She drove as if her Chevy was starving and the asphalt was its single food source. We passed a house in the rolling brown plains every thirty seconds. Some were in worse shape than others, but none looked occupied.

“You have a name?” she asked.

“Taylor.”

“Taylor what?”

Did I want to answer that? I wasn’t famous (yet). The odds that revealing my last name would endanger me were slim, but I was habitually close with information.

“Why are all these houses boarded? Oh, wait.” We passed a set-back two-story with a car in the drive and a dog tied to a tree. “Not that one. But the rest.”

She shrugged, flipping her hand off the wheel for a second. “Barrington closed, uh… I guess nine years ago? Give or take, so there wasn’t anywhere to work. Folks moved or died eventually. No one’s going to buy a house where they can’t find a job so… here we are.”

A big brick box crept over the horizon, closer than it should have been, as if it had sneaked up on us and whispered, “Boo.”

“Why did you stay?” I asked without thinking.

“This is my home.”

I was glad she couldn’t see my face because my mouth was closed against a ton of shit I didn’t say. Like, you could model anywhere, or you’re staying for your boyfriend, aren’t you? Which was followed by weirdly compulsive offers to dump him and come back with me. She’d said about ten words to me, half of them questions about whether or not I was a serial killer, yet I wanted to hear her voice again and again.

“Your parents from here?” I asked so she’d talk again.

“My family goes way back. Most left, but my sister and I stayed. I can’t really see living anywhere else.”

That seemed like a huge failure of imagination.

We got close enough to see the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence around the factory. The yellow warning signs became visible as the road got rutted, but we were still a quarter mile away. The car rocked, and Harper had to slow down to a less death-defying speed. I opened the window. Vs and Ws of screeching birds headed south.

She stopped in front of a yellow-and-black arm blocking the road, next to a boarded-up guardhouse.

“Okay, you have to drive.” She put the car in park. “When the thing goes up, you have to go through fast.”

“Okay.”

She got out, and I slid over.

She pointed at me through the window. “Put it in drive. You have to go right away. I mean it.”

I put the car in drive. She nodded and gave me the thumbs-up.

Disturbing a nest of crickets or cicadas or some other noisy, hopping bug, she reached around the base of the arm and did something I couldn’t see. The yellow-and-black striped arm jerked up violently. I went through.

Barely. I hit the gas and sped through. The back of the car was scarcely past when the arm slammed down with a high-pitched squeal.

“Jesus.”

Hair flying behind her, she crossed in front of the car, giving me two thumbs up.

Yeah. That deserved a thumbs-up. My life was falling apart, but that had been fun.

She got in the passenger seat. “Great. Take this to the gate. Then we can get out and walk around.”

“Can you get me inside?”

I had no reason to go inside, but it wasn’t as though I had any idea what I was looking for anyway.

“That’s why we’re here, right?” Like a tour guide with nothing better to say, she pointed toward a bank of tall reeds to the left. “River’s over there. I live just on the other side.”

She smelled like ozone, the buzz of the air before it rained, crackling with the pressure of something about to happen as it pushed against the few seconds preceding it.

“Pull over here.” She directed me left, around the chain-link fence and away from the parking lot.

The factory was predictably huge. Red brick. Big windows behind steel grates. What had once been graffiti dripped from as high as a kid’s arm could reach, as if it had just been melted by cleaner but not wiped away. BARRINGTON GLASS WORKS stretched across the top in chipped green paint.

“This thing steers like a bumper car.”

“How does a bumper car steer? Pull over by that concrete slab thing.”

“It slides when you turn, like it’s got no relation to the actual world. And it shimmies left.” I put the car in park. “Is this even safe?”

She got out without answering. I rushed to follow her, taking the key out of the ignition as she ran her hand along the length of the fence. It rattled like chains.

“Wait up.” I jogged after her. “Where are you taking me?”

“To the back.”

“You’re not going to cut me up into little pieces are you?” I handed her the car key.

She smiled slightly as she took the key. Just enough to let me know she was considering it.

“So, you came into town in such a rush, you didn’t figure out where to stay. Can’t tell me why you want to get into an old bottling plant. Got on a snazzy jacket.” She whipped around the corner. “Driving a rented Caddy. Those are really nice shoes, and you don’t even care that they’re getting full of dirt.”

“I have money. Never said I didn’t, Miss Diamond Earrings.”

She stopped short by a gate with a lock. “Tell me what you want here.”

