by Tess Oliver
While I was pretty sure most small town residents didn’t spend much time keeping their eyes out for a killer, it was impossible to fade into the crowd. Mostly because there was no crowd and strangers were especially noticeable. The hat would have been nice, but one thing I’d discovered about Julian in these past months, he could be totally reasonable one minute and unreasonable, almost childish, the next.
I stuck my hands deep in my pockets and kept my face low. One minute, I was in my room at Green Willow, thinking about how badly I want to kiss Sugar, and the next, I’m a fucking fugitive on the run.
My hands were shaking with anger as I picked up the phone. Somebody had left an old sandwich on top. It had to be days old and it stank like shit. A line of ants crawled up along the sides of the phone to the moldy feast. In California, public phones had gone the way of the dinosaur, and this one, it seemed, had survived only because it was sitting in the middle of nowhere. There was even a phonebook and a pen sitting neatly on the ledge beneath the phone.
I had no change, so I dialed the operator, like I’d seen people do in movies, and was almost surprised when a helpful voice came on. “Yes, I’d like to make a collect call.” I gave her the number.
“Who is this call from?” she asked. I hesitated. I hadn’t given any thought yet to what might be happening at home. Had the police swarmed the place looking for me or for clues to my whereabouts? My gut knotted into a ball of ice, and I was regretting scarfing down my breakfast.
“Uh, the name is Tommy.”
The phone rang. I closed my eyes almost hoping they wouldn’t answer. But I needed to clear this up before things got completely out of control.
My dad’s voice bursting through the phone.
“I have a collect call from Tommy,” the operator said politely.
“Yes, yes,” Dad said sharply. “Tommy, what the hell has happened? The police just left here.”
“Dad, w-w-wait.” The words were stuck. My dad had learned how to take advantage of my speech flaw, another source of disappointment, and talk right over me.
“Have you lost your mind, Tommy? Have you lost your fucking mind?” I could hear my mom crying in the background. “My god, I knew that explosive temper of yours would be the ruin of you, but—”
“Dad! I didn’t fucking k-k-k-” I pulled the phone from my ear and smacked it on the ledge twice. I took a deep breath and brought the phone back to my ear. My dad was still ranting.
“I’ve already talked to my lawyers, but I don’t know what we’re going to do. You’ve ruined this family’s name, and frankly, maybe jail is where you belong.”
“I fucking— didn’t do— it.” The words drifted out haltingly, quietly, like someone in surrender. I was sure he couldn’t hear me over the explosion of rage in his head. There were seconds during our last phone conversation when I’d thought he was coming around. The health scare had made him rethink his life and our relationship, but the man on the other side of the phone was having his usual one-sided conversation and ignoring everything his horrible, rotten son was trying to tell him.
“Your mother is falling apart, Thomas. Now do the right thing, and turn yourself in.”
“I didn’t fucking do it.” My throat tightened as I said the words again, but I knew he wasn’t listening to me. He never had before, why should he start now? Especially when all of his predictions for my future, a life behind bars, were coming true. He’d probably actually feel vindicated for being so right about his son. My eyes burned. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried. Even with all the shit that had happened to me, I never cried.
I lowered the phone away from my ear. I could still hear his voice as I stared down at it. It looked so old-fashioned, with an earpiece, a handle and a place to talk. Like something you’d see in a museum. I hadn’t really needed the mouthpiece. My own voice had once again been silenced by the words getting jammed in my mouth and the person on the other end putting on his usual stone ears.
“Tommy,” I could still hear his voice. He’d finally stopped with his rant long enough to realize I was no longer listening. How does that feel, Dad? How does that fucking feel to be ignored? I smacked the phone on the ledge again. Then again. And again. The earpiece flew off and I smacked it again, over and over again, pulverizing the thick plastic casing just like I’d pulverized the face of the real killer.
“Tommy?” Sugar’s voice drifted over my shoulder, but I kept pounding the phone until there wasn’t anything left of it but strands of wire.
