brother.

“Hey,” she asked nervously. “This may seem like a dumb question, but you haven’t seen our parents, have you? They were dressed up real nice, she had on a blue skirt and sweater. Anything?”

I shook my head. “Sorry.”

“Thanks anyway.” The girl tried to keep smiling for her brother as she left.

I banged the bell on the counter one more time, loud. Not a peep from the curtained door on the other side of the counter. There was no point in going back and looking.

“An ugly story just started here, and I think it came into town with us.” Rat said. He sounded grim about it.

I pulled the door open and walked back out. Scarecrow tried to fold the road map as she followed me back to the intersection. That ought to keep her out of my hair for a year.

Things had changed fast. There hadn’t been much traffic before. Now there was none. I didn’t see any adults, but besides the girl and her little brother, I saw four more kids down the street, standing around with the same confused expressions.

Forget the stoplights. I walked straight across the intersection and looked into the candy store again. The perky young woman from the desk had disappeared. Being female was no protection, apparently.

The store wasn’t completely empty. A girl slightly younger than me in a skirt, stockings, and a sweater covered in pony silhouettes had made a bag out of her sweater and stuffed it full of more chocolate bars than I’d dreamed of stealing. I about wanted to kick her outthrust rear just to punish her for the sweater, but that box perched on her hip was an old fashioned walkman, one of the ones that played CDs, and it connected to a pair of cheap pink headphones over her ears. My heart tightened. An old CD player. I might know the songs. I could get lucky. She could have Les Miserables in there. This whole suburb seemed to be stuck about twenty years behind the times, didn’t it? So, her walkman fit in. I didn’t care what it played. I could turn it up so high I wouldn’t be able to hear Puzzle screaming. That would help get me out of here.

Plus, she was a thief and I really hated her sweater. I tried to enjoy it as I threw open the door, stomped up behind her, and grabbed her headphones and walkman. I planted one of my pile driver shoes against her butt and kicked her forward, ripping the walkman loose. Eighties music. That scratchy sound from the earphones was eighties music. It would do. My jaw tensed up at the thought of how Puzzle’s scream had cut off wetly when her ribs came open. Anything to cover that up.

Stolen candy sprayed everywhere as the girl fell on the floor. She looked up at me. I don’t know what my face looked like, but instead of complaining or arguing or swearing she whimpered and stared.

She’d think of something to say in a second, but I didn’t give her that. I snapped the walkman onto my skirt and pushed my way back outside again.

The display said FM. She had the player set to radio. I turned that off and flipped it open. Unmarked CD. Did I even care what the music was?

Rat peeked over my shoulder and opened his mouth.

“Shut up,” I ordered.

I didn’t want to look at him. My stomach did feel like a knot, and the candy inside would make it worse. I tucked the headphones around my neck and stomped down to the next intersection.

“Taco Takeout. That’s such a cheap name, isn’t it? Did you want to eat there? And I bet that orange sign—” Scarecrow chirped until I cut her off.

“Shut up!” I yelled. Didn’t she get that I wasn’t in the mood? That I didn’t want her help?

The neon signs on that dark building—that was where I was going. Still no cars, so I cut across the street. No name on the four-leaf clover sign above the door, but once I pushed inside, I could tell. The thumping jukebox, the dark wood, and shadows everywhere, this was obviously a bar.

The bar itself might have told me that, but I wanted this place to have tables, too. That meant there’d be a menu above the shelves full of bottles. There was. I stomped up to the register.

“You’re going to need one hell of a good fake ID,” the barman said whimsically as he peered over the bar.

“I just want a burger and a coke, okay?”

“Sure. Have a seat and we’ll bring it to you, Little Red,” he quipped.

Yes, thank you, buddy, I knew quite well I looked like an idiot.

I found a booth in the corner and threw myself into it. Scarecrow abandoned me to go mess with the jukebox, and I couldn’t blame her. The song was awful. Some whiny woman begging a guy not to leave her, even though he treated her badly. Whatever. I could barely make out the words over the music. It was annoyingly loud, and I wouldn’t be able to listen to the walkman I’d just stolen, but random music was random music, and it blotted out memories.

The waitress brought out my burger. There were a couple of customers, too. The adults hadn’t entirely disappeared. I took a bite from the hamburger, letting charred beef overcome the sickly sweetness of lingering chocolate. Scarecrow stabbed buttons on the jukebox to no effect. She didn’t have any quarters for it, and I didn’t care. It was an ugly brown box. If it had been one of the old-fashioned glowing jukeboxes with actual records I might have been interested.

I took another bite, and heard several pops outside, even over the music. Gunshots.

That got attention. Two guys and the waitress moved to peek outside. Instead of sounding fearful, one of the guys asked, “Do I really see a naked chick walking down the street?”

“Wow. Just wow,” the other guy said.

“No kidding,” said the waitress. Two more customers drifted up from the back tables. Someone pushed the door enough to open it, and as soon as it opened, they all spilled out.

That just left me and the bartender as the only two people in the bar. He was pretty smart, because he pulled out a shotgun, loaded it, and laid it conveniently close under the bar.

Me and the bartender were the only two humans in the bar. If you counted Scarecrow as people, she was much more interested in the jukebox than gunshots outside, and now was having fun feeling around in the spare change slot. If you counted Rat, well, he jumped off my sleeve onto the tabletop.

“You mean to act like this, don’t you? You know how to get home,” he asked, his voice quiet enough I could barely make him out over the whining singer.

It would have been easier if I’d gotten the stupid rat, if he’d just been angry or unhappy. This was too calm and respectful, and I couldn’t quite get mad enough.

“Yes, I know. I met this girl, Rose, who could answer any question. She told me what it would do to me if I went home. I don’t think she knew she was also telling me how to get there. I don’t know. Maybe.” That was more answer than I wanted to give him, and I took a long drink of cola so the acid taste would wash the words down.

Rat sat there not saying anything.

“What was home like for you, Rat? You had to grow up somewhere.”

He tugged on one of his ears. I didn’t know what that meant this time. “Home was someone else’s fairy tale. My family and I were rats living in a blacksmithy. The blacksmith’s badly treated apprentice was actually an orphaned princess, and she shared her food with us, so one day we brought her the key to let her out. That was that. I never saw her again, and I wanted my life to be more interesting than that. I left the smithy looking for more stories.”