Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 28

"Oh, my god!"

Cheryl was smart enough not to shout out my name as we trotted through the heavy, crunchy-topped snow to where she and Kelly stood waiting for us.  

"I can't believe you're actually here!" Cheryl exclaimed once we reached her. Kelly, who—like Cheryl—I'd known since kindergarten, seemed apprehensive about even looking at me. I could understand why... Kelly and Cheryl were good girls, the kind of girls at school who always tattled if they thought that telling an authority figure was in the wrongdoer's best interest. Once upon a time I'd been that kind of girl, too, in the not-so-distant past. I'd desperately sought out approval from authority figures before my friends and I had gotten ourselves into trouble so deep that authority figures could never begin to understand what we'd done.

"Yeah, we're here," I admitted, "but obviously we can't stay long. Listen, Cheryl... is there any chance you know which hospital Violet was taken to this morning?"

Cheryl and Kelly exchanged blank expressions, but their eyes told me everything—they knew where she was, or at least they had some idea.

Kelly hesitated before replying and weakly said, "I don't think we should be telling you guys anything about Violet Simmons. You're in a lot of trouble. The police—"

"The police have it wrong," Henry interjected.

Kelly put her hands on her hips, taking a stand. Maybe she found the courage to speak so boldly to a guy who'd been a senior—and not a particularly nice senior—less than a year earlier because she knew she would have had the police and just about every parent in Weeping Willow on her side. "I saw on the news this morning that authorities in three states are looking for you guys. McKenna and Trey are presumed by local police to be armed and dangerous."

I elbowed Trey when he burst out laughing. Sure, it was funny that the cops thought we were armed, but not if they actually intended to pull guns on us if we came across them. I did not find the idea of police pointing loaded weapons at me to be humorous at all.

"Look, we don't want to get anyone in trouble," I said, trying to defuse the situation. "We're just trying to figure out if Violet's still here in Michigan, or if someone's already arrived to take her back to Wisconsin."

After a long, anger-filled silence and a lot of emotive eye movements exchanged between Cheryl and Kelly, finally Cheryl admitted, "We wouldn't know. I mean, I saw Miss Kirkovic drinking hot chocolate in the lounge right before we took our turn down the hill. But that doesn't mean anything other than that Miss Kirkovic left Violet at the hospital."

All of the hope that had been building inside of me since we'd driven out of the library parking lot earlier that morning slipped right through my nostrils and into the winter scene around us. Cheryl was right. I couldn't ask her to march into the ski lodge and ask Miss Kirkovic all kinds of suspicious questions about the whereabouts of Violet Simmons. Miss Kirkovic was one of the few actual cool teachers at Weeping Willow High. To the best of my knowledge, she had an apartment in Green Bay and sometimes her personal artwork was shown in galleries in Milwaukee and Chicago. She had a real grown-up life, and I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if she had simply not shown up for work teaching high school one day because success had come calling to rescue her from being our art teacher.

"One of us is going to have to find Miss Kirkovic," I said to Henry, turning my back on Cheryl and Kelly. Of course, the second I did, Kelly began inching her way toward the entrance of the lodge. For the first time since we'd arrived at Fitzgerald's it occurred to me that we were in a highly unsafe area. The lodge probably had its own private security, a television in every single room that would ensure every guest there had seen us on the news, and most dangerous of all, there were only two ways on and off the property: down the main road via the parking lot, or down the side of the mountain on foot.