But now she knew that coal chute was unsecured. She felt as exposed as if she were going to sleep naked outside on the dock.
Instead of sleeping in her room, Lily laid down on the couch, the bat beside her. If that shelf toppled over, she’d be ready. Tomorrow she’d find a way to secure that iron door.
Chapter 12
The next morning, as the rising sun was angling through the living room window, Lily gave the house a thorough once-over. Nothing was missing, nothing out of place. She’d simply allowed her imagination to run away with her. She felt silly and childish.
Still, that silly, childish behavior had led her to discover the unlatched coal door, she told herself, so it couldn’t be all bad.
When she entered her bedroom, everything appeared as it should be. Then, as she approached the dresser, she noticed one of the drawers wasn’t fully closed. As that was one of her pet peeves, she was certain it hadn’t been that way when she’d left the room the previous day. And, in her frenzied search last night, she’d been looking for an intruder, not something as subtle as a partially open dresser drawer.
Inching closer, she extended a trembling hand to the drawer handle. Slowly, she opened the drawer, her breath held, her flesh crawling with the thought of some stranger touching her personal things. She fully expected to see the contents in disarray, rumpled by frantic hands searching for jewelry or cash.
Her gaze fell on the interior.
Everything, all of her panties and bras, was still neatly folded—seemingly untouched.
Sliding the drawer closed, she looked around the room. The open basement door. An unidentified footprint. Her dresser drawer ajar. There were just too many things out of the ordinary. She felt an insidious mixture of violation and revulsion that made her skin crawl. Someone uninvited had been inside her house.
Then she saw it and her breath froze halfway to her lungs, her heart jolted into a frantic beat. A slanted ray of sunlight struck her pillow, and on that pillow lay a single yellow rose. Her entire body flashed hot.
It hadn’t been her imagination. Not at all.
She approached the bed with muted movements, as if the rose were a bird that might be startled into flight. Her vision telescoped. She watched her hand, feeling like it was completely disconnected from her body, reach for it. Her fingers brushed the slightly wilted petals and a chill swept down the length of her arms. She jerked her hand back and walked out of the room, leaving the rose alone in her bed.
As she paced downstairs, thoughts tumbled wildly in her brain. A yellow rose. A symbol of friendship. Who would have left such a thing? Who, that would also know about the coal chute?
The list of possibilities ran quickly through her mind. The caretaker had a key to the front door. He was also seventy-six years old and round as a dumpling; Lily just couldn’t see him skinnying in through that two-foot-square ground-level iron door. Not to mention the rose made absolutely no sense in his case.
Peter was still ensconced at the Sheldon Center; she’d called and checked.
On an inspection of the outside of the house, Lily had discovered that the coal chute door was behind a thick evergreen shrub. A passerby would never have noticed it. Someone familiar with this house had found a way in.
Not a passerby. Not Peter. Who, then?
It came to her in a flash of insight that was quickly followed by a wave of irritation. Clay. He would have known. He also knew she wasn’t going to be home last night. And after all of his talk about disliking bottled beer on Friday nights, he hadn’t even shown up at the Crossing House. Plus, Clay had plenty of reasons to apologize.
Still, she couldn’t see him doing it. He hadn’t shown himself to be a man to take such a surreptitious route to an apology—or apologize at all for that matter. It just didn’t make sense.
But, she asked herself, what about Clay did make sense? He treated the world as his enemy, yet his compassion lived comfortably under that porcupine’s exterior: he’d paid for a disabled boy’s summer camp, but had not wanted a soul to know he did it; he made a special trip to her house to make certain Riley had arrived safely the day he walked home from work; he looked at her with cold indifference in his eyes, then loved her tenderly and completely—then resorted once again to frosty rejection.
It was as if he didn’t trust anyone near his soul, and any threat to the wall he’d built around it was met with quick opposition. That thought brought everything into clear focus. His distance was his shield. She could see it so clearly now. And she knew, no matter how he’d hurt her, he, too, had somewhere, somehow, suffered a hurt as grievous himself.
