All the Bridges Burning (Davis Groves Book 1)

by Neliza Drew

  At first Jackie had appreciated my watching her back, but then she’d felt smothered. I hadn’t seen it for a long time. Because I’d been suspicious of Eric when they’d met, I’d missed the signs that I was doing the same thing.

  When I saw it, I had to walk away. I had to let her grow up. I had to let her make her own mistakes.

  Lane had been a casualty. I thought I was helping her grow up. But I’d walked away too soon. And I’d left her with none of the skills Nik and I had hard-won.

  “Dammit, Lane. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I collected my purse and snuck out the front door. From there, I stared out into the darkness and remembered Mabel, the senile neighbor who’d lived near Charley since we’d bought the place. She had an old car. Not only did it seem like a safety hazard for Mabel to have a car — and by extension, my stealing it would be a matter of public safety — but I was pretty sure it was old enough for my limited hot-wiring skills to apply.

  I remembered Tom as I walked down the street.

  He answered, equal parts groggy and grumpy.

  “I got sidetracked.” I filled him in on my reading.

  A light came on. I decided that if my gut said stealing the car was the best idea, it probably wasn’t, given the way yesterday had gone. Instead, I walked up the driveway with renewed purpose.

  “A lot of teenagers seem to die around here of overdoses and car accidents. Like way more percentage-wise than any of the schools in South Florida. But they don’t make the news, just the obits.”

  I knocked on Mabel’s door and waited.

  He yawned. “Most small towns have their fair share of teens drinking and driving, doing drugs, driving dangerously.”

  “Yeah, the usual jackassery. The key phrase there, Tom, is ‘fair share.’” I knocked again and listened for the sound of Mabel shuffling toward the door. “In the past year, there have been five ODs and seven car crashes involving dead kids just at Lane’s school. There were another three overdoses, two more car accidents and a terminal illness at the main high school on this end of the county. At the other end of the county, they had a car accident that killed three and a suicide, not to mention six ODs. That’s a lot considering these schools only have about five-six hundred students, tops.”

  “Bored, small-town kids do a lot of drugs, Davis.”

  Mabel flung open the door and stared at me. “Hi.”

  I stuck out my hand. “Miss Mabel? Can I borrow your car?”

  “Sure thing, Nik.” She beamed at me. “Just get it back to me by Monday. I have a doctor’s appointment.” Nik? Really? We looked a lot alike if you discounted my being a foot taller, but I was inclined to believe that part would be memorable.

  “Stealing an old woman’s car, Davis?”

  “I have a hunch I need to check out in Wilmington. And I don’t know where the hell mine went. Besides, I’m not stealing.”

  “Uh huh.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  Chapter twenty-two

  My hunch was born out of memory and I wasn’t sure it could be trusted. I had little evidence to prove the things I remembered happening had actually taken place. We’d moved too often to leave a permanent mark anywhere and it had left me feeling shifty, as though at any moment I might drift away and become nothingness. Even in Florida where I had a few friends, where I owned property, where I’d assembled a resume based on actual jobs in a semblance of a career, I knew it was far too easy to slip into the night and be forgotten.

  Perhaps that’s why I felt at home in Florida. We’d lived the longest in North Carolina of any of the places we’d alighted after leaving California, but the Carolinas — even in the tourist areas — held a sense of heritage. People were plentiful who’d been rooted there for generations, sometimes even next door to each other.

  Florida, especially south of the St. Lucie-Palm Beach county border, was as transient as my family. People came and went with the seasons, the tides, the rental agreements, the hurricanes and the semesters. The idea of “locals” existed on a continuum, with the few people actually born in the area on one end and the person with the longest residency on the other end.

  For its quirks and its seedy underbelly and its shiny impermanence, I felt at home in Florida. So many bad things had happened in North Carolina (and Kentucky and Texas and Montana and a dozen other states), it was a wonder I hadn’t ended up in Key West drinking myself stupid.

  Despite Tom’s insistence that bad memories could grow and change with time and fear and pain, I knew any shifting mine had done was from my attempts to erase them, to diminish them, to downplay and ignore.

