Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Milo

He looked at me then, really looked, and some of the smile went away. Maybe he saw something in my face. Maybe it was the way Rhett was standing behind me without saying a word.

"If the temperature drops below zero," he said slowly, "I'll walk out of the meeting myself. Does that make you feel better?"

It didn't. I said yes anyway.

He walked us to the bottom of the stairs. I was halfway up when he called my name.

"I almost forgot. Your brother called here, by the way. On Tuesday afternoon."

I stopped with my hand on the railing.

"Very polite young man," Professor Kim said. "He asked whether the station house had room for family, in case anything happened this winter. I told him I couldn't discuss staff housing, and that you hadn't accepted the position anyway." He laughed a little. "I assumed you'd been talking it over at home. Apparently he knew before I did."

"Which brother?" I asked, and my voice sounded strange to me.

"He said Owen."

I thanked him. I don't remember what else I said. I remember the cold air hitting my face at the top of the stairs, and the frozen pumpkin on the library steps, and Rhett's hand on my elbow guiding me back to the truck because I was walking in the wrong direction.

He didn't start the engine right away. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel and waited.

I put it together the way you put together the pieces of a broken plate, one edge at a time, until you can see the shape of what it was.

On Monday, my mother called Gallagher Outfitters and ordered six propane heaters and four sleeping bags rated for minus sixty. My mother, who complained if the thermostat went above sixty-eight, who had never camped a night in her life. On Tuesday, Owen called a professor he had never met and asked about a field station I had already turned down. Last night, before he ever stepped off the bus, he asked my mother for my grandmother's ring, a ring he had never seen. And yesterday afternoon, he sat on my bed and told me I would love it up in Northfield.

I had only woken up yesterday morning.

He had been asking for all of it for days before that.

When I came back, I had assumed I was the only one. I had stood in my mother's kitchen with that pen in my hand and thought I had been given something no one else had. But Owen had been ahead of me the whole time. He hadn't come back with me.

He had come back first.

And whatever he had done in the life after mine, whatever he had become once I was dead at the top of those stairs, he had seen Rhett in that store this morning and run like a man who had already been caught once.

"Milo." Rhett's voice was low. "You've gone white again. Talk to me."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that." He turned in his seat to face me. "That professor in there knew my father better than I did, apparently. And the company that bought my dad's work two weeks before he dropped dead is now asking how many beds are in the place you're moving to. And your brother, who's never been to this town, called about that place before you even took the job." He shook his head. "I'm not stupid. Something is going on, and you're standing right in the middle of it."

"I know."

"Do you know what it is?"

"Some of it." I looked down at the keys in my lap. "Not enough."

He was quiet for a while. A group of students ran past the truck, laughing, one of them holding a jacket over her head against the wind. Rhett watched them go.

"Northfield," he said finally. "It's what, forty miles north?"

"About that."

"Geothermal heat. A deep well. Buried greenhouses." He said each thing slowly, as if he were checking them off a list. "That's the kind of place that keeps people alive if Dad was right."

"He was right."

He looked at me when I said it. I hadn't meant it to come out that sure.

"My store's got a tin roof and one wood stove," he said. "And a warehouse full of stock I bought because my dead father told me to." He rubbed his thumb over the scrape on his knuckles. "You got room up there for one more?"

"Yes."

It came out too fast. Rhett's mouth twitched at one corner, the first real smile I had seen from him, and it changed his whole face. He looked younger. He looked like someone I had known for years.

"You didn't even think about it," he said.

"I didn't need to."

The smile stayed a second longer. Then he started the truck and pulled out of the lot, and neither of us said anything for a while. The heater roared. The sky ahead of us was getting darker, though it was barely past noon, and the trees along the highway were bending all in one direction.

He drove me back to the Starlight Motel and parked beside my car. My chin was still sore where I had hit the asphalt, and when I touched it, he looked over.

"Keep it clean," he said. "There's a first aid kit in the motel office. I asked yesterday."

"You asked?"

"You were bleeding on my truck." He said it as if that explained everything. Then he didn't unlock the doors. He sat there with the engine running and stared at the motel sign swinging on its pole.

"I have to go open the store," he said. "I've got a delivery for a Mrs. Denise Bennett of fourteen Larkin Street sitting in my back room that I'm not going to deliver."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Her card's dead anyway." He paused. "Come by tonight. After eight, when I close. There's something I want to show you."

"What is it?"

He reached down beside his seat and pulled out a thick spiral notebook with a cracked green cover and a coffee ring on the front. The corners were soft from being handled. He didn't open it. He just held it in both hands.

"Prescott took everything that was typed," he said. "Every file, every report. But my dad wrote things down by hand too. He kept these in a box under his bed. They didn't know about them." He ran his thumb along the spine. "I've read this last one about a hundred times since spring. Mostly, I couldn't understand half of it."

"What's in it?"

"A list on the last page. Places he thought might survive the cold. There are six of them." He finally looked at me, and his gray eyes were very steady. "Northfield's the first one. And right under it, in my father's handwriting, he wrote your name."