by Nicole Baart
“Okay, okay. Sob story. Here it comes.”
Lucas nodded in encouragement.
“I left when Jim got drunk one night and threw a bottle of whiskey at my head. At the last second I moved and the glass smashed into the wall behind me. I found a shard in my cheek.” Her eyes went blank for a minute. “The blood ran down my jawbone and dripped on my T-shirt. I had blood on my shirt like splotches of paint.”
He didn’t dare to push her, even when she paused so long that he wondered if she’d be able to finish her story.
“You know, I could feel that bottle brush past my head.”
Lucas could tell that the memory was hard to relive, and he was tempted to give her an out, to let her know she could stop. But he had to know.
When she’d gathered herself enough to go on, Angela said, “That was the last straw for me. I packed a duffel bag that night and hitched a ride across the country.”
“You hitched? You were eighteen years old!”
She flattened him with a scathing look. “What are you, my dad?”
The barbed irony of her disguised accusation wasn’t lost on Lucas, and he shook his head mutely.
“If you want me to answer your questions, you’d better learn to shut up.”
He glared at her, but ducked his head and filled his mouth with more rice, hoping it would help him to stop adding commentary to her story.
“So I got a ride with some trucker who was on his way to Coeur d’Alene. Don’t worry,” she assured him with a patronizing shake of her head. “He was a new grandpa who said I reminded him of his daughter before she got married. The guy was a saint. Drove me as far as Idaho and then hooked me up with a friend of his who was doing a leg to L.A.”
Lucas didn’t realize his spoon was suspended in midair until a chunk of saucy brown chicken plopped on his desk.
“I didn’t want to go to Hollywood,” Angela said. “So he dropped me off near this fantastic little town north of the So Cal madness. San Luis Obispo? Ever heard of it?”
Her voice was flecked with pride and Lucas could tell that she was besotted with her newfound home. There was a certain satisfaction in her demeanor, an obvious pleasure that bordered on delight. “No,” he said, wishing he could say yes. “But it sounds great. I’d like to ask you what you do there and how you like it, but those questions don’t factor into my allotted three.”
Angela grinned. “I was going to tell you those things anyway. I’m a manager of a coffee shop on the boardwalk. And I love it.”
“Sounds like a good job.” Lucas smiled.
“It is.”
“And . . .”
“Do I like it there?”
He nodded, even though the answer was obvious.
“I love it.” Her joy was bright and sudden, so palpable in the dreary enclosure of his dark office that Lucas felt a quick and unexpected rush of happiness for her. “It’s home,” she mused. “More home than Blackhawk has ever been to me.”
Lucas nodded as if he understood.
Angela twirled her chopsticks in the remnants of her meal. “You have two more questions,” she prompted.
“I asked you in the kitchen why you were here, but now I want to know why you said what you did. Why do you want to clear your father’s name after everything he did to you?”
Angela sighed. “I knew you were going to ask that. It’s complicated, Lucas. Things change. People change. You know that. You’ve got to know that.”
I do, he thought. Better than you realize.
“I called Jim after I had been gone a couple years. I was so angry at him when I left, but in San Luis I found a good community . . . I got some counseling . . . My counselor suggested I make contact, so I did.”
“That was . . .”
“Dumb.”
“I was going to say brave.”
“Maybe it was a bit of both.”
Lucas gave up on his rice and crammed down the top of the wax-coated container. Shoving it away, he leaned his forearms on the desk and asked with some trepidation: “How did he respond?”
“He didn’t at first.” Angela looked at the bite she had poised in the air, and then dropped it as if she had suddenly lost her appetite and abandoned her meal, too. “He didn’t say anything for so long that I almost hung up. But then I heard him whisper, ‘Where are you?’ I thought at first that he wanted to know because he was going to hop on the next plane to come and kill me. But his voice didn’t sound like that.”
Lucas didn’t even need to articulate the question that was on the tip of his tongue.
“He sounded . . . desperate?” Angela searched for the right word. “I don’t know, I have never really heard Jim sound like that before.”
“So you . . .”
“Hung up.”
“Of course.”
“I called back a few days later. I didn’t tell him where I was, but I let him know that I was okay.” Angela paused, remembering. “The thing that really blew me away was that he actually seemed to care. He was concerned, in his own way.”
Lucas hadn’t expected to hear that about Jim, and it rattled the seedy bio that he was carefully constructing around his would-be cold-blooded killer. But before he could contemplate the implications, Angela continued.
“About a year after I first called him, I trusted him enough to tell him where I was.”
“You do realize that he probably had caller ID and knew where you were all along.”
Angela shrugged. “That’s why I trusted him. I’m sure he knew, but he let me call all the shots. He never phoned me or tried to contact me in any way until I invited him to.”
“So, what? You two just patched things up and had a peachy long-distance relationship?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Hardly. Sometimes I’d call and he’d be so drunk I could barely make out a word. But other times he’d be a few drinks from the edge and he’d talk to me. Really talk. He’d tell me about my mother or his time overseas . . . He had a hard life. That doesn’t excuse his actions, but it does explain them.”
