Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [29]
There were no outbuildings near this cottage. No barn or garage or shack. If he slept here, he’d have to sleep under the stars — just him and his sleeping bag. The ground would be cold. He wished it were the old days and he could just knock on the door and ask if they had a bed he could sleep in.
A bed. That was it. He’d sleep in the truck bed tonight. He’d have to wake early and hide, though. Maybe hide back under the tarp and hope the couple drove back to Trenton, or Ellsworth, or some other town on Jack’s route.
A back door to the cottage opened, and Jack froze. He was standing under a tall pine, hoping he was well hidden in the evening shadows.
There was the unmistakable sound of a tin trash-can lid being lifted and then slamming. The remains of the couple’s lobster dinner were no doubt in that can. Jack wondered if they’d left any parts in the shell. Imagining the taste of sweet lobster meat got the best of his judgment. As soon as the back door banged shut, Jack made his way to the trash can.
Lifting the lid off without making noise was a slow but rewarding process. He didn’t think about how gross it was to be eating someone else’s food — food from a trash bin. He flicked a piece of lettuce off half a buttered roll and stuffed it into his mouth. He used his dirty fingernails to break away the stubborn, remaining shell of a lobster claw and popped the leftover meat in his mouth, too. Slow down, he told himself. This is lobster. Taste it. Then he broke off one of the spindly legs from a lobster’s discarded body and sucked the juice from it.
The blaring of a TV inside reminded Jack that the couple could not hear well. Heck, he could probably let himself in and fix himself a meal in the kitchen, and they wouldn’t even know it. He stood for a moment at the back door, listening to a news report about a robbery at a grocery store in Bangor — and then to another report. A story about a missing boy. A boy who might be on Mount Desert Island. People were encouraged to get in touch with the police if they knew anything about him.
For a brief moment, relief washed over Jack. They were looking for him! They knew he needed help! He could stop running and turn himself in! But then his head cleared, and a terrible sinking feeling filled his near-empty stomach. Something didn’t add up. His mother wouldn’t have gone to the police. She’d have known they’d take him from her. Maybe she was so worried about him that she’d risk it. But she’d never worried before. . . .
Who else? The woman from the bookstore? Had she reported the theft? But how would she know he was a missing person and not just some local kid or a tourist? Maybe Big Jack had put things together. Jack didn’t think he’d given that much away, though.
They hadn’t given any particulars about the boy, had they? It might not be him. He’d read about a missing girl on his first day on the island. Maybe this was something that happened frequently on an island — an island that had a national park.
And even if his mother had initiated the search, would she realize what she’d done? Would she realize how much trouble this would mean for the two of them? (If she was spinning, she might not be thinking straight. She might have gone back to the campground, seen that Jack was gone, and thought someone had kidnapped him. That was what the spinning times where like. She lost all sense of the order of things.)
He’d have to find out more. He’d look online tomorrow. There were lots of ways to figure out who started the search. If the reports didn’t mention his finger, it was probably his mother. If they did mention his finger, it was someone else — someone who had put the pieces together.
Jack had to be smart. He had to protect them both. For now, he would continue on his own, continue to lie low.
He’d been having wild dreams when he woke, wild, chasing dreams. The truck bed was cold, and worse, it was raining.