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entire body shook with fatigue. The mailman finally passed by with his little cart. He heard my yells. Dad still has the scar from the rope as a reminder. I could never tell if he was mad at me or thankful. I wasn’t completely sure I’d do the same for him now.
    Dad walked back into the kitchen, and his two cronies followed. Draven was a few years younger than Dad. He was a beefy guy who was half muscle and half blubber. He wore a long ponytail even though the crown of his head looked like a plucked chicken’s ass, and he always smelled gross, like a mixture of cigarette butts drowned in stale coffee and the harsh gritty detergent he used for cleaning pots and pans at Milly’s Diner, where he worked. I remembered the soap smell from my summer job at the diner. For the longest time, I thought Draven spoke with an accent, but lately I’d determined that he just had terrible speech. He pronounced the letter a long and flat making all his words sound like a splat. When he wasn’t working with my dad, he was washing dishes at Milly’s. Jason Rockfield, the other guy, was from a long family of loggers. In his twenties, he’d nearly lost a leg as a chainsaw kicked back at him. He had a major limp that was so bad it seemed most of the time he was just dragging his second leg behind him. Hal, the mill owner, had given him a job moving logs with a tractor, but he’d still kept his side job of running stolen goods with my dad.
    I gulped back the rest of the beer and pushed out my chair to leave.
    “Stick around, Jem. I’ve hardly seen you this week.” The whites of Dad’s eyes were stained like the walls of a house filled with smokers. It was obvious from his eyes and the sickly pallor of his skin that his liver would be checking out soon. He’d always been one of the biggest, toughest men in town, but he was withering away to a pale yellow shell of his former self. “What have you been up to?”
    “I’ve been working.” I lifted the beer. “And when I’m not working I’m drinking, playing poker and—”
    “And fucking,” Rockfield said with a laugh.
    I pointed my beer toward Rockfield to give him credit. “And fucking.”
    Rockfield licked his lips. “How’s that little brunette, Annie? Ooh, if I could just have one night with that hot little piece of ass.”
    “That’s right, Rocky, just keep those unreachable dreams flowing.” I finished the beer and smacked the can on the table.
    Rocky scowled at me as I stood up. I turned to walk out.
    “Heard there was some girl out on Phantom Curve,” Dad said to my back before I could step out of the kitchen.
    I turned around. “Yep. Just another family member coming to pay respects.”
    Dad stared at me as if he was trying to figure out if there was more to it. He’d always had an unhealthy interest in the deaths out on the curve.
    I lifted my hand in question. “What?”
    He shook his head. “Fuck, Jem, just brought it up. Dane said she was out there all alone, a real pretty girl with a duffle bag like she was traveling through.”
    “Well, Dane had on more of his thinking cap than usual then.”
    “So?” Draven sat forward with interest.
    I raised a brow at him.
    “Was she pretty? How’d she look?” he asked, and I could almost see the drool dripping from his mouth.
    I thought about the question. The girl had looked at me with round blue eyes peering out from long blonde bangs, and for a second, the rest of the fucking landscape had disappeared and all I could see was her. “Too damn pretty for this place.” I turned and walked out.
    Dane was working on the old jeep he’d bought for three hundred bucks. For a guy who wasn’t always thinking straight, when he focused on something mechanical, he was like a brilliant surgeon with a wrench. He straightened from under the hood. He wiped the back of his greasy hand across his forehead and left behind a black streak.
    “What happened with that chick? Damn—” He shook his head. “The only place