Fiercely Emma: Cake Series Book Three

by J. Bengtsson

  “Because I’m injured. It’s not a vacation.”

  “It might as well be. You know, for being a full grown man, you sure are a cry baby.”

  “You called me,” I said, bristling. “I was all happy not talking to you, and then the phone rang. And now you’re insulting me while trying to make a deal. You’re slipping, Shelby.”

  “Oh, please, I’m at the top of my game, as always. Besides, you know it’s true. You take more crap than anyone I know.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t make me say it,” Shelby groaned.

  I waited, knowing she would say it whether I gave her permission or not.

  “I’m talking about the skank.”

  There it was. I was surprised it had taken her so long to bring it up. It really was Shelby’s favorite subject even though our relationship had been over for some time now. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to continually harp on the past.

  “It’s over. Let it go.”

  “What did you see in her, anyway? She’s not worth the pile of shit she stands in.”

  I gave Shelby’s comment more thought than it deserved before saying, “Are you done now?”

  “Am I done? Not really, Indy. I know her type. Hell, I am her type. I mean, who do you know who’s more qualified to call out a skank than me?”

  She had a point. Shelby really was their beloved leader. This was the woman who’d appeared not once but twice on the “Who’s My Baby Daddy?” segment of the Maury Povich Show and still couldn’t figure out who the hell my daddy was.

  “I’m not trying to shit on you. All I’m saying is, she made your life a living hell, and you don’t need her whoring kind in your life. You’re lucky to be rid of her.”

  She didn’t have to tell me that; I already knew. When it came right down to it, Alexis was just a glorified, and better-looking, version of Shelby. She’d taken over my entire life, systematically alienating me from all my friends and dangling lies over my head to keep me in my place. I’d wasted so much time on her and came out of it with nothing.

  “Indy? You okay?”

  Snapping out of my medicated daydream, I changed the subject to something I knew would be more agreeable to Shelby. “Okay, I’ll come by Friday morning, but I expect you to drop my car off here Sunday afternoon. Deal?”

  “You’re the best, Indy. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Neither did I, because, no joke, she asked for a hell of a lot more than she ever gave. “Stop calling me Indy.”

  “Why not? I love your name. Ind…”

  “NO! If you’re going to start up with that shit, then I’m calling you Mom.”

  “Oh, please. I’m too young to be your mom.”

  “Except you are.”

  “Technically, yes.”

  “There’s no technically about it,” I said, my voice rising a pitch.

  “Yeah, well, no one would believe a hottie like me would have a twenty-six-year-old son.”

  “Okay, Mom, whatever you say.”

  Mother Nature had nothing on me. Lying face down on my pillow in a puddle of drool, I hadn’t even felt the earth quaking until Richie added to the rumbling by shaking my shoulders.

  “Dude, wake up – earthquake!”

  The painkillers doing their job beautifully, I groaned my displeasure at the REM interruption while raising my hand to swat him away.

  “Finn, come on. It’s still going. This is a strong one.”

  Honestly, at that point, I wouldn’t have cared if Los Angeles detached from the mainland. I was not getting out of my nice, comfy bed. “Let it kill me.”

  A picture on my shelf tumbled to the floor, and the sound of breaking glass in the distance pierced through my drugged-out coma.

  “Finn!”

  “Richie!” I said, waking just enough to give him a proper geological tongue-lashing. “What did I tell you about earthquakes? I won’t evacuate for anything less than a six on the Richter scale.”

  “Yeah, I know that, but we aren’t living in utopia anymore. We’ve got a fucking meth lab next door.”

  “Oh, shit.” I shot to my feet, confused. Richie grabbed me by my arm and steered me toward the front door. The shaking had stopped, but by then we were already in the hallway in our underwear. Our similarly startled neighbors were also exiting their apartments. A few wary souls were racing for the nearest exits, praying as they clutched their rosary beads. Those were the out-of-towners.

  The rest of us battle-tested California natives milled around, assessing the damage. No smoke, no exploding drug crystals, no upstairs neighbor dangling from a hole in the ceiling.