Leaning back in his seat, Lucas scoffed, “I don’t want excuses or explanations. I want to know who he buried under the floor of his barn. I want to know who he killed.”
“No one,” Angela growled. Lucas was shocked by the vehemence behind her defense. “Jim didn’t kill anyone. The only person he wanted to hurt was himself. I just happened to be underfoot. My pain was peripheral.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this.”
“Don’t judge me, Lucas Hudson. You didn’t know him.”
“Angela, I—”
“You didn’t know him. Do you know that he sent me most of his paycheck every month after we started talking again? That it was one small way he could see to make amends? Do you realize that he had no one? That he was completely alone in the world except for a daughter who would only allow him a weekly, ten-minute phone call? Do you know that he called me the night he killed himself to say good-bye?” She was starting to breathe heavily, and she swiped the heels of her hands against the wetness that dampened her cheekbones. “Can you imagine what it felt like to answer the phone and hear him say that? To know that I was two thousand miles away and there was nothing I could do to stop it?”
“You could have—”
“What? Called you? I’m sure you would have been a big help.”
“But what about—”
“The body? I don’t know who she is, but I do know that Jim had nothing to do with her death. I’m going to prove it.”
And before Lucas could lift a hand to stop her, Angela surged out her chair and all but ran out his office door. He sat dumbfounded, watching the spot where she had disappeared and fighting back a deep and inexplicable longing to follow.
It wasn’t until she was long gone that he realized he had only asked her two questions.
12
MEG
Meg learned in physics class that an object in motion will remain in motion until an external force is applied
to it. Though Newton’s indisputable law was hardly rocket science, copying down those words in her spiral-bound notebook was a moment of sudden clarity for Meg, a moment of understanding that thrust the beginning of her high school experience into the spotlight, where she could probe and dissect it. After only a few moments of self-evaluation, she was convinced that her life was all the proof Newton could ever need.
When it came to Jess Langbroek, she was a girl in motion, and no external force dared to apply itself to her relationship with the respected, older, and infinitely more mature young man. It was out of character, but Meg felt like a leaf in the wake of his charming esteem, for everywhere she went, she was swept along in whatever tide of admiration carried him from day to day and week to week.
It wasn’t entirely unwelcome. Being with Jess had its share of perks, and when Meg was willing to be honest with herself, she could admit that loving him in her own platonic way held a certain undeniable joy, like waking to the soft sunshine of a new day. It was constant, expected, maybe even easy to overlook, but when she took the time to turn her face toward his light, it was comforting and warm. He adored her. Who wouldn’t want to bask in such devotion?
But none of that stopped her from yearning for Dylan.
Unbelievably, as the year went on, Meg’s feelings for Dylan didn’t lessen. Those deep-rooted, tall-standing oaks of emotion that were planted when she was nothing but a little girl only flourished in the darkness where she hid them beneath reckless inattention. She ignored them and they grew to alarming proportions. There was nothing for her to do but live with a soul divided: agonized that Jess held her hand but not her heart, and equally unsettled that the man who could own her with a touch never lifted so much as a finger in her direction.
As Jess prepped for graduation at the end of Meg’s sophomore year, she anticipated his eventual departure for college with a sort of mixed excitement. He was an indelible part of her life, and she knew that she would miss him with an ache that would not be easily relieved. But freedom was like a cool breeze on her cheek, the softest whisper of a storm to come, and she welcomed it. She knew that after the rain everything was fresh, new. What she didn’t know was that Jess’s plans were not her own.
“You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” he told her one night when they were studying together. He was sprawled out on the couch in the Painters’ living room and Meg sat on the floor beside him, surrounded by books and pillows.
“Oh, I know,” she admitted, flipping a few pages in The Scarlet Letter and deciding she’d better read, not just skim. Her attention was elsewhere, and she didn’t realize that his statement was anything more than the subtlest of teasing.
“I mean it,” Jess said, sitting up straighter. “I’m going to miss you. You’ll miss me, too, right?”
It was the hint of unease in his voice that made her look up, and when she did, he caught her face in his hands.
“Right?” he persisted.
“Of course.” Meg peeked out of the corner of her eye to make sure that her parents weren’t coming out of the kitchen. Though the “no dating until sixteen” ban had expired, Meg felt awkward flaunting her relationship in front of her mom and dad.
“Are you going to miss me or not? You were slow to answer,” Jess taunted her.
“No, I wasn’t.” She tried to pull away, but Jess wouldn’t let go. Still cradling her face, he ignored her frantic glances toward the kitchen and laid a tender kiss on her forehead. Then he brushed the tip of her nose, each cheek in turn, her mouth.
Meg sprung back as if stung. “My parents are in the other room,” she hissed. “Knock it off.”
Jess grinned, but he let go of her and slumped back against the cushions. “They love me,” he cooed. “I could take you upstairs right now and they’d let me go.”
“Whatever.” Hoping to turn his attention to other things, Meg reached out and pinched the soft spot behind his knee, twisting her fingers a bit as she did so.
