LITMIR.BIZ

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the waist down. She hollered after it, pedestrians staring at this very unladylike wraith, this banshee of madness. Goddamn you! Goddamn you all!

      And now a police officer, Jesus, asking her to calm down. Sir, you insult me. I am calm. This is calmness. Wrath is calm. God, she could have slapped him, but that would have been a mistake. At least her father hadn’t shared her address with any reporters; at least there were no flashbulbs recording her dazed movements. Darcy loathed pity, but she found herself telling this beat cop, this fresh-faced rookie, that her husband had been killed last night. He told her he was sorry and took her by the arm to walk her back to her building. He asked if she had reported the crime and she said, yes, yes, it’s being looked into, that’s not the point. Jesus, she’d told a stranger, and he was helping her to walk straight, or close enough. She was crying on his shoulder, on his uniform, already wet from the rain, so maybe he didn’t mind. She wasn’t sure how long he let her do that, but it must have been a while, because when they finally reached her building again and he tipped his hat to her she felt spent. Dry.

      Where was she supposed to go?

      They had blindfolded her for the next portion of their getaway, squeezing her between two silent men in the backseat. She instantly regretted that comment about being able to identify them.

      “This is hardly the way to treat a lady,” she said, hoping her strong words could compensate for her increasing alarm. A final door was shut, the engine was turned on, and they were rolling away. Where, and for how long? Maybe he hadn’t been flirting; maybe he had less chivalrous ends in mind.

      “Let’s just say there are parts of this drive that we prefer to be secretive, and leave it at that.” Jason’s voice sounded the slightest bit different—not cold, exactly, but businesslike. She was a commodity, something to be held and then traded. She had felt this way before.

      The men didn’t talk anymore, so neither did she. She missed the exhilaration of the running boards, the wind in her hair. Already she was amazed she had felt that way—God, she was crazy. She was being kidnapped by gangsters and she had foolishly smiled her way into the executioner’s den. The freed hostages were likely offering her description to the police even now. Somewhere an obituary was being prepared.

      They drove for an hour, maybe two, stopping intermittently. A door would open and one of the shoulders beside her would depart. At least she had some room back here now.

      “I’ll have to ask you to lie down now, Miss Windham,” Jason said after the second stop. “Wouldn’t want any passersby to see your blindfold and get suspicious.”

      She obeyed, reluctantly. She began to wonder if she would ever see anything else again.

      “So how much money did we make today?” she asked them, again hoping her own words could lighten her mood. Even when she had nothing else, like in the sanatorium, she always had herself, always had her words. She used them to calm herself, reinvent herself.

      “Can’t say yet—haven’t had the opportunity to count it.”

      “Well, let’s imagine. Let’s imagine this was a pretty good day. What does that translate to in this line of work? Ten thousand? Forty thousand?”

      “That’d be nice” was all he said, but she heard a second voice grumble, “I’ll bet that’s a typical day for her daddy.”

      Minutes later the car stopped again, though the engine was still running.

      “All righty, Miss Windham, this is your stop,” Jason said as two doors opened. She sat up, and then another door was opened, and she felt a hand on hers. He gentlemanly guided her out of the car, then she felt him untying the blindfold.

      Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the sun, and to him standing so close. She backed up despite herself, wishing she hadn’t.

      She was in a small field that looked as if it had once been a farm but had been lost to neglect. To her right was an abandoned farmhouse and a narrow pathway they had driven through. Surely this drab locale would not be her final resting place.

      “Sorry to leave you here, but this is where the adventure ends. Once we’ve driven off, you can start knocking on doors and I’m sure someone will have a phone.”

      She let herself exhale. All would be well, as she had originally believed. These weren’t such bad men, especially this one right here. After the period of enforced blindness, her nascent vision was fuzzy around the edges but just sharp enough in the center for her to appreciate his face. She hadn’t been imagining it before—he really was this handsome.

      “What a pity,” she said. “I was rather enjoying myself. For a moment, I thought the famous bank robber was moving into kidnapping.”

      “Not my style.”

      “Why is that? Not dramatic enough? Not enough witnesses for your vanity?”

      “Takes too long. Ransom notes, waiting for them to rustle up the money, phone calls…”

      “You prefer immediate gratification.”

      “Pretty much.”

      “Perhaps you need to learn the benefits of patience.”

      “I suppose you know of a good teacher?”

      “Hate to interrupt, brother,” the other one said, his voice the very sound of rolling eyes. “But we’re running late.”

      Jason was still smiling at her. He had started and never stopped. He tipped his hat.

      “Been a pleasure, Miss Windham. You take care.”

      Twin door slams like gunshots, and the Pontiac was pulling away. She was alone now, on an abandoned farm, in an abandoned town, in some abandoned state, in the center of an abandoned country. They could have dropped her off in downtown Chicago and she would have felt the same way. After being in that man’s presence, anything afterward was emptiness.

       IV.

      It was dark when the Firefly Brothers crept through their mother’s backyard again.

      They had spent much of the past two days in the garage, cleaning and organizing an area that had been their father’s domain and had been collecting dust for years. There were old boxes of clothes that no longer fit June’s boys, auto parts that Pop had held on to in the misguided hope that they would one day find some use, books that everyone had read and no one had liked, scraps of excess wood molding and plywood. They had done this partly to help Ma, but mostly because it gave them something to do while they stayed out of sight.

      They had managed to find old clothes of Pop’s that fit them well enough, and Ma had volunteered to tailor them. Jason was clad in linen slacks and a white oxford, Whit in tan corduroys and a gray work shirt. Whit carried a five-year-old issue of Field & Stream wrapped around his pistol.

      No one seemed to be out that night, and no one had touched their stolen car, so they climbed in, Jason again at the wheel.

      It was the first time Whit had left the house since their unexpected arrival, though Jason had made a brief excursion the previous night, sending coded telegrams to Darcy and Veronica at several addresses, as they couldn’t be sure of the girls’ locations. The message to Darcy had read:

       PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER THAN PREDICTED / DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.

      Jaybird was a nickname she’d given him long ago, but she used it only when they were alone.

      The brothers’ main fears were that the girls had already run off someplace, or were being watched by the feds, or that they would assume the telegrams were police snares. The brothers wanted to get out of Lincoln City and find the girls, but only after they had some money to escape with—and it would be easier to procure funds on their own.

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