West Shore

Chapter 11: Free Agent

Evan was partway down the path with Ted's question still unanswered when he heard the sandals behind him, running.

Nobody ran on that path. It was gravel and roots, too narrow for two people to pass, and it only went one place.

He stopped and turned around.

The girl coming after him was Amanda Cole, who had spent the first half of the afternoon standing where Jason couldn't have missed her. She was in a thin-strapped sundress printed with flowers the color of cantaloupe, and she pulled up a few steps short of him with one hand flat on the skirt to keep it clear of the weeds.

"Okay. Okay." She bent over her own knees. "Give me a second. God."

Evan looked past her, up the path. Nobody had followed her. Behind her, through the trees, the party was still going, and the distance had worn it down to almost nothing.

"Did you need something?"

"Yes." She straightened up and shoved her hair back off her face. Her cheeks were red. There was an old scab on one knee. "I wanted to say thank you. That's all this is. That's the entire reason I just ran a quarter mile in these shoes."

Evan waited.

"You got in front of it," she said. "Whatever it was going to be. He was going to make an example of me for what I did out there — everybody out there knew he was — and then you got in front of it, and it wasn't me." She crossed her arms. "So. Thank you. Did he get you? I saw you after. I saw your face."

"Nothing that stayed." He touched his own brow and took the hand down again. "I'm fine."

"Good."

"Mr. Vance is the one who stepped in," Evan said. "Not me. I was standing there."

She looked at him for a second. Then she glanced back toward the lawn, where the music was. "Sure. Fine. I'll thank him too."

When she looked at him again, her voice had come down a step. "But listen. William. Will Thorne."

"What about him."

"He doesn't let things go." She watched him the whole time she said it. "I know that's a thing people say about everybody. I'm saying it because I know him. He has never once lost anything in front of other people, and today he lost on a lawn full of them. He'll come back for it. Maybe not today. He'll come back."

Evan nodded once. He didn't answer right away, and she took the silence for agreement.

"I'll mention it to him," he said.

She squinted at him. "The Vance one. You'll mention it to him."

"If he asks."

"Sure." And then she grinned — sudden, total, using her whole face — and stood there grinning at nothing.

"You should keep clear of him too," Evan said. "Give him room when he's around."

"Oh, me?" She waved a hand like she was clearing smoke. "I'm not on his list. I've never been on his list. That's the single thing I've got going for me."

She said it with no weight on it at all, and waited, as if he might want to argue with her about it.

"My mom worked at that house," she said. "I've been in and out of it since I was nine. She did the flowers in the front rooms, cooked some, whatever they needed that week."

There was one more question he could have asked her, about that house. He let it go by.

"Then she got sick." A shrug, not a rude one. "And then she died. It's been a while now."

"I'm sorry," Evan said.

"Thanks." She looked off at the water for a second. "So. No dad anywhere. No brothers. Nobody left to write to. I'm a free agent — that's what I tell people. I can put everything I own in a bag and land on my feet anywhere in the country, and when something starts going sideways on me, I just—" she flicked two fingers off her thumb "—gone. Poof. Nobody even has to come looking."

And Evan laughed.

It came up out of him before he could catch it. Not the laugh he kept for the house, the one that came off his mouth and stopped — this one was real, and louder, and worse in the open air, and she turned to watch it happen like she'd won something.

"You laugh," she said, delighted. "Nobody laughs around here. They just show you their teeth and keep walking."

She kicked a pebble off the gravel into the grass. She didn't go anywhere. She started in on something else — which side of the pool she'd been standing on, what she'd thought was going to happen when it started, something her mother used to say —

— and stopped in the middle of a word.

Her face changed. It changed once, and then again, faster, and by the third time she had both hands on the skirt and had taken two steps back with her head coming down.

"Mr. Vance—"

That was all she got out. Then she was walking, small steps and then not small, hunched a little under nothing at all, and nobody on the path called her back, so she went.

Evan turned around.

Jason Vance had come off the boards of the gazebo and crossed the lawn without hurrying. No socks. The same slides he'd had on all day.

Evan inclined his head and said, "Ted sent me up about dinner. In the house or out here — either one's easy, and the terrace is already laid, if you'd rather be outside."

Jason didn't answer.

He looked at Evan's face for a second, a little above the eyes, and then he reached up and put one fingertip on the scratch above Evan's left eyebrow, at the hairline, where a chip of brick had come off the wall and opened it.

It was shallow. He'd put iodine on it after his shower and it had dried into a scab, and there was nothing under Jason's finger worth looking at. Jason looked at it anyway, and Evan stood still and let him. Moving would have turned it into something.

He looked past Jason, down the path, at where Amanda had been.

The path was empty. The trees had closed back over it.

"Were you scared?" Jason said.

Evan shook his head. "I wasn't worried, sir. You'd have handled it."

Both of those were true. The second one was also the safest sentence he had, and he said it in the voice he used for trays.

The corner of Jason's mouth moved — a little, not far. It wasn't a smile, and Evan couldn't have said what it was.

Jason put his hands back in his pockets and started up the gravel toward the house, in no hurry at all.

"Come on," he said. "I'm hungry."

Evan fell in a step behind him, and they went up.