Offspring by Jack Ketchum Page B

gun? Gloria, are you kidding?”
    He listened, half smiling at first. They watched him. His voice got quieter.
    “Can you give me any idea why?” he said. “I see. All right, we’ll try it. But I’m not sure it’ll do a whole lot of good. There’ll be somebody there if we? . . . Okay . . . Thanks, Gloria. Take care, all right?”
    He hung up, walked to the table, sat down, and drank his beer.
    “That was truly
strange,”
he said.
    “What,” said Amy.
    “Gloria says that Vic and most of the sheriff’s office are out investigating a murder. The state police are involved, too. They’re strictly skeleton staff over there. I told her what we had and she said that, in the first place, they can’t do anything until Steven actually arrives—which I guess I expected—but that if he insists on seeing Claire to call them, and that they’d ‘try like hell to find somebody to send over,’ was the way she put it. She said not to let him in the house if I could possibly help it, to try to talk him into turning around and going home again.”
    “What was that bit about the
gun?”
    “That was the weird part. Gloria’s a bit flaky sometimes god knows and I don’t know if she was just playing Miss Melodrama or what, but she actually suggested I order him off at gunpoint. Or anybody else I didn’t know personally who came around tonight. Could you
see
me standing on the porch ordering Steven out of here, pointing a shotgun at him like . . . like Elvis in
Flaming Star?
Who the hell owns a gun? And even if we did . . .”
    The screen door slammed. Claire jumped.
    It was Luke. Beaming.
    “Hey! Look, you guys! Look what I got!”
    He was holding out his hand, coming toward her, and she might have scolded him for interrupting, some other time she probably would have, but somehow she
wanted
to be interrupted at the moment, with all this talk of guns and murder and with Stevencoming and calling the police in the first place, so she smiled at him, what she hoped was a bright normal smile, and looked down into his hand at the tiny white bones that chance had arranged almost to correspond to
his
bones, to the bones of the palm of his hand splayed toward the fingers, as though she were looking inside him, into his flesh. At
him
, really. At frailty.
    At mortality.

PART III

E VENING

5:35 P.M.
    Steven Carey saw her on the bridge, backpack on the ground in front of her, just beyond the Kennebunk entrance to the highway.
    It was rare you saw a girl hitching alone these days. He was in the slow lane doing sixty-five. His reactions were still very good. He pulled over.
    Through the rearview mirror he saw her haul the heavy pack up onto her shoulder and run awkwardly toward the car. The weight of the pack made her run at an angle. It threw her balance off. She looked like the cat he’d run over one night after a high school dance. He’d been driving his father’s old Pontiac. He’d stopped the car in the street to watch the cat in the headlights. The cat was leaking brain fluid and trying to run away, running at an angle.
    He used a switch on the panel of the Mercedes’ armrest to unlock the back door and another to rolldown the window on the frontseat passenger side. The girl appeared at the window and looked at him.
    She looked wary. But you could see that she was impressed by the navy blue Paul Stuart suit and the darker blue Mercedes.
    Blue was the color for inspiring trust in juries.
    “Hi,” he said. He smiled. “Put the pack in the back. Hop in.”
    The girl did as she was told. He watched her through the rearview mirror. She wasn’t particularly pretty—nose a little too sharp, face a little too round. Eighteen or so and about ten pounds overweight. Thin brown hair. The usual jeans. And a pale green washed-out T-shirt that read, “Where the hell is Montserrat?” on the front and gave you a map of the Caribbean on the back.
    She was strong. She handled the backpack well. And well mannered. She was careful not to