Bonfires

by Amy Lane

  The main house on the Olson estate was nearly half a city block long, but because it was set on a square half mile of property, it looked big but not monstrous.

  At least until Aaron powered the SUV unit up over the long concrete driveway to the top of what had once been a small hill.

  “The pool, the pool house, the garage—”

  “Four-car garage,” Warren muttered.

  “The yard—”

  “How far?” Gracie asked. The house itself had a decent-size yard, fenced in with a wrought-iron masterpiece about four feet high. But beyond that, the property itself stretched back a few acres, and as Aaron pulled up to the guest property on the side of the house and scanned that stretch, he saw the smoke of a recently used fire pit.

  “Start with the fire pit,” he said grimly. “It’s part of the grounds, it counts—”

  “And it’s a stunning place to try to get rid of evidence,” Gracie conceded. “Okay, guys, suit up—Aaron, here’s your gear in case it goes from search to crime scene.” She handed him a small sealed packet of booties and gloves, as well as an evidence bag and forceps for the small stuff.

  “Wait until after I serve the warrant,” Aaron said dryly, pocketing the gear anyway. His stomach was buzzing big-time.

  He strode up to the door, Warren at his back, while Gracie continued to the garage, which stretched out on the other side of the house. She’d wait until his signal, but the fact was, the warrant didn’t require notification or anybody on the property. This was a courtesy—like Eamon said, CYA.

  He hit the doorbell hard, unsurprised when a mussed housekeeper answered the door.

  “May we speak to the lady of the house?” he asked politely, and the woman—fortyish, with a lined and stoic face—darted her eyes to the upstairs and back.

  “She’s not well at the moment,” she said quietly. “What can I do for you?”

  Aaron pulled out the copy of the warrant Whitney would need to give to her lawyer. “Could you give this to Mrs. Olson and tell her we’re instituting a search of her grounds, her garage, and all of the outbuildings on her premises? We’ll need the garage door opened, and if that doesn’t happen within a reasonable time, we’ll have to force it open, and I can’t promise it will be pretty. According to that warrant, if we find probable cause in any of the outside part, we can turn our focus to the inside part, so she needs to know that too.”

  God, let it be outside, he thought from a strictly pragmatic point of view. He’d hate to be in charge of searching this place—the odds of missing something small in a venue this large were staggering.

  The woman took the paper with an almost rabbit-like movement, as though she was used to dodging angry words a lot, and then she nodded at Aaron in fear. “I’ll give this to her,” she said. “But she won’t be happy.”

  At that moment, Aaron caught a rustling from the corner of his vision, and he looked up in time to see the edge of a filmy white nightgown disappear from his vision.

  “Mrs. Olson?” he called, taking a step inside. “Mrs. Olson? We’re searching your property right now, and that of your neighbors. There’s a possibility of a dangerous fugitive on the grounds or about this area, if I might have a moment of your—”

  “Fuck off!” Whitney shrilled, and Aaron shook his head.

  “Well, then,” he muttered. “I guess she’ll call her lawyer.”

  He nodded at the poor housekeeper, who was going to have a very unhappy morning, and walked out, closing the door behind him. He strode toward Gracie, and they crossed in front of the wide expanse of the garage. They were in the middle of the second door when Aaron heard the unmistakable sound of a performance engine revving hard from a cold start—and it was coming from behind the door they were passing. He grabbed Gracie’s arm instinctively and hauled at her hard, both of them clearing the edge of the second door as it exploded out behind them. Aaron kept running, pulling Gracie to her feet when she would have stumbled, and he turned in time to see Julia Olson, her face contorted in fear, as she backed that gigantic vehicle down the hill. She swung the car around at the bottom of the hill, her touch on the wheel so inexpert that she almost dumped it over between the angle and the speed.

  She made the spin, though, and took off, leaving Aaron and Gracie with their chests pumping in and out, both of them shaking with the adrenaline bleed.

  “Well,” Aaron said, looking at the remains of the fractured door in the driveway, “at least we don’t have to ask them to let us in.”

