by Terese Ramin
It was a relatively mild evening—ninety degrees with a modest eighty-five percent humidity relative to the day’s one-hundredand-two degrees with its accompanying thick and cloying ninetyfive percent humidity. They ate a cold meal outside in the shade of a spreading oak at the two long picnic tables set up for the purpose; citronella torches posted a perimeter around the tables to keep the flies and mosquitoes at bay.
With a lot of kids, the family’s evening meal was lively and entertaining, occasionally informative and never boring. Outside on a hot July night, it was also a little raucous, prone to bad jokes, snickers and the sporadic flinging of macaroni or peas— supposedly behind Kate’s back. The dog, Taz, who was not allowed to beg from the table in the house, snuck underneath whichever table Kate was not at outside and cleaned up whatever Mike or Ilya didn’t like. Born in a place where food was often scarce, Bele ate whatever was put in front of him—although he no longer had a tendency to gorge himself sick, not knowing when he’d have his next meal. Outside, Kate turned her back on minor infractions of the Dinner Table Rules and Manners unless the violations got out of hand.
After dinner the family’s resident firebugs, Li and Grisha, tepeed the broken-up wood from old pallets—Tai brought them home regularly, free, from a local warehouse—in the nearby fire pit. Mike, Bele and Ilya cleared paper plates and cups from the table to add to the evening fire effort; Tai, his girlfriend, Carly, and Kate covered leftover perishables and removed them to the house, returning with roasting forks, bags of marshmallows, packages of Hershey bars and graham crackers.
Hot as it was, the younger boys urged swimming before dessert.
Kate eyed them, then her oldest son’s girlfriend and asked, “Carly, will you lifeguard these hellions? I need to talk with Tai and Li a minute.”
The younger woman cast her a curious glance, swiftly masked. She’d been with Tai four years now, considered his family hers, and there was very little Kate said to Tai but hesitated to share with her. Which meant she had a reason this time. “Sure.”
“Thanks.” Kate waited until Carly shepherded her appointed troops off to the pond before turning again to Tai and Li. Without preamble she asked, “Is Risto drinking again?”
They stared at her, surprised, then thoughtful.
There had been a problem with alcohol early in the exchange student’s tenure with them, only partially excused by ignorance, cultural differences, and an ofttimes more lenient spirits policy in Risto’s native country. He’d have been expelled and sent home by the exchange program on the spot had Kate not intervened on his behalf.
She knew from personal experience how difficult it was to be far from home, speaking a language you were familiar with but which was not your native tongue; understood the temptation to want to fit in whatever the cost She also understood that Risto was the only child of a wealthy family and used to living by a different set of standards than she exercised. But after the first few turbulent months, he’d seemed to settle in nicely—primarily, Kate suspected, because he hadn’t wanted to be sent home early. Or to return home to Finland at all.
Since school let out for the summer, though, and Risto had once more started disappearing without word, Kate wondered if she’d done the right thing in lobbying the exchange program to let him stay. Wondered if she shouldn’t have let Risto be sent home, where he could return to being his parents’ problem instead of hers.
Undoubtedly a selfish thought, but there it was.
Life’s tough, get a helmet, she cautioned herself with an inward grimace, silently repeating Mike’s and Bele’s latest favorite cartoon advice.
And at least when she was worrying about what Risto might be up to—or in to—she wasn’t thinking about Hank.
Now Kate looked at Li, who looked doubtfully back and said, “Drinking? I don’t—I’m not sure, but I don’t think...” She turned to Tai.
He shook his head. “He comes out pretty groggy some mornings, but I haven’t smelled anything on him. He sleeps in with Grisha and Ilya and they haven’t said anything—and Grisha’s got the nose of a bloodhound.”
“Do either of you have any idea where he is? Or when he left?”
Tai and Li eyed each other and shrugged.
