کتاب 07-09

9

Ten minutes later the others were gone. Only Harper and the Fireman remained behind.

“Tell Michael I’ll be along in a few hours and not to worry,” Harper told Don Lewiston.

Renée leaned in from outside, through the half-open door, her hand on the latch.

“Don’t forget to come back, Harper,” Renée said, her eyes glittering from the cold or from delight, it was hard to say.

“Go on, you,” Harper said. “Hurry. Don’t you know the first rule of running a conspiracy? Don’t get caught.”

The door closed. Harper and the Fireman heard whispers, choked laughter, Allie singing a line of “Love Shack,” and then the crunch of boots moving away. Finally it was just the two of them again, in a taut but agreeable silence, the kind of silence that precedes a first kiss.

They didn’t kiss, though. Harper was aware of the open furnace at her back, the heat cast by the shifting flames, and wondered who was watching. He had gotten up twice to feed driftwood to the fire, and each time she thought, If we abandon Camp Wyndham, he won’t be with us. He has to stay here and tend his private flames.

“It was a setup,” she said. “You guys counted the votes ahead of time.”

“Well. I wouldn’t go that far. Let’s just say the outcome was not entirely unforeseen. Why do you think Michael made a special point to let you know there was no rush to return tonight?”

There had been time, when they were all together, to sketch two different plans in broad outline. One imagined what they would do if they had to leave in a hurry. The other plotted a method to (gently) wrest control of camp away from Carol. It had been left to John and Harper to work out the details for both eventualities.

“I’m ready to hatch schemes if you are,” he said.

“I need sugar for my best scheming,” she said, found her canvas tote, and tugged out a Mary Poppins lunch box. “Nothing gets me in a conspiratorial mood like an illicit candy bar, even if they are a year old.”

His brow knotted. “I warn you. Claiming to have candy bars when you don’t would be a gross violation of your Hippocratic oath never to inflict needless suffering.”

“I have news for you, Rookwood. I’m a nurse. We don’t take the Hippocratic oath. That’s just doctors. Nurses only swear to one thing—the patient will take his medicine.”

“Sometimes you say something just a bit menacing and it gives me a happy little shiver,” he said. And then, without any change of tone or hesitation, he added, “I’d burn Camp Wyndham to the ground before I’d let Carol and her sycophants take your baby from you. There’d be nothing left of this place but charred sticks. I hope you know that.”

“Wouldn’t be very fair to the rest of them, would it?” Harper asked. “They’re not bad people, most of them. All they want is to be safe.”

“Isn’t that always a permission slip for ugliness and cruelty? All they want is to be safe, and they don’t care who they have to destroy to stay that way. And the people who want to kill us, the Cremation Crews, all they want is safety, too! And the man I killed with the Phoenix the other night—the man behind the .50 caliber. I felt I had to do it. I had to cook him down to the bones. It was the only way I could know for sure you’d get back to me.”

He looked at her with a curious mix of bemusement and grief. She wanted to take his hand. Instead she gave him a miniature Snickers and took a tiny Mounds bar for herself.

“Are we going to have to kill people to be safe?” Her voice was very quiet. “Do you think it will come to that? With Ben? With Carol? Because if you do, I think maybe I should row back to shore now. I don’t want to make a plan to murder anyone.”

“If you row back to shore now,” he said, “it might murder me. So I guess you’ll have to stay.”

“I guess so,” she said, and poured them each a little more rum.