Threat of Danger

by Dana Marton

  “He came over,” she said.

  Pam went completely still, her eyes snapping wide. The air trembled around her with excitement. She was like a Chihuahua scenting a bacon strip. “And?”

  Jess emitted a strangled sound, which Pam understood, because she was that kind of a friend. Even after ten years. As if no time had passed.

  “OK, we’ll talk about Derek later.”

  Once Jess had her coffee, Pam moved them to her table in the back. “What’s going on with you? I haven’t seen you in forever. Oh my God, you’re totally kick-ass!” She groaned. “And here I am, still looking like a cannonball. Are those some fancy Hollywood designer jeans?”

  “Plain jeans. And you’re petite and lusciously curvaceous. Men eat that up. They always have.”

  Pam grinned. “True.” Then she grinned wider, hopping in her chair as she squealed, “Oh my God, you’re here!”

  Jess grinned back. Nobody could resist Pam. And Jess didn’t want to. She needed the shot of positive energy.

  Pam gripped the edge of the table as if afraid she’d float away with excitement. “You have no idea how many times I tried to track you down online.”

  “I’m not online. The weirdos kept finding me.”

  Some people were obsessed with the macabre, with true crime, and they all knew Jess’s name and story. Her kidnapping and escape had been all over the news back in the day.

  “Oh.” Pam’s face fell. She took Jess’s hand on the table and squeezed. “How are you? I’m sorry about all the idiots. Are you back for good?”

  “A couple of weeks. What’s new with you?”

  “Since the last time we talked? Like ten freaking years ago?” Pam raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I will lay this guilt trip.”

  She sipped from her cup. “Finished college. Came back home. Got a job at Armstrong Financial. Which is why I’m over here for coffee fifty times a day. Tax season.”

  She grimaced. “Every year, I want to throw myself off a cliff and swear to switch careers. But it’s like childbirth. You forget after a few months and start thinking it’s not so bad, start thinking you can do it again.”

  “You have any children?”

  “Not yet. But Chrissy has three.”

  Chrissy was Pam’s older sister.

  Pam gave a dramatic sigh. “I’d need a boyfriend to have a child.” She finished her coffee and set the cup down. “I don’t have time to date. You?”

  “I don’t want to keep you from work. Why don’t you come over tonight?”

  The coffee shop was pretty full, more than one set of curious eyes on them. Jess didn’t want to share her life with the public ever again.

  “Yes!” Pam jumped up, then bounced for good measure. She never did anything as mundane as simply standing. “Should I sneak in booze and some smokes?”

  “Don’t smoke.” God, she’d missed Pam. How had she forgotten how great Pam was, what good friends they’d been?

  “Seriously. Me neither. Wrinkles and yellow teeth. Bleh. What were we thinking?”

  “We weren’t. We were teenagers.”

  They’d sneaked only a couple of cigarettes. Nicotine made Jess dizzy, and made Pam nauseous. She’d once thrown up when they’d climbed out of Jess’s window in the middle of the night to smoke on the kitchen’s low roof. Jess’s mother and Zelda wondered for weeks afterward where the bad smell was coming from.

  “See you tonight.” Pam squeezed the air out of Jess before bounding toward the door.

  Jess walked after her. She could finish her coffee in the car. Burlington was an hour drive, and she wanted to get to the hospital. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “I’ll bring the wine coolers, and you bring a detailed account of what you’ve done in the past ten years,” Pam said as they reached their cars. They were parked next to each other. “Special emphasis and extra detail on all sexual encounters. And the mystery boyfriend who’s too complicated for a simple yay or nay. And your delicious encounter with Derek.”

  “Nothing delicious about it,” Jess called back over the roof of her rental.

  Pam blew a raspberry. “Everything about Derek Daley is delicious. He makes taking out the garbage look delicious. I’m not even kidding. I saw him do it.” She fanned herself. “His muscles bunched. It was very erotic. Practically porn.”

