Still Waters by Emma Carlson Berne

was ten. I barely remember the place, much less how to get up there.” He unhooked the gas pump. “How do you work this thing?” he muttered, examining the antique brass handle. Hannah left him winding a crank at the side of the gas pump and tried the cloudy glass door of the store. To her surprise, it opened.
    A gaunt-faced guy in his thirties looked up from a stool by the window. A shock of ginger hair stuck out from under his dirty ball cap. The lights were off for some reason, which threw the tiny room into half gloom. On the scarred metal shelves, afew items were sparsely arranged: a bottle of engine oil, a package of Dr. Scholl’s corn pads, a bottle of Prell shampoo. Near the counter, some tired candy bars sat in a rack next to a little spin rack of maps. Hannah sighed with relief.
    Hannah felt the man’s eyes on her as she examined the rack. Two different state maps and three county maps. “Um, what county are we in?” she asked the guy. Instead of answering, he plucked one of the maps from the rack and handed it to her in silence. Hannah shot a quick glance at his impassive face and decided not to ask for directions. “And ten gallons of gas too, please.”
    “Thirty-one fifty,” the guy said and Hannah jumped with surprise. His voice was like that of a robot, deep and metallic with an odd vibration to it. Then Hannah noticed a small round hole at the base of his neck, covered with white mesh. She swallowed and held out the money, trying not to touch his hand.
    He accepted the cash and then sat back on his stool and resumed staring into space as Hannah escaped through the door, map clutched in her hand.
    “Did you figure it out?” she asked Colin. He nodded, setting the pump back in its holder.
    “Yeah. It’s a good thing too. You wouldn’t want to run out of gas out here.”
    Hannah nodded and climbed into the truck cab. “It was weird in there,” she said to Colin. “There was like nothing on the shelves.”
    Colin shrugged as he started up the engine. “They probably don’t get a lot of business.”
    He pulled out. Hannah unfolded the new map on her knees. It rustled with reassuring crispness. “It looks like we want …” She brought the map closer to her eyes. “East. Would that be left?” She looked up at the road sign nearby. “So, I guess we want this one. Burnt Cabin Road.” She blinked. “What a weird name.”
    “It’s descriptive,” Colin said dryly. He turned left and the highway quickly receded behind them, along with the familiar rush of cars. Patches of pinewoods flashed by, alternating with flat pastures on either side. The road was a gray chalk line drawn in the earth. Sodden haystacks reared up in the fields like boulders under the whitish sky. They passed a barn that looked as if it had caught on fire and a farmhouse long abandoned, the glassless windows gaping like blind eyes. No cars passed them either way, though they had been driving for almost half an hour.
    Hannah stared out the window. The monotonous landscape made her feel half asleep, as if she was being hypnotized. The area was really desolate. She didn’t know it was going to be like this.
    A stop sign loomed ahead, the first turn since the gas station. Colin pulled up. The intersecting road was just as flat and lonely. A small black and white sign on a post read 51.
    “Is this us?” Colin asked. Hannah scrabbled for her maps.
    “Um …” She spread both maps out on her lap and tried to compare the two. But she couldn’t match up any of the roads on the hand-drawn map with those on the county map. Hannah shook her head. “This map from the gas station is the same asGoogle,” she told Colin. “It doesn’t have the roads up to the house on it. Weird.”
    “Let me see.” He leaned over. Hannah gazed down at the top of his bright head.
    “Well, we’d probably get even more lost if we were in New Zealand, right?” She tried for a light tone.
    He glanced up. “Yeah,” he said briefly and bent over