by Cora Brent
Then I remembered what she’d said to me this morning as she’d sweetly leaned her head against my shoulder. I’d seen the wilting tulips at my mother’s grave. I hadn’t guessed that Leah was the one who left them there.
But that made no difference.
It was far too late to make any difference at all.
What was done six years ago could never be undone.
Chapter Ten
Ryan
Six Years Ago
After Pike’s bumbling attempt to warn me that the law was on my heels I was more pissed than worried.
This whole clusterfuck was just Luanne having a temper tantrum. But Luanne Brandeis didn’t rule the world. She didn’t even rule Emblem. She had no authority to slap a murder charge or any other charge on me. Plus she had to know I hadn’t killed Harry Beckett for fuck’s sake. My guess was that Luanne heard pieces of a conversation or something and later, when she was licking her wounds, she decided to see how she could use it.
Before confronting Luanne I walked around back first to take a look at the small but comfortable place where I’d grown up. It was nearly eight a.m. and my mother’s car was gone. She would already be on her way to another sixteen hour shift at the shelter. I was glad she wasn’t around. She didn’t need to hear about any of this. There was already enough distance between us since I quit school and started earning cash in less than honest ways. One of these days I’d make enough real money to move her out of a trailer in Luanne’s backyard. But right then I had to deal with the queen bitch herself.
Luanne couldn’t quite hide her surprise when she opened the door to find me standing there but she recovered in a heartbeat. She wore a black silk robe that trailed down to the floor and was open at the top to highlight her lacy negligée. Her hair was piled on her head, a glass of wine was in her left hand and her diamond earrings sparkled. She looked like she’d just stepped off the set of a freaking movie from the fifties or some shit. She smiled and invited me to take a seat at the dining room table. I didn’t sit. I waited while she eased her nimble body into a chair and crossed her long legs, allowing her robe to slip and show more skin.
I didn’t beat around the bush.
“What the fuck, Luanne? What kind of bullshit are you pulling? I heard what you’re doing, shooting your mouth off to the police that I killed Harry Beckett. It’s not fucking funny.”
A package of cigarettes was lying on the table. She picked one up and lit the end with a gold lighter. “No, that doesn’t sound funny at all, Ryan. You know what sounds even less funny?” She paused, inhaling and then exhaling dramatically. “To hear that you’ve been trying to groom an innocent teenage girl.”
I almost fell over. “What in god’s name are you talking about?”
Her eyes danced even as her expression remained artificially somber. “Leah told me everything. About the secrets you confided to her. And then she told me what you tried to do to her.”
Blood roared in my ears. “That’s insane. I would never touch Leah and as for the whole Harry Beckett business, I only tried to help the guy.” But a sense of dread struck me as I remembered how I’d gotten in Harry’s face a few nights before someone decided to club him to death. I promised him I’d fuck him up if he didn’t cough up my money. People heard.
“Where is she?” I marched across the dining room and stood in front of the hallway where her bedroom was. “Leah!”
“She’s not here,” Luanne called in a weird singsong voice.
“Quit with the fucking games. Where did she go?”
“Her father drove her to the airport. Leah will be visiting some cousins for a little while. This whole disgusting ordeal has hurt her enough. You can bet she’ll be back to testify though. Once you’re locked up and her father and I are sure it’s safe she can come home.”
“You’re an insane bitch. Leah was just upset because she saw us together and I wish like hell she didn’t but I didn’t touch her or threaten her. And you know it. You fucking know I didn’t kill Harry and you know I didn’t do a goddamn thing to your daughter!”
“Then why did you give her this?” Luanne withdrew an object from a pocket in her robe. She held it up. “It’s an ugly little trinket but I guess you thought an unattractive girl like Leah would like any piece of garbage you offered her.”
I was dumbfounded. I would have been less shocked if Luanne had grown a second head right before my eyes. “For fuck’s sake I’ve known Leah her whole life and I was just trying to be nice to her. There wasn’t anything sleazy about it.”
“Really?” Luanne was skeptical. “You didn’t offer this hideous piece of jewelry to a fifteen year old girl in exchange for removing her shirt and watching you jerk off?”
The very idea was beyond repulsive. “No,” I choked out. “I swear. That thought would never even cross my mind.”
Her fist squeezed around the medal. She shook her head. “I don’t believe you, Ryan. I believe my daughter. Don’t you dare underestimate how far I’ll go to protect my child. In fact, as you pushed your way in here I think I heard you make a threat. I remember now. I clearly heard you call my daughter a slut and say you’re going to put her in a box alongside Harry Beckett.”
“You bitch.” My fists clenched. My voice was deadly. “You’re the one who gets off on seducing teenagers. Or did you forget?”
She was unimpressed. “I forget nothing.”
Luanne was a liar. I knew that. But with Leah on her side she had a convincing story. It seemed implausible that Leah had gone to her mother with this wild version of our conversation. Leah would have been just as furious with her mother as she was with me. And she would have nothing to gain by inventing such a tale.
On the other hand, how did Luanne get her hands on the medal? She knew I’d given it to Leah. No matter which way I looked, everything pointed back to Leah.
