Sanctuary Page 3

  Or maybe he just gets so sick of me talking all the time that he kisses me in order to shut me up. Who knows?

  In any case, he didn't seem particularly inclined to take advantage of my vulnerable femininity there in the barn. Maybe I should have worn a skirt, or something.

  "Is this just because I drove out here?" I asked, as I watched him tinker around with the bike.

  Rob, looking up at the bike, which rested on a worktable in the middle of the barn, tightened something with a wrench. "What are you talking about?"

  "This," I said. "I mean, if I'd known you were going to be so crabby about it, I'd have called you to come pick me up, I swear."

  "No, you wouldn't have," Rob said, doing something with the wrench that made the muscles in his upper arms bunch up beneath the gray sweater he wore. Which was way more entertaining than watching sports on TV, let me tell you.

  "What are you talking about? I just said—"

  "You didn't even tell your parents you were coming here, Mastriani," Rob said. "So cut the crap."

  "What do you mean?" I tried to sound offended, even though of course he was telling the truth. "They know where I am."

  Rob put down the wrench, folded his arms across his chest, leaned his butt against the work-table, and said, "Then why, when you called to tell them you got here, did you say you were at somebody Joanne's?"

  Damn! I hadn't realized he'd been in the room when I'd made that call.

  "Look, Mastriani," he said. "You know I've had my doubts from the start about this—you and me, I mean. And not just because I've graduated and you're still in the eleventh grade—not to mention the whole jailbait factor. But let's be real. You and I come from different worlds."

  "That," I said, "is so not—"

  "Well, different sides of the tracks, then."

  "Just because I'm a Townie," I said, "and you're a—"

  He held up a single hand. "Look, Mastriani. Let's face it. This isn't going to work."

  I've been working really hard on my anger management issues lately. Except for that whole thing with the football players—and Karen Sue Hankey—I hadn't beat up a single person or served a day of detention the whole semester. Mr. Goodhart, my guidance counselor, said he was really proud of my progress, and was thinking about canceling my mandatory weekly meetings with him.

  But when Rob held up his hand like that, and said that this, meaning us, wasn't going to work, it was about all I could do to keep from grabbing that hand and twisting Rob's arm behind his back until he said uncle. All that kept me from doing it, really, was that I have found that boys don't really like it when you do things like this to them, and I wanted Rob to like me. To more than like me.

  So instead of twisting his arm behind his back, I put my hands on my hips, cocked my head, and went, "Does this have something to do with that Gary dude?"

  Rob unfolded his arms and turned back to his bike. "No," he said. "This is between you and me, Mastriani."

  "Because I noticed you don't seem to like him very much."

  "You're sixteen years old," Rob said, to the bike. "Sixteen!"

  "I mean, I guess I could understand why you don't like him. It must be weird to see your mom with some guy other than your dad. But that doesn't mean it's okay to take it out on me."

  "Jess." It always meant trouble when Rob called me by my first name. "You've got to see that this can't go anywhere. I'm on probation, okay? I can't get caught hanging out with some kid—"

  The kid part stung, but I graciously chose to ignore it, observing that Rob, in the words of Great-aunt Rose's hero, Oprah, was in some psychic pain.

  "What I hear you saying," I said, talking the way Mr. Goodhart had advised me to talk when I was in a situation that might turn adversarial, "is that you don't want to see me anymore because you feel that our age and socioeconomic differences are too great—"

  "Don't even tell me that you don't agree," Rob interrupted, in a warning tone. "Otherwise, why haven't you told your parents about me? Huh? Why am I this dark secret in your life? If you were so sure that we have something that could work, you'd have introduced me to them by now."

  "What I am saying to you in response," I went on, as if he hadn't spoken, "is that I believe you are pushing me away because your father pushed you away, and you can't stand to be hurt that way again."

  Rob looked at me over his shoulder. His smokey gray eyes, in the light from the single bulb hanging from the wooden beam overhead, were shadowed.

  "You're nuts," was all he said. But he really seemed to mean it sincerely.

