Cricket Cove

by Haddix, T. L.

  As much as she hated to do it, she didn’t have a choice. She had to contact Rick. She pulled over at a fast-food restaurant a short distance from the library and used the pay phone to call his house. His wife, Ellen, answered on the second ring.

  “Hey, it’s Amelia. I’m sorry to bother you so late but I need to talk to Rick about something. Is he there?”

  “Sure. Are you okay?”

  Her laugh held no humor. “I have a little problem that I need his help with, but yeah, I guess I’m okay.”

  When he came to the phone, she explained the situation to him as succinctly as she could. “I’ve put off telling you, but I can’t ignore him anymore. What do I do?”

  Rick cursed under his breath but she still heard him. “Where are you now?”

  “At Micky D’s, getting ready to head home.”

  “Stop here first. I’ll take a report and file it in the morning. Bring that box with you.”

  “I hate to bother you with it.”

  “Hush, Pip. See you in a few minutes.”

  She let a few tears fall after she got back in her car. He hadn’t once suggested she was overreacting, and Amelia was grateful.

  It was only a few miles up the road to their house, and once she was there, Ellen got her a big mug of hot coffee.

  “I’ll leave the two of you alone while you discuss this,” she offered.

  “I don’t mind if you stay,” Amelia told her.

  For the next hour, they sat at the kitchen table as she went through all the pranks with Rick, referring to her day planner for the exact dates and what had been involved.

  “I kept the rocks, though they looked like the same gravel that’s in my driveway. He’s been very careful until now. I’m frankly shocked he let himself be seen tonight.”

  Rick was disturbed by what she was telling him, no doubt about it. “I wish you’d told me about this sooner, kiddo. I understand why you didn’t,” he said, holding his hand up. “And as to tonight, unless there are fingerprints on this box, it’s still a ‘he-said, she-said’ situation. The ladies from the library probably didn’t get a good enough look at him to give any details. The letter is pretty ambiguous. It could mean anything. I’m sorry, Pip.”

  Amelia wrapped her hands around her mug and sat back, absorbing the warmth as much as she could. “I figured as much, to tell the truth. And I know there isn’t much you can do, but it was time to let someone know what’s going on.”

  “I’m worried about what he’s going to do next,” Ellen said. She was seated beside Rick, who was rubbing her shoulders. Though Amelia hadn’t put them together as a couple, their energies hummed along very harmoniously. She was glad, as Rick was one of her favorite cousins, and he’d gone through a rough time romantically a few years ago.

  “So am I. You’re going to have to tell your folks,” Rick said. “You know that.”

  “I do. Daddy’s going to lose his mind when he hears about this.” Just the thought of having to admit what all had been going on broke her heart. “I know I’m not the one responsible for this, but I still feel guilty.”

  “That’s his goal. That’s what he wants you to feel. Guilt, fear, suspicion. He’s counting on you not doing anything. No offense to Lori, but she’s let him get away with all kinds of shit for years. He probably sees you as a challenge and as a threat. He’s killing two birds with one stone. He thinks he can get you to give up and go away, and he gets to feed his ego at the same time. I don’t think I need to remind you just how dangerous and out of hand these things can get, and how quickly, do I?” he asked.

  Amelia thought about their Aunt Kathy. Sarah and Jack’s older sister had been in an abusive marriage. No one had realized just how bad it was until she’d tried to leave him and he’d turned lethal. Kathy had survived the attack, but her children had not.

  “No, you don’t need to remind me. Why do you think I’ve been so desperate to get Lori out of there?”

  Rick leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “Have you mentioned any of this to her?”

  She laughed. “No. That would be as useless as teats on a boar hog, as Uncle Eli would say. I can push her so far but no further, and telling her Roger is stalking me would cross the line. She’d never believe it was him. She’d find some reasoning to explain it away, and I’d lose all the progress I’ve made.”

  Once Rick was satisfied they’d discussed all there was to discuss about the stalking, he let her go. He walked her to her car.

  “If you need me, call me. I don’t care what time of day it is or where it is. This is a bad situation, Pip, and I wish to God you weren’t involved in it.”

  “Honestly, so do I. But I am involved. I don’t really know of any way to get myself out easily, do you? Even if I back off from Lori, he’s still going to keep coming. He’ll see that as a victory. It’s a game to him now.”

  Rick crossed his arms over his chest against the cold. “I’m afraid you’re right. As much as I’m sworn to uphold the law, I’ll tell you that there isn’t a lot that can be done about this. Not unless he tries something and there’s evidence or he gets caught. This may be something that calls for an old-fashioned talking to. Matter of fact, once Owen gets wind of this? We’ll have the devil’s own time holding him back.”

  “I know. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t said anything to him.”

  He looked out over the valley and she could practically see the debate raging in his head. “Maybe we shouldn’t hold him back.”

  “Rick…”

  “Someday there will be laws against what he’s doing. But until there are, until the legislation sees the need to protect innocent people from someone like Roger, law enforcement’s hands are tied. It’s frustrating, particularly when it happens to someone you care about.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t tell your folks just yet. Let me see what I can do. If I can’t figure something out by the weekend, though, you’ll have to tell them. Do you want me to be there when you do?”