Maybe he had regrets.
God, if she didn’t watch it, she’d have herself feeling sorry for him.
Riley came downstairs and interrupted her thoughts. She fed him breakfast, thankful for the temporary distraction. Then she drove him to work, organizing her plan of confrontation all the way. Clay’s truck sat in its regular spot. She looked around; today she wanted to see him. She had to look at his face, to see if there was a trace of guilt there.
She hung around for several minutes after Riley got out of the car and walked into the marina office. Since her early rising, the morning had turned gray, the lake choppy with waves from a strong, cool wind. A couple of die-hard Saturday boaters were backing trailers into the water at the launch ramp, optimistic about a better turn in the weather.
Clay didn’t emerge. After dismissing the idea of tracking him down, she backed out of her parking space. Maybe she’d have better luck when she picked Riley up.
She went back home. The first thing she did was pick up the rose and throw it in the trash. Once it was out of sight, she tried to put it out of her mind.
As she took her shower, she took mental notes on her body. Were there any symptoms of pregnancy? Her breasts were tender, but that often happened right before her period. What if she was pregnant? Abortion wasn’t an option for her. She firmly believed in a woman’s right to choose. But that was a choice she wouldn’t—couldn’t—make. Not after having one child.
She’d managed to put it out of her mind for a couple of days, but now it was eating her alive. She had to know.
Once she had herself put together, she went to buy a pregnancy test. Chances were no one would notice if she bought it in town—and she was a grown woman, after all. But she decided to drive to Macklin, the nearest neighboring town, to buy the test. She remembered a drugstore on the main drag there.
She could always drive to Bedford, but that was over an hour away. No sense in making more of a trip than necessary. It might be fun to see Macklin, an old high school rival town, again. In fact, this little road trip might be just the break she needed—clear her head.
The road between Glens Crossing and Macklin had enough hills and ninety-degree curves to be qualified as a roller coaster, which kept her progress at a snail’s pace. So different from the expressways she’d been driving for most of her adult life—roads whose character had been carved away to make way for speed and volume. There was something liberating about having to maneuver a road.
The gray underbellies of the clouds lowered. Before she got halfway to Macklin, rain began to fall, along with the temperature. She turned on the windshield wipers and the defogger. Listening to the steady rhythm of the wipers and the thrum of the rain against the body of the car, she almost forgot the reason for her mission.
The sign that warned to reduce speed ahead almost made her laugh. But when she drove into the tiny town, her humor dried up. She passed the two-story brick high school, home of the Macklin Mavericks. The building had been old when Lily was in school, built sometime in the twenties. Now it was abandoned, chained doors and broken windows. A victim of consolidated school districts.
Macklin’s business district had never had much beyond a grocery, drugstore, hardware, gas station, a tavern and feed store. But what met Lily was a ghost town. Weeds sprouted from cracks in the grocery’s parking lot—which was beside the building, where a fire
had destroyed its neighbor years before Lily was born. The drugstore had been converted into an antique store and then had its windows covered in paper when that, too, apparently had gone out of business. The hardware, tavern and feed store still seemed to have a gasp of life left in them.
Lily pulled into one of the parallel parking spaces in front of the hardware; it didn’t require much skill, there weren’t any other cars parked in that block. A weight settled in her chest. Little towns like this were dying by inches all around the country and nobody noticed the loss. Cities grew, suburbia sprawled and farms were owned by corporations. If Glens Crossing wasn’t the county seat, it might have dried up just like Macklin.
There was a real sadness with that thought. How would Lily feel if she’d returned to find Duckwall’s Hardware closed, the Dew Drop’s windows painted over, the Crossing House boarded up? It surprised her when she realized how much that would hurt.
After sitting there listening to the rain patter on the roof of the car, she put it in gear and did a U-turn in the middle of the street—which was illegal, but there was nobody around to care.
