“Any particular reason you needed your lock changed?” I asked.
“No.” She glanced away from me, seeming suddenly nervous. “I mean, not really. I just… you can’t be too careful, you know? Especially as a woman living alone.”
Something was up. I could see it in her eyes, and in the way that she was beginning to fidget. She crossed one arm in front of her chest and grabbed onto the other bicep in a clearly self-protective reflex. It was clear as day: something was making her feel unsafe in her apartment.
My jaw tensed in anger. I wasn’t sure whether she had any legitimate reason to be afraid, but it made me feel sick that she would have to worry about her safety. I knew from offhand stuff Seton had said over the years that Andi didn’t really have any family to rely on in the area. If she was afraid of something enough to want to change her locks, she must be feeling even more alone than usual.
“Yeah, true. You can’t be too careful,” I murmured, and took a swig of my beer. “You know,” I continued, as if the idea had just occurred to me, “If you want, I could stop by sometime and help you make sure all your doors and windows are secure.”
Andi glanced at me sharply. “Yeah, right.”
“What?” I spread out my hands. “I’m serious.”
“What possible reason would you have to do that?” she retorted, then rolled her eyes. “Unless you’re just using this as an excuse to try to get into my pants.”
Any other time, I would have taken that as an open invitation to wind Andi up, but not this time. This time I needed her to know I was sincere. I knew she didn’t trust me, knew she thought I was more or less incapable of being anything but selfish and irresponsible. Suddenly, even though there was no reason for her to trust me, I wanted her to see me differently. I wanted her to feel like I was someone she could come to for help.
“I’m serious, Andi,” I said again, my voice growing quiet. “I know it must be tough sometimes, living by yourself. And I know a fair amount about how to secure a building.” My eyes locked on hers. “So come on. What do you say? Why don’t you let me stop by and take a look? It’d be my pleasure. Really.”
I was sure she was gonna turn me down with some flippant joke and then head back down the bar to end the conversation. But her response convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that Andi wasn’t just being routinely cautious. She was scared of something. Scared enough to take me up on my offer.
For a moment she said nothing, her jaw tense. Then she sighed softly.
“Okay.” She nodded. “Okay.”
6
Andi
ANDI
If I had been trying to hide from myself how spooked I really was since that ticket stub had shown up on my kitchen table, the fact that I had actually consented to having Cal come over to my place tomorrow and check all the windows and doors was all the proof I needed that I was not dealing well with the situation.
Immediately after I’d told him he could stop by and take a look, I almost changed my mind. But something stopped me. After all, maybe he would figure out something that would make my apartment more secure, and I could use all the help I could get to feel safer and less anxious.
I was sure Cal probably did know a fair amount about stuff like that, like he’d said, given whatever it was the MC did to make its money. Seton had told me that some of the stuff the Stone Kings did in town amounted to being protection muscle and security for hire, since the cops in Lupine weren’t all that known for their ability to maintain law and order. Whatever that meant exactly, it was a sure bet that Cal knew more about breaking and entering than I did — which meant he probably knew a lot more about how to stop someone from doing so.
Maybe, too, there was something sort of comforting about the idea of someone else being in my space with me. A friend, or at least something like it. The apartment I had always loved and thought of as a haven had started to feel a little like a prison cell in the last couple of days. I constantly felt like I was being watched, even when all the doors and windows were locked and I knew I was completely alone. For the first time since I’d rented the place over a year ago, I found myself putting off going back to my apartment after work, preferring to go for a walk aimlessly around downtown instead. A few times I’d just driven around town until I couldn’t figure out anywhere else to drive to, and eventually just turned the car toward home in defeat.
I hadn’t been sleeping much, either, and that wasn’t helping to make me any less tense. At night it took me forever to calm down enough to drift off, and once I finally was asleep, it seemed like every little sound sent me bolting upright as if from a bad dream.
In fact, that was the very reason why I was sitting on my couch right now at three a.m., creeping on people’s Facebook pages instead of going to bed after my shift at Hammie’s. I’d pulled on the tank top and boxers I normally slept in, but I just couldn’t bring myself to get into my bed and turn out the light.
I didn’t have a Facebook account myself. Well, not one under my real name, anyway. But I had created a dummy account, with a fake name and picture, so I could look at other people’s walls.
Mostly two people’s, actually.
The first one was my mom’s.
The second one, the I was looking at right now, was Alyssa Conley’s.
My half-sister.
Neither of whom I had seen or talked to in over six years.
Unlike a lot of girls Alyssa’s age, my sister kept her profile pretty wide-open, instead of changing most of her settings to private. I knew this because I’d been creeping on her Facebook profile ever since I’d stumbled upon it a couple of years ago. Part of me was alarmed by how open all her stuff was to the world, and that part of me wished she would be more careful. After all, a beautiful girl like her was just the kind of target that someone with bad intentions might choose to prey upon. But selfishly, I was glad she hadn’t locked down her profile, because her Facebook page was the only way I was able to see anything about her life. It was the only means I had to watch my baby sister grow up.
