The Road Home

by Susan Crandall

  But there was a lingering question she had to ask. There had been so much commotion yesterday, she hadn’t voiced it. “Why’d you do it?”

  Riley kept his gaze fastened on the road ahead and shrugged.

  “Come on, Riley!” She nearly flinched at the hard edge in her own voice. “What made you pick Mr. Willit? He’s known your dad since he was a kid.”

  She saw him take a deep breath and let it out. “The old geezer yelled at me—all I was doing was walking through his stupid yard. I wasn’t hurting anything.”

  Lily supposed in his pubescent point of view, that made sense to Riley. She just bit her tongue. Her point would be better made after he’d spent the day in the sun scrubbing algae off of boat hulls.

  “Call me when you’re ready to be picked up this afternoon.”

  Riley shifted in his seat and rolled his eyes toward the passing woods.

  “Maybe you’d like to walk home.” Her fingers tightened on the wheel to keep from smacking him.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  After another mile, she started to feel badly about snapping at him. He was in a terrible situation and she had a big hand in getting him there. She patted his knee. “Call me. I’ll pick you up.”

  He didn’t respond.

  Turning into the marina, she was struck with how little it had changed. The old gas pump was the same, as was the bait shop. The only difference she could see was the old bottle-dispensing Coke machine had been replaced by one with a lighted front that sold cans. Lily parked right in front of the open office door. In the confusion yesterday, she hadn’t asked, but as things appeared unchanged, she assumed the marina was still a one-man show with Cecil “Bud” Grissom at the helm.

  As she turned off the engine, she wondered if Bud’s brother Ed was still making noises about flying saucers bothering his cows.

  Her thoughts of the old days quickly disappeared when she stepped out of the car and heard raised voices coming from the office.

  “I promise it won’t happen again—” The voice was young—and pleading.

  “You’re damn right it won’t. Now get on outta here—and take that damn cat you’ve been feeding with you.”

  Lily stopped in midstep. That voice… Not Cecil.

  “But I need this jo—”

  “You used up your second chance. Don’t bother saying another thing, just go.”

  Lily’s heart lodged in her throat. Her ears began to ring and she stood frozen, watching a boy of about sixteen emerge, slump-shouldered, from the office. He was freckle-faced and looked underfed—and about as harmless as a newborn puppy. She couldn’t imagine what he’d done to deserve what had just happened.

  The man inside couldn’t possibly be who it sounded like.

  Just as she began to draw an unfettered breath, assured it had been a trick of her imagination, like that moment on the front porch when she’d thought she heard Clay calling her from the lake, he stepped out of the office and into the sunlight.

  Her breath froze in her throat. She stared stupidly as he walked past her, toward her son.

  Clay Winters didn’t seem surprised to see her. Not that he gave her more than a quick glance as he passed.

  She stared mutely at him, trying to make order in her mind, to stop the mad whirling of past and present and fashion it into something that made sense. A peculiar buzzing feeling came from just beneath her skin.

  He stopped directly in front of Riley. “Sheriff says I have to put up with you for a few weeks.” Clay stood there with his hands on his hips and stared at Riley until Riley lowered his gaze to look down at his feet. “Damn stupid thing, sinking a boat.” Then he turned around and started toward the dock.

  Riley shifted restlessly, but didn’t follow. He finally gave Lily a questioning look.

  She couldn’t begin to find her voice. There was no air in her lungs to pass her vocal chords. Clay Winters. Impossible.

  Clay barked over his shoulder, “Hurry up. We got work to do.”

  Lily stood, feeling as if she’d been slammed in the midsection with a baseball bat, and watched them go, Riley moving slowly behind Clay.

  When Clay was about halfway to the dock, he picked up a hose that was lying on the ground and sprayed a fat yellow tabby cat who was napping on a large rock in the sun. “Get!”

  Dread coiled in Lily’s stomach. She fought the maternal urge to protect her child, to grab Riley and run away from the multifaceted dangers that lay within Clay Winters.

  Just before they got to the dock, she managed to find her voice.

  “Hey!” She searched for something to say that wouldn’t sound like whining.

  Clay stopped. It was a long moment before he turned around to look at her. “What?”

  Lily walked closer, determined to stop this before it got any worse.

  Riley took a step back when she got close. The satisfied look on his face made her rethink what she was about to do. If she intervened, just because she was afraid something unpleasant was going to happen, would it be any different than what the in-laws had been doing for years? What Riley had done had earned a little unpleasantness.

  As soon as she looked Clay in the eye, she realized she’d made a mistake. But it was too late, too late to tear her gaze away. He held her silent and paralyzed, as if the past years had never happened. A storm of memories and emotions swirled violently in her chest.

  At one time, those light brown eyes had made her heart stop, her good sense slide silently away, made it so nothing else mattered but him. There were tattered fragments of all of those things in the wild wind whipping her soul—and it pissed her off. How could he, after all these years, after he’d hurt her so deeply, still stir such feelings inside her?

  She was such a stupid fool.

  She glanced back at Riley. The pleased anticipation she saw on his face made her put everything else aside and do what was right. She had to let him go. She had to trust that her dad knew what he was doing.

