Doll Bones (16 page)

Zach nodded. “There was all that stuff with the donut guy and the crazy bus guy seeming to see her, and there was the camp getting messed up, and—and I had a dream about Eleanor last night in the woods. Just like Poppy. It wasn’t the
same
dream, but it was
kind of
the same.”

“You did?” Alice didn’t look happy to hear it.

“I should have said something before,” he told her.

“It’s just—” Alice looked down at her hands. She clenched them. “I don’t want to believe in Eleanor. I don’t want there to be a ghost that’s talking to Poppy—and now, to you.”

“You can’t really be jealous—”

She cut him off, talking very fast. “You don’t understand. There can’t be a ghost, a real ghost. Because if there is, then some random dead girl wants to haunt Poppy, but my own dead parents can’t be bothered to come back and haunt me.”

Everything seemed to pause, as though the universe had taken a moment to draw its breath.

Alice wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. They were wet and glittering with all the tears she was holding back. “What if we bury the Queen and Eleanor is really gone? What if we actually put her to rest? What if it’s real? Does that mean that my parents didn’t even care enough to say good-bye? I didn’t even get a single stupid dream. Not
one
.”

He remembered Alice’s parents only vaguely. He recalled sitting on a linoleum floor, playing Matchbox cars with Alice in a sunny yellow kitchen while her mother made them toast with jam, her father wearing crazy ties to his job at the courthouse—and, of course, Zach remembered that they’d died. But he didn’t think of them as dead, the way ghosts were dead. And he’d never thought about how it would be to go on a quest to dig a grave when your parents were already in one.

He felt like a jerk for not even considering it. Now that he had, he wasn’t sure there was anything he could say to Alice that wouldn’t make him a bigger jerk. He was helpless.

“Maybe after we die, we don’t get choices like that.” He crouched down next to her. “And it probably sucks to be a ghost.”

Alice snorted, the corner of her mouth lifting. “Maybe,” she said.

Snapping twigs made them both look up. Zach stood. Poppy was walking toward them, wearing an uncomfortable expression, half relief and half dismay.

“I think I found the way to town,” she said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A
LTHOUGH THE MAIN STREET OF
E
AST
L
IVERPOOL
was full of big store windows and shops, many were no longer open at all. There was a place called Pants Unlimited that was covered in flyers advertising
FINAL SALE!
on everything, since they were going out of business, but by the aged look of the flyers, they might have been going out of business for years. The store owner stood in the doorway, smoking a cigarette. Zach and Poppy and Alice walked past him, still trailing water, their shoes making squelching sounds. Poppy hugged the Queen to her chest, the doll’s face turned so that he couldn’t see if her cheeks had grown even rosier. Next they passed a gaming store with a few bikes leaned against the pavement and a couple more chained to a nearby
STOP
sign. And finally they came to a diner, the only restaurant they’d seen that was open.

They stopped to gaze at the menu on the door.

“I have four dollars and twenty-five cents—aside from the bus fare home,” Zach said. “How much do you guys have?”

“That I can spend?” said Poppy. “Zero.”

“Eight seventy-five,” said Alice, pushing up her dress to rifle through the pockets of the jeans she had on underneath.

“So, not much before we start dipping into our bus fare home,” Poppy said. “But something.”

Alice looked grim at the mention of the bus, but didn’t say anything, which was good, but also made Zach nervous. All the way from the woods, the three of them had only said things having to do with figuring out where they were going. He couldn’t decide if the girls didn’t want to fight anymore or if they were gearing up for an even bigger fight that was about to come.

Somehow he’d become at the center of their conflict, and he could tell it was just a matter of time before they figured out that they didn’t have to be mad at each other—he was the one they should both be mad at. He was the one who had messed up the game, the one who had hidden the Questions, the one who Alice—

The one who Alice liked, which was weird too. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought about girls or even like he’d never thought about Alice
like that
. He had. But actually asking her out? The idea was paralyzing.

“Okay,” Zach said, pushing open the door to the diner. “Let’s go in.”

The diner was warm, with a round display of desserts near the register that turned, showing huge cakes and pies piled with icing and oozing filling. There were little glass dishes of Jell-O and others of rice pudding studded with raisins, each one covered in plastic wrap.

A woman standing behind the register, her white hair in short beauty-parlor curls, looked them up and down skeptically, as though she was trying to decide if they were trouble. “You can’t track mud all over the place,” she said finally.

Zach could smell something frying in the back, and his stomach lurched with hunger.

“Sorry,” said Alice, taking a step forward, putting on her best acting face. “We were out racing our sailboat and got really into it. A little too much, I guess. We just wanted to get something warm to eat before we go back. The water was really cold.”

