Yeah, that’s me, just a dumb woman with a bad memory. “Something like that,” she said, then handed him two twenties, waited for her change, and declined his help in carrying out the long-handled tool. “Thanks, I got it,” she said, slipping the ten into her wallet and the strap of her purse over her shoulder.

“Now, if them there cutters don’t work fer ya, y’know, because y’all are a woman and they’re meant for a man, then you might want to rent a hacksaw or a sawzall.” He nodded, as if agreeing with himself. “That’d do the trick.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, silently bristling. It wasn’t as if she were some tiny little frail stupid thing, for God’s sake, but she kept her sharp tongue in check as she hauled the bolt cutters outside. At eighteen, she’d hadn’t exactly been an Einstein either, and there was just no reason to get into it with the clerk.

She’d considered asking Jay to help her with her new project. She suspected he might own a pair of bolt cutters which could have saved her the thirty bucks, but she wanted to limit his involvement. First of all, he was misinterpreting her interest in him. He seemed to think she was angling to date him and that was not what she’d intended. So it was a good thing to keep him at a distance. He’d ask too many questions and what she was doing was bordering on illegal. As it was, he’d be in plenty of hot water if he was caught getting the information she wanted from the school and police records. If he even did that much for her. She wasn’t certain that he’d cross that line and so she hadn’t shared everything Lucretia had told her about vampires and cults. It was hard enough to get Jay on board without getting into the surreal, goth stuff.

Besides, she told herself as her running shoes crunched in the gravel of the Rent-It-All parking lot littered with battered pickups and a couple of monster trucks, some things were for her to do by herself. And breaking into the storage unit holding Tara Atwater’s personal things was one, despite what Randy, the eighteen-year-old expert, thought. She slid behind the wheel and started the car. Dust had settled over the windshield and the interior of the car was warm, the sun visible through high, thick clouds. Kristi found a pair of sunglasses in her glove box and slid them onto her nose. She backed out of her parking space, trying and failing to avoid potholes in the dirty gravel. She passed a jacked-up truck covered in mud, where a man lit a cigarette as he packed a chainsaw in the back.