Secondhand Sinners

by Genevieve Lynne

  “That’s good.”

  “You gotta see this, Mom. It’s awesome.”

  “Come on out and show me.”

  Jack walked out of the room wearing a pair of her old cowboy boots. “Look! I’m Woody! Howdy, howdy, howdy.”

  Emily’s heart ached at the sight of him. Jack really was her reward. What would she do without him? She’d die, without a doubt. Like Miller would die without Abby.

  “Your kid is making me so crazy I can’t think.”

  “You’re the one who decided to kidnap us. Let’s go. I got some money in my divorce. I’ll give you some of it.”

  “No. I want Hoyt’s treasure. The key has to be somewhere in this house.” Alan moved around the room, lifting the mattress to look under it and opening the drawers. “This was the only place Daniel came the night he died.”

  “Your mom could have taken the key, cleaned out the box, and spent the money on her pills. She was always as high as Hoyt was drunk.”

  Alan gripped her by the arms and pulled her to him. His tense jaw and bulging neck veins told Emily she’d crossed a line. He put his hands on both sides of her head and squeezed. “God, I wanna hit you sometimes.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I might…later. I can’t have you walking into the bank with a busted lip or a black eye, now can I?”

  “No. I guess bruised arms are okay though.”

  He let go of her and took a step back. So that’s why he hadn’t hit her yet. For some reason, he needed her to go to the bank with him. She’d certainly made him angry a few times, and she knew he’d probably hit his share of women over the years. He may not have had Hoyt’s blood, but there was a lot of Hoyt in him. She wouldn’t be surprised if his refrigerator had nothing except beer in it and the drawer of his nightstand was full of liquor and pill bottles.

  “Get the kid and let’s go.”

  She poked her head into the closet where Jack was. He was sitting in the back corner counting on his fingers again. “Whatchya doing?”

  “I don’t like him. He’s mean.”

  “I know. We have to go with him, though. He needs me to do something for him.”

  “Why can’t I stay with Miller?”

  “Because you can’t right now.”

  “What if he goes fishing without me?”

  “He won’t. I promise. Come on, buddy, let’s go.”

  “Can I still be Woody?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jack stood up and hobbled to her. She picked him up and whispered the lyrics to “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” as she carried him out of the house with Alan right behind them. She put him in the back seat of the car and told him to buckle himself in. When she closed the door and turned around, Alan was standing right behind her.

  “Jesus, Alan. You ever heard of personal space?”

  “I don’t like what your kid said.”

  “So?”

  “He thinks I’m mean.”

  “You are mean, just like Hoyt.”

  He pushed her up against the car with his body. “I am not Hoyt.”

  “Yes you are. Deal with it.”

  He squeezed her arm so hard her muscles crushed under the pressure. “I told you. You don’t call the shots. You don’t tell me what to do.”

  “Let go of me!”

  Alan’s eyes narrowed as he stared at her, exposing suspicion. Of what, she didn’t know. “What were you doing in the bathroom?” he asked.

  “What people normally do in the bathroom.”

  “You found it, didn’t you?”

  “Found what?”

  “The key.”

  “I keep telling you. There is no key.”

  “It was somewhere in your bathroom, and you knew that all along.”

  “There was no key in the bathroom.”

  He let go of her arms. “What’s in your pockets?”

  “What?”

  “Let me see what’s in your pockets.”

  Emily shoved her hand into her pockets, panicking when she felt Levi’s loose house key. “Okay. I have a key in here, but it’s not what you think.”

  “I knew it. I knew you were lying to me!”

  “No. I…I found Levi’s keys under the passenger seat of your car. I took off his house key so you couldn’t get in, and it’s here in my pocket.”

  “That’s my money, bitch.” Alan pulled her off the car and tossed her to the ground, causing her to scrape her knees and palms.

  “Mommy!” Jack cried and pounded on the car window. “Mommy!”

  “Shut him up.”

