Free Desires of the Dead by Kimberly Derting Page B

door as she made a hasty scan of the seat to make sure there was nothing there that could make a big, nasty stain. She was afraid that the woman’s suit was in danger of being defiled by her dilapidated rust mobile.
    Violet wondered if the dark-haired boy would get in too, but he never moved; he just stood there, silently guarding Sara’s door.
    Strange, Violet thought as she started her car to get the heat going. She hoped that whatever the woman had come to say would be finished before the car actually had a chance to warm up.
    “So I’m guessing you want to know why I’m here.”
    “Uh-huh.” Even those two—nearly inarticulate—syllables sounded shaky coming out of her mouth. She hoped she wouldn’t be expected to say much.
    “Well, it seems that your name has come up during the course of an investigation.” The woman beside her brushed invisible lint from her knee before looking up to judge Violet’s reaction.
    Violet’s heart pounded. Hard.
    This could go one of two ways. One, she could deal with. The other was bad. Very, very bad.
    Maybe they’d found another missing girl’s body in the woods somewhere.
    She couldn’t believe she was hoping for something so terrible.
    “Uh-huh . . .” So far so good on the speaking part, she thought.
    The banging sound that came from the driver’s-side window felt like an explosion to Violet’s already raw nerves. She jumped hard and was immediately embarrassed by her reaction as she turned to see who was there.
    Chelsea’s nose was pressed against the glass, making her normally pretty face look distorted and hideous. Violet could practically see the girl’s sinuses from her vantage point; it was more than she’d ever needed to witness.
    Violet rolled down her window with the old-fashioned hand crank, and Chelsea jumped back before her face went down with the glass.
    “Sorry to interrupt,” Chelsea declared, not sounding the least bit repentant. She glanced disrespectfully at the woman in Violet’s passenger seat when she said it and then instantly ignored her without waiting for a response. She looked earnestly at Violet. “Do you know where Mike went? I’ve been looking all over. He wasn’t at his locker after class, and I haven’t seen what’s-her-name, his little sister.”
    Violet rolled her eyes impatiently. “I just saw him waiting for his bus.”
    Chelsea sighed. “ Crud! I was hoping to offer him a ride home.” But the way she wiggled her eyebrows implied that “ride home” meant more than a simple car ride. Knowing Chelsea, she was hoping it would.
    Violet smirked as a big yellow school bus pulled out of the lot. “I think you just missed your opportunity, Chels.”
    Now there were only a few straggling vehicles left in the student lot, Violet’s and Chelsea’s among them, as well as a big black SUV that Violet could only assume belonged to the woman sitting beside her, since it sure as heck didn’t belong to anyone at school.
    “Fine,” Chelsea sighed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”
    “Sorry about that,” Violet mumbled to the woman once Chelsea was gone.
    “I just have a couple of questions for you,” FBI Sara continued as if their conversation had never been disrupted at all.
    Violet’s airway narrowed painfully. Here goes, Violet thought, hoping against hope for the familiar questions that she’d already answered a hundred times before.
    “First of all, how did you know the body was there?”
    Violet stared at her. She wasn’t sure how to answer the question. It wasn’t clear; FBI Sara hadn’t given her enough details to be sure which body she meant.
    Violet thought about the first body she’d found last year, discarded and bloated in the shallow waters of the lake. She closed her eyes, trying for the millionth time to purge the image from her mind’s eye. But it was too vivid, forever etched into her memory.
    “I saw it,” she mumbled, hoping that that was the body the woman was talking about.
    The woman