We scoured five more neighborhoods but found no ATVs. A couple of houses had large storage areas underneath them, where an ATV could be hidden, but we didn’t go up to the houses because some people were still coming in from the beach, carrying beach chairs, umbrellas, and bags with bright towels. We didn’t want to be arrested for trespassing.
The sky turned indigo, and a cool breeze threaded through the sea grass. I was covered with sand and sweat, and the muscles in my legs ached. We hadn’t glimpsed a single ATV, and we hadn’t seen any of the wild horses either. Since the accident they seemed to have melted into the woods and disappeared.
“It’s getting dark, and I’m tired,” Stephanie complained as we picked up our bikes from the foot of a dune about a half mile past where the accident had occurred. We’d searched all the houses along the beach for at least a mile and a half, and it was becoming clear to us just how many houses and how much distance would need to be covered. And acres and acres of dunes and woods stretched further inland, all without roads.
“This is impossible,” Cody said, cutting the engine on the ATV. He gestured to encompass our surroundings. “We could search all week. A whole year.”
“We can’t give up!” I said, practically crying. How could we? Yet I was feeling completely discouraged and overwhelmed by the size of the project we’d taken on.
“We have to go back,” Stephanie said. “Daddy and Lynn are going to be really mad at us if we’re late. We’re in enough trouble already.”
“We can start again tomorrow,” said Cody.
I didn’t want to tell him that maybe I wouldn’t be there tomorrow. I thought about Cody and Stephanie spending the whole day together without me. I almost hoped Dad forgot.
“I wish we knew where those two guys lived,” I said. I was beginning to realize that it was one thing to suspect someone had done something and another thing to be able to prove it.
Stephanie and I turned our bikes around and began riding back down the beach, with Cody slowly riding alongside on the ATV. The tide was low, and parts of the beach shone with translucent, rainbow-colored puddles where the surf had been moments before. Lights popped on in the houses as dusk deepened and shadows stretched over the sand.
We hadn’t been riding long when we saw two horses running down the beach near the water. One was light-colored and the other was chestnut. As they ran by, their long tails rippled in the evening breeze.
“Hey, look!” I said, turning to watch them. “That’s Firecracker! He’s found a friend! He’s not alone anymore! He’s found a new herd! That’s fantastic!”
The three of us watched for a few moments as the two horses cavorted on the beach in the dusk. They seemed to be dancing, ducking their heads and coming together, and then galloping along neck and neck. Then a third horse raced up to join them.
Other people walking on the beach stopped to watch and admire the horses.
“Yay!” Stephanie said. She stopped and turned a cartwheel on the sand. What a show off. But I wished I could do one. Then I thought, Why not?
“Hey,” I said. “Show me how to do one!”
“Okay.” She showed me how to hold my arms up high and to follow my arms around with the cartwheel, pointing my toes and letting them wheel around with gravity.
“You’re coordinated and athletic. That’s good!” she said after my first try. I practiced doing two or three more, each a little better than the last.
“Great!”
As a joke, Cody tried one too. It was awkward.
“You look like a frog,” Stephanie said, laughing. “Standing on its head.”
Cody did another one with his legs even more bent.
“A sick upside-down frog,” I said.
“Thank you very much,” Cody said, using an Elvis accent.
The light was fading now, and we turned on the flashlights we’d brought. The air was cooler, and I zipped up my sweatshirt. The sand felt cool under my feet. Crabs skittered across the sand in front of our flashlight beams. The stars were starting to come out, and the sky was splashed with their brilliance. On the moving surface of the water, there seemed to be a sparkling path to the moon.
“This would be the perfect time for bioluminescence,” Cody said. “I wish there was some tonight.”
“There is,” I said, pointing to a lightning bug that floated past us, slowly flashing on and off.
“Are lightning bugs considered bioluminescence?” Stephanie said.
“Well, actually, yeah!” Cody said.
“Why do they light up?” Stephanie asked.
“I don’t think scientists know for sure. Some say it’s to attract a mate.”
