Sanctuary Read Online Free PDF Page B

out at the cornfield to the right of us. The brown, withered stalks were bathed in the flashing red-and-white lights from the dozen squad cars and ambulance parked alongside the road. A few yards deeper into the field, a giant floodlight had been set up on a metal pole, and was shining down on something that we couldn’t see, with the tall corn in the way.
    “Too bad you have to work on Thanksgiving,” I said to the cop. I was trying to be way nice to him, on account of my not having a driver’s license, and all. Meanwhile, my palms were now so sweaty, I could barely grip the wheel. I had no idea what happens to people caught driving without a license, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be very nice.
    “Yeah,” the cop said. “Well, you know. Listen, we kinda got a situation over here. Where you coming from, anyway?”
    “Oh, I was just having dinner over at my friend’s house,” I said, and told him the address of Rob’s house. “That’s him,” I added, helpfully, pointing behind me.
    Rob had, by this time, switched off his engine and gotten down from his bike. He strolled up to the police officer with his hands at his sides instead of in the pockets of his leather jacket, I guess to show he wasn’t holding a weapon or anything. Rob is pretty leery of cops, on account of having been arrested before.
    “What’s going on, Officer?” Rob wanted to know, all casual-like. You could tell he, like me, was worried about the whole driving without a license thing. But what kind of police force would set up a roadblock to catch license-less drivers on Thanksgiving? I mean, that was going way above and beyond the call of duty, if you asked me.
    “Oh, we got a tip a little while ago,” the cop said to Rob. “Regarding some suspicious activity out here. Came out to have a look around.” I noticed he hadn’t taken out his little ticket book to write me up.
Maybe
, I thought.
Maybe this isn’t about me
.
    Especially considering the floodlight. I could see people traipsing out from and then back into the cornfield. They appeared to be carrying things, toolboxes and stuff.
    “You see anything strange?” the police officer asked me. “When you were driving out here from town?”
    “No,” I said. “No, I didn’t see anything.”
    It was a clear night… . Cold, but cloudless. Overhead was a moon, full, or nearly so. You could see pretty far, even though it was only about an hour shy of midnight, by the light of that moon.
    Except that there wasn’t much to see. Just the big cornfield, stretching out from the side of the road like a dark, rustling sea. Rising above it, off in the distance, was a hill covered thickly in trees. The backwoods. Where my dad used to take us camping, before Douglas got sick, and Mikey decided he liked computers better than baiting fishhooks, and I developed a pretty severe allergy to going to the bathroom out of doors.
    People lived in the backwoods … if you wanted to call the conditions they endured there living. If you ask me, anything involving an outhouse is on the same par with camping.
    But not everyone who got laid off when the plastics factory closed was as lucky as Rob’s mom, who found another job—thanks to me—pretty quickly. Some of them, too proud to accept welfare from the state, had retreated into those woods, and were living in shacks, or worse.
    And some of them, my dad once told me, weren’t even living there because they didn’t have the money to move somewhere with an actual toilet. Some of them lived there because they
liked
it there.
    Apparently not everyone has as fond an attachment as I do to indoor plumbing.
    “When you drove through, coming from town,” the police officer said, “what time would that have been?”
    I told him I thought it had been after eight, but well before nine. He nodded thoughtfully, and wrote down what I said, which was not much, considering I hadn’t seen anything. Rob, standing by my mom’s car, blew on his gloved hands.