And sometimes, I wondered if that was exactly why she did it.
I hadn’t looked up Alyssa’s profile in a while. I didn’t let myself do it too often, because it just made me sad and sometimes would throw me into a dark funk for days. But right now, alone in my studio while the rest of the town slept, I was feeling lonely and alone in the world, and I couldn’t help myself.
Alyssa had posted a photo album a couple of days ago, of a recent trip to Turcs and Caicos. It looked like she and my mom had gone there together, and my mom was tagged in all the pictures of the two of them. As I clicked through the album, the screen filled with selfies of the two of them on the beach, by a pool, or sipping drinks with tiny umbrellas in them. There were shots of my sister floating on her back in water so clear that her shadow was clearly reflected in the sand below. There were a few shots of her posing on the sand in a white bikini, her tanned, lithe body looking even darker by comparison to the fabric. She was beautiful, fresh and lovely, as she gave the camera a dazzling smile and tossed her hair back like a model.
It was hard to believe she was only fourteen.
There was one person who was conspicuously missing from the photos. But that didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t there, I knew. He never let anyone take his picture.
My stepfather. Anthony Conley.
He was the reason I hadn’t seen my mother or sister in all this time.
I don’t really remember my actual father, John Wagner. For years after his death, it was just my mom and me. My dad had been a carpenter, though not a very successful one, and money had always been tight for them. My mom was working as a waitress when they married, and when I was born she quit her job to stay home with me.
When my dad was killed by a drunk driver one night when I was two years old, there wasn’t any savings or any life insurance to fall back on. My mom hadn’t been to college, and she didn’t really have any marketable skills. So after my dad’s death she star
ted cleaning houses for people, which was the only thing she could think of to do that would give her enough flexibility in her schedule to juggle her job and caring for a small child.
For years, that was our life: just mom and me in a dingy one-bedroom apartment. I was too young to really know the difference at the time, but I know from my mom that we were poor. Really poor.
Poor enough that she would have done almost anything to get us out of our situation.
Somehow — I never did quite learn how — my mom met Anthony Conley. She hadn’t dated much since my dad died, but soon, she was leaving me with sitters a few nights a week and dressing up to go out on the town with him. Then, a few months into their relationship, she asked me if I’d like to move into a big house and have a nice room all my own with all new furniture, and a swimming pool.
Of course I did. Who wouldn’t? My “room” at the time was a single mattress in a closet off the kitchen. I didn’t ask any questions about why or how it would happen. I just packed up my few possessions into a ratty backpack like my mom told me to.
A few days later, we were living in Anthony’s large, gated compound, and a few weeks after that, my mom became Mrs. Anthony Conley.
I was young enough at the time that it never would have occurred to me to ask how my new stepfather made his money. And to be honest, I’m not sure how much my mom asked about it, either. She was too happy to have gotten us out of the life of stress and want to ask any questions that she might not have liked the answer to. As it was, she took to her newfound wealth like a duck to water, and soon she was filling her walk-in closet with shoes and clothes like shopping was her full-time job.
My mom spent a lot of time and money decorating my new room, too. When she was finished, it looked like pink palace suited for a fairy princess, complete with a king-sized canopy bed with floaty white curtains that I could pull shut all around me and pretend I was in a magical cave. Piles and piles of stuffed animals languished in the corners, more than I could possibly play with, and my own closet almost rivaled my mother’s in clothes.
At first, it felt like I was Cinderella, swept up from a miserable life and plopped down in a castle. It was fun, but it was almost like I was play-acting. It didn’t feel real. I didn’t feel real.
And a king-sized bed is pretty darn lonely, when you’re a six year-old girl with no siblings to play make-believe with, even when you fill it with all the stuffed animals you own.
Eventually, when the excitement of our new life began to wear off, I found myself spending lots of time alone, playing in my room or wandering through the house looking for something to do. The only company I had most days was one of a series of housekeepers, who would grudgingly watch me while my mom went out shopping or to lunch with her new rich-lady friends. Starting kindergarten that fall was a huge relief for me, since I finally started to have other friends my age to play with, although my mother would never let them come to the house. Another huge relief was learning how to read. I had been on the verge of deciphering the mysterious code of letters as they arranged themselves on the printed page, and by Christmas of that year I was reading anything I could get my hands on. I realized quickly that my mother would buy me almost anything I asked for, so I started asking for books to occupy my time. Soon I had a new bookshelf filled to bursting with them.
That’s how I remember the first few years of my mother’s remarriage. My mother was happy, I was mostly left to myself, and a string of housekeepers filed by namelessly in my memory.
My stepfather Anthony was mostly gone during the day those first couple of years, and I barely ever had any conversations with him, anyway. Sometimes at dinner, he would ask me how school had been. It was a perfunctory question, and he barely listened to the answers I gave him. It was as though he thought this was what stepfathers did, so he was doing it. Once I had answered him, he’d usually just go back to eating and ignoring me.