The woman behind the register smiled, like the idea of healthy outdoor activity had made their mud-stained appearance wholesome. Or maybe she figured that kids with sailboats had money, however bad they looked. “Well, okay, but you go dry off in the back first. Table for four?”

“Three,” Alice said, and the woman blinked in confusion.

Zach narrowed his eyes at the doll, hanging limply in Poppy’s arms.

“Come on.” Poppy took Alice’s arm and hauled her toward the bathrooms. As she walked she looked back at the white-haired woman at the register. “Table for four is fine.”

Zach went into the men’s bathroom. There was a row of three urinals and a single stall, all in baby-blue tile, with paintings of the Ohio River in the olden days hanging high on the walls. He walked over to the sinks, took off his shoes, and rinsed them off. Then he took off his jeans, wiped dirt and bits of grass from the cuffs, and tried to dry them the best he could with a combination of paper towels and a hand dryer.

Finally he wrung out his shirt over one of the sinks, hand-combed his wet hair, and put his jeans back on. They stuck to his legs, damp and chill. He looked back into the mirror, seeing a slightly sunburnt boy looking back at him, older than he remembered himself, with a familiar mess of brown-black hair and black eyes that seemed to say:
I hope you know what you’re doing.

When he left the bathroom, Alice and Poppy were already sitting in a banquette. They waved in his direction, and he slid in just as their waitress arrived.

She was only a little older than they were, with pink lipstick, blunt-cut black hair, and a nose ring. Handing over the menus, she paused to stare at the Queen, lolling beside Poppy.

“Your doll?” the waitress said, pointing. Dirt from the riverbed was in the grooves of her nose and mouth and was turning her blond ringlets into thick clumps. “Superscary.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Alice, with a dark look in Poppy’s direction. “The scariest.”

The waitress smiled, handed them the menus, and walked off. Zach was just glad that it seemed like she was seeing a
doll
, instead of whatever Tinshoe Jones, the donut guy, and the lady at the register had seen. He pushed the thought out of his mind and studied the menu. They had twelve seventy-five that they could spend and still get home—and that was budgeting on loaning Poppy a quarter for her bus fare.

There were biscuits and eggs in white sausage gravy with hash browns, maybe big enough for them to split two plates three ways, for five dollars. But there was also a turkey bacon club sandwich that came with fries and slaw for a little more than seven dollars, and if they got water with that instead of sodas, and figured on a tip of a dollar, they would still have money left over. And there was the three eggs with hash browns and toast for three ninety-five—just enough that they couldn’t afford it all around.

There was a bowl of chili for two ninety-five that seemed promising. You could get a side of fries for another two fifty. Maybe if they got three orders of chili and one side of fries?

Thinking about what they could afford to eat was making his mouth water. If they didn’t figure out something soon, he was going to order it all and have no way home.

“Be right back,” Alice said, and headed off toward the counter, leaving him alone at the table with Poppy.

“Maybe you should go after her,” Zach said. “Talk.”

“Maybe
you
should go after her,” Poppy told him, pushing loose strands of wet hair behind her ears.

Zach sighed. “Don’t be like that.”

“Don’t be like what?” She stared at him unblinkingly. “Are you going to tell me why you answered all those Questions and then lied about it? Why you wouldn’t play even one more time?”

“I
couldn’t
,” Zach said.

“That doesn’t make any sense.” She folded her arms and balanced her chin on them, watching him.

“I know,” he said miserably. “I thought it would be easier—”

He broke off as Alice came back to the table, holding a bottle of ketchup and another bottle of hot sauce. She opened her menu, scanning the prices.

“There are free refills on the sodas,” she said. “We could get one and share it.”

“And be out a dollar seventy-five,” Zach said.

“I asked about the bus, too,” Alice said, not looking at any of them. “Next one comes tomorrow, same time as today. I got directions to the stop. It’s a couple miles from here.”

Zach wondered if it was closer to where they’d fallen into the river, whether they’d gone the wrong way, whether they could have made it after all, but he didn’t ask. Poppy was silent, worrying her lower lip with her teeth. The Queen’s dark eyes shone in her mud-streaked face, and Zach couldn’t help thinking that everything was going exactly the way she wanted it to, even if he had no proof of that.

They were still studying the menu when the waitress came back around to take their drink order (tap water) and placed a basket of bread and margarine on the table. They fell on it, ripping apart the rolls, spreading them with margarine, and stuffing them into their mouths.

Zach felt better, having eaten something since the donut. Poppy and Alice must have felt better too, because they were able to agree on the chili and fries, which they devoured down to the last little burnt, ketchup-and-hot-sauce-covered crisp of fry.

“I’m so tired,” Alice said, putting her head down on the table. “All the walking and the swimming and the being cold and miserable. I could go to sleep right here. Seriously, under this table. It would be more comfortable than sleeping on the ground was.”