  “When should I plan to come and get him?”

  Clay squinted slightly and she saw how much the years had altered him. He was harder, more rugged-looking than she remembered. But it was more than looks. It went much deeper. His speech was different. He used to talk to her for hours. He could paint a picture or rise a tide of passion in her with no more than the tone of his voice. She’d loved to just listen to him. But now his sentences were clipped, with no wasted words. His entire demeanor had changed. The wealth and city had been wiped cleanly away. No one would ever guess he hadn’t lived on this lake his entire life.

  “Depends on the day. He leaves when I leave.” He turned around and walked down the dock, the boards squeaking under his weight.

  Riley looked stunned. She could feel the anger coming off of him like heat from a roaring fire when he passed her and followed Clay. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t say goodbye.

  The deep throaty rumble of the inboard engine started before Riley even climbed into the boat. They were swinging away from the dock before he’d taken a seat. She saw him stagger slightly and grab on to the windshield to steady himself and hoped with all of her heart she hadn’t made a mistake by not taking him back and turning him over to the sheriff instead of leaving him here.

  For a long minute, she remained standing where she was, unable to command her limbs to carry her back to her car. What on earth was Clay Winters doing in Glens Crossing? And what in God’s name had happened to him that turned him into such a coldhearted bastard?

  Chapter 3

  The boat cut across the churning wake of another craft, bouncing hard enough to make Clay’s teeth rattle and casting a cool spray of water across his heated face. Now that he’d made such a production of getting in the speedboat and tearing away from the dock, he’d better figure out where he was going. He didn’t know why he couldn’t overcome the urge to run. Hell, he’d been face to face with death and had less of a visceral reaction than what had grabbed him when he set eyes on Lily.


  The thing that struck him the strongest was how little she had changed. Over the years, he’d imagined she’d aged as much as he had. He’d expected a fuller face with eyes lined at the edges, perhaps the easy life adding a few pounds. That thought sent a bitter edge of jealousy slashing through him. Why did she deserve a better life than he? Why had betrayal given her the rewards of love, marriage, family, when he’d been denied?

  His eyes remained focused on the green water in front of him. His mind, however, slipped to a time past—a single summer he thought he’d blocked from his memory. He thought he was prepared. Had convinced himself that seeing her wouldn’t make any difference. The past was over. Lily had been effectively locked out of his soul. She was a part of something as far removed from his current life as Camelot. A fairy tale with an unhappy ending. She had no power over the Clay Winters that lived in his body today.

  He was wrong.

  Luke had said Lily never returned to Glens Crossing. Clay had been a fool to believe. He’d come here because it was the only refuge he could think of in this tired, ugly, manipulative world. It was a place without pretense, a place of childhood dreams, a place that had brought out the best in him. The only place he had loved—and been loved. Maybe that part of him was as dead as the giant walleye mounted inside the marina office. Nothing left but glass eyes and a plastic-coated shell, completely empty of decency. Maybe he’d spent the last year running, only to find himself back in the place where he started. Maybe he’d taken the risk of coming back here for nothing.

  His palm itched. As he rolled his fingertips inward to scratch it, he felt the smooth scar and stopped. He slapped his palm against the leg of his jeans to calm the itching. It only set off a stinging that demanded even more attention. Leaning over the side, he showered his hand in the cold spray from the bow of the speeding boat. Through all of his turmoil, all of his thoughts since he’d gotten the call from Benny, he had managed to not once look at the scar that branded him more deeply than flesh.

  There must be something twisted deep inside him to have agreed to this situation. Something akin to not being able to tear your eyes away from mangled wreckage and flashing lights on the interstate. When Benny had called, Clay’s answer was out before his mind had fully wrapped around the far-reaching implications.

  Why, after all of these years, would he open himself to the person whose betrayal cut the deepest? Why expose himself to the very thing he was trying to expunge from his soul—that bleakness, the surety that nothing pure existed in this world, the black anger that seemed to be consuming him an inch at a time?

  He glanced out of the corner of his eye at the boy. He already disliked Riley Holt. Probably had before he even laid eyes on him. He was man enough to admit that to himself.

  Suddenly he caught himself searching for a resemblance to Peter and tore his gaze away. Was his decision based on perverse curiosity? Or was he really looking for a way to hurt Peter through his son? That thought only confirmed what he already knew about himself. Something dark had taken over his soul.

  They hit a big chop in the water. Clay’s feet bounced and he fought to retain his balance. He was going dangerously fast, but couldn’t bring himself to pull back on the throttle.

  Riley was jolted off his seat and landed half under the dash.

  Clay pretended not to notice.

  “You know anything about boats?” he asked over the wind and deep rumble of the engine. “Aside from how to sink them, that is.”

  The boy looked at him for a brief second, then pulled himself back onto the seat and faced ahead once again. He shrugged. “Grandpa has one.”

  “But do you know anything? Other than how to have your ass hauled behind it on skis?”

  This time the boy’s eyes cut to him and stayed there, narrowed with the urge to say more than he did. “I know about boats.”

  Clay just held the kid’s gaze, daring him to let loose the riptide of anger he saw churning just beneath the surface.