It would take her another hour to get to the next town—and who knew what she’d find there? She decided to head back to Glens Crossing; she didn’t want to be gone much longer, just in case Riley was let off work early because of the rain.
Having seen the dying town somehow made Lily more desperate to know if she was pregnant. She didn’t know why there seemed to be a connection, but the sight of that deserted street fired the urgency of her quest. She decided to take a chance on Hayman’s Drug in Glens Crossing. Old Man Hayman hadn’t recognized her when she lived here, she doubted he would now. If there weren’t a bunch of people she knew there, maybe she could just pick up the test and slip out unnoticed.
She drove around the square twice before she found a parking place in front of the drugstore; it was raining hard and she didn’t have an umbrella.
When she entered the store, she felt like she’d been transported back to her childhood. The only thing that had changed was the date on the magazines in the magazine rack. The same institutional gray tile covered the floor in the three aisles. The lunch counter still had the same gray Formica with a geometric light gray and pink design. It was fronted by the same chrome and vinyl stools. In fact, this stuff was old enough that it had come around and become in vogue again.
Just looking at that counter made her think of tax day when her dad brought her and Molly here for traditional hot fudge sundaes. She wondered if they still had the best sundaes in the world (hand-dipped, not the squirt stuff she’d served at the Arctic Express).
Was Shirley still tending the counter? Until ten-thirty only coffee was served. After that you could order from a limited menu. Lily looked for Shirley of the perpetual blue-black hair. She was disappointed to see a drip coffeemaker on the counter with a slotted box for coins and a sign telling the customers to help themselves—Hayman’s Drug operated on the honor system until lunchtime.
The whole scene was all oddly reassuring after seeing the haunting sight of what was left of Macklin. Lily began to feel better.
There were only a couple of other customers in the store. An elderly gentleman was seated in one of the chairs parked next to the pharmacy counter, apparently waiting for a prescription to be filled. A mother with a toddler was trying to select a card while keeping junior from climbing the shelves. Lily didn’t recognize either one.
She walked to the feminine hygiene section—and found it right where it had always been, far left aisle, rear section. Glens Crossing wasn’t yet ready to sell tampons, douches and vaginal creams right up front.
Lily’s gaze raked the tiny section three times before she gave up on finding a pregnancy test. She walked toward the pharmacy counter, which, of course, was raised so if you were under five feet tall, you didn’t have a chance of seeing over the top. She wondered if they designed it that way to keep all of those tempting drugs away from childish eyes.
Well, her eyes weren’t childish, and they immediately saw where the pregnancy tests were—right there on the back wall behind the pharmacist, next to the Trojans and the LifeStyles. Crap. She was going to have to ask cranky old Mr. Hayman for a test.
She waited for a moment; the pharmacist was on the far side of a tall shelf. Glancing around to see if anyone she knew had slipped into the store, she was startled when someone said, “May I help you?”
Jerking her head around, she was sickened to see not Old Man Hayman, but his grandson, Mark. She would recognize that shock of red-orange hair anywhere. “Um, yes….”
“Lily? Lily Boudreau? I heard you were in town.”
“How are you, Mark?”
“Good, good.”
“So, you’re the pharmacist now.” Just my luck.
“Yep. Took the store over from Granddad about six years ago.” He shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I never thought I’d land back here. Planned on finding a job near Indy when I graduated from Purdue. But Granddad was showing signs of failing health. You know—one thing leads to another, and—well, here I am.”
“Yes, I do know,” she said wistfully. Then she remembered her manners. “How is Mr. Hayman?”
“Pretty good. Managing better now that he lives in a retirement community in Florida. The winters were really getting hard on him. So, what made you move back?”
“Oh, I’m not here permanently, just for the summer. Staying at Peter’s lake house.”
Mark smiled. “Just like the old days, huh? I remember Peter always had that big bonfire at the end of summer…”
“Yeah, just like the old days. Except now I’m the mom.”
“How many kids do you have?”