  "Rob," I said, taking a step toward him. "I just want you to know, I am not like your dad. I will never leave you."

  "Because you're a freaking psycho," Rob said.

  "No," I said. "That's not why. It's because I lo—"

  "Don't!" he said, thrusting the rag out at me like it was a weapon. There was a look of naked panic on his face. "Don't say it! Mastriani, I am warning you—"

  "—ve you."

  "I told you"—He wadded the rag up and threw it viciously into a far corner of the barn—"not to say it."

  "I'm sorry," I said, gravely. "But I am afraid my unbridled passion was simply too great to hold in check a moment longer."

  A second later it appeared that in actuality Rob was the one suffering from the unbridled passion, not me. At least if the way he grabbed me by the shoulders, dragged me toward him, and started kissing me was any indication.

  While it was, of course, highly gratifying to be kissed by a young man who was clearly so incapable of controlling his tremendous ardor for me, it has to be remembered that we were kissing in a barn, which at the end of November is not the warmest place to be at night. Furthermore, it wasn't like there were any comfy couches or beds nearby for him to throw me down on or anything. I suppose we could have done it in the hay, but

  a) eew, and

  b) my passion for Rob is not that unbridled.

  I mean, sex is a big enough step in any relationship without doing it in an old barn. Um, no thank you. I am willing to wait until the moment is right—such as prom night. In the unlikely event I am ever invited to prom. Which, considering that my boyfriend is already a high school graduate, seems unlikely. Unless of course I invite him.

  But again, eew.

  "I think I should go home now," I said, the next time we both came up for air.

  "That," Rob said, resting his forehead against mine and breathing hard, "would probably be a good idea."

  So I went in and said thank you to Rob's mom, who was sitting on the couch with Just-Call-Me-Gary watching TV in a snuggly sort of position that, had Rob seen it, might just have sent him over the edge. Fortunately, however, he did not see it. And I did not tell him about it, either.

  "Well," I said to him, as I climbed behind the wheel of my mom's car. "Seeing as how we aren't broken up anymore, do you want to do something Saturday? Like go see a movie or whatever?"

  "Gosh, I don't know," Rob said. "I thought you might be busy with your good friend Joanne."

  "Look," I said. It was so cold out that my breath was coming out in little white puffs, but I didn't care. "My parents have a lot to deal with right now. I mean, there's the restaurant, and Mike dropping out of Harvard. . . ."

  "You're never going to tell them about me, are you?" Rob's gray eyes bore into me.

  "Just let me give them a chance to adjust to the idea," I said. "I mean, there's the whole thing with Douglas and his job, and Great-aunt Rose, and—"

  "And you and the psychic thing," he reminded me, with just the faintest trace of bitterness. "Don't forget you and the psychic thing."

  "Right," I said. "Me and the psychic thing." The one thing I could never forget, no matter how much I tried.

  "Look, you better get going," Rob said, straightening up. "I'll follow behind, and make sure you get home okay."

  "You don't have to—"

  "Mastriani," he said. "Just shut up and drive."

  And so I did.

&nb
sp; Only it turned out we didn't get very far.

  C H A P T E R

  4

  Not, may I point here and now, because of my poor driving skills. As I think I've stated before, I am an extremely good driver.

  But I didn't know that at first. That I wasn't being pulled over on account of my driving ability, or lack thereof. All I knew was one minute I was cruising along the dark, empty country road that ran from Rob's house back into town, with Rob purring along behind me on his Indian. And the next, I rounded a curve to find the entire road blocked off by emergency vehicles—county sheriff's SUVs, police cruisers, highway patrol … even an ambulance. My face was bathed in flashing red and white. All I could think was, Whoa! I was only going eighty, I swear!

  Of course it was a forty-mile-an-hour zone. But come on. It was Thanksgiving, for crying out loud. There hadn't been another soul on the road for the past ten miles. . . .

  A skinny sheriff's deputy waved me to the shoulder. I obeyed, my palms sweaty. My God, was all I could think. All this because I was driving without a license? Who knew they were so strict?

