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too thin or too rich” mother. Maybe if she’d spent more time trying to be a mom and less time pretending none of us existed, she might have noticed that her eldest daughter was turning into a wraith. Of course, my dad was a self-absorbed jerk who ignored Melinda’s problems just as much as Mom did, so there was enough blame to go around.
    I’d abandoned her, too—I left for school without a second thought for how she’d survive.
    Guilt and remorse joined anger and worry in the giant spinning hamster wheel of my brain, but I didn’t even have the energy to defend myself from myself.
    A little while later, a splash of light on the window from headlights turning onto our driveway snapped me out of the half-doze I’d been falling into in spite of the situation. I hadn’t slept well for the past few days, since Dad’s phone call and the chaos of withdrawing and packing, and it was all finally catching up to me in the dark, quiet room.
    I stood up, only to find Melinda staring at me with wide, terrified eyes.
    “Will you find out what happened? If it really is . . . was . . .” Her voice trailed off, and I squeezed her hand in what I hoped was reassurance.
    How do you comfort your sister when her boyfriend might be dead, and she believes it’s her fault? Nothing in any of my advanced placement classes had prepared me for this.
    “I’ll find out, and then I’ll be right back,” I told her.
    With one of Mom’s sleeping pills, I promised myself. One way or the other, Melinda was going to need it.
    I tucked the blanket more snugly around her thin shoulders and then went down to face the music. When I got to the door, Melinda called my name. The moonlight slanting in through the window highlighted the silvery tracks of the dried tears gleaming on her pale cheeks, and again I was struck by how wraithlike she’d become.
    “Welcome home, baby sister.”

CHAPTER 4
    Mickey
    I parked my bike in the pothole-infested lot—and then thought about turning right back around and leaving. The last place I wanted to be was school, where nobody would want to talk about anything but yesterday’s fire, but since escaping this rat hole of a town was high on my priority list, earning good enough grades to get into college was part of the plan. I played football, but I wasn’t a superstar, so chances of a scholarship there were slim, and I had no intention of becoming just another uneducated, drunken, no-good Rhodale, with or without criminal tendencies. Having a teacher for a mom gave me some hope, but if anybody had been fool enough to make a scrapbook of my family tree, they’d see that the Rhodale genes always seemed to drown out whatever they mixed with.
    Every Rhodale male had black hair, blue eyes, and a nose for trouble, no matter which side of the law he ended up on. One of my great-uncles had been a kingpin during Prohibition, running moonshine so good that people claimed Al Capone himself had special ordered it for his own table. Chicago was far enough from Kentucky that the story was probably pure bull, but rumor turned petty crooks into godlike myths in a place where there wasn’t much hope for climbing out of poverty in any legal way.
    On the other side of the law, another ancestor had been a Pinkerton man, riding trains to protect the railroad’s payroll. His badge and gun were in a glass case at the Whitfield County Historical Museum, labeled with a neatly printed card that explained how Frank Rhodale of the National Pinkerton Detective Agency had been instrumental in the pursuit and capture of Jesse James and his gang. Again, probably overinflated bull, at least about the James Gang, but the badge was real enough. Like most legends, there was just enough truth in it to pay for a wagonload of maybe.
    When Ethan got drunk enough, he liked to tell people that he would have been riding with Jesse James, not against him, and my brother Jeb was just gullible enough to go along with whatever Ethan said. Jeb was