He scared me. I very nearly peed my pants.
Wait a minute. He hadn’t scared me that much. I just needed to go.
“Stoat,” I said equably, “lookie here.” I stood up, came around the table so he could see me, and toed my unlovely sneakers off. Standing on my bare, blistered feet, I said, “Please let me go to the privy like this. You’re a fair man and you’ve got good sense. You don’t want me stinking up this shack and you know I’m not going to run away in this swamp without any shoes.”
I’m sure the “fair man” and “good sense” flatteries were key. Stoat hesitated, staring at my toes as if he found them repulsive, but finally he growled, “Fine. Just take them smelly shoes away from me.”
“Okay!”
“Say, ‘Yes, sir.’”
“Yes, sir!”
“Say, ‘Thank you, sir.’”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Go.”
I picked up my much-abused shoes and placed them against the wall farthest from Stoat, where he could see them. Then I started toward the door, but I felt something whiz past my backside and turned to look. Stoat had thrown his big, vicious knife at my shoes. If he had double vision, like he said, it didn’t seem to be slowing him down much. His knife had gone right through one sneaker and pinned it to the floor.
“Bring my buck knife back,” Stoat ordered, but I headed out the door, pretending not to have heard.
“I said bring it back!”
The tone of his command stabbed me in the gut, and I knew he would kill me if I didn’t obey. I scuttled back inside, yanked the knife out of my sneaker, and returned it to him, all the time trying to muster the will and strength to kill him with it instead. But I couldn’t. Because I badly had to go pee. How humbling is that?
Finally out the back door, picking my way carefully toward the privy, I nevertheless cut my foot on something sharp hidden by old live oak leaves. It bled a little, and hurt. But not as much as my heart. How could I possibly survive Stoat? And what had become of Justin?
FIFTEEN
Seated beside his brother on the flight to Tallahassee, Forrest looked at Quinn and asked, “The iPad, is it really for work or just to keep me from talking at you?”
“Both,” Quinn replied at once, without looking up from the tablet, but divulging just a hint of a smile.
“So what exactly is it that you don’t want me to talk at you about?”
Quinn actually turned his head to answer. “Forrie,” he chided, very dignified in his three-piece suit, “where’s your grammar? You mean, ‘What is it about which I do not wish you to talk?’”
“‘That is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put,’” retorted Forrest promptly, quoting Winston Churchill. Both brothers enjoyed their verbal sparring, although it had been a lot more serious in their teen years, all about sibling rivalry—well, mostly on his part, Forrest admitted to himself. As always younger, shorter, chunkier, and grungier than his very successful brother, Forrest sat next to the Suit, wearing khakis and shirtsleeves, uncomfortable in the airplane’s narrow seat and also within himself. “Are you going to answer my question?”
“What do you think?” Quinn parried.
“I think, as usual, you do not want to talk about the dysfunctional family.”
“You mean Jeb and Derry?”
“Them too.” Their perennially married grandparents were at least as dysfunctional as their divorced parents. “What did they say?” Quinn had been the one to phone them.
Quinn looked away, checking out the cloudscape. Of course he had the window seat. All Forrie could see from his seat was a rather murky horizon.
Finally Quinn gave an oblique reply. “I think they’re still mad at Mom.”
Her own parents. Bummer. “What do they think is going on with her?”
“They have no clue and neither do I.”
“And they don’t care.”
“They didn’t say,” Quinn hedged. “They’re happy to leave it up to you and I.”
“Grammar, Quinn.” Forrie pounced on this unexpected opportunity. “Objective case.”
Obedient to their longtime rules of verbal engagement, Quinn corrected himself. “Okay, they’re happy to leave whatever’s going on with our mother up to you and me.”
“And what the heck do you think is going on with Mom?”
“It is a capital error, my dear Watson,” lectured Quinn, waggling his eyebrows, “to theorize with insufficient data.”
“Suit, come on.” Tired of the game, knowing damn well Quinn used it to keep his family at a comfortable emotional distance, Forrest gave Quinn a long, level look that would not let go. “What do you think, really?”