51

Amherst, Massachusetts

Salem’s eyes were dust-storm dry. It had been forty-eight-plus hours since she’d had a full night’s sleep, longer since she’d showered. Sleep deprivation at this level felt like walking next to her body, floating over it, making a sandwich out of her brain and then eating it. Her muscles were tight and sore, aching from long rides in small areas.

They didn’t have the energy needed for small talk. The adrenaline marking the last two and a half days had drained out, leaving an aftertaste of ozone and lye. When Ernest parked the car three blocks from the Emily Dickinson Museum, the sun was four hours from rising and the air felt heavy, like it’d be night forever. The somber cloak seemed like a natural fit for Amherst, a town straight out of the Colonial period for all its paved roads and electric lights.

Ernest yanked a baseball cap and dark sunglasses out of his backpack, the only piece of luggage he carried. “I’m going to get two burner phones and another car. I’ll be back at sunrise.”

“Is that a disguise?” Bel asked listlessly, pointing at the cap. She didn’t ask where he’d acquire the car or phones. Her body language suggested she’d reached a grudging acceptance of him.

Ernest shrugged. “As much of a disguise as I can pull off. It’s hard to blend in when you’re this tall. You two toss your phones”—he pointed at the Dunkin Donuts’ dumpster—“and you should try sleeping. You look … crusty.” He tucked his jacket tighter around Mercy, even though he’d be freezing without it, and stepped out of the car, unwinding himself from the confined interior like a jack-in-the-box finally freed. He jogged down the street, not glancing back.

“I’ll take care of the phones.” Salem laid her hand across the front seat. Bel placed her cell in it without a word. Salem stepped out of the car, inhaling air as crisp and juicy as a fresh-sliced apple. The ground was spongy with a pre-frost. Despite being an urban area, a wall of scrub and trees lined the road across from the doughnut shop. Salem considered running rather than walking to the dumpster, but by the time she made up her mind to do so, she was already there, inhaling the grease and sugar and sour of the alley.

She glanced back at the Buick. Bel and Mercy were inside, their scalps pressed against the passenger windows, probably asleep. Bel’s phone was warm in her hand. She yanked out the battery and SIM card and tossed the phone.

As a safety precaution, she charged another block up and flung Bel’s battery and SIM into the receptacle outside of Kelly’s Restaurant, a mom-and-pop joint at the end of a strip mall. Her breath came out in white plumes.

Next up, her phone.

She tugged it out of her pocket, holding it for a moment. A sleek black rectangle, it was both phone and computer, and now, possibly a lifeline to her mother. She fired it up and checked for new messages. There were none. But there could be. A message could arrive that would save Grace or Vida. Something that would make it okay that she’d lied to Bel about the original text.

She had to keep her phone.

Salem powered it down and inserted it into the inside pocket of her parka, the one where she kept spare tampons and a black-and-white tube of Chapstick.

She glanced around. No one was up yet. The city-country of Amherst didn’t even have cars moving at pre-dawn. She felt silly with exhaustion, wired and loopy, like she could have run all the way back to the car and kept on running until she hit Mexico, and then leaned over to touch the border just like the relays they used to complete in phy ed, and then flip around and charge up to Amherst before Bel and Mercy woke up. That sounded like a plan, but when she returned to the side of the Buick, she realized she couldn’t move another step if her soul depended on it.

She fell into the car and a bottomless sleep.

She realized something just before she plummeted. She and Bel would not talk about the fact that one of their mothers was dead. They would just keep moving forward, racing toward the end, pretending it wasn’t true.