Abandon - Meg Cabot [27]
“Drive,” I panted. “Just drive.”
“What’s wrong? Didn’t you like that new doctor? Jennifer McNamara’s mother said he —”
“It’s not that. Let’s just go.”
The next few hours were agony as I waited for the police — or him — to show up at our door. Surely, someone had seen the car I’d jumped into and had written down Mom’s license number. What if there’d been security cameras in Mr. Curry’s shop?
But the police never came.
Neither did John.
And though I scanned the paper every day, even the obituaries, I never saw a single story pertaining to the jeweler.
I found out why the next time we were in the area. There was a For Rent sign in the jewelry store window. When I asked a salesclerk in the dress shop next door about it, she told me that she’d heard Mr. Curry was recovering from a heart attack and had moved…possibly to Florida. She thought he said he had grandchildren there.
And thank God, because everyone on the block had hated that cranky old man, and now maybe finally they’d get a decent shoe store on the block, and that dress would look so cute on me, did I want to try it on?
From what I was able to put together, by the time the police arrived, the jeweler’s assistant was too busy giving Mr. Curry CPR to remember the fact that he’d actually called them about some girl who might have been in possession of a stolen necklace.…Never mind some guy in a leather jacket who’d disappeared as mysteriously as she had.
Maybe that’s why I’d never shown my necklace to another person again.
It had been hard not to feel ever since as if…well, as if John were watching me. Maybe even protecting me. A little over-zealously.
Especially after what happened at school, with Hannah and Mr. Mueller.
What I’d never been able to understand is why. Why would he bother? I’d run away from him.
And now that he’d just hurled the necklace off into the maze of aboveground crypts that made up the Isla Huesos Cemetery, I knew that wasn’t because he’d wanted it back.
I should have gone to look for it. I should have, but I didn’t.
Because when he lifted his arm to fling the necklace, I saw — as might be expected of someone who’d been kicked out of the Westport Academy for Girls — that I’d gotten it all wrong.
It wasn’t any of my business, of course. Not anymore. He’d just seen to that, by hurling my necklace the equivalent of a football field away. Except that I had decided recently to begin making everyone’s business my business. It was part of the “new start” Mom wanted us to have on this island.
And his business had always been my business. He was the one who’d started all of this. He’d come up to me. The first time, anyway.
So I couldn’t go look for my necklace. I had to stay. I had no choice, really.
Which was why that night in the cemetery I stood my ground and asked, “What happened to your arm?”
Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto I
He stared down at me as if he suspected I was insane. Well, why would he be any different from anybody else?
“What?” He still seemed pretty mad. A good sign of this was when his chest started to rise and fall as if he’d been running, which it was doing now.
So I should have known better than to do what I did next, which was reach out and run a finger down the scar I’d just spied, snaking up the underside of his arm, then disappearing into his black sleeve.
I should never have said, “That one’s new.”
But I did anyway.
He jerked his arm away as if my finger were a live wire and I’d just tried to electrocute him.
“Stop that,” he said, glaring. “It’s nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing to me,” I said worriedly. I’d started to add a few things together in my head and didn’t like what I was coming up with. “Is that a consequence?”
His eyes narrowed. I could feel the heat from his body, and smell the scent I remembered so well — a mix of wood smoke