and thickets of pungent bay and eucalyptus trees.
A third scream ripped through the wildwood and then another, deeper.
Jeanne yelled, “We’re coming, we’re coming!”
At the bottom of the hill they found Hannah in tears, her shirt half open and filthy, leaning against the trunk of an oak tree. She looked at them accusingly.
“He said you guys went to the flume.”
“Who?”
“What’s the matter with you? Why were you screaming?” Jeanne tossed her braids back. “We were just this minute up by the chicken coop.”
“Are you okay?” Liz asked. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“He said you had cigarettes.” Snot ran out of Hannah’s nose and along the line of her lip. She licked it away. “Billy Phillips.”
“What about him?”
Hannah pointed down over the root saddle, down the path and onto the Bluegang rocks.
Liz inched her way to the edge of the overhanging roots. “Wow!”
Billy Phillips lay sprawled on his back on a boulder, his head at an odd angle, his arms and legs splayed.
“His mom’s our cook,” Jeanne said.
“What happened?” Liz asked.
“I . . . pushed him.” When Hannah cried, her whole body moved, up and down, pumping up the tears.
Jeanne grabbed her by the shoulders and shook hard.
“Stop being a bully,” Liz said. “She’s scared and you’re makin’ it worse.” She reached around Hannah and hugged her. “You want us to go home with you so you can tell your mom?”
“Are you stupid? You know her mother, how she gets. And what about the nail polish? That’s gotta come off before we—”
Hannah looked down at her toes.
“But he’s hurt—” Liz said.
“He isn’t hurt, you stupe, he’s dead,” Jeanne said. “This isn’t like a story, in a book, it’s real and she’s in big trouble.”
Hannah sank to the ground and huddled against the trunk of the oak.
“Are you sure?” Liz peered down at the body on the rocks. “There’s lots of blood on the rock. We should go down and look, huh?” The way his head was turned, they couldn’t see his eyes. “He might be in a coma.” Liz had read of such things.
“He had my underpants. They were in his pocket.”
“Yuck.”
“How’d he get them?” Jeanne asked.
“He stole them, I guess. Off the clothesline.”
“Is that why you killed him?”
“I didn’t kill him!”
Jeanne peered over the bank another time. “Looks suspicious.”
“I didn’t mean for him to fall. He was touching me and saying nasty stuff.”
“Boy, if this ever gets out, your family, your entire family, is going to be completely ruined. You’ll have to leave town.”
The three girls looked at each other.
“She didn’t mean to do anything. It was an accident, like self-defense.”
Jeanne snorted. “It’s not like he was trying to kill her.” She crouched on the edge of the hillside and picked at a scab on her knee. “This would destroy your parents. Probably ruin your father, you know that, don’t you?”
Hannah didn’t know anything except that she wanted to be away from Bluegang.
“Him being a minister means his family’s got to be perfect or the congregation fires him.”
The way Jeanne said it left no room for doubt.
“I just wanted him to stop touching me.”
“Your mom’ll have a heart attack.”
“I’m sure it’ll be okay.” Liz’s round, serious face in its squared-off haircut looked almost adult. “I read in a book where this woman—”
“I told you before, this is real life.” Jeanne thought a moment. “When the police find out she was down here alone painting her toes with stolen polish, in public, they’ll say it’s no wonder Billy Phillips acted funny. Haven’t you ever heard of girls asking for it?”
“Asking for what?”
“You know.”
They looked at each other again. Below them Bluegang sang over rocks and gravel and sand on its way down to the Santa Clara Valley and the San Francisco Bay; and in the deep pools the trout and crawdads dozed in the shadows of boulders and above it all crows perched in the oaks and sycamores and alders and bays, translating everything the girls said into squawks and caws.
Liz said, “I still think we should tell a grown-up.”
Jeanne crouched before Hannah. “If you tell someone, it’ll be just like on Gangbusters. The police’ll want to know everything Billy said and what he did and there’ll probably be photographers from the paper and no one’s gonna care if you’re crying or embarrassed or anything like that. I bet you have to stand up and tell everything in court. With a jury and all.”
“He said bad things.”
“And the judge’ll want you to say ’em out loud for the jury.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“You expect a jury to believe you? You’re a girl.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“The church’ll have a big meeting and they’ll vote and you’ll have to move out of Rinconada. Maybe go someplace like Georgia or Alabama.”
Hannah blinked and wiped her tears. A smudge of dirt and snot and tears spread from one cheek, under her nose to the other. “All I want is for it to be like it never happened.”
Jeanne thought a moment. “Maybe it can be.” She stared down at Billy Phillips. “We could just go away and leave him.”
“You don’t mean it. You know that’s wrong, you know it.” Liz’s plump cheeks colored. “Besides, dogs might get him. There’s coyotes around here . . .”
“Someone’ll find him. They’ll just think he fell over.”
“What about his mother?” Liz said. “She’s only got one son.”
“What’re you talking about her for?” Hannah sprang up in outrage. “What about me? He said he was going to make me do something . . . nasty. I don’t care what happens to him. I wish coyotes would get him. I wish I could forget about this forever. I wish I could hit my head on the rocks and get amnesia.”
“Like Young Widder Brown.” Liz nodded as if she now understood perfectly.
“Yeah, well, if wishes were fishes our nets would be full. My dad says in real life people don’t get amnesia.” Jeanne tossed back her braids. “Actions have consequences and he says we have to take what we get and make the best of it.” She glanced down at her Mickey Mouse Club watch. “If we’re gonna leave we better do it before anyone comes along.
“We’ll say you fell. We’ll say we went up to the flume and you fell off at that place where the boards are rotten. You could say you saw a snake, a big one and it really scared you and that’s how come you were crying. And you could walk through the poison oak on the way home. You’ll swell up like I do and no one’ll blame you for being miserable.”
Half