  Four cups of coffee and three hours later, I pulled into the lot of my old campus library. It felt familiar and familiarity stirred memory.

  Tom called me as I parked.

  “I need your authorization to use my tech guru.”

  “You mean your hacker?”

  “You lack subtlety, Davis.”

  “Yeah. Do what you have to do. Just send me the invoice when you’re done.”

  “I won’t.”

  He didn’t hang up, like he knew I had other things on my mind.

  I stared at the building I’d once felt most at home in. The place I’d gone when Jackie and Eric’s drama had become too much, when the static in my head was too loud to concentrate anywhere else. When I’d needed to feel the oppressive silence of the research stacks or the chatty nonchalance of the café. When I’d needed to feel as close to normal as I could get.

  “Nik wanted us to pretend. She wanted us to strive, I should say, to be like everyone else. She made me read everything she could find on how families were supposed to act, on the kinds of ‘problems’ normal people had. She must’ve made me read stacks of books on kids upset by divorce or a lost dog or regular bullies.” I thought about the Judy Blumes and Cynthia Voigts. “It sounds pretentious to say it now — and I used to get looks and taunts then — but I preferred the stuff with meat: The Odyssey, Beowulf, Hamlet, Antigone, Lysistrata.”

  “Your sister did what she thought was best.”

  “I know.” Nik’s insistence that I do homework and read and study no matter what was the thing that had gotten me into college in the first place. It was the thing that allowed me to juggle stripping and calculus. But it separated me from both worlds. It left me alone with all the things I couldn’t tell Nik. “What if this is all our fault?”

  “It’s not.”

  I hung up before he could argue further.

  • • • • •

  The local newspapers were stored in piles until converted to microfilm. What I was looking for was about five years old, which meant it had already been microfilmed and stored in the back of a cabinet to be forgotten. There were plans to digitize the microfilm, but it hadn’t been done. On the back of my notes, I had written a few vague dates I’d wanted to check out. Not having kept a journal or possessing a meticulously ordered brain like Nik, I had to rely on seasonal clues like weather, holidays and midterms.

  Around the time the coffee wore off, I found myself staring at a headline under a date two days off from the one I’d written on my paper: Local Woman Found Murdered. A waitress at a bar a mile from our dorm had been found in the alley near her car. She’d been beaten and possibly raped, the contents of her purse dumped, but police weren’t saying anything else.

  Two days later, police confirmed that the woman had been sexually assaulted and her wallet and keys were found beside her. The paper ran a yearbook-style photo of the young woman. My memory told me she looked familiar because she’d often waited on Jackie and me at the bar. I’d forgotten the murder because I’d been mostly hiding in my dorm desperately studying physics at the time.

  I stared at my list of dates. I felt like I had a broken TV in my head that kept playing snippets of shows, flipping channels, and occasionally going to static. The dates triggered little bits of my past and I felt guilty I hadn’t noticed sooner.

  In my memory, Jackie and Eric had started a
ridiculous fight that had gotten out of control, more verbal than physical, and the fight had escalated to Jackie telling Eric she never wanted to see him again.

  The following day, I’d had a huge philosophy exam.

  Around that time, a cocktail waitress had died.

  My gut told me it was more than coincidence, but the police had never suspected Eric. They had no reason to. He was only a jerk in my head. The victim’s boyfriend was arrested two days later.

  I followed the story through the rolls of microfilm. In the photos, she looked cheery and innocent. I knew too well how she’d felt at the end and that feeling left an ache in my chest.

  I followed the trial of the boyfriend to his acquittal and the photos of sobbing parents and the relieved defendant. Not guilty wasn’t the same as innocent.

  I looked him up on the library computer and found he’d committed suicide a year after the trial. Comments in forums still blamed him for her death and called the jury morons.

  I wondered.

  Chapter twenty-three

  By the time I left, the sun still hung high overhead but had already started its descent. Tom had tried to call three times. I finally answered as I stood on the steps in the relative warmth, a fistful of copies in my purse. My stomach growled and my eyes felt blurry and dry.

