Today had been just chock-full of surprises. First there’d been the sight of Joe and Charlotte nearly getting it on by the fruit bowl. Oh, hell—she couldn’t exactly indict the woman. Charlotte had been married to the most strait-laced guy on the planet and then left a widow. Of course Joe Mills proved too much to resist. The poor sex-starved thing never had a chance.
And that little soul-baring discussion she’d had with Jimmy that afternoon? Bring it on, that’s what she had to say about it! The truth will set you free, and all that shit. So here she was, thirty-six years old, getting a shot at freedom, no longer needing to give a rat’s ass about what some man would prefer. It turned out she’d been wrong all along anyway, so from now on it would be all about what she wanted. What she preferred.
From now on it was going to be LoriSue, unchained.
She hopped off the bed and stood before the floor-length mirror of her closet door. After that talk with Jimmy, she’d soothed her soul with a search-and-destroy boutique shopping spree. Nothing like three thousand dollars in clothing and accessories to take away the sting. And she couldn’t wait to unleash her new look on the world.
What else could she do now that she was free? She could live anywhere she chose, of course. Change her hair. Get her MBA or law degree. Run for Congress. Train for a marathon. Well, maybe that was stretching it… but the point was she could do anything at all and never again have to worry about it affecting Jimmy’s wandering eye or fragile ego.
So maybe this was her first little sample of empowerment. LoriSue decided it suited her. And first thing tomorrow, she planned to get her ass out there and get herself some more.
Bonnie woke up in the middle of the night, her heart beating wildly in her chest.
She reached over and shook Ned awake.
“Hmmph?”
“Ned. Wake up.”
“What? What is it?” He was up in a flash and the lamp was on. He blinked back against the bright light.
“I just realized we can’t go visit Raymond and his family next month. We can’t leave Charlotte here alone with Joe Mills.”
Ned moaned. “You woke me up to tell me that?”
“I had a bad dream.” That was an understatement. The dream was more than bad. It was horrible—Charlotte was crying and Hank and Matt had vanished and there was blood all over the driveway.
“Don’t worry about Joe.” Ned clicked off the light and fell back against the pillows.
“What?”
“He’s a good guy. I can tell. And I got his prints tonight.”
“You did? How?”
“A drinking glass from dinner. I’ll take it into the station Monday morning and see what we can find out.”
Bonnie felt some relief. Maybe they’d get enough information that she’d feel comfortable going ahead with their planned visit to Arizona. She really wanted to go—she hadn’t seen her oldest son and his wife and kids in months.
“You really think he’s okay?”
“He’s cool. Don’t worry, babe.” Ned patted Bonnie on her hip, let his hand linger there a moment, and gave her outer thigh a tight squeeze. Then he rolled over.
“How long will it take to get fingerprint results?”
“Couple days. Not more.”
“I’m really worried, Ned.”
Her husband rolled back toward her, insinuated a warm hand up the front of her nightgown, and gave her a playful caress. “Good thing I know a way to get your mind off your troubles.”
Charlotte gave up trying to fall asleep. Part of her knew she should remain awake in case one of the boys needed something.
Another part of her couldn’t sleep because of Joe. He was staying, and that changed everything. He was offering her more than one last taste. He was offering her another chance. And now that it looked like she’d get everything she’d always wanted, she wondered if she was ready for it.
And whether she deserved it.
The first issue was the kids, of course. Should she try to keep her family and her love life separate? Was that even possible when the love life lived next door? He said he wanted to see her tomorrow—but that was Sunday, a family day. She couldn’t pawn the kids off on Bonnie to frolic with Joe, and she couldn’t seem to wrap her brain around the image of Joe heading to the park with them, joining them for popcorn and a matinee, or sitting down with them to a big Sunday breakfast. She didn’t even know if he’d be comfortable with those things.
Then Charlotte winced, wondering how many hours it would take before every living soul in Minton knew that the Widow Tasker had taken a lover. She imagined facing everyone, knowing that they knew. The Noonans. The Rickmans. Old Mrs. Watson. Everyone on the Little League Board. Everyone in Troop 492. Everyone at the William Howard Taft Elementary PTA meeting.
The Bettmyers. Bonnie and Ned.
Hank and Matt.
Kurt up in heaven.
“Ohmigod.” She flopped over again on the couch, angry that the sun would be coming up in a couple hours, still feeling Joe’s arms around her and his mouth on hers, aware that his presence was dragging to the surface everything she’d spent her whole adult life trying to ignore.
She’d brought her poetry journal downstairs earlier, just in case she felt the urge to write. She was sure feeling it now. She turned on the lamp and picked up her pen.
Slut
When did she appear, the slut in me?
At the spark of creation, when I was two cells,
The way we all start?
Sex from sex?
(Though my mother would never admit to this)
Does she have a name, this wanton?
I’ll call her Charlotte—for she is me, one and the same
I’ve just always insisted she have an early curfew
Because she can’t be trusted
And she would like to dress provocatively
That slut
So the answer may be zero—it took zero encounters
To make me all I am
Because she was always there
Just laying in wait
For Joe’s touch
To set her free
The slut in me.
