Ashlyn's Radio by Norah Wilson, Heather Doherty

never goes through on consecutive nights.”
    “Tomorrow then?”
    “How about next Friday night?” Rachel suggested.
    “Is that when you think it’ll come through again?”
    “Hell if I know. But we can’t go out every night until it comes. We’d get caught. Plus we’d sleep through school. Since there’s no knowing when it’ll come, we just have to go out when it’s convenient and hope we guessed right. And if we go on Friday and Saturday nights, we can sleep in a little the next morning.”
    Ashlyn brightened. That didn’t sound so bad. They might go out dozens of times and never see it. But she’d see Caden each of those nights….
    “Sounds good to me,” she said.
    “Where should we meet?” Caden asked.
    They fixed a time — 11:00 p.m. next Friday — and chose a rendezvous point down by the river, on that outcropping of rock Rachel had told them about. Then Caden excused himself to go feed the dogs.
    “I gotta go, too,” Rachel said. “I’m supposed to be picking up bread and milk.”
    Ashlyn and Rachel went back through the barn to Maudette’s front yard, where Ashlyn’s gaze immediately flew to a huge Crown Victoria parked behind Maudette’s SUV (or the Dogmobile, as Ashlyn called it).
    “You drive?” she asked. Mentally she added, THAT?
    Rachel dug car keys out of her pocket. “Sweetie, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s no transit system out here. Everybody drives.”
    “ I don’t.”
    “Yeah, you don’t need to, I suppose. You’re going back to Toronto and the subway as soon as you graduate, right?”
    Damn right, Ashlyn thought. Maybe sooner. “That’s right,” she said.
    “Yeah.” Rachel sketched a salute. “Okay, catch you later, then.”
    Ashlyn returned the salute. “Later.”
    Rachel started toward the giant boat of a car, then stopped and turned around. “He likes you, you know.”
    “Huh?”
    “Caden. He likes you.”
    Ashlyn’s heart leapt, but she reined it in. “Don’t see how you figure that. He spent more time talking to you than to me. More time looking at you, too,” she groused.
    Rachel grinned. “Exactly.”
    Then — damn her cryptic ass! — she got in her car and drove away.

Chapter 6

    A SHLYN STOOD THERE , HANDS on her hips and her mouth agape. She could not believe what she was hearing.
    “I don’t care who invited you,” her grandmother continued. “You are not leaving this house. We don’t go out at night in Prescott Junction. We stay at home in our beds.”
    “But I’m seventeen! ”
    “And you’re under my care, young lady!”
    God, was she serious ? Ashlyn blew out her breath in an exasperated growl. “What do you expect me to do? Have no social life at all for the next year? Just sit here at night … knitting ?”
    “Oh, you can have as active a social life as you want. Just do it like everyone else in the Junction does — during daylight hours.”
    Ashlyn shook her head, at a loss as to what to do, what to say. Exactly how deep in Paranoia Land was her grandmother living?
    If this were Toronto, Ashlyn would simply have stormed out. She’d have stomped around the streets a bit until she cooled down. And more often than not, she would realize that her mother maybe had a point. But it wasn’t Toronto and it wasn’t her mother she was dealing with. Her mother had never been this strict, thank God. Never as unreasonable, as unjust as Maudette was being.
    Clearly, being honest with her grandmother had been a mistake.
    Well, not that she had been totally honest. Maudette would have blown a gasket if she’d told her she was going to the tracks with Caden and Rachel in the hopes of spying the ghost train. So she’d tweaked the truth a teensy bit. She’d told Maudette that she was going to Rachel’s for a movie, popcorn and a dose of girl talk, tossing the explanation over her shoulder as she headed for the door. (That was always the best way, she’d found. Don’t ask. Just do it. Act as though permission was a foregone