“And how do they light up? And don’t tell us we wouldn’t understand this time,” I said in a teasing voice.
“It’s caused when lightning bugs release a little bit of luciferase, and it reacts with ATP and luciferin. They have a special organ where the chemical reaction takes place. When one of the chemicals runs out, their light turns off.”
“When I was little and Mom and Dad took me to church sometimes,” Stephanie said. “We sang this song in Sunday school called ‘This Little Light of Mine.’ That’s what the lightning bugs make me think of. The idea that there’s a light inside each one of us.”
“Cool,” I said. “Mom takes yoga, and after a yoga class they say ‘Namaste,’ which means ‘the light in me honors the light in you.’ Kind of the same idea.”
“Namaste,” Stephanie said to me. Then she turned to Cody and said it to him.
“Ditto,” Cody said.
The triangular window in front of our house was lit.
“We’ll meet you out here tomorrow!” Stephanie said to Cody. He waved good-bye and drove behind the dune to the path to his house, and we walked our bikes up the walkway, their wheels making a rattling sound on the wood.
We opened the sliding doors, and Norm was sitting on the couch in the great room, watching the news. “There you are!” he said.
We smelled fish cooking and saw Mom in the kitchen. She turned around.
“Did Dad cancel?” If he did, I was ready to find out now.
“Nope. We’re meeting him tomorrow at ten by Jockey’s Ridge. He’s got big plans, apparently,” Mom said, but she raked her hair off her face in a way that I knew meant she was nervous. So was I.
18
STEPHANIE
A full-length mirror hung on the back of my bedroom door, and before climbing into bed, I studied my reflection. Suddenly the door pushed open, smashing me against the wall. Diana came in, wearing her father’s Heineken T-shirt and carrying a deck of cards.
“What are you doing?” she said, throwing herself on my bed.
“Do you think I’ve lost weight this week? Maybe because we’ve been riding bikes so much?”
“I don’t know,” Diana said. She sounded bored. She shuffled the deck of cards in a smooth, practiced way, making them whir like a little fan. “Who cares? You look at yourself in the mirror way too much.”
“I do?”
“Yeah! It’s annoying. I mean, everyone already thinks you’re gorgeous. You don’t need to play it up. It makes you seem stuck-up or something.” She started laying out the cards to play Solitaire on my blue bedspread.
“I’m not stuck-up!” I said. I liked looking in the mirror because I hadn’t been “pretty” until just a year or so ago. Suddenly boys liked looking at me, and I felt like I had to check to see why. And to tell the truth, sometimes I looked in the mirror to figure out who I was. Sometimes, especially lately, with Daddy and Lynn getting married, and trying to get along with Diana, and Mama marrying Barry, and the stuff at school, my mind went through so many changes that I felt like I had to look at myself to make sure I was still the same person. Almost as though I had to check to make sure I hadn’t disappeared. But that was too much to tell Diana. I put my pink nightgown on and started brushing my hair, suddenly thinking that Diana probably thought I brushed my hair too much too. Well, I thought, l
ooking at her scraggly, matted, blonde ponytail, Diana brushed hers too little.
Outside the open sliding door, through the screen, the surf made sounds that were almost quiet and reassuring, like someone saying, “Shhh. Shhh.”
“So, since you and Cody were together last night, you haven’t seemed so negative about him,” I said. I poked Diana in the leg with my hairbrush.
Maybe she’d tell me what had gone on between them.
“He’s not so bad,” she said abruptly.
“Is that all you can say? He’s not so bad?’”
“Yes.”
“And what did he do to make you change how you feel about him?” I asked.
Cards snapped as she built up piles of each suit at the top of the columns, ending with a king at the top of each pile.
“I won!” She pushed the piles together and began shuffling again. “I don’t know. We were together when we found the horse.” I’d seen her crying when she was talking to him at the aquarium, and I’d seen him put his hand on her arm.