  “Uh, Aaron?” Gracie asked, eyes big. “Did that look like a car you’d give a teenager?”

  “Nope,” he muttered, taking a few steps toward the inside of the garage. Sure enough, a bright blue Kia Sportage sat, pristine, at the far end. “In fact, that looked like the kind of car an adult would tell her kid to drive off the premises to hide evidence.”

  He pulled out his radio. “Sheriff Mills, this is Deputy George, can you read me?”

  “What do you got, Deputy?”

  “I’ve got Julia Olson taking off in her mother’s car, so freaked out she took the garage door with her.”

  “Well, that was unexpected.”

  “You are telling me.”

  “I think that might get us a probable cause. You sit tight and we’ll send B group in with you for the premises search, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “Yessir. You may want to put out an APB across the county for a black Lincoln Navigator with the following plates—”

  “You got the plates?”

  “Yessir, I did.”

  “I’m having my wife bake you some more cookies, Deputy, because that was damned quick thinking.”

  Aaron met amused eyes with Gracie as she made gagging motions with her index finger. “That would be much appreciated, Sheriff Mills. Thank you kindly.”

  He rang off and shook his head. “Are we ready to start the garage now?”

  Gracie made gagging motions again. “I can’t believe you get excited when that man rewards you with cookies.”

  Aaron laughed and figured he was safe with Gracie, mother of two and raging liberal. “I came out to him and he still wants me to have his job,” he said mildly. “I’ll even take home her coffee cake.”

  Gracie looked amused. “Yeah, and let Larx put it down the garbage disposal,” she snorted.

  Oh. “You know about Larx?”

  Gracie shrugged. “Dropped my kid off at the dance last night and saw you two talking,” she said with a little smile. “I’m a trained observer, Deputy, but I wasn’t going to say anything if you weren’t.”

  Aaron thought about Larx, warm and sleepy when he’d left the bed that morning, and felt an unexpected surge of satisfaction at that. People saw them and thought they belonged together. Not “go figure,” not “stranger things.”

  “Well, one of us has a scary job where coming out could shake people up,” he said meaningfully.

  “Yeah, and the other one of you is in law enforcement.”

  He laughed then and had a thought. “Here, let me get in there and turn on the light for you, and we’ll start searching. But first I need to call Larx.”

  Home Fires Burning

  SO MUCH for sleeping in.

  The call from Aaron came at seven thirty in the morning—it wasn’t the first call he’d gotten, although it was the one guaranteed to wake him out of that “screening the calls” fugue state that grown-ups could enter when they didn’t want to get up.

  “You’re okay, right? What happened?”

  “Fine,” Aaron said, his voice so deliberately laid-back Larx had to wonder what happened. “I was just wondering—the Olson girl took off in her mother’s car just as we got here. Do you have any idea where the kids might park—any lovers’ lanes I haven’t heard of, any haunts where a kid who’s got no friends at the moment would chill out and hide?”

  Larx sat up in bed and sucked in a breath. His ass was a little sore—muscles a little stretched, a little used, all points south a bit tender.
He wriggled as he sat, and the tenderness became sensitivity, and whee! Just like that he was ready to go again.

  At forty-seven. Go figure.

  He had to work at focusing on what Aaron had asked him about. “Uh, there’s a pullout off Olson Road. It’s sort of overgrown—used to be a forestry service track, but it’s what we used to get all the chairs and shit to the bonfire, because you can pull a car closer and come in from the north side instead of the east side where the footpath is.”

  Aaron’s rough chuckle told Larx he’d said something important. “You are sheer genius,” he told Larx. “I hadn’t thought of that one. It’s like you can read my mind.”

  “Can you read mine?” Larx asked lasciviously, and this time Aaron’s laugh grew positively filthy.

  “We’ll play that game after the kids are asleep,” he promised. “And I’ve got to go so we can be done and I can get home to you.”

  “Okay,” Larx yawned. “Love you—be careful.” And just like that, he was wide-awake. “Oh my God.”

  “I already said it,” Aaron told him. “So you can’t freak out. Love you too. Back later.”

