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CHAPTER 20

Maggie

THE START OF school was postponed yet again. They probably didn’t want to welcome us back with grief counselors. Everyone knew the Carters and the Moores. In this town, everyone knew everyone.

As I walked around Mount Hope, the flags were at half-mast, and people seemed in a daze. There were too many rumors and wild theories about the meltdown and this explosion for anyone to feel completely safe, and Mayor Tinkerton appeared to be AWOL. A jowly sixty-something guy with perpetual armpit stains, the mayor considered himself a modern leader by sending out emails to the community with the latest on pothole repairs and library acquisitions. But such communications weren’t an option now, and from what I could tell, no one had seen him walking around, reassuring the populace and doing whatever stuff you might expect a small-town mayor to do.

The fact that we couldn’t leave town didn’t help. People habitually pulled their phones out of their pockets, punched a few buttons, and then scowled. The lack of cell service was messing everyone up. We’d grown so used to having the world at our fingertips that we felt crazily vulnerable without such access.

Over the next few days, there was no word from either of Jordan’s parents. Did his dad know where he was? The soldier had taken down our address and contact information, but still …

Jordan tried calling the power plant from our house but couldn’t get through. He also had no information about how to contact his mom and brother. I loved having him around, but I missed that guy who was always lifting my spirits. I didn’t blame him at all, but he was preoccupied, to say the least.

The fact that I didn’t believe him about the flaming guy didn’t help. It was like he didn’t totally trust me anymore; I could feel a barrier where there wasn’t one before.

But even with everything that had happened since we returned to town, there couldn’t have been a running skeleton with bits of flaming flesh falling off his body. That’s just bananas. I worried about him and that battered noggin of his.

Jordan and I went back to his house the day after the explosion so he could leave a note for his father to say he was staying with us. Jordan’s face fell as we approached the smoldering, blackened mess that used to be a large nineteenth-century house.

“This is where my granddaddy was born,” Jordan said, his voice still scratchy from the smoke, as was mine. “He was a servant, ‘never a slave.’ He always reminded us of that. His parents had been slaves, and when the masters lost their workforce and plantation, my granddaddy left the house and worked on a ship out of Charleston. He returned in 1928 and bought this house. He said he did it for his parents and all the people who came before them. And here it is.”

We stood there, smelled the ashy air, and took in the sight of a once-majestic house now missing its second floor and charred everywhere else.