“He left,” Tai said, “probably around four, when he came in from the fields to do something and didn’t come back. As for where he went...” He lifted a shoulder, let it drop. “Far as Risto’s concerned, I’m an egghead plowboy, so how would I know?”
“Yeah,” Li put in, “and I’m a nerd-geek-spook-eggheadgoody-two-shoes-milkmaid-freaky-animal-lover, and guys like Risto don’t tell girls like me squat because he knows if you ask me and I know and it’s for his own good, I’ll tell you.”
Kate swallowed a smile at her daughter’s offhandedness. In her day—gee, did that make her sound old, or what?—being called anything on Li’s list was tantamount to being ostracized for life from all polite society. Li, on the other hand, considered such name-calling a compliment. “Nerds are the world’s billionaires, was her prosaic response—and had been since grade school:
“I see,” she said, amused. Then she sighed. “Okay, so nobody thinks he’s drinking or knows where he went, but he probably left around four. It’s seven-thirty now. He didn’t drive, he didn’t take a bike, so—”
“I might know where he is.”
Stuffed gym bag in hand, Jamal stood off to one side shifting from foot to foot, ill at ease. Kate regarded him, taking in both the picture and the implication behind it in a glance.
“Your mother out of town again?” she asked.
Jamal nodded once without looking up. “I think she be gone a while this time. She wondered, could I stay here like we been. doin’.” He lifted his head, face strained, not quite pleading. “It’s time you need extra help an’ all, an’ I’ll help out with everything—”
“I know you will, Jamal,” Kate assured him quietly. “You always help, you work hard. We’re lucky you can be here. That’s why we keep Ilya’s top bunk empty when you’re not here. It’s yours.”
“Thanks.” Jamal grinned shyly, giving Kate the impression that praise and simple acceptance were rare commodities in his life. She could change that Other things she couldn’t change.
She waved gratitude away and cautioned gently, “If this’ll be an extended stay, you’ll have to tell me what and why so we can make...temporary legal guardianship arrangements if they’re necessary.”
Jamal took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Okay.” He eyed her. “Y-you want we should do that now?”
Kate shook her head. “Later’ll be soon enough. First tell me what you think about Risto....”
His legs and back were stiff, and he had to go to the bathroom.
Wrinkling his nose, Hank sniffed the air around him. He also needed a shower. Bad.
Stifling a groan, he shoved himself up the wall, stood a moment stretching. Behind Megan’s door all was quiet; Hank wondered if she’d fallen asleep. He pressed an ear to the wood, listening, tapped gently and said, “Meg?”
No response.
Figured. Still, he hadn’t really expected one. He knocked again, tried the knob. Again no response; the door was locked.
Sighing, he wiped a hand tiredly across his face and spoke to the door, hoping his daughter was listening. “I’m going to shower. You need anything before I do?”
Silence.
Defeated, he stared at the door, his shoulders drooping. The temptation to say “Screw it, ” and leave Megan to whatever hell she chose to inhabit was strong tonight, as hard and bright as the light from the descending sun crowding into the living room through a minuscule break in the trees outside. The impulse was momentary and would pass, it always did; it was only the thought’s guilty aftertaste that lingered.
His lips compressed; he puffed out his cheeks on a breath and let the air out slowly. Enough, for the moment, with letting his child rule both his every action and his psyche. He needed a shower, damn it, and he was going to tak
e one.
Tramping firmly on doubt by telling himself he’d only be in the shower five minutes, that even parents with infants sometimes had to leave them alone in their cribs that long, Hank stalked through the kitchen, stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower.
“You think he’s where?” Kate asked incredulously—for the second time. “Where?” With all the legal bars that abounded, including some that served alcohol to minors, why would anyone need to run an illegal bar in this day and age?
“Blind pig couple miles up the road,” Jamal repeated. “I heard him talking with Meg about it. I think they mighta been there before.”
“A blind pig?” Kate mouthed the words as though they were foreign. “A blind pig? I thought they went out with prohibition.”
