Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Milo

"My brother's alive," Rhett said. "Or he was ten seconds ago."

He held the phone out to me, and I took it with the blanket still around my shoulders. I read the two messages on the screen while he stood over me in the gray light from the window, breathing as if he had run a mile.

Don't let anyone take the Northfield station. They know about the Bennett kid and they want him.

Dad didn't have a heart attack. I can prove it.

I read my own name and felt the cold come in through the walls.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Cal. My little brother. Adopted." Rhett sat down hard on the edge of the cot, and the frame groaned under both of us. "Dad took him in when he was nine. He's twenty now. In March, he went to work for Prescott Holdings at some compound they're building out west, and I haven't heard his voice since September." He rubbed his hand over his mouth. "I called, and the number's dead. Not off. Dead."

"Maybe he's changing phones."

"Maybe someone took it off him in the middle of typing." He stared at the screen. "He said they check everything. If they check everything, they saw that."

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything. I reached over and took his hand. His fingers were ice cold, and they closed around mine so hard it hurt, and I let them.

We sat like that while the window went from gray to pale white. Last night he had held me through the dark without sleeping. I could see it in his eyes, red at the edges, and in the notebooks spread across the table, and in the framed photograph lying face down beside the flashlight.

In my last life, nobody had ever sat with me like this. I had been the one who sat with everyone else, my mother after her bad days, my father after he lost his job, Trent after his breakup. I had always been the one holding the hand.

It was strange to find out I knew how.

"We're leaving today," Rhett said finally. "Not Wednesday. Today. Your professor's house up there is empty and warm, and everybody who wants it seems to know exactly where it is. I'm not waiting around for them to get there first."

"Your stock."

"Comes with us. I've got a flatbed trailer behind the warehouse. I'll load what I can and come back for the rest tomorrow."

"I'll help."

"You'll eat first." He let go of my hand and stood up, and some of the hardness came back into his face, and I understood it was holding him together. "Then you'll help."

He made coffee and oatmeal on the wood stove while I folded the blanket and tried not to look at the photograph on the table. When he went outside to start the truck and let it warm up, I almost turned the picture over. I didn't. It wasn't mine to look at, and I already felt as if I were living inside too many of his secrets while keeping all of mine.

At eight-thirty, my phone rang. Hollis Community Bank.

"Milo, it's Dwayne Porter." His voice was tight and low, like a man talking with his hand cupped over the phone. "I'm sorry to call on a Saturday. Are you somewhere you can talk?"

"Yes. What happened?"

"Your father came into the branch at opening with an attorney." He breathed out. "They filed a fraud claim against your new account. Your father says you stole the money out of a joint account he'd been managing on your behalf, that you aren't in your right mind, and that the family is worried you're going to hurt yourself with it."

I had to put my hand on the table.

"I told them that account was custodial and every deposit was yours," Mr. Porter said. "I told them in plain words. But son, when somebody files a fraud claim with an attorney's letter, the bank's policy says I have to put a temporary hold on the account while it's reviewed. I don't have a choice. I've put it off as long as I can. The hold goes on at noon."

"How long?"

"Review usually takes ten business days. Sometimes longer."

Ten business days. The freeze would come before the review even started. I had twenty-five thousand nine hundred dollars in that account, and the professor's bonus would land on Monday straight into the same frozen box, and by the time anyone at Hollis Community Bank opened a file on my case, there would be no bank, no lawyer, and no review.

"Can I take it out before noon?"

"In cash, if you come in person. I'll be at the front counter myself. I'm not supposed to tell you that." He paused. "There's something else. They weren't alone. There was a woman with them. Tall, maybe fifty, red wool coat, very well spoken. She said she was the family's social worker from Tulsa, the one who handled your brother's case. Patricia Dunn. She did most of the talking for the attorney. She asked me a lot of questions about you. Where you were living. Whether you'd been in to see me about anything besides money."

I knew that coat.

In my last life, a woman in a red wool coat came to dinner at Larkin Street the week after Owen moved in. My mother made a roast. The woman complimented everything in the house and asked about the furniture and the cars and whether my parents owned the property outright. Then she asked me what I did for work, and when I told her, she smiled and said I must be very valuable to my family. I had thought she was being kind.

"Thank you, Mr. Porter," I said. "I'll be there before noon."

When I hung up, Rhett was standing in the doorway with his truck keys in his hand. He had heard enough.

"How much?" he asked.

"Twenty-six thousand. If I get there first."

"Then let's get there first."

He drove. He didn't ask me to explain the rest, and I didn't offer. I watched the town go past the window. The wind had died down overnight, and it was a pretty morning, cold and bright, with a hard blue sky and frost still white on the shaded side of every roof. People were raking leaves. A man was putting up Christmas lights on his porch on the second of November, and his little girl was handing them up to him one strand at a time.

It was the kind of morning that made everything I remembered feel like a bad dream. That was the most dangerous thing about it.

Mr. Porter met me at the counter with an envelope already counted out. He didn't smile. He made me sign three slips and checked my ID as if he had never met me, and then he slid the envelope across with both hands flat on top of it until I took it.

"Your father's going to come back," he said quietly. "When he finds out the account is empty, he's going to be very angry."

"I know."

"Do you have somewhere safe to go?"

I thought about the gray room behind my eyes. About the station house with geothermal heat and walls dug into the ground. About Rhett's hand in mine on the cot.

"Yes," I said. "I do."

Mr. Porter looked at me for a moment longer, then reached across the counter and squeezed my shoulder, the way my father had never once done in my life.

"Then go there," he said. "And don't let anybody talk you out of it."

Back at Gallagher Outfitters, Rhett backed the flatbed trailer up to the open warehouse doors and started loading. He worked like a machine, lifting propane tanks two at a time, rolling barrels of lamp oil up a ramp, stacking sleeping bags and tarps and boxes of hand warmers in tight rows and strapping them down. I carried what I could. After an hour my arms were shaking, and he had barely broken a sweat.

"You don't have to keep up with me," he said, passing me with a crate of canned fuel on his shoulder.

"I'm not trying to keep up with you."

"You've been trying to keep up with me since you walked in my door." He set the crate down on the trailer and looked at me over it. "Sit down for five minutes before you fall down."