  After a long moment, Riley turned away.

  Clay spun the boat around and headed back to the marina, no longer worried about pretense. Lily would be gone by now, and the kid wasn’t about to ask questions at this point.

  He cut the engine so quickly when he hit the no-wake zone of the marina that Riley rocked forward in his seat. Coasting up to the dock, he said, “Jump out and tie us up.”

  Riley moved, albeit slowly. Clay watched him tie up the boat with admirable skill. Well, let’s just see how far that knowledge goes. Most likely beyond filling the tank with gas and charging it to Daddy’s—or Grandpa’s—credit card, the boy would be in no-man’s-land.

  Stepping onto the dock, he made a show of inspecting the knot and checking the play in the line. As Riley looked up at him with a look of smug satisfaction on his face, Clay grunted. “It’ll do.” Then he headed back to the large pole barn used for storage and boat repair.

  Once he reached the wide sliding doors, he stopped and waited with his hands on his hips for Riley to catch up. “It won’t do you any good to poke along around here. You don’t leave until the work is done.”

  Riley stopped directly in front of him. “I’ve got the money to pay for that friggin’ boat. I don’t need to work here.”

  “Is that right? You think money makes you who you are? Well, money don’t mean squat, kid. Time you learn that.” He shoved a gallon of muriatic acid and a Scotch-Brite pad into the boy’s hands and pointed toward a boat sitting on a trailer inside the fenced lot. “That hull is to be clean by day’s end.”

  Riley looked at the boat, then back at Clay. “You’ve got to be kidding, dude.”

  Clay shook his head. That twenty-six-foot hull had two years’ worth of algae on it. It’d take a grown man from sunup ’til sundown to get it down to the fiberglass. “Nope. Better get started.”

  As he headed toward the office, he heard Riley mutter, “Bastard.”

  “That’s right, dude,” he called across the lot. “Better get used to it.”

  Lily wanted a drink. Two drinks. Maybe a washtub filled with margaritas. She had new empathy for Peter’s need to drown his tribulations in alcohol. There was something almost magical about the way one little bottle had the power to shave the edges off the pain—at least for the moment. That’s what kept her driving past the liquor store at the edge of town: the knowledge that no matter how you pickled it, your trouble would be there sitting on your chest, staring you in the face the moment you pried open your hung-over, bloodshot eyes. If nothing else, Peter had taught her that.

  Why hadn’t her dad mentioned Bud was gone and Clay was the person he’d set Riley up with? If she’d been forewarned, she might have stood a chance, might have been able to do more than stand there with her mouth hanging open and her heart thumping so strongly against her chest that her T-shirt vibrated.

  God, she hated being blindsided. She didn’t make a habit of running from her problems, but she did like to meet them with the proper preparation. She knew her dad hadn’t done it on purpose. She held this conviction wholeheartedly simply because he had no idea she and Clay had ever been more than summer friends. Still, she couldn’t help feeling she’d had the rug ripped out from under her and her dad could have at least softened the landing.

  After the way Clay had reamed that poor kid who sounded like he needed the job more than he needed air and water, Riley, who was there expressly for punishment, was doomed. An ache started somewhere deep in her chest, a tightening that threatened to surge into a full-blown crying fit.

  Then she realized that she didn’t know who she wanted to cry for, herself or Riley. What kind of selfish mother was she?

  She rolled down the window and let the cool morning air blow against her hot cheeks. Breathing deeply, she was amazed at how even the air here felt different than Chicago—and it was more than the number of idling cars and belching smokestacks. Take away that and Chicago still felt… populated. Too much concrete holding heat, too many hormones colliding in the air, too muc
h hurrying. Here, even on the courthouse square, the air spoke more of flora than fauna, of open space and deep shadowy woods.

  Shadowy woods.

  The Place.

  Suddenly everything in her universe was coming back to that one spot. As much as it beckoned her, she’d faced enough of the past this morning. She certainly wasn’t going to prod her already seeping wounds by going there.

  She headed down the main drag in Glens Crossing, pulling into an angled parking spot in front of the Dew Drop Inn. Since liquor was out, coffee at the little café was going to have to do. And, deep down, somewhere buried beneath the foundation that Clay had so recently shaken, there was a tiny voice that cried out for company. It was a voice she had taught herself to ignore. Long ago she’d developed a whole host of white noise to cover it. Suddenly it was louder than it had been in years, rising above the busy mental racket she’d concocted to drown it out—and she didn’t know why.

  As she started to pull open the glass door, a tall man pushed against it from the other side. He gave her a nod as he passed, rolling the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. Then he was gone. It felt like she should know him. But she couldn’t make the connection that had a fourteen-year break in it.

  Lily told herself she was bound to have a whole lot of moments like that during her first days back in town and walked on into the restaurant.

  Like her father’s tavern, the Dew Drop had changed little in her absence. The same embossed turquoise vinyl booths lined one side, the same knotty pine paneling covered the walls. The rest of the room was filled with wood-grained Formica-topped tables sided by chrome and vinyl chairs (these brown, not turquoise). Slices of fresh pie filled a glass case that sat on the end of the counter.