Jamal shrugged. “Meanin’ no disrespect, Kate, but if you think that, you don’t know nothin’. There’s a market, people gonna sell liquor without a license, you got prohibition or not. That’s what my grandpa used to say.”
“Yes, but a blind pig?” She felt like a broken record, but disbelief was like that. “And they serve children there?”
Jamal nodded. “Kids ten, eleven years old go if they want to drink, smoke, gamble. Parents even drop ‘em off thinkin’ Maybe they just goin’ to a battle of the bands at a teen club with their friends or whatever. Adults got no need for a blind pig anymore ’less they want to hold secret meetings or gamble or something.”
“Secret meetings?” Kate stared at him. This just got worse and worse, and she felt stupider and stupider. Had she ever been a teenager? Had she ever known anything like the things her kids already knew? “What kind of secret meetings?”
“I dunno. Could be anything, I guess. Things like maybe—”
“Hate groups,” Carly interjected quietly.
Hank swiped soap from his face and reached up to switch the shower head to “massage.” He would take an extra minute, damn it, Megan or no, because he needed it.
Cool water chattered over the back of his neck, drowning tight muscles. Sighing, he let his head drop forward, forcing himself to relax. God, he’d needed this. There was nothing like washing crisis away with dirt in a cold shower—even when the reprieve was only temporary.
He enjoyed the peace as long as he dared, then shut off the water and toweled quickly, slid into a pair of running shorts and reluctantly let himself out of the bathroom. Time to rebeard the lioness in her den.
He was halfway across the kitchen when the receding sound of a car motor caught his attention. His head whipped around. He knew that motor. That was his car.
With a furious oath he glanced at the top of the refrigerator where he normally tossed his keys when he came in. Missing.
“Damn.”
Six long strides took him to Megan’s open door. Gen’s dress and the strappy sandals lay in a heap on the floor.
Megan was gone.
The boys had finished their swim and come rampaging back only moments before to burn their fingers and make s’mores; Carly had slipped over to stand beside Tai and join the discussion.
Tom between the desire to make himself some dessert and also to separate himself from the littler guys in favor of being included with the older guys—even Jamal was younger than him, after all—Grisha smashed a couple of cold marshmallows between a pair of chocolate bars and hung at the fringes of the group, listening. Ilya, on the other hand, quickly burned half a dozen marshmallows, built a handful of sticky treats and brought them with him—and generously handed half of them to Jamal, who made a distracted oh, gross face and passed them back.
For their part, Kate, Tai, Li and Jamal turned to Carly, appalled.
“Hate groups?”
Clearly Carly’s suggested reason for secrecy hadn’t occurred to any of them—including the urbanwise Jamal. Or perhaps that was particularly the urbanwise Jamal.
The corners of Carly’s mouth tucked wryly, her shoulders hunched an apology. “I’m a waitress, I hear things. I don’t know how much I can believe most of the time, but that’s something I heard in a way I couldn’t not believe it.”
Kate stared at her, not wanting to take it in. The fact that she had to sat poorly with her. “Risto might be at a blind pig run by a hate group?” Not only streetwise but worldwise, she’d thought there were few surprises any of the kids who came through her doors could throw at her. Apparently she was wrong.
Carly shook her head. “I don’t know for sure, that’s not what I meant. You were wondering, I heard about maybe one that exists like that where these...this society can print pamphlets and make plans and find recruits. It’s not like I know where it is, so it’s probably not the same one and that’s not where he is, you hear what I’m saying? I mean, if some people can run one blind pig for one purpose, other people can run another one just to...just to...make easy money.”
“I suppose,” Kate agreed, hardly comforted. Risto was in her care, her responsibility—until he went home next month. Of course, if she found he’d been sneaking off to an illegal liquor joint—of any kind—she’d personally see to it he was shipped home under the exchange program’s chaperonage by the end of this week. Risto’s staying here was not a necessity but a privilege, and one he’d managed to abuse already, at that. She believed in giving a kid a second chance and even a third, but in this instance she had to think of her own kids and the effect Risto’s activities would have—were already having—on them, too.
