agree,” Lucas answered.
Their private conversation amid the chaos helped her relax a bit.
“Send everybody!” Reid kept yelling. “We need help, Mrs. Patterson.” When he hung up he must have dialed his brother because all at once Reid was cussing, blaming the mess they were in on whoever answered.
“Hang on, Lauren,” Lucas whispered against her hair. “I’ll try to reach the window.”
“I’m scared. Don’t let me fall.”
He bumped the top of her head with his chin. “So am I, but I promise I’m not letting you go.”
Finally Lucas reached the window that Reid had dropped from, and he lowered Lauren slowly to the ground outside.
“I got her,” Reid shouted just as car lights began to shine through the trees. Emergency vehicles turned off the main road and headed toward the Gypsy House—one volunteer ambulance, a small fire truck, along with one sheriff’s cruiser and Mrs. Patterson’s old gray Buick tailing the parade.
Lauren watched Reid move toward the men storming through brush.
“We’re all right,” he shouted. “I got Lauren out, but Lucas and Tim are still in the house. I was going in after them next.” When he spotted the sheriff in the half dozen flashlights surrounding him, he added, “I tried to tell them this was a bad idea, sir, but thank God I went in to help Lauren, just in case she got into trouble.”
The first men hurried past Reid, ignoring him, but finally Sheriff Brigman and an EMT stopped.
Men with bright flashlights moved into the house with ropes and a portable stretcher. She could hear Lucas yelling for them to be careful and guiding their steps. Tim was somewhere below, still crying.
Her father shone his light along her body. She could feel warm blood trickling down her face, and more blood dripped down from a gash on her thigh. “I’ll take her from here, son,” he said to Reid as if she were a puppy found in the road. “You all right to walk, Reid?”
“I can make it, sir.” Reid limped, making a show of soldiering through great pain.
“We’ve got the boy,” someone yelled from inside the house. “He’s breathing, but we’ll need the stretcher to get him out. Looks like his leg is broken in more than one place.”
Her father never let go his hold of her as they watched Tim being lifted out of the house. One of the EMTs said that, besides the broken leg, the boy probably had broken ribs. The sound of Tim’s crying was shrill now, like that of a wounded animal.
She listened as her father instructed the ambulance driver to take Reid and Tim. They needed care on the way to the hospital. He picked up Lauren and carried her to his car as if she were still his little girl. “I’ll transport her to the emergency room. She’s got wounds, but she’s not losing much blood.”
“Lucas is hurt, too,” she said as the boy who’d saved her life was helped down from the second floor window. Lucas was the last to leave the haunted house. He’d made sure everyone got out first.
The sheriff nodded. “Make sure he’s stable and put him in my car, too. I can get them both there faster than the ambulance can.”
Two firemen followed his orders.
Lauren looked over her father’s shoulder as Lucas moved clear of the shadow of the house. She’d had far more than the little adventure she’d wanted tonight. When her father set her in the back of his cruiser, she wondered at what point she’d gone wrong and swore for the rest of her life she’d never do something so dumb again.
One of the men from the volunteer fire department bandaged up Lucas’s arm and wrapped something around her leg. The sheriff oversaw the loading of the other two injured, then returned. She could almost feel anger coming off him like steam, but he wouldn’t step out of his role here. Here he was the sheriff. Later he’d be one outraged father.
Wrapped in blankets, she sat in the backseat of her father’s cruiser with Lucas and watched everyone load up like a small army. Mrs. Patterson had tripped in the darkness, and two firemen were taking her home for treatment.
She looked over at Lucas sitting a foot away. He was leaning his head back, not seeming to notice that his forehead dripped blood. He’d saved her and helped bring out Tim. She realized he’d passed her to Reid so he could go back for Tim. No one was patting him on the back and saying things like “great job” as they were to Reid.
Lauren seemed to have been labeled “poor victim” and Lucas was invisible.
“You saved me tonight,” she whispered. “Why didn’t you tell my dad? He thinks this whole thing was your fault, thanks to Reid.”
“The truth isn’t worth crossing Reid. Let him play the hero. All I care about is that you’re all right. If I spoke up, I might not have a job tomorrow. One word from Reid and the foreman will take me off the list of extras hires, or worse, tell my father to find another job.”
“We’re alive, thanks to you.” She was touched that he worried about her. “The cut on my leg isn’t deep. But I owe you a blood debt for real now.”
“I know.” His white teeth flashed. “I’ll be waiting to collect it. You’ve got to save my life now.”
Her father climbed into the car without saying a word to them. He spoke into his radio and raced toward the county hospital, half an hour away.
Lauren didn’t feel like talking. She knew the sheriff was probably already mentally composing the lecture he planned to give her for the next ten years. Worry over her would be replaced by anger as soon as he knew she was all right. She’d be lucky if he let her out of the house again before she was twenty-one.
In the darkness, she found Lucas’s hand. She didn’t look at him, but for the rest of the ride, her fingers laced with his. They might never talk of this night again, but they both knew that a blood debt bound them together, and sometime in the future she’d pay him back.
Yancy
THE GREYHOUND BUS pulled up beside the tiny building with Crossroads, Texas, United States Post Office painted on it in red, white and blue, and Yancy Grey almost laughed. The box of a structure looked like it had been rolled in on wheels and set atop a concrete square. He had seen food trucks at county fairs that were bigger.
This wasn’t even a town, just a wide spot in the road where a few buildings clustered together. He saw the steeples of two churches, a dozen little stores that looked as though they were on their last legs framed in the main street, and maybe fifty homes scattered around, not counting trailers parked behind one of the gas stations.
A half mile north there stood what looked like a school, complete with a grass football field with stands on either side. To the east was a grain elevator with a few buildings near the base. Each one was painted a different shade of green. Yancy couldn’t see behind the post office, but he couldn’t imagine that direction being any more interesting than the rest of the town.
“This is the Crossroads stop, mister,” a huge bus
