“What the hell?” Aria whispered.
“What?”
“Her.” She nodded down the road where a woman was jogging our way.
Any normal kid might not wonder about a woman running on a quiet road, but Aria and I were far from normal.
“Have you ever seen her before?” I asked.
“No. You?”
“Never.” In the nearly three years we’d been living in the junkyard, not once had we encountered a jogger or pedestrian of any sort on this road. Not once. People didn’t walk around here. And there were many, many roads to run on that were better than ours.
One neighbor, farthest from the junkyard, had five pit bulls. They were contained by the thick fence that surrounded their property, but those dogs loved to bark. The ruckus they could create still startled me at times.
Then there was the neighbor who’d planted the jungle to block out the world. Because the trees and shrubs were so overgrown, walking past the mouth of their driveway was borderline creepy, so we always walked on the opposite side of the street.
The junkyard itself had enough KEEP OUT signs to shingle a mansion’s roof.
Nothing about this road was welcoming. It screamed go away. And this woman running did not belong.
Her dark hair was trapped under a headband that was as electric blue as her leggings. The white of her shirt was nearly blinding under the morning sun. Her fuchsia shoes crunched on the rocks that littered the pavement. Not even the city’s street sweepers came this way.
She was too clean. Too colorful. Too happy.
“Morning.” The woman smiled and waved as she passed us.
Aria and I didn’t respond. We stared at her, our necks twisting to keep her in view as she jogged on by.
“Think she’s lost?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Aria muttered, her legs moving faster. “It’s weird, right? Or am I just getting paranoid?”
“Then I’m paranoid too.”
Maybe other seventeen-year-old kids didn’t get gut feelings, but my sister and I had learned a long time ago to trust our instincts.
“Maybe she just got turned around,” Aria said. “One jog down our road and she’ll never be back.”
“Yeah.”
On cue, the dogs started howling and snapping at the chain link. Aria and I both paused enough to glance back.
The woman yelped and leapt away from the fence. Her hand pressed against her heart. Yet she didn’t turn back. She kept on running, getting closer and closer to the junkyard with each step.
“Come on.” I took Aria’s arm. “You’ll be late.”
She checked her black wristwatch, one that matched mine. “What are you going to do before your shift?”
“I’m going to hit the store. Get some bread and maybe applesauce or something. We’re almost out of peanut butter too.”
“We need cat food.”
“Okay.”
When Katherine had lived with us, she’d adopted this stray cat. The beast was unfriendly to everyone but her, but when she’d left, she’d begged us to keep feeding it. So Aria and I bought the damn thing food, feeding it enough to survive but not so much that it would lose the incentive to hunt mice.
We reached the edge of town and walked past two industrial buildings, then turned down the block that would lead us to an arterial. When we got to the first stoplight, I hugged her goodbye. “Have fun at work.”
“You too. See you later.”
She went one way and I went the other, making my way the seven blocks to the closest grocery store. My shopping didn’t take long. I didn’t have the money to fill a cart or the means to get it home, so I picked out the few items on my list, made it through checkout and found a bench outside to load my haul into my backpack.
I was just zipping it up when a flash of electric blue caught my eye.
The jogger.
I stood straight and faced her.
She was staring at me, hovering beside the store’s brick wall. Her face wasn’t red. Her chest was dry, not even a sheen of sweat above her breasts. No way this lady had gone for a strenuous run.
The hairs on the nape of my neck stood on end. With a fast swoop, I swung my bag over a shoulder and scurried away, dodging the few people going in and coming out of the grocery store.
I didn’t look back to see if she’d followed as I hurried to the diner, where I ducked in the rear employee entrance and let the door shut with a slam.
“Hey.” One of the cooks spotted me as he came out of the walk-in refrigerator.
“Hey.” I forced a shaky smile, hovering by the door until he left. Then, when I was alone, I cracked the door open and scanned the alley. The dumpster was overflowing and due to be picked up today. The cars parked next to the building all belonged to the staff.
Besides a crow pecking at a clump of dry grass, the alley was devoid of any life. No lady in electric blue.
“You’re early.”
I jumped at my boss’s voice and let the door close again, turning to face her. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Dishes are waiting.”
I nodded and got to work, stowing my backpack in a small cubby. Then I tied on a grease-stained apron and took my place at the restaurant-grade dishwasher, spending my day scrubbing away syrup and ketchup from thick, heavy ceramic plates.
When Aria arrived an hour before my shift ended, she poked her head in to say hello before retreating into the diner to wait at a small table and drink a Dr. Pepper. The waitresses were supposed to charge for soda and refills, but they never made Aria pay.
The hour she waited was the longest of the day. All I wanted to do was tell her about the creeptastic jogger, and by the time my shift ended, the nervous energy was making my bones rattle. The second we stepped outside, I told her the whole story.
“Do you think she’s a cop?” I asked. “Like, maybe undercover or something. Or a private investigator? Maybe the sick fucker hired her to find us.”
The sick fucker. Our uncle. Aria and I referred to him with a variety of expletives, only speaking his name when necessary.
“Do you think he’s been looking all this time?”
“I don’t know.” The worry on her face made the knot in my stomach bunch tighter. “He’s crazy.”
And after all he’d done—to us, to her—there was no telling how psycho he’d gone after we’d run away. “Let’s just . . . get home.”
Home to the junkyard, where there was a padlock to keep people out. Where there was a maze of scrap metal and broken cars to hide in.
Where there was Karson.
We walked so fast that both Aria and I were panting as we squeezed through the side gate. Between the two of us, we’d kept a constant eye behind us. There’d been no sight of the woman in blue in town, and when we’d hit the road to the junkyard, there’d been no sign of anyone. Even the dogs were absent, probably down for an afternoon nap or snack inside with their owners.
“Tomorrow, we should go in even earlier. Like, mix up our routine,” Aria said as we unloaded our things into the truck.
“Yeah. Good idea. And maybe we don’t walk home right after work. We could go to a park or something.”
She nodded and kicked off her shoes. Then she plucked my newest book off the stack. “Can I read this?”