The Casquette Girls (Book 1)

9. Run, Run, Run

I was both curious and mildly disconcerted that my father was just ignoring the fact that I'd lied to him. I mean, he was so tense about the crime in the city I couldn't imagine him just letting it slide. Each second it took me to lace up my running shoes and loop my hair into a ponytail built my dread of the upcoming interrogation. I traded my silver chain for a house key on a knotted shoestring and hurried through the front door to get it over with.

He was already waiting outside, rolling his ankles. I bent over next to him and became temporarily woozy as the blood rushed to my head and the stretch moved up my hamstrings.

"When's the last time you ran?" he asked.

"Uh, I think I ran twice in Paris, in the very beginning."

"That's not much to keep your lungs in shape, Adele."

When I was a kid, I developed juvenile asthma, right around the time my mother left. Even though the doctor told him the attacks were anxiety based, my father became obsessed over the health of my lungs. I hadn't had a panic attack since the seventh grade, but he still kept the house stocked with inhalers, and we used to run together three mornings a week before school.

"I ran every day in Miami," he continued.

Good for you.

Normally, I would have said it, but something about this trite conversation warned me to proceed with caution, so I held back on the sarcasm. "My dad, the fitness buff—who'd have known?"

He did his best not to crack a smile. "Well, what else was I supposed to do without you around to bug me all the time?" He tossed me his second bottle of water and took off jogging.

So we're joking now? My father could never stay mad at me for long, but this was a record. Something else was brewing.

"Wait up!"

"Catch up!"

"Oh, this is going to be loads of fun."

The quick sprint left me panting. I took his right side; my father was adamant about the man's position always being on the street side. He seriously watched too many Mafia movies.

We jogged in silence through Jackson Square, up the cement stairs of the amphitheater, and over the two sets of nonfunctioning tracks (one for the train and the other for the streetcar), finally arriving at the riverfront, otherwise known as the Moonwalk.

The Toulouse Street Wharf was annihilated. Pieces of it bobbed on the river, along with a mass of other buoyant debris, and heaps of floating trash occupied the large, empty space where the SS Natchez had been docked since the early 1800s.

Just as my breathing began to even out, he broke the silence. "Up or down?"

"Up." And that was the end of our conversation for several more minutes.

The murky Mississippi was calm. I pretended the paddleboat was just out on the river, lazily taking mint julep–drinking tourists on leisurely rides. The absence of the old riverboat was another reason the city now felt so eerily silent. If I concentrated hard enough, I could hear the steam shooting out of the whistling calliope—I'd heard that pipe organ at 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., like clockwork, almost every day of my life. My eyes burned, and I had to tell myself not to cry over a missing riverboat. Pathetic.

"I heard the Natchez is docked somewhere in Baton Rouge," my father informed me, as if he knew it was bothering me.

"Oh good." I sucked in a breath of air, and then we were back to silence. The muscles in my legs eased, and side by side, we fell into a steady rhythm. I spaced out for a while.