The Familiar Dark - Amy Engel Page 0,2

Hated thinking about what it might mean.

I dropped the rag on the counter and pressed my hands into my lower back. I was too young to feel like such shit at the end of the day, my legs aching and spine a dull throb. You would have thought the snow might’ve made for a quiet day at the diner, but weather was everyone’s second-favorite topic, right behind politics. The place had been hopping all day, only now emptying out as everyone made their way home for dinner. The pie rack had been cleared out, and I didn’t want to estimate how many cups of coffee I’d poured in the last eight hours. Lots of jawing and not a whole lot of tipping. My least favorite kind of day.

“Looks like your brother’s pulling in,” Louise said. “Hope he doesn’t want a piece of apple. He’s shit outta luck.”

I straightened up, watched Cal’s car slide to a stop out front. Even after all these years, the sight of my brother behind the wheel of a patrol car came as a little shock. We’d spent the majority of our childhoods evading the cops, grew up always keeping one eye out for the law. The kind of public service that might earn us an extra dollar from the dealers using our mama’s cracked countertop as a storefront. So cop hadn’t exactly been at the top of my list of promising potential professions for my brother. But he’d surprised me, first by becoming one and then turning out to be good at the job. Word around town was he was tough but always fair. Which was more than could be said for his boss and the other lazy-ass deputies. Once, when Thomas had spent a night in jail after he’d made a drunken mess of himself, he’d told me that Cal had “a real nice way about him, even when he was putting on the cuffs.” Praise for the law didn’t come higher than that, not around here.

“He’s not usually in town on Saturdays,” I said. The cops around here were spread thin, patrolling not just Barren Springs but multiple small towns and the long stretches of almost empty highway in between.

“Maybe the man needs a cup of coffee,” Louise said. “I’m sure he’s had a long day.” She fluffed her hair with one hand. Louise was old enough to be Cal’s mom and then some, but even she turned ridiculous in his presence, wanting to baby him and flirt with him in equal measure.

“Maybe,” I said, but something heavy settled in my stomach as Cal unwound himself from the front seat of his cruiser. He shut the door and then stood there, head hanging down, dishwater-blond hair catching the light. After a moment, he straightened up, set his shoulders. Steeling himself, I thought, and the heavy knot in my stomach bottomed out through the floor. Those sirens . . . I told myself they had nothing to do with Junie, who was too young to drive and too old to be fooling around on a playground. I grabbed the rag and looked away from the window, went back to scrubbing at the cracked Formica countertop, didn’t look up even when I heard the bell jangle over the door.

“Hey, Cal,” Louise said, her voice pitched high and girlish. “You want—”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my brother hold up one hand, stopping Louise’s voice in its tracks. “Eve,” he said quietly, walking toward me. His cop shoes were loud on the ancient linoleum floor.

I didn’t look up, kept scrubbing. Whatever he was here for, whatever had been nipping at me all day, it wouldn’t be true, it wouldn’t have happened, if I could keep him from saying it.

“Eve,” he said again. I could see his belt buckle pressed up against the edge of the counter now, and he reached over, laid his hand on mine. “Evie . . .”

I jerked my hand away, took a step backward. “Don’t,” I said. I meant it to come out fierce and commanding enough to stop him from speaking, but my voice wobbled and broke, the single word dribbling away into nothing.

“Look at me,” Cal said, gentle but firm. His big-brother voice. I raised my eyes slowly, not wanting to