thirty-six

We turn onto a side road and pull to the shoulder. Dawn is breaking, but it’s still quiet.

“I think I should go home,” I say.

Jude turns off the ignition and twists to look back at me. “I scared you.”

I climb from the bike and remove the helmet. “I’d just—”

“You can say it. I did. I could see that. I have a temper.”

“That wasn’t a temper.”

“Yes, it was.” He climbs off the bike and puts up the kickstand. “The first time I reacted like that, I was eight. I went off on a guy at school. I can’t even remember why. We got into it, and I lost my temper. He had to go to the hospital.”

I tense. “What did you do to him?”

“Cracked a couple of ribs.”

I relax. “A schoolyard fight.”

“Just because I didn’t put the guy in traction doesn’t mean I’m okay with what I did, Winter. Ten years later, I still can’t look him in the eye, even if he’s long over it. I lost my temper. Totally lost it, and if no one had intervened, it could have been a lot worse. My mother freaked. She pulled me from school for a month, had all these assessments done. When shrinks tried to shrug it off, she’d find another one until she was absolutely convinced I wasn’t okay.”

Had she seen signs of trouble with Lennon, even then? Signs that made her worry about Jude?

“She didn’t want me embarrassing the family,” he says, as if I asked the question aloud. “Considering where we came from, me and Lennon, sometimes I think she’s always watching.”

Watching for signs that the boys’ biological parents came from a place not much better than Reeve’s End. As if Mrs. Bishop adopted children who weren’t quite as high up on the evolutionary scale as she was, and perhaps even after pouring all that money into smoothing their rough edges, it was like putting a Neanderthal in a fancy suit and teaching him proper English, and underneath it all lurked that half-wild creature.

I hate his mother for that. Which isn’t fair—I’ve never met the woman and might be totally misjudging. I still hate her.

Yet something is wrong here, at least with Lennon. And it’s a lot more disturbing than a propensity for violent outbursts.

“So lots of therapy,” Jude continues. “The upshot being that two counselors recommended martial arts for self-discipline. My mother said no—she didn’t consider those real sports. But for once our father argued. Mom finally agreed I could get training. Just me; not Lennon. I was good at it. Really good. When my coach suggested I compete, though, my mother fired him. I kept training on my own. It taught me discipline, how to control my temper. Also taught me how to defend myself without going off like I did on that kid in school.”

“Okay.”

He eyes me. “You think I went too far with those two tonight.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You do. You think I shouldn’t have broken his wrist. I shouldn’t have stabbed the other guy. And this is where we’re going to disagree. I tried to avoid a fight. When it happened, I ended it quickly. And the truth, Winter, is that I’m okay with that. I don’t regret what I did to them. Which is probably why you’re wondering if Lennon is the only brother you should be scared of. Maybe you’re right. But I’m not going to apologize, and I’m not going to say I’ll never do something like that again. If you want to leave, I understand. Hop back on the bike, and I’ll take you home.”

When I hesitate, he says, “All right. I’ll call you a cab, then. I’ll cover the fare.”

He just broke a guy’s wrist. Stabbed another guy in the leg. That should be a clear sign to run, as fast as I can. But his “victims” were threatening me with worse, and while I think I could have gotten away if Jude hadn’t shown up, my attempts to defend myself had only riled them up. He’d stopped them.

I still reel at the suddenness of that violence, the almost perfunctory way he handled the situation. Face a threat; put it down. It’s the same part of me that still bristles recalling how he threw me aside in the cabin. He had no compunction about hurting me. Not if I came at him.

I don’t know how to handle that.

I’m accustomed to Bert, someone who lashes out in anger, needing no provocation. Someone who’ll blame me after the fact—you should know to stay out of my way when I’ve been drinking. Someone who’ll deny the damage—stop giving me that look, Winter, it was just a tap. Endless blame and denial. I’m trying here, and you need to understand that.

When I don’t reply, Jude says, “I need to make sure you’re okay, Winter. That means I’m a little stuck here. If you don’t want me around, I should leave you alone. But that isn’t safe. So either you let me drive you to town or you let me call you a cab and wait until it comes.”

I want to find Edie. I want to find Lennon, whatever he may have done.

And I want to stay with Jude. Even if I felt I could pursue this alone, I don’t want to. That’s the hardest part.

Jude is a puzzle I have to solve. A puzzle I feel, uncomfortably, that I need to solve. I don’t understand him, and I want to.

That’s not because he’s a cute boy. Lennon is the kind of guy who, if he went to my school, I would have a bit of a crush on. Nothing I would ever act upon. But I would sneak glances at him, and I would think he was cute and funny and charming and sweet and smart, and that it would be nice to get to know him better.

