Ovenshine

30.

Indy stares at the phone long enough to feel the blood drain from her palm. Then she calls him. "I need you to take me back."

"Take you back?" Jude says. His voice sounds weak, like more of a croak, but Indy forces herself not to worry. "To where?"

"Dobbs's house. I need to look around. There's something else I need to find in there; I'm sure of it."

"Whoa, Indy. Wait wait wait. Did you talk to Dr. Clover? Did you not see my message? What did you say to him?"

Indy doesn't reply. She's nearly to the other side of campus now, the parking lots coming into view.

"What did you say?"

"Are you going to take me or not?"

A pause. Indy closes her eyes.

"No, Indy. I can't take you."

"Fine."

She hangs up, and dials another number.

She got lucky; with Sterling it's never a guarantee that he's even still in the same country. He picks her up behind the football stadium, clearly concerned at the sense of urgency written all over her face, but thankfully he is not the type to ask. They spend most of the ride in silence, and Indy pulls Elizabeth's journal from her lap and pages through it again, one more time. Finally they pass the city line into Erskine and he says, suddenly, "Indy, I—I need to know. You're not wrapped up in something bad, are you?"

She doesn't hear him at first, her focus honed in on the journal and the journal alone. She turns over the last page.

"Indy, are you listening to me?"

The floors were always uneven is a new line at the top of the page. Indy swallows.

"Indy—"

"No," she answers at last, folding the journal shut over her finger. "Even if I was, Sterling, it wouldn't be any of your business. I can handle myself."

She wants there to be some flash of hurt, anything, across her brother's face, but his expression is remarkably still. That is the thing about Sterling. He's always the same. "Am I not allowed to worry?"

"You never have before," Indy says. "Why start now?"

The car turns down a familiar residential street, the road wide but the houses close together. Indy presses her face to the glass like an excited child on a field trip. "Here. Right here is fine."

Sterling lets out a harsh sigh and parks, turning to her. "Indy, if you need help with anything—"

"Thanks. I'll see you later, Sterling," she says, and hops out, the journal tucked under her arm.

The floors were always uneven.

As twilight settles around her, the sky a faded, stormy mauve, Indy treks slowly through the overgrown grass to the house's backyard. She finds the window she broke last time, some of the glass shards still settled there in the grass below it, speckled with dirt. Indy holds her breath, ducking her head and climbing inside.

Mildew and sawdust, old wood, all the smells of a home that has not been anyone's home for years attack her senses as they did the first time she crossed the house's threshold. She can retrace her own footsteps with the prints her boots left in the film of dust over the floor, each corner of the room littered with trash and the dried crunchy bodies of bugs.

Indy knows she doesn't have much time left before the sun is down, and she loses her largest source of light. She tosses the journal to the floor with a thud, sending up a cloud of dust with it. Then she gets down on all fours.