  I turned to Richie. “You got me out of bed for that?”

  The redheaded crack whore came out of her apartment, dragging a bunch of kids. She took one look at Richie and me half-naked in the hallway and shook her head, smiling. I can now safely report – she had a solid mouthful of teeth.

  “Would you boys take that shit inside?”

  Confused, I glanced to Richie and got my first real look at him… and his shimmering gold bikini briefs. “What the…? What are you wearing?”

  “I was trying on stuff for this weekend when the earthquake struck.”

  “And you couldn’t slip on some pants?”

  “Excuse me for thinking of you first and trying to save your life.”

  “You really should be more grateful,” the crack whore said, addressing me as she nodded toward Richie. “You’ve got a man who puts you first.”

  “Right?” Richie said, flamboyantly waving his arms around. “I try to tell him how lucky he is, but sometimes he’s just so selfish.”

  “Ugghh… I’m going back to bed. A SIX, Richie. Do not wake me up for anything less.”

  Goddammit, I needed a girlfriend.

  4

  Emma, 2004: Forty-Eight Hours

  Forty-eight hours. It was the most crucial period of time in a stranger abduction case. That was what the police officer said. If Jake wasn’t found in those few hours, his chances of survival greatly decreased. Again, that was what he said.

  It couldn’t be right. Jake had just disappeared, and now he was already being given a countdown to his death? No. This couldn’t be happening. We all stood there dumbfounded, still trying to make sense of what was unfolding before us, and then this horribly grim statistic… delivered in the most heartless and matter-of-fact ways. Glaring at the detached officer, I fought the urge to spit in his unsympathetic face. Who blurted out something like that to a victim’s terrified family? Was he just so desensitized to violence that the kidnapping of a thirteen-year-old boy received little more than the shrug of his shoulders?

  His words took a minute to really, truly register, but when they did, Mom slid to the floor and began to wail. Not a normal shrill sound, but a strange mewling, moaning one that peaked and ebbed in eerie intervals, conjuring up an image of a wounded animal in its dying moments. Dad bent over and clenched his knees, drawing air into his lungs in constricted, exaggerated grunts. Kyle, wrapped in a blanket, was folded into Keith’s arms. Both were covered in blood, looking like survivors of a deadly school massacre. I was just struggling to keep from punching the bearer of bad news. The police officer had instantly become the embodiment of all that was wrong in my rapidly shrinking world.

  Grace and Quinn wandered around the house frightened and confused. They hadn’t even finished their dinner before the police were swarming through our kitchen doors. The call to action was swift. If Kyle’s story was to be believed, and it was, Jake had just been brazenly stolen. Kidnapped… that’s what everyone kept saying, but it wasn’t sinking in. How could this happen to us? To Jake? Oh, god, not to Jake. None of it made sense, yet here we were.

  My heart racing in my chest, I glanced at the clock. We had time. Forty-six hours. It would have been forty-seven had Kyle not spent an hour of it in hiding behind a garbage container before gathering the courage to run home. Still, there was no need to pan
ic, I reasoned, grasping at any thread left dangling. There was still plenty of time left. Jake would be home soon, and then everything would be right in the universe again.

  Within hours, our kitchen had transformed from a family gathering spot to a command center. Mom was struggling to hold it together, but she seemed to have come to a shaky agreement with herself to hold the hysteria and crying at bay in order to focus on bringing Jake home. She understood that her level head and quick actions in those crucial hours were the most important things she could do to assist the FBI, who had immediately claimed control of the investigation. She and my father consented to separate interrogations, they allowed complete access to the family computers, and they gave their permission to a full and intrusive search of our home. Anything they asked, my mother rushed to oblige. Had they required her to throw herself into oncoming traffic, I was convinced she would have done it if it meant Jake’s safe return. Getting him home alive, in any condition, was preferable to the alternative.

