بخش 03 - فصل 55

55

Pete lets Jerome carry Tina as far as the baseball field, then says, ‘Give her to me, please.’

Jerome surveys him – Pete’s pale, shocked face, the one blistered ear, the holes charred in his shirt. ‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’

Tina is already holding out her arms. She has been quiet since being hauled from the burning basement, but when Pete takes her, she puts her arms around his neck, her face against his shoulder, and begins to cry loudly.

Holly comes running down the path. ‘Thank God!’ she says. ‘There you are! Where’s Bellamy?’

‘Back there, in the basement,’ Hodges says. ‘And if he isn’t dead yet, he wishes he was. Have you got your cell phone? Call the fire department.’

‘Is our mother okay?’ Pete asks.

‘I think she’s going to be fine,’ Holly says, pulling her phone off her belt. ‘The ambulance is taking her to Kiner Memorial. She was alert and talking. The paramedics said her vital signs are good.’

‘Thank God,’ Pete says. Now he also starts to cry, the tears cutting clean tracks through the smears of soot on his cheeks. ‘If she died, I’d kill myself. Because this is all my fault.’

‘No,’ Hodges says.

Pete looks at him. Tina is looking, too, her arms still linked around her brother’s neck.

‘You found the notebooks and the money, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. By accident. They were buried in a trunk by the stream.’

‘Anyone would have done what you did,’ Jerome says. ‘Isn’t that right, Bill?’

‘Yes,’ Bill says. ‘For your family, you do all that you can. The way you went after Bellamy when he took Tina.’

‘I wish I’d never found that trunk,’ Pete says. What he doesn’t say, will never say, is how much it hurts to know that the notebooks are gone. Knowing that burns like fire. He does understand how Morris felt, and that burns like fire, too. ‘I wish it had stayed buried.’

‘Wish in one hand,’ Hodges says, ‘spit in the other. Let’s go. I need to use an icepack before the swelling gets too bad.’

‘Swelling where?’ Holly asks. ‘You look okay to me.’

Hodges puts an arm around her shoulders. Sometimes Holly stiffens when he does this, but not today, so he kisses her cheek, too. It raises a doubtful smile.

‘Did he get you where it hurts boys?’

‘Yes. Now hush.’

They walk slowly, partly for Hodges’s benefit, partly for Pete’s. His sister is getting heavy, but he doesn’t want to put her down. He wants to carry her all the way home.