As far as I was concerned, I’d been the picture of patience and charm up until that moment. I hadn’t pushed her to help me. I’d been nice. I hadn’t freaked out half as much as I wanted over the fact that a trapdoor had opened up under my life.

“Are you done helping me?” I asked.

“If you’re not here to buy the place?”

“I told you—”

“Everett Fitzgerald’s talking about buying it so…” She drifted off as if I could infer the rest.

The Fitz I knew was eccentric, brilliant, two generations from royalty. I couldn’t believe he’d ever heard of Barrington Glass Works. Not for a minute. Fitz was in the business of eliminating traffic and solving world peace. Not bottling.

“Since when?” I asked.

“Heard about it a month ago from a realtor in Doverton. He needs it to build the personal helicopters is what we think. He’s coming in three weeks to look at it.” She glistened with excitement. “When I first saw you, I thought you might be scouting for him.”

“I’m not.”

She shrugged, clearly disappointed.

“I’m not going to hurt you or the property. I’m not going to buy the plant. I’m not going to do anything you expect. In an hour, I’m going to be a crazy story you tell your friends. Are you going to let me in or not?”

“No.”

My patience was held together with scotch tape, and it was getting loose. “Why not?”

“I don’t have the code.” She tilted her head toward the padlock. It was the size of a box of pushpins and had a row of buttons.

“Okay, you know what? This was fun. But I could have done it myself. I could have driven here with my GPS, parked at the guardhouse, walked here, and been in the same barrel of shit as I am now. No, I would have been better off because I would have had a car. So, no, I don’t want to cut you into little pieces. It’s not my thing. But my God, if I were a cut-a-girl-into-little-pieces kind of guy, this would be the day I started.”

She raised an eyebrow. Daring me. She was daring me to cut her into little pieces, which wasn’t even on my list of shit to do.

“Let me see this.” I got my hands on the padlock.

It attached the ends of a heavy chain, which was wrapped around the poles of the gate. It had a code, which meant it could be cracked, right? I took out my phone to check the Tor boards. Maybe someone had a master code that worked.

No signal.

“Is this the only gate?”

“As far as I know.”

“Do you have tools in the trunk? A hacksaw? Stick of dynamite?” I looked at the top edge of the fence. There was a break in the barbed wire. Maybe I could get in there. I hooked my fingers on the chain link just above my head.

“No.”

I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t think tools would do it either. I also didn’t believe she didn’t know how to get in. There was enough graffiti to account for a hardware store full of spray paint.

“Rebecca or Carlyle would have the key, I guess. She’s the realtor over in Doverton, and he does security for everything around here. We can call them if we go back.”

“Yeah. No. Don’t worry about it.”

I took out my pocketknife and pinched out the awl. I didn’t have time to pretend a normal way in was going to work, nor did I have the patience to explain a hundred times why I wanted to get into an empty factory.

I lifted the weight of the lock and looked under it. Three pinholes. One bigger than the other two. “Those earrings? They platinum?”

“White gold.” Her veil of suspicion didn’t obscure her curiosity enough to silence her.

“Can I borrow one?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s white gold, so it’s hard enough that I won’t bend it.” I held out my hand. “If I break it, I’ll replace it. But I won’t break it.”

She thought for a second, looking me up and down as if scanning my complete character. Either liking what she saw or accepting my shortcomings, her hands went to her ear. When she looked at the tall reeds, her hair blew back. Her neck, her jaw, those earrings. I wanted to mark her right at the base of the curve and the center of the length of her throat.

I didn’t even have time for the fantasy, much less charming it into reality.

Two pieces of jewelry sat in her outstretched palm. The diamond post and the backing.

I reached for the post. “Thank you.”

She closed her hand before I got it. “What do you think is in there?”

This girl.

“Someone left something for me in there. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Who?”

“Someone who wants to screw me. I don’t want to be screwed. I want to get him before he gets me, but I have to follow along until I can make a move. Is that enough of an answer for you?”

She opened her hand and let me pluck out the post.

I was extra careful with the post, making sure to push and not bend. The lock popped open.

“So,” she said when I handed her back the earring, “you’re a thief?”

She couldn’t know it was a trick question because she didn’t know where I’d been and what I’d done.

“I like to know how things work. Once you know that, you can do anything.”

She put the dirty earring in her pocket. I couldn’t tell if she believed a word I’d said. It didn’t look good for me though. I wouldn’t have trusted me if the situations were reversed.

I hooked the lock over the fence and opened the gate. I gestured for her to go in. “Are you coming?”