  The click on the other end of the phone left Larx floundering, lost in what they’d both said, all of it, while Larx’s body still tingled from their lovemaking the night before.

  Oh God. He’d said it. He meant it. How could he possibly have meant it? It had been—Forever. Weeks. Months. They’d known each other for years.

  He meant it. There was no time before Aaron. If he didn’t have two beautiful daughters, he wouldn’t believe any such time existed.

  An odd feeling, this—not something he’d felt with Alicia. Not something he’d felt with any lover. When he’d been a kid fucking anything that moved, he’d thought love didn’t happen. Love was too painful. What human being would actually let themselves in for that sort of loss? And then he’d held Olivia, and Christiana, and he’d known love was real, it was powerful, and the creatures we bestowed it upon were fragile and human.

  With Alicia he’d experienced contentment, but he’d thought that was all a couple would have—you couldn’t choose to love another adult human being the way he’d been compelled to love his two tiny daughters.

  But you could. He did. He chose to let this feeling in, chose to let Aaron take over his heart just like Larx had let him into his body.

  Those fucking-around years—the lube-and-condom years, the “what was this person’s name again?” years—hadn’t prepared him for the night before.

  Hadn’t prepared him for this moment right now.

  His name was Aaron.

  OF COURSE even epiphanies about love had to yield to taking a shower and answering the slew of calls coming through.

  And then returning more.

  Yoshi called at ten while Larx was outside, talking on the phone and finishing the final bits of stripping the garden. The weather had gotten chilly since two weeks earlier, and Larx was in jeans and a sweatshirt, wearing gloves to keep his cold fingers from stinging as he pulled plants from the ground.

  “Yes, I’m freaking out,” Larx said. “Yes, it’s going to be a clusterfuck. Yes, Heather Perkins is a complete twat. Is there anything we haven’t covered here, Yosh?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting the burn pile ready. I’m taking the kids to the hospital in half an hour, and after visiting, we’re coming back to roast hot dogs and marshmallows. Because I need to clear my yard, dammit!”

  “Fine. I’ll be there with soy dogs.”

  “That’s blasphemous.”

  “Soy dogs, Larx, soy dogs. Something not awful for you!”

  “That will give me gas when I’ve finally got someone willing to sleep with me? Thanks a lot, Yosh. I thought you were my friend.”

  “Wait—go back to that other part again?”

  “I don’t kiss and tell.”

  “But do you fuck and write it in an exposé?”

  Larx laughed. “Not that either. But it’s real, Yosh. I hope it is. I’m a little bit, uh… you know.”

  “Gone.”

  “Think so.”

  “I’ll tell Tane. He keeps telling me your aura was incomplete—he’ll be happy.”

  Larx didn’t want to talk about Tane, thin and intense and taciturn—he never could figure out how cheerful, sarcastic Yoshi could live day in and day out with Tane Pavelle, but he figured as long as Yoshi stayed cheerful and sarcastic, it had to be all good, right?

  “I’m happy he’s happy,” Larx said diplomatically. “Why are you coming here with a meat-like abomination?”

  “Because,” Yoshi said, sounding like an irritated child. “Because I need you to not do anything stupid tomorrow, and I’m hoping by coming and participating in your weird Samhain ritual bonfire, you’ll listen to me when I talk.”

  “I always listen to you when you talk,” Larx said, confused. True, Yoshi couldn’t ground Larx the way Aaron—unexpectedly—could, but Larx would have gotten fired at least three times if he hadn’t listened to Yoshi’s commonsense advice.

  “Sure, but you don’t always do what I say, and we need that to happen this time out.”

  Larx sighed. “I was hoping it would just be because you wanted my company and we were friends,” he said, feeling melancholy and betrayed.

  “We are friends. I love your company. More specifically, I would like to keep working with you for the next twenty to thirty years.”

  “In thirty years I’ll be too old to have a prostate. Let’s settle for twenty-five.” But in thirty years, if they took good care of each other, maybe he and Aaron would still be around. That was heartening.

  “Only if you never mention your prostate again for the next twenty-five years.”

