Chapter Text
For the better part of a minute, they just looked at it.
No one wanted to be the first one to approach the bus, not after seeing it pull in and just…stop, never opening its doors, never doing…well, much of anything, really. It was as though the driver had just kept going, pulling up to the next available spot to wait for the next route, and that couldn’t be right, could it?
It was Jamie Brown (to no one’s surprise) who finally marched her way over and knocked on the door, Jamie who took the first step onto the bus to have a terse conversation with the driver, and when she hurried back over to their sad little group, there were spots of color high in her cheeks. “Call Melinda and Bob,” she said to Colleen or Al or hell, both, confirming all their worst suspicions with those four little words.
Involving the Washingtons, Scott Giddings had learned, wasn’t something the Hartleys or Browns did willy-nilly.
“Maybe it was just the wrong one,” he said, pushing down the growing sense of dread in his gut as he watched her shake her head and shake her head and shake her head some more. “There’s probably - ”
“It was that one,” she interrupted, pulling her phone out of her coat pocket. “That was the Blackwood bus. He said he waited and waited, for three hours…and no one ever came down to the stop. Something isn’t right.”
And she was correct in that – something wasn’t right.
It would never be right again.