  I cleared Grace and Quinn’s plates and tidied up the taco fixings they’d dumped onto the table. The other six plates remained where they lay. Once Jake returned, he’d be hungry. It was getting late and past the little ones’ bedtime, but with the light and sirens and loud, frantic talking, there was no putting them to sleep. Grace went into tantrum mode and with every fling of her tiny, convulsing body to the floor, my mom would blast my name in frustration: “Emma, please!” Please what? Exactly what did she expect me to do about the little demon?

  Thankfully a family friend swooped in, packed their bags, and whisked Quinn and Grace away, effectively shielding them from the horrors of the dwindling clock.

  Kyle had also been taken away, but his ride was in the form of an ambulance, so there was no protecting him from the nightmare he’d just survived. Our next-door neighbor stepped in to accompany him to the hospital, as neither of our parents could be convinced to make the trip. Kyle was injured but alive, so his welfare took a backseat to Jake’s, who’d become Mom and Dad’s sole focus. I wasn’t sure I agreed with their decision to abandon Kyle in his moment of need, but my little brother was gone before an opinion could really be formed one way or another. I felt a pang of guilt that I hadn’t volunteered to go with him, but I was barely keeping it together myself, and if I had to listen to even one more minute of Kyle’s incoherent babbling and sudden terror-filled wails, I’d lose it. After he left, I picked up his dinner plate and placed it back in the cupboard.

  Keith and I sat blurry-eyed and stunned in the darkened living room. Through the front windows, the flashing of the police lights colored the space between us.

  “Do you think he’s okay?” Keith grimaced, wringing his hands together. He’d asked the same question probably fifteen times already. “You don’t think he’ll hurt Jake, do you?”

  No, he wasn’t okay, and yes, I did think the man would hurt him. Keith knew as well as I did that’s Jake’s situation was dire. You didn’t put a gun to a kid’s head and then take him out for ice cream.

  “Jake’s smart. He’ll be okay,” I offered up feebly. Whether I believed it or not didn’t matter. Keith obviously needed reassurance, so I gave it to him.

  My stomach growled in protest. I checked the clock: three in the morning. Jake had only thirty-nine hours left of the forty-eight hours he’d been given to live. Of course I understood it didn’t work that way, and he could already be dead, for all I knew, but my brain perceived those hours like the stopwatch of death. Every minute that passed was another minute of Jake’s life that was ticking away.

  “Are you hungry? I left the dinner on the table. I can heat something up for you.”

  Keith looked down at his hands, which were curling into fists over and over again.

  “Keith. Are you hungry?”

  He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes, his despair clear to see. “Do you think Jake’s hungry?”

  I couldn’t think about our brother or what he might be going through. I purposely pushed that picture from my mind. Whatever was happening to him, he just had to fight and survive and come back to us alive. There was no other option.

  Wringing my hands in worry, I checked the clock for the thousandth time and was frustrated to discover that it just kept barreling forward. Why was it when you wanted time to move faster, it instead crept by so slowly that you were certain the hands of time had decided to stop ticking? But when time was the only thing you had on your side, and the life of someone you loved was literally hanging in the balance, the minutes turned to hours at heartbreaking speeds.

  I spent those forty-eight hours fixated on the passing of time… waiting, hoping, praying. The number loomed in my brain like a vulture ready to swoop down and devour my faith.

  At thirty-five hours a search party was formed. Keith went off with Dad while I stayed back with Mom to wait for Jake’s call. Soon, I continued to reason with myself. Jake would be home soon.

  I fell asleep at thirty-two hours and was awakened by my mother’s haunting howls at twenty-four. An entire day had passed. We were back to the same time I had thrown my stupid fit in the kitchen the day before. How could I have been so selfish? Had I known it would be the last normal moment of my life, I might have savored it more.

  Kyle returned home from the hospital with sixteen hours left. His arm had been broken in two places, and he had a gash in his forehead that had required seven stitches. On some pretty serious pain meds, his red-rimmed eyes were glazed and his head kept dipping to one side, as if it took extreme effort to keep it steady. Although he’d already been interviewed by professionals, that didn’t stop Mom from descending upon him the moment he returned. She was convinced he’d suppressed valuable information related to the kidnapping and demanded he remember it. Kyle tried, he really did, but he was a drugged out, emotional wreck, and certainly in no condition to withstand an interrogation. But as the hours disappeared at an alarming rate and Mom’s terror intensified, Kyle’s spotty memory was the only thing she could cling to.

