Astrid noticed him noticing. “It’s not for me,” she said snippily. “It’s for Little Pete.”
“I know. He’s…” He didn’t know the right word.
“He’s autistic,” Astrid said, very breezy, like it was no big thing. “Well, no one here,” she announced. Her tone said she’d expected it, and it was fine.
“Where’s your brother?” Sam asked.
Astrid yelled then, something he hadn’t known she could do. “I don’t know, all right? I don’t know where he is.” She covered her mouth with one hand.
“Call to him,” Quinn suggested in a strange, carefully enunciated, formal voice. He was embarrassed by his freak-out. But at the same time, he wasn’t quite done freaking out.
“Call to him? He won’t answer,” Astrid said through gritted teeth. “He’s autistic. Severely. He doesn’t…he doesn’t relate. He won’t answer, all right? I can yell his name all day.”
“It’s okay, Astrid. We’re going to make sure,” Sam said. “If he’s here, we’ll find him.”
Astrid nodded and fought back tears.
They searched the house inch by inch. Under the beds. In the closets.
They went across the street to the home of a lady who sometimes took care of Little Pete. There was no one home there, either. They searched every room. Sam felt like a burglar.
“He must be with my mom, or maybe my dad took him to the plant with him. He does that when there’s no one else to babysit.” Sam heard desperation in her voice.
Maybe half an hour had passed since the sudden disappearance. Quinn was still weird. Astrid seemed about to fall apart. It wasn’t even lunchtime but already Sam was wondering about night. The days were short, it was November 10, almost Thanksgiving. Short days, long nights.
“Let’s keep moving,” Sam said. “Don’t worry about Little Pete. We’ll find him.”
“Is that meant to be a pro forma reassurance or a specific commitment?” Astrid asked.
“Sorry?”
“No, I’m sorry. I meant, you’ll help me find Petey?” Astrid asked.
“Sure.” Sam wanted to add that he would help her anywhere, anytime, forever, but that was just his own fear talking, making him want to babble. Instead, he started toward his own house, knowing now beyond doubt what he would find, but needing to check, anyway, and to check something else, too. Needing to see if he was crazy.
Needing to see if it was still there.
This was all crazy. But for Sam, the crazy had started long before.
For the hundredth time Lana craned her head to look back and check on her dog.
“He’s fine. Stop fretting,” Grandpa Luke said.
“He could jump out.”
“He’s dumb, all right. But I don’t think he’ll jump out.”
“He’s not dumb. He’s a very smart dog.” Lana Arwen Lazar was in the front seat of her grandfather’s battered, once-red pickup truck. Patrick, her yellow Labrador, was in the back, ears streaming in the breeze, tongue hanging out.
Patrick was named for Patrick Star, the not-very-bright character on SpongeBob. She wanted him up front with her. Grandpa Luke had refused.
Her grandfather turned on the radio. Country music.
He was old, Grandpa Luke. Lots of kids had kind of young grandparents. In fact, Lana’s other grandparents, her Las Vegas grandparents, were much younger. But Grandpa Luke was old in that wrinkled-up-leather kind of way. His face and hands were dark brown, partly from the sun, partly because he was Chumash Indian. He wore a sweat-stained straw cowboy hat and dark sunglasses.
“What am I supposed to do the rest of the day?” Lana asked.
Grandpa Luke swerved to avoid a pothole. “Do whatever you want.”
“You don’t have a TV or a DVD or internet or anything.”
Grandpa Luke’s so-called ranch was so isolated, and the old man himself was so cheap, his one piece of technology was an ancient radio that only seemed to pick up a religious station.
“You brought some books, didn’t you? Or you can muck out the stable. Or climb up the hill.” He pointed with his chin toward the hills. “Nice views up there.”
“I saw a coyote up the hill.”
“Coyote’s harmless. Mostly. Old brother coyote’s too smart to go messing with humans.” He pronounced coyote “kie-oat.”
“I’ve been stuck here a week,” Lana said. “Isn’t that long enough? How long am I supposed to stay here? I want to go home.”
The old man didn’t even glance at her. “Your dad caught you sneaking vodka out of the house for some punk.”
“Tony is not a punk,” Lana shot back.
Grandpa Luke turned the radio off and switched to his lecturing voice. “A boy who uses a girl that way, gets her in the middle of his mess, that’s a punk.”
“If I didn’t get it for him, he would have tried to use a fake ID and maybe have gotten in trouble.”
“No maybe about it. Fifteen-year-old boy drinking booze, he’s going to find trouble. I started drinking when I was your age, fourteen. Thirty years of my life I wasted on the bottle. Sober now for thirty-one years, six months, five days, thank God above and your grandmother, rest her soul.” He turned the radio back on.
“Plus, the nearest liquor store’s ten miles away in Perdido Beach.”
Grandpa Luke laughed. “Yeah. That helps, too.”