Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

The fire had started more than a hundred miles away, outside Granville, but warm weather and drought had brought the flames right to Jenny’s doorstep.

Before this summer, the only threat in that thick stand of dead spruce near her house had happened ten years ago. It wasn’t fire, but a stranger who had emerged from those trees and threatened their safety. Jenny was so sick of hearing that particular story, she was almost relieved to see it being rewritten by nature.

Not Jenny but her sister, Jade, had been riding her bike near the dead-end road that butted the forest. Jade had been about six, and had just gotten her training wheels off. Seven-year-old Jenny hadn’t been there, but she could imagine it: her younger sister, standing up on her pedals and braking with the full force of her weight, scattering pebbles beneath her tires.

Jade had always been overly sure of herself, in Jenny’s opinion.

The part about the man coming out of the woods was harder for Jenny’s brain to wrap itself around, since she and her sister never really saw strangers. They lived in a place where everyone knew everyone. Jenny knew about strangers, of course, but the girls had never been anywhere that they might run into one, except for maybe JC Penney. It was the only place they could even imagine wandering off and getting separated from their mother. The one place where their mother had bothered to use that delicious word—“stranger”—which always made Jade and Jenny move a little closer to the hem of her skirt, as if she were base in a game of tag.

But in their neighborhood, mountain lions were a bigger threat than strangers. Also rare, but they had at least been spotted once or twice. “Strangers,” though: that was an exotic, spine-tingling word.

So Jenny had been especially jealous when Jade had met one.

Jade had relished telling the story, how he’d come toward her slowly, with a five-dollar bill in his outstretched hand.

“Here you go, sweetheart,” he’d said. Jade had said he smelled like skunk, and she’d seen a rip in his jeans. Every time her little sister told it, Jenny noticed that the story grew, until it included every missing button on his shirt, the ominous dirt under his fingernails. She doubted very much that Jade was remembering new details for every retelling, but Jenny said nothing, just chewed the inside of her cheek, feeling invisible, while her little sister awed everyone in her typical way.

Jade had taken the money and then whipped away on her bike (her words again), standing expertly on her pedals. Jenny knew that Jade thought the people she was telling the story to would be impressed by this.

Jade loved an audience.

“Hold on there, darling,” the man had said. “There’s lots more money where that came from, if you just come through these trees with me.”

Even back then, Jenny had been skeptical of the words “darling” and “sweetheart” coming out of her sister’s mouth in a drawl she’d never heard before, but the five dollars was certainly real. For weeks, Jade had had her eye on a yellow raincoat at JC Penney, one that came with a matching umbrella—also yellow, with pictures of more umbrellas on it—and she just needed five more dollars to add to her birthday money before she could afford it.

“That’s okay,” she’d called over her shoulder to the man. “This is just enough. Thanks!”

Over time, people had even joked about this last bit, how if Jade had been just a little greedier, she might not be around to tell the story. Jenny had never thought the joking was funny, especially because the man was never found, and a tiny part of her thought maybe Jade had lied just to make herself seem even more interesting.

It seemed that people had forgotten about the stranger in the woods until two years ago, when another six-year-old girl went missing, in another part of the state. She still hadn’t been found. Jenny was conflicted, since she had always doubted Jade’s story, just a little bit. After all this time, could the same stranger still be out there, calling little girls “darling” with a drawl like a country singer and luring them with money? She couldn’t believe that she’d actually been jealous of Jade and that stupid umbrella.

As the fire bore down on them, they’d had to leave their cat, Colonel Mustard, because they couldn’t find him. Jenny was frantic. He was mostly hers, and she thought he might be hiding on the top shelf of her closet, but the fire crew had refused to let them go back. One of them had even grabbed her arm to stop her from running inside. Under his hard hat, his face was covered with soot, making the whites of his eyes stand out.

“You can’t go in there,” he said, his fingers leaving a black ring around her forearm.

“My cat…,” she whispered, and at that moment there was a deafening crash of burning tree limbs falling nearby.

He’d shoved her into the backseat of the car even as she held on to the reflective tape on his jacket.

“Colonel Mustard. His name is Colonel Mustard.”

“I hear you, Miss Scarlet,” he said, and she thought maybe he even smiled.

But as they drove off, she’d heard another crash of burning tree limbs and wondered why people made jokes in the midst of tragedies, and what if she never saw Colonel Mustard again?

That was already a week ago.

Jenny was lying on the makeshift cot in the emergency shelter, eating a bologna sandwich from the Salvation Army and reading an old People magazine from a stack that had been donated.

Jade refused to lie down, saying she wasn’t going to get bedbugs just because she was now an evacuee. Jenny wondered how much longer Jade would last, sleeping propped against the wall in a sitting position.

“I think lice is more of a problem in shelters,” Jenny said casually, noticing that the magazine’s pages were stuck together with what looked like