Page 80 of Love on Deck

“Is this where you bring all your victims before you make them disappear?”

“If I did, would I tell you?”

“Good point.”

The alley had been narrow but wide enough for a car. The lane itself was not much wider and led directly to a dilapidated house on a shallow hill. The house was noticeable from the alleyway, but the overgrown trees gave it enough privacy that it wasn’t standing out too much.

It was worn and beaten, the wraparound porch broken in places. The windows were boarded up.

“You were joking about the victims thing, right?” This was definitely a perfect murder spot.

“Why are you so obsessed with murder?”

I laughed. “It’s the small town bringing it out in me, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about Signs.”

“Well, good thing there’s no threat of aliens here,” he said, chuckling. “You have life security, anyway, so you don’t make a good victim. If you went missing, Amelia would hunt me down.”

Now that was funny. “You act like she would notice if I went missing.”

“Is that a joke? Amelia would hunt you down and then anyone who played a part in your disappearance.”

“Wow. You have a lot more confidence in my sister’s opinion of me than I do.”

He stared at me. “Are you joking?”

“I think she’d be sad if I disappeared, obviously, but I don’t picture her as the dad from Taken or anything. Our relationship isn’t like that.”

“But if she went missing, you’d Taken the heck out of the situation.”

“Of course I would.”

Jack crossed his arms over his chest. “You hear the double standard, right?”

“I’m the older sister, the caregiver, the grandma. Obviously I don’t expect Amelia to see me the same way I see her. She wasn’t the one making my lunches and getting me to the bus on time for all those years.”

“Or tucking you into bed at night,” he said, so quietly I wondered if he was saying it to himself more than me.

“Exactly. You get it.”

“No. I understand why you see it that way, though.” He peered at me too long, his X-Ray eyes boring through my skin to all the yucky, misshapen parts underneath.

“So,” I said, a little too loudly, my smile a little too bright. “What’s so special about this place?”

He watched me for a minute, and I could see the moment when he decided to trust me. It made me straighten my spine and pay close attention, because this didn’t seem like standard hometown date protocol for Jack.

He looked briefly at the house. “It’s my Narnia.”

“As in—”

“As in my secret escape closet when I was a kid.”

I tilted my head a little to the side. “I didn’t take you for a reader.”

“My mom read to us a lot when we were kids, so I know the whole walk through the closet to another world part well. This”—he swept his arm up toward the house—“is the doorway in my closet.”

“In plain speech?”

“I used to come up here a lot as a kid and play with my brothers. The house was haunted or a shipwreck or an orphanage we needed to escape from or whatever suited our purposes that day.”

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