Just a Little Honesty Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, shrugging a shoulder. “If I don’t get any sleep, and you don’t go hiking, then what do you want to do?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, standing straighter and dropping my arms to my side. “You said you were the one who picked this town.” He nodded to confirm that I’d heard him correctly. “Obviously there was a reason.”
    “Maybe,” he said, and that maybe sounded a lot more like well, duh .
    “Then,” I said, trying to put my faith into the fact that my fate for the day rested in Luke’s hands. “Surprise me.”
     
    Saturday, April 06 | 9:00 a.m.
    We drove about a mile out of town before Luke turned off onto a shaded dirt road. The tree-lined street was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Back home, in both Oakland and West Bridge, we’d never had anything quite so… simple. The little town of Piqua was tiny in size, rustic in charm, and as quaint as quaint could get.
    I stared out the window for the entirety of our drive, utterly speechless by the simplicity of Piqua’s natural beauty. A small creek ran alongside the dirt road. The two bridges we crossed were wooden and covered, and the air smelled cleaner than I could ever remember it smelling. There was something about the small town that made life less stressful; it was calming.
    Two miles down the road, Luke pulled off into a large siding. I looked around to get a better idea as to why he’d stopped, but nothing stood out to justify his pulling over. He parked the car next to a line of trees that ran along the small creek.
    “The road gets too narrow up ahead,” he said, letting himself out of the car without another word. He went around to the trunk, opened it, and began unloading the bags.
    “Um, Luke,” I said, now out of the car myself. I went around to the back as he slung his brown bag over his shoulder. “Whatcha doin’?”
    “We’ll have to cover the rest on foot,” he said, nodding ahead at the stretch of dirt road. “It’s not even a mile; you’ll do fine.”
    “One mile…on foot?” I asked, trying to steal his gaze, but he wouldn’t let me. “Where exactly are we going?”
    I watched as a semi-playful smirk crept up his lip. He almost looked happy, maybe even excited. If it was at all possible for a Reibeck man to look giddy, Luke looked exactly that; and giddiness from Luke could only mean one thing: he was up to something.
    “Why do I get the feeling that whatever is on the other end of this one-mile walk is going to leave me pitching a tent and setting up camp in the middle of the woods?”
    “Pitching a tent?” Luke’s smile faded. He dropped his head and sighed. “Do you seriously think—given the circumstances, Julie—that I want you sleeping outside in the open woods?”
    “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I said, helping him unload the last suitcase. “It might be easier for you to just leave, let Milton hunt me down and kill me, and then you’d have one less problem on your hands.”
    I half-expected Luke to fire a nasty remark back at me, but he didn’t. A simple smirk formed on his scarred lip.
    “That’s one way to handle it, I suppose,” he said, not arguing for a second. “ Or , we could just wait it out, let your uncle catch the evil son of a bitch, and then carry on with our lives.”
    And with that, Luke slammed the trunk closed. With a bag over his shoulder and his suitcase in hand, I followed closely behind as I carried my own luggage.
    Luke hadn’t been lying when he said that the road was narrow up ahead. Slowly but surely, the road we’d once been driving on had turned into nothing more than a small walking path.
    We walked along small hills and slight curves, weaved in and out of trees, and stumbled over rocks all along the way. It wasn’t until we were about a mile into the walk—just as Luke had predicted—that we reached a large clearing. I could only assume—based on the smile he bore as we stopped—that we’d reached our final destination.
    The wooded