Free The Edge Of The Cemetery by Margaret Millmore Page B

encouragement. “Come on, Billy, put your big-girl pants on. We've got bigger fish to fry with this kid and his demon!”
    She stiffened and began to pull away, but not before she elbowed me in my ribs. My bruising had already reached the final stages of healing and I was hardly sore now, but I doubled over dramatically and said, “Keep that up and you're on your own.” When I looked over at her she was smiling…well, more like smirking, but that was good enough for me.

Chapter 13
    We went back to our respective apartments with the intention of getting cleaned up from our workouts. As we left the elevator, she said, “When you hear from Phil, call me immediately.” I nodded and headed to my front door.
    While I was in the shower I made two decisions; call Phil for an update, and Google Julie Wilkinson. The latter was plain old curiosity, the former necessity.
    “Hey Phil,” I said when he answered his phone.
    “Hey man, how ya feeling this morning?”
    “Much better. How are you?” He sounded amped up, probably on copious amounts of coffee or some other caffeinated beverage. “What's new? Any word on the kid?”
    “I'm good, man. Listen, I was just gonna send you and Billy a text. Aris wants us all to meet at Lincoln Way in about two hours. Can you two be there?”
    “I guess. What's going on?”
    “Pete got back late last night, and he's got some stuff to report. I found some stuff too that I think might tie into all of this.”
    “Okay. Well, things got interesting last night when Billy and I got home.” I told him about Julie's visit, her accusation about the burglary, and the other thing that had been bothering me since our encounter with her.
    “How'd she know what really went down? I mean, the only people that survived our little scrimmage, besides our people, were those poor bums we saved, and possibly Edgar….” I let that hang out there for a second.
    I'd fantasized that Edgar was fatally injured that day in the abandoned auto garage and had simply found a sewer to crawl into until death took him, but deep down inside, I knew that was just a pipedream. Our people would never mention that day to outsiders, and the bums wouldn't remember enough and didn't really see much anyway, because Vokkel had them drugged almost to the point of unconsciousness. And let's not forget, Julie knew about the papers we'd liberated from Vokkel's house. I didn't think she was close enough to her father to be aware of his work, but I could be wrong.
    Phil sighed. “Sorry man, but we all knew that Edgar probably survived, and I don't think we should discount him as Julie's source of information.”
    “Yeah, I know, but there's another possibility we need to consider. I think we need to see if Caleb is around. He could have known about the notes and journals, and he sure as hell knew things were going from bad to worse between me, Billy, and Vokkel. He could have easily told Julie we killed him, or at least had something to do with it.”
    “Yeah, not a bad idea. I'll run it past Aris.”
    “Good idea, Phil. Ah…one more thing.” I hesitated. “GG made an appearance last night, and when I asked if she knew why the kid was doing this….” I paused again. “She thinks he's out to kidnap one of us and kill the other…at least that's what I think she was trying to say.”
    Phil moaned loudly and said, “Not good, my friend. I'll let Aris know about that too. But you two need to be careful, more so than usual, okay?”
    “We will, I promise. See you in a couple of hours,” I said, and hung up.
    After I texted Billy, I got started on Julie. I entered her name into my search engine, using both Wilkinson and Vokkel. I had no idea where Julie had been living or under what name, so I wasn't that hopeful.
    Much to my surprise, there were more hits than I expected…she wasn't keeping a low profile in the least. They were all society page updates about who attended what and with whom. Most of these events were held in