  She ducked her head. “If you don’t mind. I don’t know if I can do it on my own. I’m going to owe you big for this, Rick.”

  He gave her a hug. “Hush. You won’t owe me a damned thing and you know it. Are you going straight home?”

  “Yes. I’m exhausted.”

  “Call me when you get home and let me know you made it okay.”

  She promised she would. The whole time she was driving, she kept checking her rearview mirror for Roger’s headlights. She never saw his truck, but she was on edge the whole time. Once home and after she’d called Rick, she poured herself a glass of wine and drew a hot bath. She tossed a handful of lavender into the water for its soothing scent. With her hair pinned up, she climbed in and sank into the water up to her shoulders, where she let herself cry.

  She hated the fact that she was considering giving up on Lori. Hated herself for even thinking about it. But she was tired of fighting. Tired of not getting anywhere. The stress of worrying about Lori and what Roger might do, combined with the humiliation and hurt she felt from her dealings with Logan, was too much. It reminded her an awful lot of how her relationship with Lori’s brother Jimmy had ended.

  Amelia, Lori, and Jimmy had formed a trifecta of friendship from the time they were young. Jimmy was a couple of years older than them, but he and Lori had always been close and he’d never minded when she and Amelia would tag along. By the time they were teenagers, Amelia had started to develop a crush on Jimmy, and it had appeared he felt the same way about her. The fall of her eighteenth year they started dating, after he’d come back from a two-year stint in the Army.

  Casual at first, almost as though they couldn’t believe they were acting as more than friends, the romance had built. They took things very slow, not rushing into anything. After all, they had all the time i
n the world, and they’d both been raised conservatively. There was no need to rush the fences, so to speak. But as time wore on, Amelia’s curiosity grew. She and Jimmy started exploring the physical side of their relationship, and that’s when things had gone south.

  A few weeks after she turned nineteen, not long before Valentine’s Day, they’d been at his tiny apartment. They were both half naked, and Amelia felt certain they would go past the heavy making out they’d stopped at thus far. Her instincts had been warning her for weeks that something was wrong, that they weren’t a good fit, but she’d ignored them.

  When she’d urged him to go further than they had before, he’d gotten angry with her.

  “We need to stop,” he said, scrambling up from the couch. He straightened his jeans, fastening them back where she’d undone them. “Amelia, this isn’t right. We need to stop.”

  Stunned, it had taken a minute for the words to penetrate. “Why do we need to stop? I don’t want to. Jimmy, I love you.”

  He was shaking his head almost violently. “No, you don’t. Not the way you should. And I don’t love you.”

  The words dropped into the space between them like lead. For what felt like forever, they stared at each other. Jimmy was the first to look away. He fumbled with his cigarettes and got one lit, inhaling deeply. “I’m sorry.”

  “You—how long have you known?”

  He had the grace to flush. “For a while now. And… I met someone. Three weeks ago. She’s different. She’s more… mature.”

  All she wanted to do was get back into her bra and shirt and leave, but her arms moved so slowly she felt as though she were swimming in syrup. She cursed the bra and decided to forego it. She got the long-sleeved shirt over her head as she tried to catch her breath.

  “You met someone.”

  He nodded. “Cheryl. She works at the bank.”

  “And she’s different.”

  “Pip, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen, I swear to you. But we started talking and one thing led to another and… We’ve been seeing each other.”

  Amelia felt like she’d been sucker punched. “You’ve been seeing each other. As in dating?”

  He sighed. “And other things.”

  She laughed bitterly. “You mean sex?”

  His silence was her answer.

  “You’ve been fucking some girl you met at the bank while you’ve been dating me. Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “I just did.”

  “Oh, well then. Okay. No harm, no foul.”

  He groaned and angrily stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. I knew you’d get overset and make a drama of the whole thing. You knew when we started this thing that it probably wasn’t permanent. She’s older. No offense, Pip, but you’re just a kid compared to her. That isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t what I want anymore.”

  Amelia had heard enough. She got to her feet, praying her legs would support her. “Does Lori know?”

  “Hell, no. She’d skin me alive. I’ll tell her about Cheryl after she gets used to the idea of you and me not being together.” He ran his hands over his hair, disheveling it even more than it had been. “If you could keep from telling her until I’ve had a chance to…”

  “You can just go fuck yourself. Go to hell,” she hissed at him as she frantically slid her feet into her boots. “I hope Lori castrates you. Of course, given what I’ve learned here tonight, she’d have to have a fucking microscope to find your balls.”

  She left and hadn’t seen Jimmy again for a few days. When he showed up at the farm two days before Valentine’s Day, Owen hadn’t wanted to let him in. Sarah had backed him down. Amelia had also not wanted him in the house, and she’d grabbed her coat.

  “We can walk, and you can tell me whatever the hell it is you have to say.”

  They went to the fence line and stood. Amelia waited stonily for him to speak.