If only he’d kept ignoring me, maybe everything would have turned out fine in the end.
As the years passed, the relationship between my mom and Anthony grew more volatile. Whatever business he was involved in was making him impatient and easy to anger, and he would pick fights with my mom over things like him not liking a dress she was wearing, or her not making sure that the kind of gin he liked was stocked in the bar. My mother, probably not wanting to rock the boat and risk her marriage, would do her best to placate him. After one of his tirades, she would speak to him in soft, soothing tones, and sometimes they would disappear into their bedroom for a while. When they came out, Anthony would be calmer again, and then he would go to the bar and mix himself a cocktail in silence while my mom asked him what he wanted for dinner.
Then, the summer I turned eleven, my mom got pregnant.
As the months went by and her belly started to swell, my stepfather began to grow even more surly and out of sorts. I was learning to avoid him when he was in his increasingly frequent moods, and tried to spend most of my time in my room when he was at home. But a strange thing started to happen: for the first time I could remember, Anthony began to seek me out. One day, a knock came on my bedroom door, startling me from a book I was reading. Before I could say anything, he opened it and strode inside.
I couldn’t remember him ever coming into my room before.
I was sitting on the bed, the canopy curtains pulled closed around me. I even remember the book I was reading. It was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. One of the first grown-up books I ever read. I remember I was the same age as Francie in the story. As I sat in my bed, I was pretending to be Francie, on the fire escape of her tenement apartment in New York, surrounded by a canopy of leaves from the tree in front of their building. I even had a bowl of peppermint candies next to me, like the ones she had in the book.
My stepfather pushed the curtains aside and sat down on the bed next to me. As I stared at him wide-eyed, he started making small talk. I was confused, but answered all of his questions, wishing he would go away so I could continue reading.
Then he put his hand on my leg.
At first, the things he did were just inappropriate, but not so much that I completely understood what was happening. He would lightly caress my arm, or reach over and finger my long blond hair as he talked to me. Even though I didn’t understand what he was doing, I hated it when he touched me like that.
One day I screwed up my courage and went to talk to my mom about it. I told her that he would come into my room, that he would take off his shoes and lie next to me on the bed. That his hand would lightly graze the skin on my bare leg or arm.
But there was one thing I couldn’t bear to say out loud, even to her: That I noticed his thing would get hard when he touched me.
My mother brushed the accusations away. “Honey, he’s just more affectionate than you’re used to,” she told me, shaking her head indulgently. “You’re just not used to being around men. You’re misinterpreting.”
“But Mom,” I protested, my voice lowering to a near-whisper. “His hand went up my leg, almost to my…” I stopped, unable to continue without words to explain what I instinctively knew was wrong, the jolt of fear I had felt.
“Baby,” she interrupted, her voice a warning. “Don’t be ridiculous. Anthony is your father. He would never do anything to hurt you. You are imagining things.” She frowned. “It’s all those books you read. You’re turning into a little drama queen.”
“I’m not!” I protested. But my mom had convinced herself. She leaned back in her chaise lounge by the pool, her hands moving protectively around her very pregnant tummy.
“Andrea. Do not do this. Do not ruin this for us, honey.” Her voice had grown sharp, almost angry. She shut her eyes, and the conversation was over.
Although I knew deep down inside that what Anthony was doing was wrong, my mother’s words had planted a seed of doubt in my mind. After all, I was young, and like she had said, I didn’t really know what it was like to have a father. Maybe I was just misinterpreting, after all.
“Don’t you push me away,” he said angrily, his voice a low growl. He shoved me back on the bed, and I shrieked loudly in surprise and fear.
Alarmed, Anthony let go of my wrist and strode quickly out of the room. I thought I’d managed to make him stop. Until that night, when he brought me a cup of hot cocoa and insisted that I drink it.
What happened next is still hazy in my memory. I know I was too confused to struggle much. It wasn’t until later that I realized he’d drugged me that night. All I really remember clearly is that when it was over, he leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Don’t you tell anyone. Not now, not ever. I will know if you do.”
I didn’t even know the words to use to tell about it, at first, and even if I did, I was afraid my mother wouldn’t believe me.
My mother, who loved her rich life so much. My mother, who looked the other way at so many other things that my stepfather did. As I had gotten older, I started to realize that whatever Anthony did to earn his money couldn’t have been legal. Sometimes men, rough-looking men, would show up at the compound, and Anthony would take them out by the pool to talk business. Occasional snippets of conversation I would catch by walking past open windows would tell me that he was involved in selling something illegal, probably drugs, and that he had people operating for him around the state. If I could learn this from eavesdropping, I was sure my mother must have known, or at least suspected. But she never said anything, never questioned anything.
When I finally did have the words to tell her what Anthony was doing, I was afraid she wouldn’t believe me.
Or worse, that she would, but she wouldn’t do anything about it.
STONE KINGS MOTORCYCLE CLUB: The Complete Collection Page 57