  Jess refused to think about Derek doing porny things, involving waste management or otherwise. She waved goodbye.

  “I’ll tell you all about it tonight,” Pam promised before she drove away.

  Jess bit back a groan. Did she want to know more about Derek?

  Yes. She wouldn’t mind knowing how he’d been, if he’d married and was living over at the Daley farm with a wife and four kids. Things Jess hadn’t dared to ask Zelda because Zelda would make too much of questions like that. Pam wouldn’t.

  Meeting Pam was an incredibly nice surprise. But the next person Jess came face-to-face with, pulling into Pam’s spot after she’d pulled away, was just the opposite. Jess had to bite back a groan.

  Curse his eyes, the man recognized her as soon as he got out.

  “Jess Taylor!” In a blink, he was scurrying around his blue SUV toward her. “You’re back. How about an interview?” Mark Maxwell beamed the fakest smile in New England, more teeth than a shark, his smile so wide it was a miracle those freakish teeth all didn’t fall out of his mouth. “We could just have coffee right now and make it something informal. Taylorville’s Hollywood Daughter Returns.”

  “Not a chance.” She opened her car door, but he was already next to her, with a hand on the frame.

  He was a couple of inches taller than Jess, in good shape, probably from chasing people. He wore a wrinkled black suit with a wrinkled white shirt. His expression was over-the-top cheerful, but his body language gave a weird, looming, vaguely threatening vibe.

  The last time he’d ambushed her, she’d felt plenty threatened. But she was a different Jess now.

  She could have thrown him over her car with an action-movie flip, but going to jail for assault wasn’t among her weekend plans. So instead she said, “I never understood people who screwed you over, and then when you next met, pretended that you were the best of friends.”

  “Come on, Jess. I never screwed you over. I’m a reporter. I report. I want to do my job well, like you want to do yours.”

  “My job doesn’t involve dragging people through the mud just to humiliate them.”

  His freakish smile never wavered. “I only asked the questions the public wanted answered.”

  “You insinuated that Derek and I made up the kidnapping for attention. So we could sell the story for money.”

  “You have to admit, the evidence was scant.”

  “Screw you, Mark.”

  His smile finally slipped as his gaze turned speculative. “Are you here because of the Hannah Wilson disappearance? They found her. Accident. Drove off the bridge.”

  “I saw it in the paper.”

  “You know I’m not going to rest until I have an article about your return.”

  “Are you going to stalk me again?”

  During that month after the kidnapping, before she’d left for LA, Mark had been her constant shadow. He had seemed obsessed with the story. Jess had even thought he might have been obsessed with her. At the lowest point, when her anxiety had crossed over into paranoia, she’d wondered if he’d been the kidnapper. Jess had never seen the masked attacker’s face. Maxwell was the right height and body type.

  Having him inches from her now still made her uncomfortable.

  Ten years ago, she had cringed from him. Now she pulled her spine straight and stared him down, looked at his hand on her door frame, then back into his eyes.

  “Get your hands off my car. I’m not a hurt little girl anymore. You come near me again, and I’ll slap a restraining order on you so fast, your press pass will fly into the next county.”

  A cold, calculating expression took over his face, with more than a little anger simmering u
nder the surface.

  She slammed into the car and yanked the door closed. He had to snap his hand back or lose the fingers, so he moved fast.

  Jess drove away, refusing to let him upset her. She was past all that now. Maxwell was nothing but one of the demons from her past. And she’d just taken control of the situation and put him in his place. She liked that.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Pam all about it tonight. She was looking forward to seeing her old friend again. As Jess drove off to Burlington, she was in a lighter mood than she’d been in since she’d gotten her mother’s text on that rooftop in New York.

  “I’m taking some furniture from the house to the garage so you can move around when you come home,” she told her mother once she was sitting in the plastic chair next to Rose’s hospital bed again. “I’d also like to move Zelda down to the dining room, and move your things down to Dad’s office by the time you come home. It’ll take a while to get all that done, so I’ll probably stay longer than I thought.”

