Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One Read Online Free

Willcox, which couldn't even be
considered a small town.
    Luzena was too close to Bowie and Cassie
wasn't about to risk being seen walking down the highway with her
thumb out when she should be on the three o'clock bus to Tucson.
The chances of being spotted by someone she knew, or worse, someone
Grace knew, were just too high.
    Again, she felt a stab of guilt for the lies
she had told to the family that had shown her so much kindness.
    Cassie squared her shoulders and tugged the
strap of her duffel bag tighter.
    It was done, and she couldn't change it.
    She had let Frank the cabbie take her as far
as the bus station, and then waived off his offer to wait with
her.
    "My bus is leaving in ten minutes," she had
told him, running for the door, "Go get yourself a fare back to
town!"
    "Yeah, right," Frank had laughed as he pulled away.
    Once inside the station, Cassie had watched
through the window until the taxi was out of sight, then pulled out
her bus ticket and walked up to the cashier's desk. The attendant
was a graying matron with blue-shadowed eyes and impossibly long
lashes.
    "One moment," she had said, as Cassie had
opened her mouth to speak, "I'll be right with you."
    The woman made a show of counting through a
thick stack of tickets, then recounting, and finally, with a smirk
playing at the corners of her lips, counting them a third and final
time. With a sigh, she set the stack down and turned to Cassie,
whose own eyes had begun to flash dangerously.
    "May I help you?"
    "Yes, please," Cassie said, "I need to cash
in my bus ticket."
    The woman stared at Cassie with frank
disapproval, studying the girl over the top of her black-framed
reading glasses, before taking the ticket from her with two fingers
as though she suspected that it might be soiled.
    "Reason?" she asked.
    "No reason," Cassie replied, her eyes
suddenly glazing over and her smile becoming vapid.
    "I just need to cash it in, and it's
refundable, that’s what this word here is,” Cassie pointed to the
ticket’s large, red lettering, her voice dripping with sincerity,
“right?"
    The impossible lashes blinked once, then
twice; the woman’s scowl deepening the crevasses of her face.
    Katherine Belanger had been known to say
that her daughter had a gift for finding the one thing that could
drive a person absolutely crazy.
    "It's like she can see
this big invisible button, and Lord help you if you give her reason
to push it." Kathy would
laugh , "That girl can make you yank your
hair out, and her smiling that sweet smile the whole
time!"
    The ticket attendant at the Bowie Greyhound
station was no exception, and her eyes narrowed dangerously as she
glanced back and forth from the ticket in her hand to Cassie.
    "Well," she replied,
"It is refundable, yes, but--"
    "Great!” Cassie cried, clapping her hands,
"That’s what I want to do, exactly!"
    The woman's face was a thundercloud as she
jammed a small key into the desk drawer in front of her and began
savagely counting out fifty-dollar bills. Cassie waited until she
had almost reached two hundred and fifty dollars.
    "Oh wait! I'm sorry," she said, with an
insipid giggle, "I needed that in tens and twenties…."
    The woman didn't even look up at she stuffed
the fifties back into the drawer and counted out the money, pushing
the stack across the counter and under the window toward the
girl.
    "Thanks so much," Cassie gushed, "and have a
great day!"
    Turning to go, she heard the
attendant's Window Closed sign come slamming down on the counter as the
older woman stormed away. Picking up her duffel bag, Cassie started
across town towards the highway, whistling as she went.
    She was still chuckling as she hiked out
past the bluff and turned south, away from Interstate 10 and
towards Buckeye Mill.
    Two miles further, the trail ended at an
intersection with a seldom-used dirt road. It was a single lane of
deep ruts, torn up by the fat tires of four-wheel drive trucks,
winding around scruffy junipers and islands of