I tried not to be jealous. But I still was, a little. But then, when we were at the aquarium, I understood that Diana and I just reminded Cody of his stepsisters, and maybe he didn’t like either of us.
I decided to change the subject.
“So, what do you think you and your dad are going to do tomorrow?”
She finally stopped shuffling and put the cards on the nightstand, then crawled under the covers, pulling them to her chin. She talked not to me but to the ceiling.
“I’m going to guess that we’ll do something dangerous that he thinks I’ll love but my mom won’t let me do.” She turned on her side, facing me, and propped her cheek on her elbow, speaking earnestly. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore. Listen, what kind of person do you think hit the mare? Who would do that?”
At that moment Daddy knocked on the door and poked his head in. “Just thought you girls might want to know that Lynn just called the Wild Horse Fund again, and there’s no change in the mare’s condition. She is hanging in there, but she’s not out of the woods.” He drummed his fingers on the doorjamb, then left.
“God can’t let Isabel die! I don’t know what I’ll do!” Diana said.
“Oh, so you believe in God now,” I said.
“I guess I’ve been thinking about God more since last summer with the wolves,” Diana said. “But mostly I’ve always thought that we’re on our own in this world. No one really cares about anything but themselves. You live and then you die. That’s it.” She hesitated. “What about you? Do you believe in God?”
“Yeah, I guess I do. Maybe God isn’t in charge of all the good and bad things that happen in the world. You have to admit, it was a person who hit Isabel, not God.”
“But who would do that? Hit a horse on the beach and leave it lying there?”
“I have no idea, Diana.” I let my eyes wander around the room as I thought about the possibilities for a minute. “Maybe the person who did it was drunk or on drugs and just really messed up.” I picked at a string on the comforter. “I mean, I know some people do evil things on purpose. But I bet it was an accident.
“That’s what I think too. And do you think this person feels guilty? ”
“I don’t know. I mean, I hope so. I would.”
“Let’s say he feels terrible about what he did, and he doesn’t want anyone to find out that he hurt the horse. Let’s also say the ATV is damaged from hitting the horse—so what would he do? Would he ride the ATV in public?”
“No. He’d hide it,” I said.
“That’s what I think too. So it’s hidden somewhere. So where’s the best place for a person to hide an ATV around here?” Diana’s thin, serious, freckled face was only inches from mine on the pillow. Her water-washed blue eyes, as she looked at me, were intensely focused. “Where do you think that is?”
“Uh … out in the wilderness, where the horses are?”
“Bingo. And that’s where we’ve got to look. We probably were wasting our time looking around the houses today. So tomorrow you and Cody need to go out in the dunes and the woods behind the houses and look for another ATV.”
She kept on talking. I watched her lips move and nodded my head. I was scared of the woods behind the houses. I was scared of riding the ATV again. I knew two people weren’t supposed to ride at once. I was scared of the wild horses, and I didn’t want to do any of it. But I kept nodding my head until she went back to her own room.
After that there were cracks of thunder and streaks of lightning. I listened to the shrill of the wind through the trees. Rain pattered on the roof and sifted through the tree leaves. I drew in the fresh smell of the rain coming through the open windows.
At some point I fell asleep.
19
DIANA
Mom and I sat in the parking lot by Jockey’s Ridge, waiting. The lot was beginning to fill up, and people were piling out of the cars, slamming doors, laughing, yelling, and filing down the sandy path toward the dunes, which rose behind us like sleeping giants. The sky was an impossibly bright, clean color of blue today after last night’s storm. I thought about the fact that because of the storm, all of the evidence of the accident with Isabel was now washed away.
Mom looked pale, and she kept picking at the cuticles on her fingernails until she finally made her thumb bleed. “Shoot,” she said, putting her finger in her mouth. She took it out and examined it.
“He could have gotten stuck in traffic.” My mouth was dry and my lips felt chapped. I could barely form the words.
