Wildefire Read Free Page B

stairs, taken barely a year after the adoption, when Ash was only a toddler, it looked now as though the last fifteen years had finally ambushed the patriarch of the Wilde family.
    Her father scooped his keys off the foyer table and 17

    then fished around in the pockets of his khakis for the fourth time. “Wallet, wallet . . .”
    “Dad,” Ash called down to him. “Back pocket.” She pointed to the lump on the back side of his khakis, and his panicked expression softened a few degrees as his hand settled on the billfold.
    “You know, Ashline . . .” He slipped on his leather coat, which Ash had given him for his fiftieth birthday.
    “We could use a third pair of eyes out on the road. Your grounding doesn’t have to start until afterward.”
    Ashline’s hands tightened around the balusters.
    “Thanks, but I’ll gladly opt for house arrest over ‘search party of three’ in the rain.”
    Her father stepped over to the staircase so that they were face-to-face through the balustrade. “No one’s saying Eve hasn’t made enough mistakes for ten childhoods.
    But she was always a good sister to you.”
    There was some truth to that. Even after the poison of adolescence had set in and Eve had slowly grown carcinogenic to the people around her—her classmates, her friends, and eventually her parents—she had always retained her loyalty to Ashline. On days when Ash had returned home from school feeling trampled and down-trodden, she could always expect to find Eve in her bedroom doorway soon after. Some days Eve would even invade their mother’s liquor cabinet and have two mint juleps mixed and waiting for Ashline’s arrival home. The older they got, the more Ash could count on Eve to sense her moods from a distance, like a change in the wind.
    18

    That is, until Eve disappeared.
    Ashline stood up. “Good sisters don’t leave in the first place. They don’t make their little sisters hang up missing-person flyers on every telephone pole from Brooklyn to Albany . . . like she was some sort of lost dog.” She started up the steps toward her room. “I’ll be damned if I do it again.”
    “Ashline.”
    Ash stopped. This time it was her mother, perched on the bottom stair.
    “Ashline, please,” her mother repeated.
    Ash opened her mouth to say no, but then she spotted the jacket clutched in Gloria Wilde’s hand. “What is that?” Ash demanded.
    Her mother held it up. It was the orange and silver warm-up jacket that Eve had worn when she’d still been a gymnast. Ash hadn’t seen her wear it since she was thirteen, and it was at least a few years past fitting her.
    “I thought I’d bring it,” her mother said slowly. “In case she was cold.”
    Ashline didn’t know if it was the way the jacket trembled in her mother’s hands or the pleading look that she gave Ash, as if Ash were the only one who could bring her sister back. But she walked down the stairs, opened the closet door, and pulled out her own winter coat. “Here.” She delicately replaced the warm-up in her mother’s hand with the wool peacoat. “This will probably fit her better.”
    Her mother pecked her on the cheek. Ash was grateful 19

    that her mother didn’t cry until she was out the front door and walking to the car.
    Ash stood at the glass door for a minute, until the red taillights of the car disappeared beyond the trees that framed their yard. No doubt her parents would stop at every diner, gas station, and motel they could find within a fifteen-mile radius.
    Just like last time, they wouldn’t find her.
    Curled up in her bedroom window seat with the lights off, Ash watched the rain splatter against the glass. For the second time that day, the weather matched her mood precisely—first the freak afternoon snowstorm, and now this midnight thundershower. She left the window open just a crack so that the patter of raindrops against the leaves could wash over her. She hoped she could cull some sense of relaxation out of the white