I dropped the dangling pieces of phone and braced my hands against the ledge that I’d just used to annihilate what was probably the sole surviving payphone for miles. I dropped my head. It pounded from the rage, the frustration.
Sugar put her hand on my shoulder. “Tommy, what is it?”
I closed my eyes. “My dad has already appointed himself judge and jury. He wants his murderous son to turn himself in because the family name is ruined forever.”
I swished past her and Julian and headed straight to the liquor store.
“Tommy.” Sugar ran up next to me.
I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t even face the one person in this whole damn world I cared about. I wanted to slide into a hole and fade out of existence.
As my arm reached for the door, Sugar took hold of my hand to stop me. “Don’t. We’ll get this straightened out. Just don’t.”
I stood there for a second, shutting my eyes as she spoke to me, wishing to hell she hadn’t come with me, that she wasn’t having to see me like this.
“Please, Tommy.” I still hadn’t turned to look at her. She stared at the side of my face. She lifted her hand. I could feel that her fingers were shaking as she reached up and pushed the hair back off my face. “We’ll go to Julian’s dad and get this straightened out. Don’t do this.”
We might’ve been able to untangle the mess, but nothing could take away the fact that my dad had decided, without even talking to me or allowing me to explain myself, that I’d murdered two people. That couldn’t be wiped away, even if he someday had to face the embarrassing fact that he’d been wrong about it. He’d been convinced that I was capable of killing someone, and that said it all.
I pulled away from Sugar’s hand and slammed into the liquor store. Sugar and Julian followed, even though it was the last thing I wanted.
The clerk looked up from his newspaper. “Morning.” There were no televisions in sight. I could only assume he hadn’t seen any news yet. It wouldn’t have made the paper yet, but that fun little bit of publicity was coming next, no doubt. And, because of who I was, the story would be in a lot of papers. People always loved to hear about big, powerful families being shamed by their out-of-control heirs. Made for great headlines, scandal packed headlines that were probably being sent to print right then. Even if we got this cleared up today, people would see the story. For some stupid reason, once they’d seen it on a headline, it was hard to wash the story away, even if it was blatantly false. Heir to the Jameson fortune a murderer would stick in their memories forever, and ten years from now, people would still be saying ‘I wonder what ever happened to that horrid heir to the Jameson fortune’.
I walked straight to the whiskey aisle and grabbed my favorite brand. The bottle felt cool and soothing in my hand. My mouth watered at the thought of it. Sugar with her floaty, ballerina style movement was behind me. I hadn’t heard one footstep. I steeled my expression and looked at her. Her face, the face that was always with me in my daydreams and at night when I was alone in bed, almost made me put the bottle back. She was completely disappointed. She didn’t say a word, but her silent pleas for me to rethink this were painfully evident.
I stared down at the bottle. For only the shortest fleeting moment, I considered putting it back. I considered, for once in my life, not disappointing someone I cared about. Then I slipped past her and went to the cash register.
I pulled out my wallet. “Two packs of Camels please.” A rack of cheap sunglasses o
n the counter caught my attention. I grabbed the blackest pair and put them down next to the bottle.
The clerk glanced at me for a second longer than seemed normal, and I worried that he had seen the news report, after all. He leaned to the side and looked down the aisle to the shelves of cold medicine and aspirin. Julian was standing in front of the shelves, methodically turning all the labels toward the front. I’d seen him do stuff like that before. Like in the cafeteria when he would straighten all the food trays so that their sides were perfectly parallel with the front of the table. Or when he’d count the number of strawberries on a platter and then calculate exactly how many each person should take to make it fair. And if it came to a number that ended in point five or point three, he would cut a berry in half or in thirds and take that amount. It didn’t matter if anyone else was following his suggestion on how much was fair, but he would stick to it.
Sugar, who looked about as mad at me as she could be while still looking completely beautiful, even after the long, shitty night, noticed where the clerk’s attention had fallen. She hurried over to see what Julian was up to.
