Page 107 of The Reformatory

“He’s not gonna let you run off ’til you do what he says first.”

Robert glanced around again, and no one else was in sight except the haint sitting in the bleachers. He had changed position, from center left to dead center, sitting at the top. He wasn’t a regular boy for sure, since he moved too fast, but could he be Blue in disguise?

“Who says he even knows?” Robert said.

Redbone gave him a look: biting, almost angry. Then he sighed. “Come on.”

“Did he say something to you?”

“He knows everything here,” Redbone said. “Everything.”

“Are you gonna tell him?”

“Hell no, but I don’t have to. He probably knew before you did, soon as they drove up. He’s a haint. You thought you could keep a secret from him?”

Embarrassment flashed hot on Robert’s cheeks. He’d misjudged how much he could evade Blue then. What else had he misjudged? Even a small thing would get him caught.

“You better be sure Haddock don’t know too,” Redbone said, lowering his voice when he said the warden’s name.

“No chance,” Robert said, his fervent hope. But what if the guards had searched Miz Lottie’s Bible? What if they had found the drawing and realized it was a map?

“Better hope not,” Redbone said. “I’d rather meet Blue in a bad mood than those dogs.”

Friday seemed like an even more impossible time away. Robert felt dizzy.

They stood at the red clay entrance to the baseball park, facing home base with bleachers on each side of them. The haint was still there—Robert didn’t look closely at his face—but he pretended to scan the places where he saw nothing but empty rows.

“How many haints we got now?” Robert asked Redbone. Anytime they logged an imaginary haint, Robert was hoping to throw Boone off the trail of real haints he’d seen. Blue had warned him not to capture anyone else, and Robert never wanted to see anyone else turned to ash before his eyes.

Redbone flipped through his notebook. “We said three yesterday.”

“I could say I saw one at the pool.”

“So Boone has to crawl out on that diving board to put down his dust,” Redbone said, and they laughed. Laughing felt reckless, so they both stopped right away, looking over their shoulders. Again Redbone’s eyes looked straight past the haint in the bleachers.

“He’s gonna know,” Robert said, realizing he had misjudged Warden Haddock as much as he had Blue. “When there’s no ash pile, he’s gonna know. We can’t do it three or four times: he’ll know after one time. He’ll look me in my face and see with those… those…”

“Those devilish eyes,” Redbone said, and nodded, although they didn’t tell each other their stories about being with Haddock. Neither of them wanted to.

He had to get past Warden Haddock too, not just Blue. His escape was a fairy tale! “You gotta come up with a story and stick with it,” Redbone said. “Say you’re messed up since church. ’Cuz a spirit can’t dwell in God’s house. But you’re praying you’ll feel better.” Ooh, that sounded good! Clever words flew out of Redbone’s mouth like rainwater.

Robert tried the words on, remembering the frightening sight of the haint tumbling end over end down the aisle, shaking the church floor. He could sound convincing to Warden Haddock. He could, if it meant he could run away on Friday. He could even endure the Funhouse again if it meant he could run away on Friday.

“Do you think… I can do it?” Robert said. “Christmas?”

Redbone knocked his head back as if giving it thought for the first time. His pause made Robert’s heart pound. “You damn well better do it,” Redbone said. “ ’Cause now I gotta go too.”

He sounded like he had no choice, almost sad. Annoyed, even.

“Not if you don’t want to,” Robert said. He’d hoped that Redbone would want to come because he was a quick thinker; maybe that was why he’d burned to tell him all along. But the plan might not work for two. Gloria hadn’t said he couldn’t bring someone with him when he ran, but she hadn’t said he could. She’d trusted he would have the good sense not to tell, and Robert felt he’d let her down. But he could have convinced her if he’d had time. He could have.

“You don’t know how it goes here,” Redbone said, his voice still sad. “They’d put me out in the Box. They’d whip me and starve me to try to make me tell where you went. They do it all the time when somebody runs.”

“You could say I didn’t tell you.”

“Wouldn’t matter if you did or didn’t: punishment’s the same. They make you an example. ‘If you run away, this is what happens to your friends.’ ”

The worst of the worst of the worst, Blue had said. Blue had been right: Robert couldn’t think like them enough to imagine how low their wrongdoing could go.