  At the twelve o’clock hour, the body of a teenager was discovered near a river in a neighboring state. I watched my parents drop to their knees, sobbing. Kyle locked himself into the bathroom and screamed. A steady stream of tears dripped down Keith’s shocked face. Me? I sat at the kitchen table, gripping its sides with a steely-eyed and furious expression on my face. Why had I been such a self-centered bitch? Why hadn’t I cherished the moments with my family? Why had I pulled Grace’s beautiful baby hair? Why? Why? Why?

  A couple of heart-wrenching hours passed before we learned the body was, in fact, not Jake’s but that of an older teen who’d suffered a drug overdose. With that stunning revelation, Jake came back to life on my shaky timetable, eight hours and counting. New hope swelled. The search efforts were intensified. The FBI visited known predators. The media descended on our home. Jake’s picture circulated throughout the state and then the country. Yet despite all the valiant efforts of so many, time kept speeding up. The forty-eight hour mark was looming, and we were no closer to finding him than we were when he’d been taken. Desperation took hold. Jake was going to die, and there was nothing we could do to save him.

  My eyes were on the clock at that fateful moment. The all-important time came and went with no fanfare. I’d expected so much more than just the passing of another minute. Forty-eight hours and one minute. It should have been bigger, more dramatic. Something should have happened. My brother died, and all the clock could do was tick away another goddamn minute. That was when I cried.

  5

  Finn: Lord of the Flies

  Pulling up to the family compound on Friday morning, I deftly dodged giant potholes, wandering chickens, and the gaggle of small children scurrying every which way in front of my moving vehicle. As was always the case at the Perry house, there were no adults in sight. Kids, at least ten of them, darted around like animals at feeding time. As I waved at all the dirt and snot-smeared faces, I had to wonder if they’d multiplied since my last visit. Jesus, it wa
s like a human zoo here.

  I parked next to the old station wagon. A fixture since my younger years, it was matted in rust and sat on dented rims, the tires and any other useful parts having been stripped away long ago. The kids who lived here used the corroded hazard as a fort, but they were well aware, as I had once been, that the wagon was an interactive play area. One false move and you’d be in the kitchen pouring whiskey on the open wound.

  Two boys, both my cousin’s kids, ran up to me as I stepped out of my car.

  “I’m Indy!” the older boy screamed, pretending to be me, while the younger one slashed him with an invisible cleaver. ‘Indy’ grabbed his throat and rolled his eyes before falling to the ground, theatrically flopping around in the dirt until he ‘died.’

  “Obviously you’ve been watching my movies too,” I said, helping him up. My many onscreen deaths were a source of great amusement in the Perry household.

  “Yep, with Shelby last night.”

  Of course you did. “Those are all rated R movies. How old are you again?”

  “Seven.”

  Of course he was. “Awesome. Well, nice job on the death scene. Next time, not so much drooling.”

  Because they were so starved for attention, I had to spend time chatting with all the little kids before taking care of the business I’d come here for. The pint-sized welcoming committee consisted of my niece and nephew, second cousins, and other children, some I wasn’t even sure belonged in the family. Sometimes I wondered if people in the community just dropped their kids off and used our fenced in property as a sort of day care. With the whole lot of them running around unattended at all times, no one would know the difference.

  Although I only lived about twenty miles away, I rarely made the trip. For the life of me, I just couldn’t understand how my relatives thought it was okay to let these kids fend for themselves surrounded by piles and piles of trash. Even though I’d grown up as one of them, and for the most part had loved it, watching this new crop exist in such conditions bothered me. Back then, I knew I wasn’t living the norm. I saw how ‘real’ families lived on television shows and it was as foreign to me as rules and dinnertime and bedtimes. As a Perry, I got to run around at all hours of the night, grab snacks whenever hunger struck, and fall asleep where I lay.