“How much do I owe you?”
“You’re over twenty-one?” he asked.
“Yep.” I hadn’t even considered that he might card me.
“That’ll be twenty-eight dollars.”
I paid him and thought, shit, if only the California liquor stores of my youth had been so damn easy to please. Obviously, laws out here were a bit more lax.
Sugar was standing next to Julian. He held his computer under one arm and the other arm busily worked its way along the entire medicine aisle, straightening every bottle and box. Sugar glanced at me and shrugged.
“Are you going to buy some of that?” the clerk called from behind the counter.
I stepped behind Julian. “Hey, Jules, you’re making the guy nervous. Let’s get out of here.”
He didn’t stop until he got to the last bottles of pink stomach medicine. Then he turned and looked at us almost as if he’d forgotten we’d walked in with him.
“You ready? The clerk is getting worried, and we need to get to your dad’s place before the swat team descends on me.”
We followed Sugar out, me clutching my bag of goods and Julian, pleased with himself for ridding the world of an untidy medicine aisle.
Once outside, Sugar turned around and looked at both of us. “Let me just say, thanks so fucking much, both of you, for holding it together. I feel in such good company. It just warms my heart.” With that, she spun back around fast enough to loosen the braid in her hair. The chocolate brown strands danced around her shoulders as she made a cute attempt at stomping off in anger.
We reached the half paved sidewalk. Most of the cement had been eaten away, more likely by time rather than by wear.
“This street turns into a highway. It’s about four miles to the turn off for home,” Julian seemed to have bounced himself temporarily from that other place in his mind where things had to be orderly and fair.
Sugar stared straight ahead.
“Look.” I lifted the bag. “I’m not going to drink it unless I really need it.”
“And what will you use to gauge your need for it? Another bend in the road?”
“Shit, I’m the one being wrongly accused and hunted for murder. Give me a little break. Besides, sweetie, don’t act so damn high and mighty like you’ve been fucking sober all your life.”
“Don’t call me sweetie.” I seemed to be the one person who could make her mad. She tolerated everyone else, but when it came to me, I could make her thin shoulders tighten with rage with just one misstep.
I laughed. Another misstep, but I was good at stepping in shit over and over again. “Your damn name is Sugar. Sweetie isn’t that big of a stretch.”
She stopped suddenly, and Julian, who hadn’t expected it, nearly smacked into her.“I know this whole thing is going bat shit crazy, Tommy, and I know most of that shit is falling on you. But do me a favor and shut the fuck up.” She continued walking. Julian and I trudged behind.
Chapter 15
A murky blue sky fanned out ahead of us along with an impossibly long stretch of road, a river of black asphalt that had waves of heat curling up from it. I didn’t have to worry about that ‘bend in the road’ Sugar had mentioned. There were no turns, no curves, no deviations from straight ahead. Both sides of the two lane stretch of highway were lined by what seemed to be baby corn plants, silky green tufts of leaves sprouting along perfectly spaced rows of plowed dirt.
Sugar walked ahead with her face turned up and her arms held out as she took in the sun. She’d taken off my sweatshirt and tied it around her waist. I watched her through my cheap sunglasses. Those were my favorite times, watching Sugar enjoy something simple like watermelon or sunlight. She found good in everything. Even knowing the grim reality that her mom had basically told her to fuck off for good, she still managed to find seconds in time where everything was perfect. I would have given anything to be able to find those incredible moments of time. Then it occurred to me that that moment, right then, while I was watching her enjoy the warmth of the sun, was one of those snapshots of life that was pretty damn close to perfect.
Julian walked along next to me still grasping his computer under his arm as if the thing was holding him down on earth, his own personal piece of gravity. The front of his cap had a line of moisture and beads of sweat rolled down his temple. But he didn’t wipe them away. He just let them roll. Without his usual course of medication, he was slowly splitting apart. One second, he seemed agitated, and the next, somber and the next, normal as if he’d just climbed his rock wall.