Especially if the police were involved.
And they would, of course, have to be. For the first time her mind turned to Hank—not as the subject of her errant daydreams, but as a cop who’d know how to handle the problem. Know who to call and how to bust the blind pig—if indeed there was one—and how to proceed with Risto afterward. Hank would probably even appreciate having the tables turned on her for a change, as in her needing his help to avert a crisis instead of vice versa. And this was one crisis she wanted to prevent now.
“Li—” She turned to her daughter. “Did you say Hank and Meg were going out to dinner tonight?”
“I thought that’s what Meg told me. I didn’t see their car leave—”
“It was parked at their house when we came back from the pond,” Grisha volunteered.
“Good,” Kate said. “Then I’ll ask Hank to help—”
She turned at the sudden rumble of a car motor nearby. Behind her the Mathisons’ dusty white Chevy four-door bounced up the back drive and out the front without slowing, Megan behind the wheel.
Chapter 8
The house was a big, dirty yellow clapboard thing with enclosed steps mounting the outside to the second floor.
Sprawling with additions appended at haphazard angles through the years, it had once been a legal combination of business and residence. Situated on a rural section of the main highway almost halfway between the affluent small town Hank and Megan called home and the slightly larger county seat, it was a perfect hide-in-plain-sight location for a teen-geared blind-pig gambling parlor. Run by a pair of twenty-something ex-cons, it was a lively place whose posted intent was to provide a venue for middle- and high-school-age garage bands to prove themselves.
In actuality, it provided what it advertised and more.
At the main-level entrance, it was strictly an unlicensed teento-twenty club that served nothing more stimulating than cherry cola. If a few ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-olds filtered through the cracks to mingle with a crowd that was primarily aged thirteen to eighteen, with a few immature twenty-year-olds thrown in, oh well. It was the bar that lay below the main level that provided much of the attraction, coupled with the poker, blackjack and roulette tables hidden in the attic above the second-floor living quarters. The first-floor club acted as a screening base for the other two.
Palms sweaty, Megan slid Hank’s car into a spot hidden behind a pair of Dumpsters located at the rear of the gourmet deli-party shop about five hundred feet from her destination. Too many law-enforcement people in the area knew Hank’s vehicle f
or her to risk parking any closer.
If he’d just remembered...
But no. She stiffened her jaw, felt the skin around her eyes tighten, her mouth harden with the movement. She was over that little parental screwup and on to better things.
Adrenaline, already pumping, spurted with renewed vigor through her veins as she alighted from the car and leaned the door shut. She breathed deep, savoring the rush. She’d been to the club plenty of times, but she’d never before stolen and driven her father’s car, never come alone. And it was his own freaking fault that she did it tonight.
First time for everything, she thought, angling the side-view mirror and bending to check her appearance by the light of the setting sun. She fiddled a few stiffened spikes of heavily gelled bangs across her forehead, then tilted her head critically to eye the eight rings and studs in her left ear, the six danglies in her right ear; flicked the ring in her right nostril before glancing quickly about Spotting no one, she slid a hand down the front of her tight-fitting bustier-style zippered leather vest to plump and adjust her sweating breasts. A humid ninety degrees and climbing was hardly the weather for leather anything, but Danny and Earl kept the air-conditioning up and the fans on, so she’d be comfortable enough inside. Also, the motorcycle-bad-girl look advertised exactly the wares she intended it to advertise and suited her mood down to the ground. Now all she needed was a dose of ma huang and a tequila shooter or two, and she’d be chilled just fine.
She slipped an arm through the thin strap of her tiny rivetstudded purse and carried the strap over her head. Then twitching her slim leather miniskirt into place and shining the metal toes of her boots on the backs of each other, she headed for the club.