Leah, who had discovered a good reason to hate me.
Leah, who could be sneaky and unpredictable and who was, at the end of the day, every bit her mother’s daughter.
My word would mean nothing against theirs.
Right now the police were searching for someone to lock away for Harry’s murder. There was some evidence that I was involved and my name wasn’t exactly golden to local law enforcement. I’d been giving them trouble for years. And now there’d be the testimony of a fifteen-year-old girl and her mother that I’d bragged about my role, propositioned a child and then ran around making threats.
“Fuck you,” I said, the grief in my voice so thick it emerged sounding like a sob.
Luanne tilted her head and gazed at me with false pity. “Imagine what your mother is going to say.”
There was nothing more horrifying than the thought that my mother would hear about all this. I stared down at the expensive Saltillo tile floor Luanne had paid to import and felt the world spin beneath me.
There was one tiny sliver of hope.
Luanne might have been lying about Leah’s involvement in her plot to send me behind bars. Leah had been mooning after me like a lovesick puppy for years. But no matter how angry she was I couldn’t imagine that the girl who used to draw butterfly pictures for my mother and search for buried treasure with me in the desert would tell such colossal lies that would ruin my life.
But Leah had been sent away and I couldn’t get to her right now. Pike was the one who’d been tipped off that trouble was coming. I had to find exactly out what Pike knew. And who had told him.
“Get out of here, Ryan,” Luanne said, tapping her cigarette ashes directly onto the table. “Enjoy your final hours of freedom while you can. Maybe you should find your mother and say goodbye. My heart aches for Celeste. This will destroy her.”
“Don’t do this,” I whispered. “Please.”
She was unmoved. “I didn’t. You did. Now get the hell out of my house.”
Luanne had no fear at all as she sat back in her chair and triumphantly observed me crumble. Despite all the crazy things flying out of her mouth
she knew violence against women wasn’t one of my flaws, that I wouldn’t lash out and throw a piece of furniture at her.
There was a shuffling noise behind me and I turned to see Eddie had silently entered the house at some point. He wouldn’t look at me. If he really thought I’d murdered a guy and then tried to corrupt his teenage daughter he would not only look at me, he would want to fucking kill me. Instead he just appeared slumped and miserable, a hapless accessory to Luanne’s treachery. And maybe Leah’s too.
“Eddie.” Luanne chanted his name softly, like she was casting a spell.
He raised his head. And when he laid eyes on his wife all the misery disappeared, replaced by the sick adoration that left him blind and stupid.
“She’s on the plane,” he said, a hopeful lilt in his words. The man sounded like a talking puppy begging for a pat from its master.
She rewarded him with a smile, his master. “Thank god she’s safe.”
“The hell with all of you crazy bastards,” I muttered and stumbled out of there.
I knew Pike worked for an air conditioning repair company and I hoped he wasn’t on the job yet. I didn’t want to call him and give him a chance to hem and haw about what he knew and how he knew it. Pike was my friend and I appreciated the trouble he’d gone to but for the sake of my sanity I needed an immediate answer to a question.
I caught up with Pike in the parking lot outside his apartment building. He was already buttoned into his grey Al’s Cooling and Refrigeration shirt with his first name stitched in blue thread beneath the right collar.
“What the fuck are you doing out here, man?” he hissed, eyes shifting around hysterically like a SWAT team might be lying in wait behind the dumpster. Hell, maybe they were.
I stopped right in front of him. “Who got to you?” I demanded.
But Pike was looking panicked and started herding me out of the sunlight and into the shadowy alley around the side of the building.
“I thought you would have run out of town by now,” he said, raking a sweaty hand through his hair and looking as paranoid as if we were trading international secrets.
“I had to go pay someone a visit.”
“Who?”
“Luanne Brandeis.”
He inhaled sharply. “Aw fuck, man, you didn’t do something stupid, did you?”
“Like what? Strangle the bitch with my bare hands?”
Pike’s beady eyes popped out and his mouth fell open.
“No, I didn’t strangle Luanne,” I said, wondering how a guy who’d known me since grade school could even seriously think such a thing.
Pike relaxed.
“Are you going to answer my question?” I asked. “Who got to you?”
He sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Hell yes it matters. We’ve been friends for a long time. So you need to tell me who tipped you off and what the story was.”
He wilted against the dirty building. “Just get out of here for a while, Ryan. Once they start investigating they’ll catch who really fucked up Beckett.”
“First you tell me exactly why the police think I’m a killer.”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you fucking do.”
His hand was unsteady as he reached in his back pocket. He located some bills and tried to hand them to me. “You need to go. Here’s some cash to help you out.”
“Yeah, I’ll live like a goddamn king for twenty two dollars. Who the fuck told the police I killed Beckett?”
“Ryan, just go.”
“Be straight with me, Pike.”
“No.”
“Motherfucker!”
Steven Pike was my friend. Ordinarily I would no sooner mess him up than I would cut off my little finger. But my time in the Brandeis house this morning had left me cracking at every seam. And that was why I seized Pike’s arm, whipped it around at an unnatural angle and forced him to the ground, keeping him there with my knee in his back and his arm bent backward while he yelped in pain.