I had the deck of cards, and I’d brought a pillowcase with Dad’s old Heineken T-shirt, a change of clothes, a bathing suit, a towel, and a toothbrush just in case I ended up spending the night. But I felt all mixed up. If Cody and Stephanie found the damaged ATV, they probably wouldn’t know what to do without me. They needed me there with them. I really wanted to see Dad, but I really wanted to be there with Cody and Stephanie. If only I could clone myself or be two places at once.
I needed a cell phone in case I had to call them and tell them what to do.
As if Mom read my mind, she handed me her cell phone. “Here. Take this today. And here’s Norm’s cell number.” She scribbled Norm’s number on a page of her Day-Timer, and when she handed it to me, a bit of blood from her torn cuticle smeared onto the paper.
“Mom, I know Norm’s cell. And it’s stored in your phone anyway. He’s, like, number one on your call list.”
Mom blinked. “I know, I know. I’m just a little nervous, that’s all.”
As soon as Mom left, I’d text Stephanie to see what she and Cody were planning to do to find the ATV.
Mom pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her wallet. “And here. Take this. You never know when you might need it.”
“Thanks.” I folded the bill and put it in the back pocket of my shorts.
Mom drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Hmmm. What else? Obviously if he tries to take you skydiving or something like that, you just say you can’t.” She gave a high-pitched, fake-sounding laugh.
“I think you have to be eighteen to skydive. Anyway, I’m going to be fine,” I said roughly.
“I know, I know. I hope you and your dad have a great visit.” She reached to brush my hair back from my forehead. I looked away, so that she was brushing air. “I’ll be here promptly at five o’clock to pick you up. Make sure you call me if you’re going to be late for any reason. And, just call me halfway through the day to let me know how things are going. Just so I won’t worry.”
“Mom, you’ll worry no matter what. So what difference does it make if I call you?”
“Diana, call me. I mean it.”
At that moment a silver convertible car spun into the parking lot and came to a screeching halt at an angle next to us. I glanced over, cringing slightly.
It was Dad, just hanging up his cell. He jumped out of the car and opened our passenger door. “Dudette! How great is this, that we get to spend the day toget
her?”
I have never been a touchy-feely person. I slid out of the seat and kind of stood there while he hugged me and gave me several hearty, nervous pats on the back. Mom always described him as the kind of guy who could sell ice to Eskimos. His nickname in high school and college was “Motor,” short for “Motormouth.”
“We had a breakfast session that went long this morning, people just listening to themselves talk ad infinitum.” He was tall and skinny and energetic, with reddish gray hair and piercing green eyes. He and I have the same eyes and freckled skin. He had a loud voice, and when he walked he had loud footsteps.
Mom had jumped out of her side of the car and come around. “Hello, Steven,” she said.
“Lynn. You look absolutely fabulous,” he said, his smile widening.
“Oh, thanks.” Mom cleared her throat, looked down, and jangled her car keys. “So”—she gestured to the convertible—”this a rental?”
“That’s right! I figure when I’m renting I might as well rent something decent that I actually want to drive. It’ll be fun for Diana. We can spend the morning together. Then I have to go back to the resort for some ad-hoc meetings, so I figured Diana could keep herself busy at the pool. Do you have your bathing suit?” He patted me on the shoulder. I guess he meant for it to be a pat, but it was more like he was hitting me, the way referees hit the wrestling mat during a match.
“Yeah.” I held up the pillowcase.
“So, there will be time when you can’t be with Diana?”
“It won’t be long, just a quick meet and greet,” Dad said. “She’s fourteen. She’ll be all right.”
“Sure,” I said.
Mom squinted at him. “So, what are you going to do?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking we’d go for the veritable all-sports day,” Dad said, squeezing my shoulder. “Start out with a little hang gliding here at Jockey’s Ridge? And maybe move on to some jet skiing or parasailing later? What do you say, dudette?”
“Sounds cool to me!” I smiled in spite of the lameness of the dudette. Jet skiing last summer had been a blast. And I’d never gone hang gliding, but it looked fantastic. All the stuff Dad had mentioned was expensive. It made me feel like Dad was willing to spend a lot on me.
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