  Emily stood up. “I can’t shut him up, Alan. He’s upset, and you’re only making it worse.”

  “If you don’t shut him up, I will. I swear to God I will.”

  “He’s a kid, Alan. You can’t hurt me and think he won’t be bothered by it.”

  “And you can’t lie to me and think I won’t beat you for it.” Alan put his hand on the holster of his belt and pulled his gun out. He aimed it at Jack through the window. “If I take care of him now, I can hit you all I want.”

  Emily stepped in front of the gun with her back to the window and put her hands out like a negotiator. “Alan,” she said calmly, “I’ll get him to be quiet. I’ll show you the key in my pocket. If you want, we can go to Levi’s and I can show you it’s to his door. I’ll do whatever you ask. Please put the gun away.”

  He looked at her with one side of his lip curved up and raised the gun to her head. She held her breath, too scared to talk. Talking was only making him angrier.

  “You think I’m a rotten bastard, don’t you?” he asked.

  “No. I think you were hurt. Really bad.”

  “You know what they say, don’t you?” Emily shook her head. “They say, ‘Hurting people hurt people.’ I wanna hurt you, Emily. And I wanna hurt that damn kid of yours who won’t shut the hell up. Which one of you should I hurt?”

  “Me. Hurt me.”

  He stepped so close his body pressed to hers and held her chin with the hand that wasn’t pressing a gun to her temple. The longer he stared, the better, she thought. It put more time between him and whatever had made him snap. It took everything she had to not recoil when he pressed his lips to hers, forcing her mouth open with his. When he ran his hand that was holding the gun down her neck to caress her breast, she dared not resist. One twitch and she’d be dead.

  He pulled his lips away and whispered, “Why do you have to make me so crazy?”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered back. “I’ll get Jack to be quiet. I’ll stop telling you what to do. You can have the key. If you look at it you’d see it’s a house key.” That was the trick to getting him to calm down, she realized. Apologize for everything. She’d apologize all day long if he kept him calm.

  “I didn’t just want something from you, you know? I came to Levi’s to help you. I was even worried when I realized you were gone. I drove out to Miller’s thinking, Surely she’s not dumb enough to be out there. That’s before I knew you were fucking him in high school.” He closed his eyes tight and looked at her again. The anger seemed to be subsiding. “You shouldn’t have walked out on me. You should’ve treated me better than that.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry.”

  “Mommy!” Jack called out as he pounded the window. “Mommy!”

  Anger flared in Alan’s eyes again. “I thought you said you were going to shut him up.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “You’re just like the rest of them.” He pulled her away from the car and shoved her to the ground. Then he opened the car door, yanked Jack out, and chucked him to the ground as well. “Shut up, kid! Shut the hell up!” he yelled, though Jack probably couldn’t hear him over his own loud wails and Emily’s pleas. He aimed his gun at Jack and said it again. “Shut the hell up!” Jack was still screaming when Alan took another step closer and pulled the trigger.

  Emily screamed and rushed to Jack, who was still crying. There was no blood on him anywhere.
In fact, there wasn’t even a pop or a bang when Alan squeezed the trigger, just a click. Alan was smiling.

  “You bastard!” she yelled as she stood and lunged for him.

  Alan slapped her across the face with the side of the gun and pushed her back down. “Relax. I knew it wasn’t loaded.”

  Emily held her face where the ache was starting to pound. “He didn’t! I didn’t!”

  “Big deal. Hoyt used to do that to me all the time.”

  “So that’s what you’re doing now? Whatever Hoyt used to do? I knew you were exactly like him.” She got her purse out of the car and slammed the door shut. “Good luck finding your non-existent key.” She picked Jack up and started to hurry away.

  “I’ll tell Abby.”

  “Not if I tell her first!” she called back over her shoulder.

  “Come back here!”