“Once we get to the house, I can plug this in and see what she sent me.”
“Who sent you? Jules, you’re starting in the middle of a sentence.”
“Dr. Kirkendall. The night she died, she’d come by my room. I ignored her knock.” His face dropped, and he looked truly sad for the first time since he’d followed us out of Green Willow. He’d gone from his never seen before take charge face to plastic and non-committal, like a guy just going through the motions, in less than twenty-four hours. Now, I was looking at a glimmer of emotion. It showed in the lines around his mouth and the tension in his cheek.
“It’s all right. You didn’t know what was about to happen to her.”
He nodded. He’d actually listened to my words of comfort, another rarity for him. “She said she sent me an email. She said there were some things she needed to talk to me about. But I didn’t look. I didn’t really think it would be anything of interest.”
“How do you think your dad will react when he sees us? Does he have a gun? I guess that should be my first question. You should probably go in and explain things first.”
No nod this time. It was the same cement reaction I always got from him when I brought up his dad. Julian seemed to have just as many sink holes in his relationship with his dad, but he tended to skip over the holes. I dove right in head first, or maybe it was heart first, like Sugar had said. Maybe my biggest problem was that I reacted more with my heart, my emotions, than my head. Logical, measured responses like Julian’s, maybe that had been my problem all along. Of course, that method hadn’t really done much good for Julian either. He was a walking nerve on fire, and I was sure he wouldn’t last much longer without his meds.
I squeezed the bag in my hand, the one with my crutch. I reached in and pulled out a cigarette. My fingers grazed the whiskey bottle. I resisted the urge to yank it out and open it. It would be like a bag of potato chips, once I got started, it would be hard to stop.
“Car coming,” Sugar called back over her shoulder. “Too bad they’re going the wrong direction. Otherwise, I could stick out my thumb and—” She froze.
I lifted the crappy black sunglasses from my eyes and squinted ahead but could only make out the outline of the car. It was a sedan. Then the police light came into view. “Shit. Hide in the field.”
We hopped over plants and irrig
ation ditches like scared rabbits running through the farmer’s cabbage patch. I motioned toward a tractor a good five hundred feet ahead. Sugar and I were fast runners, but Julian moved awkwardly with his laptop in hand. We were gasping for a decent breath as we ducked behind the tractor. The police car whirred past, and two more followed. Their lights weren’t on. They were coming back from something, rather than going toward it.
I looked at Julian. He seemed to be coming to the same conclusion as me. “I take it that it’s rare to see three cop cars in a row out here.”
Julian nodded. “I’m sure they were coming from my house.”
“I guess your parents are going to be freaking out.”
He looked at me. It was the stone-faced Julian again, only his face was red from running and more sweat had pooled at the front of his hat. “About what?”
“Uh, about you missing from Green Willow. They probably think that I kidnapped you.”
“Then they’ll only worry if they think they’ll have to part with some of their precious money.” He stepped out from behind the tractor. “It’s clear. We should get out of this field. Probably tons of toxic pesticide in it.”
I looked back at Sugar. Her expression mirrored my own surprise. I’d heard Julian complain about his dad, but I’d never heard him say anything so obviously hateful as that. Another show of emotion. It was as if all this time, with the meds, he’d been wrapped in layers of wax, and as they peeled away, a man with feelings just like the rest of us, was being exposed.
We hiked back over the lines of plants and reached asphalt again. A sputtering motor nearly sent us back into the field. An old wobbly truck was rolling up from behind us. “I’m going to get us a ride,” Sugar stated confidently. “We need to get off this road and get to Julian’s sooner rather than later.” Couldn’t argue with that.
As the truck coughed and chugged closer, the driver came into view. It was an older man with a straw cowboy hat and a denim shirt. Sugar’s multicolored hair glistened in the sunlight as she stood with her arm stretched out and her thumb in the air. Her smile, that smile that could light up the darkest heart, broke out on her face. The truck pulled over.