“Who was it?” I yanked his arm higher. Another few inches and something might snap. “Who the fuck was it?”
He was gasping, sweating. “Note was left on my car.”
I applied more pressure. Pike groaned. “There was no fucking note. I don’t think Daisy would have called you. She hasn’t even been home in a year so there’s no chance she even knows what’s going on. And you didn’t hear it from Luanne because she’d spit in your eye before she’d give your fat ass the time of day. Who was it?”
“LEAH!” He sobbed, pounded his forehead into the gravel. “Fuck, it was Leah. Leah told them everything.”
I released my grip slightly, my soul shriveling in my chest. “Leah told the cops I killed Harry?”
“I don’t know. I think so. That’s what she said.”
I let him go. I spun around and kicked the wall. “Fucking little bitch!”
Leah.
I hadn’t believed it, not completely. Not until now.
Pike had scuttled away to the far side of the alley where he panted with a slightly green cast to his face. He kicked his feet, trying to get them underneath him. Then he gave up temporarily and twisted his features into a menacing glare. He muttered something with a growl.
I stared down at him, beginning to feel sorry that I’d handled him so roughly. I felt sorrier for myself though.
“What?”
“I said leave her alone, Jedson. Listen, I know she fucked up and she knows that too but she won’t follow through with nailing you to the wall. She’s just a dumb kid and she’s got things bad at home.” His feet tried again to support him and this time succeeded. He pulled himself up to his full height, which was a solid six inches below mine, and tipped his chin up to deliver a valiant threat. “And if you need more convincing, I’m telling you that if you go after that girl I’ll…um…I’ll try kill you myself.”
Such false bravado. Pike was no match for me and he knew it. But did he really believe I was planning to go hunt down Leah Brandeis? I didn’t know when I’d flunked the life test so completely that one of my oldest friends assumed I’d physically harm a young girl. No matter what she’d done.
“You’re probably late for work now,” I said and left him there in the alley. He called my name once but I didn’t turn around.
Time was moving fast, too fast. I had no idea what kind of wheels of justice were turning, how long it would take for the cops to put out the word and haul me in. Part of me was so indignant that I couldn’t imagine running away with Leah’s tall tales chasing me. But a bigger part of me listened to the harsh whisper of common sense. Chances were high I’d be arrested. Even if I could scrape together bail money I didn’t have the kind of resources it took to mount a decent legal defense. Anyway, the best lawyer wouldn’t be able to counter the Oscar-worthy performance Luanne was surely planning, not to mention the mumbled accusations by a teenage girl who looked sweet and innocent but wouldn’t hesitate to eviscerate your life if she felt like it.
I needed to leave Emblem. Today. Men on the run usually made a beeline for the border. I couldn’t even speak Spanish. With my head still spinning and everything in sight appearing strange and unreal I drove down the road to the largest trailer park in the area. After cruising around for about fifteen minutes I found a boxy station wagon that likely predated my conception. The hood was covered with a layer of palo verde blossoms and it looked like it hadn’t been moved in weeks. I hoped that meant its owner was either away or somehow wouldn’t mind if it went missing for a little while. I only planned to drive it to the next state where I’d exchange it with something else to keep the trail cold. I traded the car’s plate for one attached to a jeep parked on the other side of the trailer park and exited.
I didn’t dare return to my place. There wasn’t much there worth salvaging anyway. I had only one thing left to do before I could leave Emblem and the thought of it made me want to dry heave onto the dashboard of my stolen car.
The shelter was in
a nondescript brick building that had been abandoned for decades before the non profit my mother worked for purchased and painstakingly restored it to usable condition.
I found her in the cafeteria, overseeing the last of the breakfast line. She did a double take when she spotted me walking through the double doors, then beamed a mile wide before rushing over. It was hard to believe my mother was exactly the same age as Luanne. The thought made me feel like a traitor. If the quality of a person’s heart was any measure of beauty then my mother would have been the most gorgeous woman in the county. Instead she looked exhausted, gray-haired, unhealthy and about ten years older than she was.
“Ryan!” She embraced me, hugging so tightly I heard a pop from one of her elbow joints. She was thrilled, delighted, simply because I’d walked into the room. And when was the last time I’d bothered to stop by and see her? A month ago? Two months?
I hugged her back. Then I broke her heart.
She blinked up at me, utterly perplexed by the things I was telling her, that I had to leave town, that the authorities thought I’d killed someone.
“I’m leaving right now. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“No, no, this is nuts.” She shook her head from side to side like she was trying to chase away the words I’d said. She touched the gold cross hanging around her neck for comfort “This can’t be happening.”
“It is happening, Mom. I have to leave.”
An idea gave her hope. “Wait, we’ll go talk to Luanne. Eddie knows everyone. The police chief spends half his time hanging out at the bar for heaven’s sake. Eddie and Luanne will have some ideas about what to do and-“
“No.” I cut her off with a sharp shake of my head. “You should stay far away from Eddie and Luanne.”
She was confused. “I don’t understand. They’ll want to help you. You should let them.”