  Emily ignored him. She rushed as fast as she could to the front door of her parents’ house. Once she was in the house she could lock it. She looked back. Alan was gaining on her so she tried to pick up her pace. Jack was too heavy, and she was starting to feel a little dizzy from the blow she’d taken. She looked back again, right in time to see the hard metal grip of the gun coming down toward her forehead. Then everything went black.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  Miller

  Miller kept checking his phone as he sat in the lobby waiting for Sheriff Owens to come back out and tell him he could leave. He’d already answered all their questions twice. Why couldn’t they let him go? He was going to have to pick Abby up from school soon. What the hell was he going to tell her? The truth. That was obvious. The way small-town gossip worked, if he didn’t tell her soon, she’d hear some crazy story about how Chester rescued her from the pack of wild dogs who’d been caring for her. Maybe that was better than the truth.

  What was the truth? He never knew. He’d worked for so many years to bury the lies—hiding all photos of Daniel so Abby wouldn’t see the resemblance, giving Sara everything she asked for in the divorce in exchange for not telling Abby about the adoption, keeping the Wilson’s a secret from everyone—that he was digging on sacred ground.

  “Well, Miller,” Sheriff Owens said as he came into the room. “He’s gone.”

  “Norman’s dead?”

  “Yep. Heart failure. The hospital has video of Gail walking to her car and driving out of the parking lot like nothing’s wrong. Funny thing is, we wouldn’t have even known about the bleach if Gail hadn’t left the syringe lyin’ around. Like she wanted us to find it.”

  “What happens now? Is she responsible for the death or is Levi? I mean, he was already going to die from the head trauma.”

  “He wasn’t gonna die.”

  “Yes he was. He had a stroke last night. Emily had come up here to see him one more time and say her goodbyes.”

  “I don’t know where you got your news, son, but he was stabilizing.”

  “I got my news from Alan.”

  “Alan?” Owens scoffed. “Well there’s your problem right there. Alan don’t know shit, ain’t been on duty for days.”

  “He was on duty last night. He’s the one who came out to my house this morning to pick up Emily.”

  Owens smiled. “You son of a gun. I had no idea you moved so fast.”

  Great. In one hour’s time the whole town would be talking about how he and Emily were shacking up, which would only fan the flame of the news of Abby’s adoption.

  “Alan came out to my house in his uniform and said he’d just gotten off duty.”

  “He was pullin’ your leg. He came into my office the morning after Levi put Norman into the hospital and said he needed to take a few personal days. Weren’t much goin’ on so I said okay.”

  “Was this the day Emily came back to town?”

  “What day was that?”

  “Today is Monday, so that would’ve been Saturday.”

  Owens looked up and scratched his cheek for what seemed like forever. He finally put his hand down and looked at Miller again. “Yeah. Saturday. That’s right. I remember because that was the day Sookie Hanson came by selling fish off the back’a his truck. I said to him, “Sookie, you cain’t be selling them bottom feeders outta the back’a truck like that. You gotta have a license.”

  Good God. It was like that nightmare Miller had sometimes where Abby was late getting home and he was trying to call her, but he kept pressing the wrong buttons on his phone. “Is there anything you can do about Alan pretending to be on duty when he’s really not?”

  “You want me to arrest a police officer for impersonating a police officer?”

  “I don’t know.” That did sound ridiculous. “What about Emily?”

  “Did he force her into the car with him, or did she go voluntarily?”

  “Voluntarily, I guess.”

  “Good. Cause I got a lot bigger things to deal with.”

  “Can I go, now?”

  “Sure. I guess so. If you see Gail, I’d steer clear and call me or one’a my guys.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Miller left the hospital feeling like he was in a daze.

  What did Alan want with Emily? He shouldn’t have let her go with him. Like he had a choice. He checked his phone, hoping he’d missed the text message from that receptionist. Or even better, one from Emily. Nothing. What now? The list of wrongs he was responsible for was growing bigger by the hour. He’d never told Abby she was adopted, and now it was too late to tell her the truth. He knew Alan couldn’t be trusted, and now he had Emily. He told Gail where to find the bleach, and now Norman was dead. It seemed wherever he went he screwed things up. Should he go find Emily and get her away from Alan, or should he go to the school and tell his daughter the truth before the town’s gossip chain produced some hyped-up version?