Charlotte closed the journal. Turned off the light. And wondered how it would feel to go through life comfortable with who she was—everything she was.
Maybe she’d soon find out.
Chapter Sixteen
LoriSue didn’t feel one lick of guilt about asking Jolene to open her beauty salon early on a Sunday morning, because she’d made the woman an offer she couldn’t refuse. Jolene had four kids to support and a house LoriSue knew very well cost a good $1,700 a month.
She’d sold it to her.
Jolene appeared slightly stunned when she unlocked the doors to the Hair You Are salon on Main Street. She looked LoriSue up and down. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Absolutely certain.”
“Well, okay.” Jolene shrugged, getting out a plastic cape. “Have a seat. You look real nice today, by the way.”
She sure as hell hoped so. This was the first public outing of her new look, the first of nine outfits she’d hauled away from that boutique in Mount Adams that promised that style was an attitude, not an age.
And that morning she was wearing three hundred bucks’ worth of attitude—cream yellow linen crop pants and a little matching jacket with retro buttons. The low-heeled slides were ninety. The earrings—simple little things that didn’t even dangle, for God’s sake—had been sixty-five.
She had no idea it cost so freakin’ much to be subtle.
“I like the way you’ve toned down your makeup, too,” Jolene said, quickly adding, “Not that it didn’t look good before.”
“Let’s talk cut.” LoriSue whipped out the folded page from a magazine and pointed. “That one.”
Jolene’s eyes bugged out. “But that’s a layered shag! You’ve got a long page boy! This will take a lot of cutting, probably five inches on top!”
“I realize that,”
LoriSue snapped. “I’m going for the no-fuss, casual chic look—something classy and low-key. Something totally different.”
“No shit,” Jolene said under her breath. She put the magazine page on the surface of her styling station and smoothed it out. “I guess I can do something like that.”
“Great.” LoriSue was feeling more empowered by the minute.
“Now. What about color?” Jolene snapped the cape around LoriSue’s neck and combed her fingers through the pale blond locks. “You said you wanted to go a couple shades darker than usual.”
LoriSue spun around in the salon chair and looked Jolene right in the eye.
“I said I want to go back to my natural color.”
Jolene’s mouth fell open. “Uh,” she said, looking worried. “I don’t think I even know what your natural color is, LoriSue.”
She probably wasn’t exaggerating. Jolene had opened this shop ten years ago, and every four weeks, like clockwork, for a decade, she’d been helping LoriSue disguise the fact that she was born with a head of medium brown hair.
LoriSue sighed. “Then go get those sample hunks of dyed hair you have in the back and we’ll figure something out. I want to get this over with. Oh, and don’t forget my eyebrows.”
“Why are we going to the lake, Mama?” Hank asked.
Matt yawned. “And how come you woke us up so early?”
Charlotte wasn’t proud of herself, but after tossing and turning on the couch all night she’d greeted the day with a plan: avoid Joe at all costs.
So she’d called all the parents to pick up their boys by 9:00 a.m., packed the van with lunch and supper picnics, a change of clothes, rafts, beach blankets, towels, books, sunscreen, beach chairs, and drinks and snacks, then told the kids to put on their swimsuits and get in the car. They were going to Pike Lake for the day—the whole day.
“I just realized we haven’t been in a while, that’s all. I thought it would be a nice treat.”
“I guess,” Matt said, unconvinced. “But I’m kinda sleepy.”
“You can sleep in the sand.”
The lake wasn’t crowded, possibly because it was still early when they got there and many families didn’t arrive until after church. Charlotte hadn’t been to church since Kurt died, much to her parents’ horror. The last long-distance conversation she’d had with her mother, which was several weeks ago now, had ended when she reminded Charlotte about the eternal fire pit of hell. She’d thanked her mother and hung up.
Charlotte took a deep breath of the mild morning air and smiled. This would be her church today—the soft roll of Ohio earth, the sun, and the happy voices of her kids.
From behind her gray-tinted sunglasses and from her comfortable perch in her beach chair, Charlotte watched Hank and Matt swim and splash. She wiggled her toes in the light brown sand. This lake would always remind her of Kurt. They had taken the kids here often. She could almost see him now, his burly body bursting through the water, roaring in his best impersonation of a grizzly bear, making the kids scream with delight.
She scanned the horizon of blue-green water and the uneven line of tall sycamores, maples, and oaks that rimmed the lake. There was no Kurt and there never would be again. Life was so much quieter without him.
How could she have ever wished him away?
By six, everyone was pink from the sun, worn-out, and waterlogged. Charlotte opened the cooler to pull out the food she’d packed for supper—rather limp-looking veggie roll-ups, fruit and flaxseed salad, and oatmeal-raisin bars—and sighed. The resigned looks of suffering on Hank’s and Matt’s faces sealed the deal.
“We’re going to Fritz’s,” she announced, slamming the cooler lid shut. Hank and Matt cheered and gave each other high fives.
They drove down the state highway to Fritz’s Snack Shack and Driving Range, where they sat at an outdoor picnic table under the eaves and gorged on greasy fried cod and chicken planks, French fries, coleslaw, and soft drinks, the way they used to do when Kurt was alive. Then they played a round of cutthroat putt-putt.