  “Where are you?”

  “Hi, Tom. How’s it going?” Great. I sounded like Nik bitching about phone pleasantries.

  “Yeah, where?”

  “Wilmington, why?”

  “Perfect. You’re right near Charley’s car. It’s in an impound lot on the edge of town.”

  “Why is Charley’s car impounded in Wilmington?” As far as I knew, she’d never even been here.

  “A group of teenagers were driving it. Hit a deer. Turned out to be a bunch of runaways from all over three states. The youngest claimed not to speak English. Got an interpreter and she tried to hang herself with her sheets. She’s still in the hospital. The other four? Two went to foster care, one went to a youth camp. One’s back home with her parents.”

  “Runaways?”

  “One from Charleston, one from Danville in southern Virginia, another just outside Raleigh, a town outside Charlotte, and no one knows where the other one came from. She just says she doesn’t want to go back. Not sure if that means with the other girls, to her home, or to Mexico.”

  “You assume she’s Mexican?”

  “Translator assumed it, based on word choice, accent.”

  “Huh.”

  “I talked to some buddies. Looks like they may have been prostitutes. The oldest was sixteen, acted like the leader until they got her alone. Then she turned innocent.”

  I took a deep breath. “Yeah, I know that game.”

  “Not at that age, though.” He sounded hopeful even though he knew damn well what I’d been up to in Miami a few years back.

  I let go of a sigh. “Younger.”

  “You ever have a pimp?” His voice sagged on the line.

  “No. Everything I did? That was on me. My idea. My choice. No one owns me.”

  He didn’t answer for a long time. “You think that’s what these girls were up to?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He fell silent again.

  “Tom, I’ve gone a lot of years without telling anyone these things.”

  “Davis, you can tell me anything. If I haven’t heard it already, I’ve heard pretty close.”

  “Keeping things inside is a hard habit to break, even if it’s done more harm than good.”

  I hung up and steered Mabel’s car to the warehouse edge of town, thankful I’d had the foresight to get power-of-attorney papers out of Dick and that I hadn’t left my purse behind when I’d run from Charley’s.

  I pulled up in front of Port City Transport and Towing with a cup of Port City Java and my forgeries already in hand.

  Perhaps the skinniest Southerner I’d ever met held out a grease-stained hand to shake and hitched his green work pants as he led me to the lot. “It’s not a bad Impala. You looking to sell it? I know a few guys who could flip it if you don’t need it anymore.”

  I still hadn’t even seen it. “What gave you that idea?”

  He shrugged. “Been here almost a month.”

  “Really?”

  He stopped in front of a blue mid-90s Impala. “I can get you maybe five hundred for it.”

  I suspected it was worth a little more, but couldn’t see how. The driver’s side headlight had been smashed in, the windshield cracked, and the hood had a deer-shaped dent running diagonally from the headlight to the spider-webbed glass. “So, it still runs?”

  He looked sheepish. “Yeah.”

  “Eight hundred and it’s yours. I just need to get some stuff out of it.”

  “Like what?” He looked nervous.

  “Paperwork.”

  “Oh.” He smiled like he’d gotten the better deal. “I’ll go write it up.”

  I watched him leave and pulled my sleeve down over my hand to open the car door. Any car had plenty of hiding spots and over the years Nik and I had tried most of them. The slot in the door, center console, and glove box were obvious and I started with those. By the time the grease monkey had returned, I’d found about two dozen motel receipts from up and down the coast, including several from Myrtle Beach. I shoved them all in my purse to sort later. Shoved under the seats, I found several used condoms, food wrappers, a couple of half-empty soda bottles and a wad of gum.

  The trunk yielded a bag of spandex outfits suitable for clubbing, a bag of randomly-sized pills and a couple bags of brownish-white powder.

  The grease monkey’s eyes went straight to the bag before he recovered. “Got everything, ma’am?”

  “The police never checked out this car?”

  He shook his head. “Car accident. Seemed pretty straightforward.”

  I wondered about that, given the occupants. “But you went through it.”