  When he got to his truck, he knew exactly where he needed to go and what he needed to do next. The choice wasn’t between Abby and Emily. It was between what he wanted and what he needed. He needed Abby. He wanted Emily. He was so tired of lying, so tired of there being something in between him and Abby. If he was going to start telling the truth now, he might as well start with his oldest lie. He loved Emily. He’d loved her since junior high, loved her even when he thought she loved Daniel, loved her when she ran away. The first thing he needed to do was tell Abby, neutralize the threat. No matter what happened, the truth would finally be out. Then he’d find Emily.

  Miller drove to the school and parked in the loading zone. He ran up to the building, slowing to an easy stride when he went inside. He walked into the office and up to the counter to wait for Shirley, the attendance secretary, who was sitting behind the counter and talking on the phone, telling someone their child was close to failing due to absences in the worst Spanglish he’d ever heard.

  She finished with: “I’m sorry seen-your-a Wauneka…that’s no bway-no. Bway-no…as in not good. Yes. Yes. Si. Graw-see-ass.”

  She put the phone on its cradle, pulled a pencil out of her gray nest of hair, and wrote something on a yellow pad in front of her. “I swear to God I don’t know why these parents think I’m such an idiot.”

  Miller was about to say, Probably because they don’t speak Spanish, but decided against it. If she didn’t already know Wauneka was a Native American name, he sure as hell didn’t have the time to explain it to her.

  When she finished writing, she put the pencil down, looked at Miller and sighed. “You here to get Abby?”

  “Yep. She’s got an appointment, and we’re late.”

  “You know what class she’s in?”

  “What period is it?”

  “Fifth is about to start.”

  “She’ll be in math I think. Want me to go get her?”

  The phone rang. Shirley picked it up and waved Miller off. He went to the math hallway, dodging teenagers as he looked in every classroom window. It wasn’t hard to find her; she was in the third room on the right, sitting on the top of her desk in the middle of the room, surrounded
by other kids who were listening to her talk with so much animation that she looked like the girl she was six years ago. She paused, looked around the crowd that was hanging on her every word and then said something that made the group laugh. Then she smiled, and his heart melted. He remembered that smile.

  “You stalking your daughter?”

  “Huh?”

  Tabby Rainwater, Abby’s math teacher, was behind him. She cocked her head in the direction of the classroom. “Your daughter?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “What in the world happened this weekend?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Abby as happy as she is today. At first I thought she was stoked over right angles, but she said something about yesterday being the best day ever.” Tabby smiled when she overemphasized the word ever to make it sound like Abby when she said it.

  “We had company.”

  “Well,” Tabby said, stepping backward into the classroom, “whoever was over yesterday, I suggest you invite them back.”

  “Yeah. I will.”

  Abby was happy because she thought he was. Within the span of a few hours, everything had gotten so messed up. He didn’t realize Abby had seen him until she waved at him. He didn’t have any time to adjust his expression to keep her from seeing the worried look that must have been on his face.

  She frowned, got up, and walked over to him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why are you here? The last time you showed up at my school like this—”

  “No. I was…” Shit. He was losing his nerve. “I had to go to the hardware store so I thought I’d drop in to see you.”

  She still wasn’t convinced. He could tell by the way her eyes darted as she tried to read his face. “Where’s Emily?”

  “She uh…” The last time he showed up at her school unannounced was to bring her home to say goodbye to Sara. She and Sara stood there staring at each other. They didn’t hug, didn’t cry, didn’t even speak except to say “goodbye.” After Sara left, Abby did a load of laundry and then went through the house taking down all evidence of the woman who had left her, leaving only the one picture in his room. Like an idiot, he’d thought she was okay. It took two years and a diagnosis of depression to realize she wasn’t.