“Greer can’t be in labor.” I stated the obvious as Boone and I climbed into Sadie-Grace’s car. “She’s not pregnant.”
“Her water broke an hour ago,” Sadie-Grace said from the driver’s seat. “She asked me to clean it up.”
That was some next-level deception—and possibly self-deception, given that Greer knew that Sadie-Grace knew the pregnancy was fake.
“I activated the GPS app on her phone a few days ago,” Sadie-Grace confessed in a hushed tone, like that was the real scandal here. “You know, Find Your Friend? She’s not exactly my friend… but I found her.”
She handed the phone to Boone. “Shockingly,” he said, “she’s not at a hospital.”
Sadie-Grace frowned. “She told my dad she wanted a midwife. She told him everything was arranged. He’s in Buenos Aires on business, but as soon as she told him the baby was coming, he chartered a plane to fly him back.”
“You have to tell him,” I said.
Sadie-Grace couldn’t argue with that statement, so she ignored it. “Can you read me off the directions?” she asked Boone. “To find my friend?”
Boone did as she asked.
“Where are we going?” I said as Sadie-Grace put her car in drive.
Boone held out Sadie-Grace’s phone, with the Find Your Friend app open for me to see. “A town called Two Arrows.”
Based on its size, Two Arrows should have reminded me of the town I’d grown up in, but it didn’t. I’d grown up in a part of the state where half the people I’d known had family farms. Things here were dustier. Less green. There were stray dogs in the streets. I didn’t have to look too closely at the red dirt beneath our feet to suspect that it was at least a third clay.
“There,” Sadie-Grace said, pointing. We’d parked the car a block or so back. The Find Your Friend app, apparently, wasn’t that accurate. But we’d chosen the right direction to walk in, because there, parked in front of a metal garage that appeared to be full to the brim with lawn chairs and boxes and clothes, was Greer’s car.
“Very stealthy,” I commented. “A Porsche doesn’t stick out around here at all.”
Any reply the others might have made was cut off by a bloodcurdling, heartrending scream.
Summertime meant open windows—which almost certainly meant these houses didn’t have air-conditioning. Either way, there was nothing to block the sound of the scream, which just kept coming.
“It’s okay,” I heard a familiar voice say. “I’m here.”
Greer.
“Am I the only person thinking that Greer isn’t the one whose water broke?” Boone asked.
He wasn’t. I thought back to Aunt Olivia shutting me down when I’d tried to tell her the truth about Greer. She’d insisted that no woman would fake a pregnancy. I wondered what her stance would be if I told her that Greer had somehow secretly—and, given that her husband didn’t know and hadn’t signed any papers, almost certainly illegally—found herself a baby.
“You have to talk to your dad,” I told Sadie-Grace as another round of gritty, voice-breaking screams started up.
“I know,” Sadie Grace said, rising up to the tips of her toes in a relevé. “It’s just—eep!”
I was about to ask her what that was supposed to mean when I felt something hard and round press into the small of my back.
As a child, I’d been obsessed with many things—lock-picking and medieval torture and mixing the perfect martini. But one thing I’d never educated myself on was guns.