The Hidden - Jessica Verday [15]
“Well, it’s no sweet chariot,” I replied, and grinned at Caspian.
He didn’t seem to get it.
Or maybe he did, because he frowned.
“Are we supposed to be impressed by your ability to remember church hymns?” Cacey asked. “Ooh, do you know one called ‘Amazing Grace’?” she deadpanned.
Heat bloomed in my ears. “No. I meant ‘swing low, sweet chariot.’ Like the song? Aren’t you guys ‘coming forth to carry me home’ and all that? Aren’t we, you know … Going? To my next destination? A long drop and a short stop?”
Cacey laughed, and it rang through the car like the clear high-pitched peal of a bell. “Dramatic much, Abbey? We’re just going to get some lunch.”
I sat back and looked morosely out the window, feeling duly chastised. Highway blacktop rushed up to meet us, and the single lane became two. I felt a slow flare of sensation in my knee and looked down. Caspian was trying to nudge it.
He gave me a sympathetic smile. “I thought it was pretty clever,” he leaned over to whisper. “The whole ‘sweet chariot’ thing.”
“Good-looking and loyal,” I whispered back. “You’re a deadly combination.”
“Deadly.” … Good going there, Abbey.
But if he noticed my poor choice of words, he didn’t let on.
“Hey, you two,” Cacey said. “This isn’t secret time. Do you want to share with the rest of the class?”
“No.” I crossed my arms.
“Fine. It’s rude, but whatever.”
Cacey was calling me rude? The same person who had drunk all of her soda in front of me just so she wouldn’t have to share any of it when I was in the hospital and practically dying of thirst, and who had a snarky reply whenever someone asked her something, was calling me rude?
I was about to launch into it, when all of a sudden Caspian leaned forward and said loudly, “So, Uri, about that Volkswagen bus …”
Instantly the tension in the car broke, and I laughed.
“Loyal, good-looking, and smart,” I said to him. “But you already knew that.”
Uri grinned and switched lanes. “It was a 1951 VW bus, and it was a beast. Already going on forty years old when we, uh, acquired it. It had some interesting history.”
“It was a crap-mobile,” Cacey said. “With pleather seats and orange shag carpeting. I swear it had to have once been a traveling sideshow circus car or something.”
“Do you remember the mummified mouse?” Uri asked her.
“Yup. Stuck between the seats.”
“What? Ew. No way,” I said.
“True story,” Cacey replied. “Someone had actually taken the time to mummify this thing.”
“How could you tell?” Caspian interrupted. “Couldn’t it just have been a really old dead mouse?”
Cacey tapped her mouth. “The lips. They were sewn shut.”
“God, Cacey!” Nausea roiled through me, and I wanted to barf at the thought of seeing some poor little mouse that way. “That’s just insane.”
“Do mice even have lips?” Caspian mused. Uri laughed, and they shared a grin.
“Moving on,” I said.
But Cacey obviously didn’t want to move on. “Its little fingers had been pushed apart. Splayed open, instead of curled shut.” She mimicked it with both hands. “And the eyeballs—”
“I’m not going to be able to eat lunch,” I warned her.
“Then there was the tooth,” she said.
“Do I even want to know about the tooth?” I groaned, and then promptly answered myself. “No. No, I do not.”
“… on a key chain,” Uri filled in.
“Lost baby tooth?” Caspian suggested. “A family memento?”
“Molar,” Cacey and Uri both said at the same time.
“Must have been pried right out of someone’s mouth with something blunt, because the ends were all damaged and jagged,” Uri supplied. “The bus came from a junkyard in West Virginia. Crazy-ass place. Who knows what happened there.”
Cacey laughed delightedly, and I shook my head at her. She saw me and stopped, but grinned at Uri. “Abbey thinks I’m creepy. She told me when she got into the car.”
Something passed between them