  He stuttered awkwardly as he started. “I should have handled things better the other night. I didn’t mean to hurt you like that.”

  She stared at him, astonished. “Jimmy, what the hell did you expect would happen? I’d pat you on the back and shrug it off?”

  “I should have told you about Cheryl weeks ago. I know that. I just… I do love you, Pip. You’re like another little sister to me. And we never should have started dating each other. You know that as well as I do.”

  “But you didn’t tell me weeks ago. You were having sex with her, Jimmy. You were cheating on me, whether you ‘love’ me or not. I don’t know how to forgive that. I don’t want to. And at this point, I’m thinking that I probably made a lucky escape. If you’re the kind of spineless man who screws around on someone he’s known for so long, on someone he allegedly cares about? I’d be better off with a battery-operated boyfriend and a dog.”

  “I just want to make things right between us,” he told her desperately. “How do I do that?”

  Exasperated to the point where she was ready to hit him, she held her hands up and backed away. “You can’t. You need to go.”

  “But Amelia, you’re my best friend. I need—”

  “I don’t care what you need!” she shouted. “For once in my life, I don’t care what you want, I don’t care about making things right. You broke this, Jimmy. Not me. You’re the one who has to carry this weight. We were never friends. True friends don’t do what you did. Go find your girlfriend and cry on her shoulder. Mine’s closed.”

  She stalked off, back into the house, and Owen had taken things from there. He’d gone out to the pasture and had a few words with Jimmy. Amelia learned later that he’d simply told the boy to go, to not come back without an invitation.

  The phone call telling her that Jimmy had been killed came at eleven o’clock that evening. He’d been involved in a single-car, drunk-driving accident. After he’d left the farm he’d evidently gone to a seedy country bar where he’d proceeded to get plastered. No one had stopped him from driving, and he had wrapped his car around a tree not a mile from the bar.

  A week after he was buried, Lori told her that Cheryl was pregnant with his child.

  Amelia shut down. She stopped eating, lost interest in everything around her. It wasn’t that she’d lost the love of her life, but more that she’d been so deeply betrayed by someone she’d considered a friend. No one outside the two families had known about Cheryl, so Amelia also had to face the sympathy offered by people who hadn’t been aware of the breakup. A few times she’d spoken bluntly to tell them that while she appreciated the sentiment, Jimmy hadn’t been hers when he died.

  The pity she’d faced after that revelation was worse than the sympathy, so she’d just stopped bothering to explain.

  And the guilt… It had taken Archer and Emma a long time to convince her she wasn’t responsible for Jimmy’s poor decisions. That she wasn’t responsible for his death.

  It took her years to be able to forgive him for the way he’d handled things. It wasn’t that he’d found someone else. She could have dealt with that. But he’d cheated on her, and he’d caused everyone more pain than was necessary by the way he’d handled things. Not only had he bungled things with her, he’d left an innocent child behind to grow up without a father.

  She still ran into Cheryl occasionally in town. Her son was three and the spitting image of Jimmy.

  Amelia also blamed him in part for his sister’s current predicament.

  Lori had met Roger a couple of months after Jimmy’s death, when she’d still been reeling from the loss. He’d stepped in and courted her in a way that made him look like a knight in shining armor. They’d bonded over mutual loss—Roger had been orphaned a few years earlier.

  If Jimmy hadn’t died, Amelia didn’t think Lori would have given Roger more than a passing glance. That was
something else she was still unable to forgive him for.

  The hell of it was, she knew now that Jimmy was right. She’d known it then, if she were being honest with herself—they never should have dated. She knew that she really had made a lucky escape. But knowing that didn’t ease the pain from his betrayal.

  With Logan having been so nice to her face but then saying the things he’d said to Archer, the blow was like dealing with Jimmy’s duplicity all over again. Here was yet another man who was dishonest with her, telling her what she wanted to hear but believing something entirely different. And now he seemed so apologetic… she didn’t know what to think.

  “What is it about me that makes it so hard for men to be honest with me? To respect me enough to tell me the truth, even if it hurts?” She sipped the wine and closed her eyes. “That’s one thing I have to say for Roger—he’s never hidden how he feels about me, not from me, at least.”

  The irony that the man who represented the greatest danger to her physical well-being was the most honest man she was dealing with made her laugh through her tears.

  She’d rewarmed the water three times before she was ready to get out. When she did, she didn’t bother getting into a gown but wrapped herself in the new fleece robe Rachel had gotten her for Christmas. She took her wine to the living room and started a fire in the fireplace. With the cushions from the couch piled up on the floor in front of the hearth, she sat and stared into the flames until they’d turned to glowing embers. Tears trickled down her cheeks from time to time, and she used tissues to wipe them away.

  “I wish I could get rid of this misery as easily as these burn up,” she told the empty room as she wadded up a used tissue and tossed it on the embers where it promptly was incinerated.

  She didn’t bother even getting up from the floor, just reached over to the couch and pulled a blanket down to cover up with. Too weary to bother with bed, she slept on the floor.