  The officer who strolled up to the car after I pulled over was one I recognized from the night Mastriani's burned down. I didn't remember his name, but I knew he was a nice guy—the kind of guy who maybe wouldn't bust my chops too badly for driving illegally. He shined a flashlight first on me, then into the backseat of my mom's car. I hoped he didn't think the stuff my mom had in the backseat—boxes of cassette tapes by Carly Simon and Billy Joel, and some videos of romantic comedies she kept forgetting to return to Blockbuster—were mine. I am so not the Carly Simon, Sleepless in Seattle type.

  "Jessica, isn't it?" the cop said, when I put the window down. "Aren't you Joe Mastriani's daughter?"

  "Yes, sir," I said. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Rob pull up right behind me on his Indian. His long legs were stretched out so that his feet rested on the ground, keeping him and the bike upright while he waited for me to get waved through the roadblock. Rob was gazing out at the cornfield to the right of us. The brown, withered stalks were bathed in the flashing red-and-white lights from the dozen squad cars and ambulance parked alongside the road. A few yards deeper into the field, a giant floodlight had been set up on a metal pole, and was shining down on something that we couldn't see, with the tall corn in the way.

  "Too bad you have to work on Thanksgiving," I said to the cop. I was trying to be way nice to him, on account of my not having a driver's license, and all. Meanwhile, my palms were now so sweaty, I could barely grip the wheel. I had no idea what happens to people caught driving without a license, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't be very nice.

  "Yeah," the cop said. "Well, you know. Listen, we kinda got a situation over here. Where you coming from, anyway?"

  "Oh, I was just having dinner over at my friend's house," I said, and told him the address of Rob's house. "That's him," I added, helpfully, pointing behind me.

  Rob had, by this time, switched off his engine and gotten down from his bike. He strolled up to the police officer with his hands at his sides instead of in the pockets of his leather jacket, I guess to show he wasn't holding a weapon or anything. Rob is pretty leery of cops, on account of having been arrested before.

  "What's going on, Officer?" Rob wanted to know, all casual-like. You could tell he, like me, was worried about the whole driving without a license thing. But what kind of police force would set up a roadblock to catch license-less drivers on Thanksgiving? I mean, that was going way above and beyond the call of duty, if you asked me.

  "Oh, we got a tip a little while ago," the cop said to Rob. "Regarding some suspicious activity out here. Came out to have a look around." I noticed he hadn't taken out his little ticket book to write me up. Maybe, I thought. Maybe this isn't about me.

  Especially considering the floodlight. I could see people traipsing out from and then back into the cornfield. They appeared to be carrying things, toolboxes and stuff.

  "You see anything strange?" the police officer asked me. "When you were driving out here from town?"

  "No," I said. "No, I didn't see anything."

  It was a clear night. . . . Cold, but cloudless. Overhead was a moon, full, or nearly so. You could see pretty far, even though it was only about an hour shy of midnight, by the light of that moon.

  Except that there wasn't much to see. Just the big cornfield, stretching out from the side of the road like a dark, rustling sea. Rising above it, off in the distance, was a hill covered thickly in trees. The backwoods. Where my dad used to take us camping, before Douglas got sick, and Mikey decided he liked computers better than baiting fishhooks, and I developed a pretty severe allergy to going to the bathroom out of doors.

  People lived in the backwoods … if you wanted to call the conditions they endured there living. If you ask me, anything involving an outhouse is on the same par with camping.

  But not everyone who got laid off when the plastics factory closed was as lucky as Rob's mom, who found another job—thanks to me—pretty quickly. Some of them, too proud to accept welfare from the state, had retreated into those woods, and were living in shacks, or worse.

  And some of them, my dad once told me, weren't even living there because they didn't have the money to move somewhere with an actual toilet. Some of them lived there because they liked it there.

  Apparently not everyone has as fond an attachment as I do to indoor plumbing.

  "When you drove through, coming from town," the police officer said, "what time would that have been?"