She held her chin up and crossed through. I followed, leaving the gate open, and we went toward the building. As we got closer, the sheer magnitude of the place got very real. In the vast emptiness, it had looked to scale, but against the size of actual humans, it was titanic. The warehouse windows had survived the closure, some even looked new. The grass and brush were trimmed. We came to a sealed metal door set over a steel staircase to the second floor. The door was painted black. Shiny, as if it was new.

“We bottled beer and soda,” she said. “The syrup and soda came from all over, but the glass bottles were too expensive to ship, so we made them here.”

“Bottles have been plastic since forever.”

“Yeah, the soda went away a long time ago. We did beer, then there was just nothing. All the bottling went to Mexico. The work just shrank and shrank.”

“Are we going to have to get past another lock to get into the building?”

“Why do you think I’d know?” She laid her hand flat on the brick that was red in a space between turquoise washes. The touch was loving, as if the building was a pet elephant.

“I have a feeling you know more than you let on.”

Her head made a sharp quarter turn. Surprise. Insult. Truth.

“Let’s not play games,” I said. “Like I said, I’m here to look at something and get the hell out. And I’m sure you have things you have to get back to. So, if you want money to get this over with—”

“I don’t want your money.”

Of course. Miss Diamond Earrings wasn’t interested in money.

“Well, if you want something to get this done fast and get me out of here, just say it.”

She wanted something. Something specific. The way she folded her bottom lip in half. The way she wouldn’t look at me. There was so much more than simple, stubborn pride at work.

“What time is it?”

I shot my arm forward to hitch my cuff high and checked my watch. It was mechanical and got slow a few seconds every day. She peered over my forearm to see, and I was suddenly embarrassed to have such an expensive thing in Barrington.

“Almost two.”

She crossed her arms and tapped her finger on her elbow. “I’m going to take you in because, yeah, I brought you this far and now I need to get going. But first…” She held out her hand. “Your wallet.”

“My what?”

“I need to make sure you’re not going to steal something or trash the place or whatever.”

“No.”

I wasn’t giving her my wallet. It would take her a second and a half to find out my full name, Google me, and spread the word all over Twitter that I was in Nowhere, USA, a day after the bottom had fallen out of QI4. I didn’t want to answer questions. I didn’t want to give the guy who’d broken my life any more attention.

In a half second of clear signal, my phone buzzed repeatedly. An hour’s worth of notifications were coming in. I had to look at them. They might be a way out of here.

I walked to the gate as if my no had been the final word. It wasn’t. I was bluffing.

On a whim, I asked another question.

The signal dropped. Who knew when it was coming back? What was I going to do now? Go to the hotel in the next town over and try to get into the building legally? By asking nicely? I hated asking nicely.

Harper sat on the metal steps with the toes of her cowboy boots hooked behind the step beneath her. If I was going to be out of here by nightfall, morning at the latest, I needed to find whatever I was supposed to find. The longer I waited, the more I lost control of the QI4 narrative.

My fucking wallet. Driver’s license. The real one. Credit cards with the company name. Gym membership.

Fine.

I walked to her. “You can get me in?”

“Yes.” She crossed her heart, kissed the fingers that had committed to the cross, and flicked them at the grey sky.

I tossed her my wallet.

She plucked it out of the air. “Thank you.”

“Let’s go then. No fucking around.”

I stood beneath her and watched as she flipped my wallet open and did forensics on it. Jesus Christ.

“Can we go?”

“Taylor Harden. That rings a bell.”

“There was a singer with the same name,” I lied.

She saw right through it. This was why I only lied through a computer screen. As long as no one could see my face, I could get away with anything. When I was a teenager, the screen had offered me a comfortable anonymity since my emotions showed all over my face. I’d gotten better at controlling my shit later in life, but lies were still hard.

“Platinum card?”

“You said you didn’t care about money.”

She pocketed the wallet and skipped down the steps. They clanged under her. Her hair swung as she traversed the side of the building and turned around to the backside and a rutted, overgrown parking lot with cracking yellow paint indicating eighteen-wheeler-sized parking spaces. A loading bay.

She clambered up a short metal stair and motioned me to follow. Next to the bays stood a human-sized metal door. She pushed the handle down and opened it.

“You’re fucking with me.”

“You coming or not?”

I didn’t move. She shrugged and walked in, letting the door slam behind her. I pushed the handle down and pulled. It opened. Motherfucker. I’d given up my wallet without checking all the entrances. Unforced errors under pressure. I was smarter than this, and she was smarter than I’d expected.