Patricia Geary by Strange Toys (epub)

Author:Strange Toys (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“What’d you tell your aunt?” Darlene asked when I picked her up that night in her own car. “Got any reds?”

“Studying at Shaun’s.”

“I said Casey’s, but it’s the same difference. Let’s hope the old bat doesn’t check in with the old bitch.”

“Who cares?” Maybe this was existentialism, my current frame of mind, or maybe it was Buddha resignation. At any rate, my mind was unclouded by trifles. “Look in my makeup bag.”

“Oh, good.” Darlene popped some. “So where is this party anyway? It better be good because we’re missing the one at Mark’s.”

There was a lot of traffic, mostly kids racing around in beach buggies, throwing beer cans and stuff. I lit a cigarette and concentrated on driving carefully. “Oceanside.”

“Oceanside! Look, Pet, what if—”

It was only fair to let her know what was going on, so I gave her the whole story. Well, an expurgated version anyway. By the time we were in Del Mar, she was sympathetic.

“One thing I don’t get, though.”

“What’s that?”

She raked back the top of her hair with her hand. “What are you gonna do when you see this Tommy?”

Good question.

“You go up and accuse him of all that stuff, he’s not too thrilled to see you.”

Not hardly.

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Yes.” Why was the drive taking half the time it had earlier? We were nearly to Leucadia already. At night, it was this terrific expanse of nothingness.

“Or,” Darlene mused, “maybe he knows where your sister is.”

“I told you she disappeared.” My hands were very sticky on the wheel. “Besides, why would he know anything?”

“Geez, Pet, I don’t know! Don’t yell at me. I just said maybe.”

All these things to think about. Darlene turned up the radio, clearly annoyed with me, and I lapsed into speculation. There was the old Best/Worst conundrum to ponder: in any situation that you find yourself unduly anxious over, you could ask yourself what was the very worst thing that could happen and what was the best. In this case, the worst was that Tommy would remember me. No, the worst was that he would somehow hurt me again. No, the worst was that it hadn’t been him and he wouldn’t remember me.

The worst was what Darlene suggested: that he would lead me to Deane?

But wasn’t that the best as well?

Damnation, I hadn’t a clue. I mean, the whole thing was beginning to wear on me, and if I’d been in the car by myself, I think I would have gone ahead and swung the sucker around. But somehow, after dragging Darlene out, quitting didn’t seem right. With another person, you could always believe you were in the midst of adventure, an attitude often difficult to sustain alone. Alone, for instance, it often felt like regular old danger.

“This must be Petey’s.”

Darlene snorted through her nose.

The ramshackle old beach house was not a pretty sight. First off, several of the windows had been tinfoiled over, and one window just had cardboard where the panes used to be. Second, the porch steps were missing. And the guys hanging around on the porch looked like rejects from the Salvation Army.

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