Companions of the Night by Vivian Vande Velde

Author:Vivian Vande Velde
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-11-02T18:35:06+00:00

Chapter Eleven

AT THE CREEK Ethan ripped open Regina's pillow, shaking out a cloud of down before tossing the empty pillowcase into the water.

He dropped the nightgown farther along, then left the creekbed, veering off through the underbrush They weren't backtrailing, and Kerry could only hope Ethan knew where he was going She had no sense of where they were in relation to the car.

And Ethan wasn't talking to her. He hadn't said a word—besides "Give me the pillow"—since they'd left Regina's body at the clearing. He was walking faster than she could comfortably keep up with, but she didn't want to hold on to his jacket the way she'd done earlier. And she certainly wasn't going to beg him to slow down when he could easily see for himself she was having trouble. She tramped along behind him, snapping twigs, skidding down embankments with a flurry of dead leaves, uprooting plants when they climbed a steep incline, and puffing open-mouthed with the exertion. She didn't dare let the distance between them grow to more than a few feet or she'd likely misjudge where he'd stepped and land in ground that was boggy rather than just wet. The only way she could keep up was noisily, and if he didn't like it, he could say so.

He didn't say a thing.

She had a chance to catch her breath when Ethan stopped to set one of the sheets on the soggy kind of ground she'd been avoiding. He picked up a rock, big enough that a normal man probably would have had a hard time budging it, and hurled it so that it landed on the sheet. Both began to sink immediately.

Then they were back to walking.

Just when Kerry had begun to give up hope that they'd ever find their way out of the woods, they finally reached the road, the stolen Shadow just a few feet from where they'd emerged.

"What about...?" She gestured vaguely to the other sheet, the comforter, and the quilt he was still carrying.

He threw them into the backseat, which she took as his subtle way of telling her not to worry, that they'd dispose of them later. And, indeed, as they passed through Spencer-port—once more heading toward Rochester—he flung the denim jacket out the window without even slowing down.

He still wasn't talking when they returned the Shadow and exchanged it for his original Skylark.

"It'd be interesting," she told him, "to be here when the customer and the mechanics start arguing about the mileage and the half-empty gas tank and all the mud."

Still no answer, despite two attempts at conversation on her part. Sulking, she figured. Be like that. She crossed her arms over her chest and stared out the window.

She expected that they'd turn around and head back toward Brockport, toward finally doing something about finding Ian and Dad, but he continued on to Rochester. They stopped at an observation point that looked out over the Erie Canal, where he weighted down the second sheet with a rock and threw it into the water.

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