Kyle wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “I don’t know.”
I thought of all the places I loved downtown: the coffee shop, the fair trade store where Tess bought handmade paper and funky scarves, the used-books store where you could get four books for two dollars, and the restaurant where I had worked before taking off to Colorado without giving notice. Any one of them could be burning right now.
Hemlock was the only real home I had known and it was being torn apart.
“Why would anyone do this?” I asked, chest aching.
Kyle didn’t answer; he just pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. Next to him, Jason was equally silent. I was starting to think maybe there were never any reasons for the horrible things people did. None that mattered, anyway.
The knowledge that this wasn’t even the night of the rally—that things would probably get worse before everything was over—made my stomach flip. I wished I knew what the packs were planning. If the Trackers and the wolves went to war in the middle of Hemlock, the violence would consume the city, catching a lot of innocent people in its wake.
I pulled in a deep breath and forced myself to turn my back on the fires.
I still had Kyle’s cell, and as we crossed the parking lot, I tried calling Hank. No answer. I don’t know why I bothered. Eve had called this afternoon and gotten nowhere closer to finding out what the wolves had planned for tomorrow night. If he wouldn’t tell Eve, there was no way he’d tell me.
With a small sigh, I slipped the phone back into the inside pocket of my borrowed jacket.
“Any news?” Kyle asked as Stephen approached.
Stephen shook his head. “I didn’t want to tell the hospital who I was and they’re not big on releasing patient information to complete strangers. I left messages and texts with a couple of friends. Maybe one of them can find out something.” With a dejected shrug, he turned his attention to the building in front of us.
Hemlock’s north side had strict zoning rules to ensure the area stayed free of fast-food joints, big box stores, and just about anything else the town’s wealthier families thought would drive down property values. The one exception was the small strip mall near the bridge. It was a miniature oasis for tired nannies, frazzled parents, and kids looking for a quick sugar fix.
Like a lot of the retail property in town, the strip mall was owned by Jason’s father, but unlike the drab, boxy strip malls he owned on the other side of the river, Matt Sheffield had built this one to be as attractive and inviting as possible. It was practically the anti–strip-mall strip mall. The U-shaped building was a strange mix of Italian and Oriental architecture—a mix that shouldn’t have worked, but somehow did—and the stores all faced a large, shady courtyard—a courtyard complete with a fountain that bubbled away during the summer months.
There was a convenience store, a Chinese restaurant, a dry cleaner’s, a yoga studio, and two cafés. There was also a store that sold mailing supplies and rented mailboxes. I headed straight for the latter. Amy had mentioned getting a box last year after her mom had freaked out over a seven-hundred-dollar pair of shoes she had ordered online.
While Amy hadn’t told me she had actually gone ahead and rented a box, it was the only reason I could imagine her getting Trey to pick her up here, a twenty-minute walk from her house, in the middle of January.
Our only hope was that the box was still under her name. Hank had rented a lot of mailboxes from a lot of different places when I was a kid—it was amazing the number of illegal things you could move through the mail. Most places let you pay for the boxes up front for a set number of months. Depending on how long Amy had rented the box for, we might still be able to get into it—assuming that was what the second key we’d found in her room actually unlocked.
Fallen leaves crunched under my feet as I crossed the courtyard. Christmas was more than a month off, but small blue lights had been strung in the bare branches of the trees. I glanced at the fountain as I passed. It had been emptied in preparation for the cold, but a layer of leaves had gummed up the drain and several inches of old rainwater and melted snow filled the basin.
We reached the store.
Most of the lights were dark, but one row of flickering fluorescent bulbs lit a wall of mailboxes in an alcove between two sets of glass doors.
Kyle tried the door. It was locked.
“Attention customers,” read Jason, leaning toward a small sign taped in the window. “For twenty-four/seven access to mailbox, please speak to management.”
“You probably pay a deposit and they give you a key to the door,” I said.
“So where’s Amy’s key?” asked Jason, stepping back.
I shrugged. “We only found the one extra key in the window seat.”
“Great. So we have no way in.”
“For someone who tries so hard to make everyone think he’s a tortured bad boy, you are shockingly inept at being a badass,” muttered Kyle. He walked over to a nearby bench. The thing was made of cement and must have weighed a ton. He glanced at Stephen as he bent to lift one end. “Give me a hand.”
With an uneasy look, Stephen did as he was told.
“I don’t think . . .” Jason started to object, but I put a hand on his arm and pulled him away from the front of the store as Kyle and Stephen prepared to hurl the bench.
The sound of breaking glass was unbelievably loud. I held my breath and waited for an alarm to go off, but things stayed mercifully silent. I guess the store wasn’t too worried about people breaking into the alcove.
The bench lay across the door like a beached whale.
“My father is just going to love this,” muttered Jason. Given how much he enjoyed pissing off his parents, I had a hard time believing he was actually that upset at the destruction.
Kyle climbed inside, then reached back and helped me over. Broken glass crunched under my feet and I was glad he had found an old pair of my sneakers in the trunk of his car.
“Someone driving by is going to notice this,” I said, glancing back across the courtyard. The store was one of three that faced the street: anyone who looked would be able to see the broken window.
“With everything happening on the other side of the river, they may not care,” said Kyle, letting go of my hand.
He had a point.
I pulled out Amy’s key as I headed for the bank of mailboxes. The key wasn’t numbered; there was nothing to indicate which box it belonged to.