Trip motioned to Hunter to put down the crate. “Things got pretty hairy there at the end, huh? Glad you got out. We were walking up River Road to get Will’s truck when the cops picked us up. I parked up there after we unloaded the booze so that we wouldn’t get parked in, and there were a couple of other kids who were also leaving at the same time. The cops saw Will toss a beer can into the woods, so they gave him a ticket for underage drinking and insisted on calling the folks to pick us up. Our dad kept asking Will about drugs, and if you were there, but he couldn’t get anything out of him, so he sent him to bed. He woke us up at dawn to start work, and now he’s got Will out there raking the apple field. Oh, and the parents took his phone, so don’t text him.”

“Shit, I’m sorry.” Hunter recalled passing the cops on River Road as he’d headed home. He remembered glancing at the clock on the dash and seeing that it read 1 a.m. just as two cop cars passed him, their lights flashing. “I must have left right before they got there,” he said. “Did they write you up?”

“For what? I’m twenty-one, and I wasn’t driving yet, so no DUI. Honestly, I think they just wanted to get everyone out of there and go home.”

“But what about the house?” Hunter asked. “There must have been fifty kids there.”

“Dude, that’s the crazy part,” Trip said. “I don’t think they even saw it. We were up on the road when they stopped us. I mean, shit, I was sweating bullets. If they’d seen the house we would have been completely fucked. Trespassing, breaking and entering? I don’t even know. But one of the cops asked if we were drinking in the woods, and someone said yes, and that was that. Real detective work.” Trip laughed. “Sometimes I think they’re just going through the motions.”

Hunter frowned. “Someone’s going to find it, though.” He remembered walking through the kitchen, an inch of water on the floor from a clogged sink. It was starting to come back to him—his wet shoes. “Things got pretty out of control.”

Trip lit up a cigarette—hand rolled, of course, part of his thing. “Whatever,” he said, as if that was an answer. “Whose house is it, anyway? No one from around here. It’s probably just some builder doing it on spec, trying to make a quick buck.” He looked at Hunter and winked. “No offense.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Hunter said, thinking that Trip was taking this way too lightly.

“But when whoever is building that house sees it, they’re going to want answers. The cops will put it together that you guys were down there. Who else got caught?”