“One. A son. He’s working at the marina.”
“Oh, I did hear that, now that I think of it.”
Yeah, if you hadn’t, you’d be the only one in this town. She kept her mouth shut and smiled.
“What can I get for you?”
Uh-oh. No way was she asking him for a pregnancy test. “I, uh, got into some poison ivy. What do you suggest is best? I haven’t had it since I moved to Chicago. I’m sure there’s something better than calamine lotion nowadays.”
“Sure thing. What you want is something with cortisone in it. And it doesn’t hurt to take a few doses of Benadryl orally along with it. You’ll find both at the other end of aisle one.”
“Great, thanks.” Did he really number the aisles in this place? She glanced overhead. There, suspended from thin nylon line, were three signs: AISLE 1, AISLE 2, AISLE 3. Just like the big chain stores. Lily stifled a chuckle and went to purchase ointment she didn’t really need.
When she left Hayman’s she was like a child who’d been told she couldn’t have something. With each denial, her determination to get what she wanted grew proportionally. She drove straight to the only other place in town that might have a pregnancy test, Kingston’s Market. She’d passed an aisle with health and beauty aids when she did her shopping. She certainly didn’t think she’d be needing anything of this nature, so hadn’t looked to see exactly what they carried in the way of contraception and such.
She was studying the limited choices and had just spied an at-home pregnancy test (there was only one on the entire shelf) when a voice startled her.
“Hi, Lily.”
She spun around to see Cassie Edmunds looking over her shoulder. “Hello.” Could Cassie have followed the line of her gaze and known what she was looking for?
If she did, she didn’t give any indication. She said, “Had any more run-ins with our buddy Tad?”
Lily thought that an odd question coming from the blue. She shook her head. “Nothing to speak of. Why?”
Cassie shrugged and eyed something on the shelf over Lily’s shoulder. “Just wondered. Saw him looking at you funny last night—like something was on his mind.”
“Maybe he was just trying to figure out who I was. It has been a long time.”
Cassie pressed her lip
s together and cocked her head to the side, reminding Lily of a bird. “Maybe.” Her voice said she was just being agreeable. “Haven’t seen you in for the blueberry pancakes yet.”
Lily smiled. “I’m gonna make it one of these mornings. Promise.” She paused. “So, what did you think of Dad’s new place?”
“Real nice. Skeeter, my date, liked the big new TV hanging on the wall. Said it’ll make it a good place to watch the game.”
“Skeeter—doesn’t he work for Brownie at the garage?”
“Yeah, but just until he opens his own place.” She sounded almost defensive. “He’s going to get one of those Tire Barn franchises.”
“Oh, that’ll be great.” Lily didn’t think Skeeter had enough brains to count his money, let alone negotiate a franchise purchase. “He going to locate it here in Glens Crossing?”
“Yeah. But he’s waiting—doesn’t want to run Brownie out of business. He feels like he owes him, so he’s going to wait ’til Brownie’s closer to retirement.”
Lily nodded. “That’s very loyal.”
They stood in awkward silence for a moment. Then Lily said, “I just need to grab something here.” She reached in the opposite direction of the pregnancy test and grabbed blindly. When she looked at her hand she was gripping a large tube of hemorrhoid cream. “See you around.”
Cassie stood there, smothering a chuckle. “ ’Kay.”
When Lily glanced back over her shoulder, Cassie picked up the lone pregnancy test and shielded it behind her purse as she headed toward the checkout.
Now, there’s something to think about. Wonder who’s the prospective daddy?
A nasty little thought snaked into Lily’s mind—Cassie had gone out with Clay shortly before…
Lily shook her head to rid herself of even the hint of speculation. That scenario would be just too awful for words.
She stashed the tube she’d picked up on the candy shelf and headed out of the store. She’d already purchased one ointment she didn’t need, she’d be damned if she was going to get stuck with a lifetime supply of hemorrhoid cream, too.
The Road Home Page 19