  “Yes, that sounds great.” Her mother grabbed on to the offer. “Thank you.”

  She had a little more color in her face today, her eyes clearer. Maybe she wasn’t on as many pain meds now as she had been right after the surgery.

  A couple of seconds passed in silence; then Jess said, “I heard the Daleys moved into town.”

  “Helen had a double knee replacement that didn’t heal well. Couldn’t deal with the stairs. And I think Bob might be in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s.”

  Jess’s heart sank. “I didn’t know that.”

  She liked Mrs. Daley. She’d put up with a lot from her husband over the years. Mr. Daley wasn’t bad either, when he wasn’t drinking. He’d taken care of a number of people who’d fallen on hard times, given them work on the farm.

  Two widows—sisters—lived down the road from the Daleys on the opposite side of the road from the Taylor farm. Mr. Daley would plow their driveway clean all winter, every winter. If he was too drunk, Derek would step up and do it.

  “What happened to the Pratt sisters?” Jess asked.

  “Moved to a retirement home.”

  How would you feel about something like that? Jess held the words on her tongue, trying to decide whether this was the right time to ask them. Not a retirement home, but something more manageable than an old farmhouse and a sugaring operation.

  Her mother must have seen the question in Jess’s eyes, because she stiffened. “I’m not that old.”

  “Zelda is.”

  “I can take care of Zelda.”

  Jess looked pointedly at the hospital bed. Then she said, reasonably and gently, “That sugaring operation is too big for you. You could sell the farm and live a much easier life. You could take early retirement like Mr. Crane.”

  If the high school principal, Harold Crane, knew when it was time to quit, why didn’t her mother?

  But instead of seeing Jess’s point, Rose flattened her lips. “You never appreciated your heritage.”

  And just like that, the mood in the room changed, from hopes of reconciliation to same old shit. Did all mothers and daughters fall back into old ruts this fast?

  “Maybe you always loved that heritage too much,” Jess said. More than you loved me.

  Her mother huffed. “Derek came back.”

  The subtext being that Derek had gotten over it and returned to his parents like a good child would. While Jess continued to play the drama queen because she was selfish.

  “Good for Derek.” Dammit. She hadn’t meant to say that. She hadn’t meant the snap in her voice either.

  “If I ever need help, he’s always there.”

  Even that fed Jess’s anger. “You never blamed Derek.”

  Pinched silence. Then, “You were the one making eyes at him, always putting yourself in his path.”

  Why did you go into the woods with that boy? her mother had asked back then, over and over. Because, of course, she blamed Jess. Other people too said similar things behind Jess’s back. Yes, what had happened to her was a tragedy. But if she hadn’t been sneaking around in the woods with a boy in the first place, nothing would have happened, now would it?

  Even after all these years, the memories made Jess want to punch something. She wanted a good practice session at the gym. An hour or two of kickboxing would do the trick. Maybe I became a stuntwoman to deal with my pent-up fury and aggression, she thought, not for the first time. Throwing oneself off a tall building released a shitload of tension.

  She hated when she felt this tense. She was never like this anymore. Except, coming back, she felt like a helpless girl once again, broken, either pitied or blamed or both—a victim.

  She recoiled from the word. Not a victim. Never again. She was an adult. Childhood hurts could no longer touch her. She had a life, far away from here. None of this mattered.

  “I saw a snack shop in the lobby.” She pushed to her feet. “They were putting out fresh doughnuts when I came up. I’ll go bring you one and some tea.”

  She walked out without waiting for a response. They needed a break. She’d go, grab a snack, come back, and then they’d start over.

  Except, when she came back, everything suddenly turned even worse than when she’d left.

  Jess froze in the open door, staring at Principal Crane sitting on the chair Jess had left only fifteen minutes earlier. The man was holding her mother’s hand. Which was not the most disturbing thing by far. The most disturbing thing was the expression on her mother’s face.