At the fifteenth hole, the par three loop-to-loop space rocket, Matt curled his arm around Charlotte’s waist and said, “Remember how Dad used to nail this one?”
What amazed Charlotte was that her son said it with a smile.
Both Hank and Matt fell asleep on the fifteen-minute drive home, which she felt like doing herself. The combination of lack of sleep the night before, the sun, and the heavy food was making her eyelids droop. She rolled down her window all the way for fresh air, then adjusted the mirror so she could see her children’s faces, sated in sleep. They were such beautiful creatures. They were her whole life. She’d been blessed.
As the headlights arced past her in the twilight, she did the math. Hank had just turned eight. In ten years she’d be looking forward to starting her freshman year at college and Matt would be a junior. In ten years Charlotte would be forty-five.
And alone.
They arrived home late, and she had to drag the kids up to their beds, where they fell on top of their covers in their T-shirts and shorts, with sandy feet.
Charlotte took a quick shower, then went downstairs to let Hoover out for a tinkle. When she opened the double doors off the family room, she saw a piece of paper taped to the glass. She read it by the porch light:
Hope you all had a good day. I really missed you.
—Joe.
The DEA field office was on Third Street in downtown Cincinnati, a city Joe had never seen firsthand and one he’d never really desired to see. It was surprisingly pretty, with hilly streets and restored vintage buildings tucked right next to modern steel and glass. The downtown was nestled against the Ohio River, surrounded by hills.
He spent the morning in meetings with Supervisor Rich Baum and his staff, his thoughts equally divided between Charlotte and the job at hand. The Cincinnati office did indeed have a mounting crystal meth problem and Joe was surprised by the numbers—six major busts in the last four months, three dead dealers, and two fatal overdoses in one area high school that had politicians and parents demanding answers. Joe was happy to help and gave them the benefit of his expertise, and by lunch he seemed to have told them everything he could.
Also by lunch, he’d relived Saturday at least three times in his head. He remembered each of Charlotte’s touches. Her kisses. The sound of her laughter. The way she’d peeked around Hank’s curls to smile at him across the campfire.
That’s when it had hit him. He was nearly thirty-eight and had never been in love. It had never bothered him, up until that moment, seeing Charlotte with a child in her lap. Because that’s when he realized that if he’d done things differently that day so long ago, if he’d only gotten the Miata’s license plate number, he might have been looking at his own child cradled in her arms.
He hadn’t been able to shake the thought since.
Rich Baum stayed behind as the conference room cleared out of agents, and chatted with Joe for a few minutes. Rich seemed nice enough and had a good reputation in the Administration.
“How’s Clermont County treating you, Joe?”
Joe leaned back in the swivel chair and shrugged. “The hectic pace is killing me.”
Rich laughed loudly. “I heard we could have a hell of a pool party at your digs—mind if a few of us single guys borrow the place one night?”
“Have at it.”
Rich chuckled some more and cleared his throat, then fiddled with his pen. “Listen, Joe.” He wasn’t looking him in the eye. “I was talking with Roger the other day—”
“Uh-oh.”
“And he wants me to send a couple agents into your neck of the woods a few times a week, just to put extra eyeballs on the situation.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s up?”
“I’m sure you’re fine, but—” Rich frowned. “Did Roger tell you Jay Mauk was murdered Friday?”
Jay Mauk had worked on the Guzman case with Joe and Steve out of the Albuquerque field o
ffice. He’d been a civilian computer engineer. Extremely bright. Jay was only twenty-three years old.
“No.”
“Here. I printed this out for you.”
Joe took the sheets of paper, incensed that Roger would keep this from him, feeling the black hole grow bigger in his chest as his hands began to shake. Jay Mauk had been a fucking kid. And by the looks of the report, the way he’d been murdered was pure Guzman—a drive-by in broad daylight, AK-47s out the car window, in front of a popular steak house. Albuquerque Police found a stolen Chevy a few blocks away and no sign of the suspects.
Joe folded the report and stuck it in his pants pocket.
“I’m right here if you should need anything,” Rich said.
Joe left the offices and headed toward the parking garage, stopping at a newsstand on the way for a pack of bubble gum, pulling the brim of his Reds cap down over his sunglasses as he walked.
He felt the familiar nervous hum through his body, the cold fingers on the nape of his neck. And what amazed him most was the realization that he’d been living without this for a few weeks. He’d forgotten how the baseline fear coiled inside him, ate at him, emptied him of everything but a sharp awareness of his surroundings.
It had been nice while it lasted.
On the drive back to Minton, he thought of Jay Mauk and the million-dollar price on his own head. He told himself again that there was no way Guzman would ever link Special Agent Joe Bellacera of the Albuquerque DEA to the reclusive Joseph Mills of Minton, Ohio.
He told himself that it was still possible to get to know Charlotte and her kids without putting them in danger. It could be done. It had to be done, because he’d already told them he was staying.
Joe was still trying to convince himself of this when he arrived in Minton and saw the Kroger grocery store to his left. Since he’d found nothing in his refrigerator for breakfast that morning, he pulled into the parking lot.
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