  He shifted from one foot to the other. “Not at first, ma’am. It’s just, it didn’t look like nobody was coming back for it.”

  “Tell me what you want out of here?” I hefted the bag slightly.

  He rubbed his beard. “Well, there was some merchandise and I was thinking I could unload.”

  “That why you wanted to buy the car?”

  He shrugged.

  I set the bag on the trunk, heard the click of the cheap clasp on the metal. I unzipped it and tossed him the drugs. “You need the hoochie clothes, too?”

  He smirked. “I’m good.”

  I signed the papers and threw the bag of clothes in Mabel’s trunk on the off chance one of the girls had stuffed something in a pocket.

  Chapter twenty-four

  My phone rang again as I pulled up in front of a pizza joint. Tom. I answered and yawned. “What now?”

  “You asked me to dig.”

  “I did.”

  “You sure you want to know what I found?”

  I stared at the neon pizza slice in the window. “Sure.”

  “Your roommate died in a car accident two days after your friend, Jackie, was hit by a car in a parking lot. Your apartment building burned to nothing but a cement shell the night your roommate, Ryan Winston, died.”

  I said nothing. Listed out like that, it sounded like a bad Lifetime movie. It didn’t sound real.

  “You were in the hospital.”

  “Ryan’s boyfriend found me in the snow in the woods next to the parking lot. He and a girl from his anthropology class. They were laughing. And then they weren’t.”

  “You nearly died.”

  “Maybe I was supposed to.”

  “Don’t give me that. What the hell happened?”

  “I failed. I told Jackie I’d keep her safe. I promised. I lied.”

  “You thought you could keep a car from hitting her?”

  “I thought I could keep the guy driving it from hurting her. I was wrong.”

  “Davis, it says you were treated for multiple guns
hot wounds.”

  I swallowed hard. “That came after the car.”

  “The car that hit you two? It belonged to Eric Wright. He reported it stolen that morning from in front of his apartment in Wilmington. Police found it that night in a strip mall lot ten miles outside Boone. Inside wiped clean. Your blood, your friend’s blood still in the grill. Your hair caught in the broken glass of the windshield. Bits of her skin were still stuck to the undercarriage. Case is still open.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself, but the cold that had seeped into my bones that night wouldn’t subside.

  “Someone tried to kill you, Davis. Why the hell didn’t you ever tell me this?”

  “It was my fault.”

  “What?”

  “I left her. Her mother loved Eric. She hated me. Even knowing none of my past, she called me a whore. But that’s not why I left.”

  “You think he did it?”

  “Not directly.” His wasn’t the voice I’d heard that night.

  “The car that hit your roommate…?”

  “Ryan,” I said. “He loved me, you know. Not romantically, but…”

  “You didn’t kill him.”

  “But I didn’t stop it either.”

  “You were in a fucking coma, Davis. Someone stole a car a town over, bumped him, not even hard. The roads were icy.”

  “He was driving my car, Tom. The one with the balding tires I didn’t have the money to replace. He was coming to see me. I might as well have killed him myself.”

  “Davis!”

  “No, Tom. You don’t understand.” My breath caught in my chest. I felt like I’d been punched by a giant. I’d known what he’d find, but I hadn’t been prepared to relive how I’d felt.

  His voice soothing, he asked, “What don’t I understand?”

  I sucked up snot and tears, dug my fingernails into the cut on my palm and let the blood flow again. “He was there. When I was raped.”

  “Davis, what—?”

  “It took me a long time to say that word. Until then, it never felt like it fit.”

  “Davis—”

  “No, let me say this. I thought it was over. Stupid, I know. It just sounds silly, crazy maybe. But growing up, if I wasn’t screwing someone for money, I was doing it to prove I was in control or I was doing it because someone was holding me down. It all blurred together at some point into just the way things were. And I don’t mean to say that for pity. I never wanted any and I still don’t. It was. Some kids get cancer. Some kids go deaf, get paralyzed. Where I came from, kids talked about it like it just happened. Just life. And I never saw myself as a victim. Not really. I made my choices. Even when all the options sucked.