“Ah-h-h!” Jess bent at the waist and pried her hand away. “You little minx. You troublemaker. You tease. I can’t believe you just did that to me.”
“I’ll do it again if I need to,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder with a haughty flick of her wrist. But she had to tuck the inside of her lip between her teeth to stop herself from smiling at him.
“What am I going to do with you?”
“You won’t have to worry about it for much longer,” she assured him. “School will be out in a few weeks and then summer will fly by. You’ll be college bound in no time.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Big school, big scholarship . . . Everyone has big plans for you.”
“Big deal,” he murmured, sounding sad.
She yielded then, and laid her head in his lap to let him know that she was still his. At least for now. If college life for Jess proved to be anything like it was for Bennett, Meg would be little more than a fond memory in no time at all. The thought both dismayed and excited her. But Jess’s leaving wasn’t something that she could contemplate while he was still in the room; she feared he’d misunderstand the spark in her eye. So Meg turned her face into the stiff fabric of his jeans and hid from her uncertain future in the fleeting consolation of the present.
Jess spread his fingers and combed them through her loose hair. She still wore it long, partly because he loved it and partly because it held a certain easy security for her. It was a curtain, but there was something soothing in the way that Jess parted it, and she sighed a little when he stopped brushing at the nape of her neck and bunched her waves in the palm of his hand. Tugging back gently, he coaxed her to look at him.
“What?” she asked, refusing to lift her head.
“What if your parents walk in?”
Meg sat up reluctantly and wrinkled her nose at him. “I was comfortable. Bad time to switch roles on me.”
“I wasn’t done talking.”
“About college?”
“About leaving you.”
Meg dropped her gaze, because she couldn’t stand to look at him when she knew their thoughts ran different tracks. That though they met, they also diverged.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey.”
She couldn’t ignore him, so she took a deep breath and tried to settle a faint smile on her lips. Hurting him was something she swore she’d never do. But she never got to see if her ruse worked or not, because her eyes never made it past his hands.
Meg loved Jess’s hands. They were strong, generous somehow, and marked with small scars and lines that bespoke a depth that seemed beyond his years. And when she lifted her eyes, those storied hands were cupped in his lap, and between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he held a ring.
Panic seized her. “Jess, I—”
“It’s not an engagement ring,” he laughed, obviously enjoying her discomfort. “It’s not even a promise ring.”
“What then?” She didn’t mean to be so harsh, so blunt, but the words were out of her mouth before she had a chance to gentle her response.
Jess didn’t seem to mind. He reached for her left hand and held it in his. Without asking permission or waiting to see how she would react, he singled out her index finger and carefully slid the ring all the way down. It didn’t get stuck once. It fit perfectly.
“There,” he said, satisfied. “You’re not really the jewelry type, but I think this suits you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Meg was momentarily distracted.
“I like it that you’re not the jewelry type,” Jess clarified.
“Good.”
“But I do think this works for you.”
Meg gazed at the ring for a few seconds, startled to find that she actually did think it was pretty. It was earthy somehow, natural, but there was a small stone that glowed at the center. She liked the muted sparkle on her hand. Trying to be discreet, she swiveled her wrist a little, letting the smooth band catch the light. But when Jess covered it with the prot
ection of his palms, she didn’t complain.
“So . . .” she started, waiting for him to fill in the blanks.
“So it’s just a little present. A thank-you of sorts.”
“Most people send a card when they want to say thank you.”
Jess shrugged. “I’m not most people, I guess. Besides, I couldn’t decide between the card with the ape and the one with the flowers.”
“Definitely the ape.”
“I thought so. But I went with the ring instead.” He offered her a shy smile and leaned in close. “It means thank you. It means you’re amazing and I’ll miss you and don’t forget about me.”
Meg thought he looked unbearably sweet with his face only inches from hers, so sweet and earnest and hopeful that she laid a breath of a kiss on the corner of his mouth. It was her own thank-you. She expected him to kiss her back, and she was prepared to say something light and funny before pulling away. But instead, Jess squeezed his eyes shut and let his forehead fall against hers.
“It means I love you,” he said. Then he wrapped his arms around her and held her so tightly her chest was pinched and aching.
Her arms went around him automatically, but Meg was numb. She buried her face in the warm crook of his neck where it didn’t matter that her cheeks were drained and white.
Jess left in the fall amid quiet fanfare and choked good-byes. He was the oldest child of the Langbroeks, whom the Painters had called neighbors for well over a decade, and the pride of his parents rested on his shoulders like polished armor. In fact, the whole neighborhood participated in the advent of his new adventure by loading his car down with baked goodies, handmade patchwork blankets, and good wishes as thick as the harvest of apples on the tree in the Langbroeks’ front yard. The evening of his send-off, Meg stood beneath the tree—so heavy-laden with ripening fruit that Mr. Langbroek had propped up sagging branches with lengths of cut two-by-fours—and thought that Jess must feel just like that. Like he was hung with a hundred burdens of hope. They were sweet but heavy, and Meg both envied and felt sorry for him in turn.
“You doing okay?” Mrs. Langbroek asked, coming up to Meg and putting a consoling arm around her shoulders.