  “Deal.”

  “I’ll be there at three. I’ll bring Nancy with me—”

  “Not Tane?” Larx was trying to be a good friend.

  “This whole discussion makes Tane crazy. He can’t believe it’s even coming up, and he gets weird and his art gets weird and we start having goat people with swords coming out of the kiln. Do you know there’s a glaze that perfectly simulates old dripping blood?”

  “Gnarly.”

  “I’m too young to even know what that means.”

  “God, fetus, get off the phone so I can talk to Coach Jones, who is calling me right now.”

  “Fine, geezer. Later.”

  Larx switched over. “Hey, Andy. How’s the wife?”

  “She says if I get fired over this, she’s going to make me sleep on the couch.”

  Oh God. “I’m sorry—”

  “I told her if she kicks me out to the couch, I’m getting a divorce, period, because I didn’t sign on to blame kids for getting stabbed in the stomach.”

  “Oh, damn. Thanks, Andy—”

  “She said I was really sexy and commanding when I was standing up for my principles. We had the best sex of my life. I think we made a baby.”

  “And that was too much information.”

  “I blame you. I’ll see you tomorrow, Larx. I’ll be there early for the meeting, but you’d better not get me fucking fired. I’m gonna have a kid to support.”

  Larx laughed in bemusement and took the next call. This one was from MacDonald’s father, who thought Isaiah should have died and gone to hell.

  Larx was done laughing by the time that conversation finished. And he was more determined than ever to listen to Yoshi—but not to yield to the idea that they were defenseless punching bags of hysterical parents either.

  Dammit, the world had changed. This town needed to change with it.

  ISAIAH WAS pale, flushed and feverish, when they arrived. Larx kicked Christi and Kirby out after a quick hello, and he sat quietly as Kellan told him about their homecoming pity party and about how quiet it was at Larx’s place.

  “No Mom yelling?” Isaiah asked softly.

  Kellan shook his head. “No Dad….” The boys looked at each other meaningfully, and Larx knew about all those things in Ke
llan’s life that no one could prove but that were happening anyway.

  “Thanks, Larx,” Isaiah said, eyes never leaving Kellan’s. “It’s good he’s safe.”

  “We’re happy to have him,” Larx said sincerely. “It was getting too quiet with just Christi and me.”

  “And Deputy George,” Kellan said slyly.

  Larx had to smile. “And Deputy George,” he conceded. “But that’s new.”

  “Wait. What’d I miss?”

  Larx felt his face heat, unable to do a damned thing about it.

  “Larx is gay,” Kellan said, lowering his voice and looking both ways like they were sitting in the quad. “And so is Kirby’s dad. They’re together.”

  The look Isaiah gave him was so full of shining worship that Larx felt a little ill. He wasn’t out. He wasn’t proud. The only reason he and Aaron hadn’t lived and died in Colton without ever knowing they were meant for each other was that Aaron—who’d had no active physical knowledge of his sexuality—had been braver than Larx about his heart.

  “You’re dating?” he breathed.

  Larx nodded. “Something like that.” They’d tried. Aaron had bought him hot dogs at a football game. Larx had made him coffee in the morning. “It’s pretty new.”

  Isaiah’s happy glow faded a bit. “So… you know. Not coming out? Not—”

  “When we’re ready,” Larx said. “Just like you two. I’ve already done the dramatic coming out, Isaiah. I almost lost my girls. I promised them I’d never let who I was hurt them again. That’s why I’m so glad for the two of you. You have a freedom now—a strength—that I never had.”

  “But what about…?” Isaiah bit his lip.

  “The board meeting,” Kellan said, looking at Larx worriedly. “They’re not going to make it… you know. Illegal to be gay, are they?”

  Larx shook his head. “Guys, you did nothing wrong. And me and as many teachers as I can drag in by the hair are going to show up to tell them that.” He grimaced. “Isaiah, what happened to you was awful and scary. People always want to find a reason—a thing they can point to and say, ‘This awful and scary thing will never happen to me!’ So boom! Guess what?”