  I told him I thought it had been after eight, but well before nine. He nodded thoughtfully, and wrote down what I said, which was not much, considering I hadn't seen anything. Rob, standing by my mom's car, blew on his gloved hands. It was pretty cold, sitting there with the window rolled down. I felt especially bad for Rob, who was just going to have to climb back on his motorcycle when we were through being questioned and ride behind me all the way into town and then back to his house, without even a chance to get warmed up. Unless of course I invited him into my mom's car. Just for a few minutes. You know. To defrost.

  Suddenly I noticed that those police officers, hurrying in and out of that cornfield? Yeah, those weren't toolboxes they were carrying. No, not at all.

  Suddenly my palms were sweaty for a whole different reason than before.

  Let me just say that in Indiana, they are always finding bodies in cornfields. Cornfields seem to be the preferred dumping ground for victims of foul play by Midwestern killers. That's because until the farmer who owns the field cuts down all the stalks to plant new rows, you can't really see what all is going on in there.

  Well, suddenly I had a pretty good idea what was going on in this particular cornfield.

  "Who is it?" I asked the policeman, in a high-pitched voice that didn't really sound like my own.

  The cop was still busy writing down what I'd said about not having seen anyone. He didn't bother to pretend that he didn't know what I was talking about. Nor did he try to convince me I was wrong.

  "Nobody you'd know," he said, without even looking up.

  But I had a feeling I did know. Which was why I suddenly undid my seatbelt and got out of the car.

  The cop looked up when I did that. He looked more than up. He looked pretty surprised. So did Rob.

  "Mastriani," Rob said, in a cautious voice. "What are you doing?"

  Instead of replying, I started walking toward the harsh white glow of the floodlight, out in the middle of that cornfield.

  "Wait a minute." The cop put away his notebook and pen. "Miss? Um, you can't go over there."

  The moon was bright enough that I could see perfectly well even without all the flashing red-and-white lights. I walked rapidly along the side of the road, past clusters of cops and sheriff's deputies. Some of them looked up at me in surprise as I breezed past. The ones who did look up seemed startled, like they'd seen something disturbing. The disturbing thing appeared to be me, striding toward t
he floodlight in the corn.

  "Whoa, little missy." One of the cops detached himself from the group he was in, and grabbed my arm. "Where do you think you're going?"

  "I'm going to look," I said. I recognized this police officer, too, only not from the fire at Mastriani's. I recognized this one from Joe Junior's, where I sometimes bussed tables on weekends. He always got a large pie, half sausage and half pepperoni.

  "I don't think so," said Half-Sausage, Half-Pepperoni. "We got everything under control. Why don't you get back in your car, like a good little girl, and go on home."

  "Because," I said, my breath coming out in white puffs. "I think I might know him."

  "Come on now," Half-Sausage, Half-Pepperoni said, in a kindly voice. "There's nothing to see. Nothing to see at all. You go on home like a good girl. Son?" He said this last to Rob, who'd come hurrying up behind him. "This your little girlfriend? You be a good boy, now, and take her on home."

  "Yes, sir," Rob said, taking hold of my arm the same way the police officer had. "I'll do that, sir." To me, he hissed, "Are you nuts, Mastriani? Let's go, before they ask to see your license."

  Only I wouldn't budge. Being only five feet tall and a hundred pounds, I am not exactly a difficult person to lift up and sling around, as Rob had illustrated a couple of times. But I had gotten pretty mad upon both those occasions, and Rob seemed to remember this, since he didn't try it now. Instead, he followed me with nothing more than a deep sigh as I barreled past the police officers, and toward that white light in the corn.

  None of the emergency workers gathered around the body noticed me, at first. The ones on the outskirts of the crime scene hadn't exactly been expecting gawkers this far out from town, and on Thanksgiving night, no less. So it wasn't like they'd been looking out for rubber neckers. There wasn't even any yellow emergency tape up. I breezed past them without any problem. . . .

  And then halted so suddenly that Rob, following behind, collided into me. His oof drew the attention of more than a few officers, who looked up from what they were doing, and went, "What the—"