Jude is more. He is cute. He is smart. He can even be sweet. But he’s more than all of that and it’s the rest that I want to get to know better. I just want…

I don’t even know what I want. To solve the puzzle, I guess. It goes back to that, and I don’t know if that’s reducing him to an enigma I need to crack. I have never in my life met someone I want to understand the way I do Jude.

“I know you don’t want to discuss Lennon,” I say. “You want to just throw the possibility out there and consider me warned. But we need to discuss exactly what we’re saying when we say he might have lied. Exactly how he could be involved. If you think he took Edie—”

“No,” he says. “I absolutely do not. No matter what’s happened since I left, it can’t have gotten that bad.”

“Which means things have gotten worse since you left.”

He flinches.

“I’m not blaming—” I begin.

“No. Honesty, right? Yes, he’s been different. Secretive. He was never like that with me. We had an agreement—no secrets. So I thought he was trying to get my attention. I’ve always been the one who gets him out of trouble, and the surest way to bring me running back is to make me worry.”

“You thought he was manipulating you into coming home.”

He nods. “It’s been hard on him. Me leaving. He doesn’t understand. I’m not sure I understand. But yeah, I thought he was acting secretive, knowing that’s the one thing that would get me home: him needing me.”

Except he did need you. He always needed you. That’s the problem. You feel responsible, but at some point, you need to step away. Yet if you do that and something goes wrong, you’ll never forgive yourself. Which is why you came back, guns blazing, to do whatever it took to find him.

I don’t say that aloud. He already knows it.

“You don’t believe Lennon could have hurt Edie,” I say. “But his story about helping her is clearly a lie, and she is missing. So the alternative is…” I think it through, piecing the clues together, and then say, “A middle ground. He’s involved but not the perpetrator. He’s gotten mixed up in something. Mixed up with the person responsible.”

“The person…?”

“What if Lennon knows the person who did this. Maybe a friend who shares his…” I struggle for the right word. “Proclivities,” I say, and I think it’s the best one, but Jude flinches again so I say, “His interests, impulses. Someone who recognizes that in him and got Lennon mixed up in something he didn’t condone.”

As I say the words, those pieces clunk into place, backfilling the story. “Which is why he ran. Why he was beaten before he escaped. Why he said he could fix it. Because he knows the guy responsible.”

Jude blinks, mouth slightly ajar.

“It makes sense, doesn’t it? As a theory.”

“It does.” He takes time to do some thinking himself and says, “If he made a new friend, another guy who shares his…his issues. Someone who was ready to go further. Lennon meets him, and it’s like…like meeting a girl you know is no good for you but you can’t stay away. You keep it a secret from everyone.”

“The other guy sees the connection he’s looking for. If you’re messed up, you want to believe others are, too—proof you’re not a freak. He thinks Lennon wants what he does. So he kidnaps Edie. Tells Lennon to meet him.”

“Lennon finds out what this guy has done and he freaks. They fight. Lennon escapes. You find him and he has to make up a bullshit story.”

“Which convinces me not to go to the police or your parents. He’s afraid of anyone finding out he was involved. He wanted to save Edie and fix it as much as he can.”

“Then he realizes he’s endangering you. So he leaves to go resolve it alone.”

And after that? Well, neither of us speculates about after that. Lennon goes back to “fix” the situation and then two days pass and we hear nothing from him. Then someone starts stalking me.

Is Lennon still trying to find Edie?

Has he been taken captive himself?

Or worse?

If it played out as we think, then Edie is still alive. She is the first person this guy has ever taken. He was waiting until he had a partner, only to have that partner reject him.

“That’s why he’s coming after you,” Jude says, in that uncanny way of his, as if he’s answering an unspoken question. “Because he saw you with Lennon,” he continues. “This guy saw that and if he’s pissed with Lennon, he’s going to target you.” He goes quiet. Then he says, “But it fits, doesn’t it? It fits everything we know.”

I nod, and he smiles. A smile so real it startles me, as I catch a glimpse of the guy I saw in older pictures, the ones when they were children, ones that caught him off guard, talking to his brother or scoring a touchdown or backstage after accepting an award. Those rare, real grins from a rare, real boy.

This theory doesn’t mean Lennon is okay. If he got caught up in this, he has problems. He needs help. But he’s still the person Jude knew him to be, under all the shadows and the confusion.

“All right, then,” he says as he gets to his feet. “So the next step is to investigate this theory. First…” He checks his watch. “First, you can get some sleep while I talk to his friends. Okay?”

I’m not sleeping anytime soon, but I can’t accompany him to talk to their friends—it’d raise too many questions. I agree and he drives me back to Reeve’s End.