  Because Rose Taylor was looking at Principal Crane with . . . love?

  On the bedside desk were his gifts: three mini-cupcakes, three red roses already in a Styrofoam cup of water, and a women’s magazine.

  The sight of her mother with a man other than her father hit Jess with a visceral response. She stepped into the room. “What the hell?”

  Crane jumped up and stepped back. He smiled at Jess with a guilty expression on his face that looked way weird on her old high school principal.

  He wore a cheap suit, like he always had. He was thicker in the middle, his gray hair thinner on top. The same mild, encouraging tone in his voice that she remembered, as he said, “Jess. I was so glad to hear that you’re back. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  Might not have changed, but sure have learned. I now know how to kick you through that window right behind you for messing with my mother.

  OK, so that might have been too harsh a response, but . . . Was her mother dating the man?

  “We are all very proud of you here in Taylorville,” the man said, trying to suck up. “I hope you know that.”

  The sense of anger and betrayal that slammed into Jess was stunning in its fury. Her father was probably rolling over in his grave.

  She put the doughnut and tea on the tray built into the bed. “I need to go. I told Chuck I’d go and see the trees with him today.”

  Her mother called after her. “Jess, I—”

  But Jess was already walking to the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Would she? Because right now she just wanted to drive straight to the airport and go home to LA, to her little apartment. She wanted palm trees. She wanted Eliot and his calm, kind presence.

  Coming to Vermont had been a mistake.

  Her mother didn’t need her. Her mother had a boyfriend, for heaven’s sake. Chuck had the sugaring under control. Zelda handled the house. Jess was completely superfluous.

  This afternoon, she would clean out the downstairs and drag her mother’s bed down to the study. Tonight, she’d catch up with Pam. Then tomorrow, when Jess came to the hospital for a visit, she would bring her duffel bag and go on from here, straight to the airport.

  As she drove home, a little voice in her head asked if she might be overreacting. She told the pipsqueak to stuff it.

  Then, halfway between Burlington and Taylorville, she realized what she’d forgotten. She hadn’t asked her mother where that old diary went.

  She could look again
later today. Her room wasn’t that big. She would find her little pink book before she left.

  Jess pushed all that from her mind and thought about meeting up with Eliot when she got back to LA.

  She felt much better by the time she drove into the woods and parked by the jumble of pickup trucks so she could go with Chuck to walk through the sugar bush. She greeted workers, most of whom she didn’t recognize. These were temporary jobs, filled by high school kids and people who needed a little extra money. A good worker could make a nice chunk of change during a season.

  “I want to walk to the cliffs,” she told Chuck when they were done. “Haven’t been there forever.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  They talked about Kaylee and high school as they went. The more Chuck told her, the more Jess realized how much she’d missed. Not coming back was one thing. But she should have done a much better job at staying in touch.

  Before she knew it, they were at their destination. The cliffs were like two white towers, a hundred feet or so high, with a thirty-foot gap between them. People around here called them Short Stack and Tall Stack, although the difference in height was minimal, no more than four or five feet. The cliffs were surrounded by the river on one side, tall pines on the other, the far side of the cliffs tapering off to lower ground and blending into the forest. Jess and Chuck walked in that way, all the way to the highest point of Tall Stack.

  Jess snapped a couple of pictures and sent them to Eliot. She was looking at the LCD screen when she caught sight of a limping figure down by the water, walking with a stick.

  “Derek,” Chuck said unnecessarily. Jess had already recognized his shape. Despite his injury, he was still unmistakably a warrior.

  “How bad is his leg?”

  “Seems to be just the limp. He walks by the river every day. Goes all the way down to the bend and back.”

  At least five miles, walking on uneven ground. Wouldn’t his leg hurt?

  None of her business. Jess turned away. “I’d better get back to the house.”

  She wasn’t even half finished with her furniture shuffle.