The Best Revenge

by Justine Davis

  The exchange came back to her with a vivid intensity that nearly took her breath away. She remembered those last four words, remembered how he was unlike so many kids who tossed them off so glibly when confronted with the potential of parental anger. “My dad’ll kill me when he finds out I lost my history book.” “My mom’ll kill me when she finds out I cut class.”

  But Adam had stated it flatly, without inflection, as pure, unadulterated fact.

  And she had believed him.

  In the end, it had been that that had kept her mouth sealed. She’d seen too much, too many bruises, black eyes and broken bones not to believe he meant exactly what he’d said.

  If she told, his father would kill him, and it would be her fault.

  And for the last twenty years, she’d lived with the grim knowledge that he was dead anyway, that her silence hadn’t saved him. That she knew, deep in her heart, that it had been no accident that he’d been lost in the raging river waters, made no difference. Even through her pain she understood why he’d done it, why he’d had to finally put an end to it.

  And only occasionally did she wish she’d told in spite of everything. If Adam was going to die anyway, at least the world would know his father for what he was. It had been an ugly, sometimes agonizing tangle of emotions for her ten-year-old soul to deal with. A tangle that hadn’t gotten much easier as she grew up.

  And now, sitting a foot away from the man she should have recognized much sooner, her emotions were still in chaos.

  Coming back here, St. John thought, had been a huge mistake. He’d expected it to be unsettling, but never, ever would he have expected it would bring him to this.

  He wasn’t sure if it had been Jessa’s words, praising the long-dead Adam Alden, her tone of lingering, wistful loss, or the simple fact that she remembered him so clearly that had done it, but something had, and as a result here he was, walking streets he’d sworn never to tread again, fighting down a maelstrom of emotions unlike anything he’d experienced in twenty years.

  And trying to shake the uncanny feeling that was growing within him that in some way, on some level, whatever had drawn two very unlikely childhood companions together still existed.

  He knew perfectly well some would have said, had they known about their secret meetings all those years ago, that it was unnatural that a teenage boy was friends with a girl so young. They would have tried to make it something dirty, evil, when in fact it had been the one clean thing in his life, in his world.

  He should have been jealous of her, of her happy, normal life. But he wasn’t. His time spent with her was the only taste of that kind of life he’d ever had, and he ached for it, longed for it. Once he had even fantasized about it, wondering if something magically happened to his father, if the kindly mayor and his sweet, gentle, wife would take him in.

  But fantasy was not something he’d been able to hang on to for long back then.

  It was something he never, ever indulged in now.

  Not to mention that the thought of Jessa as his sister, even in that kind of scenario, while it might have been comforting then, was decidedly unsettling now.

  And that gave rise to a fantasy he was surely not going to indulge in.

  Not for you, he reminded himself.

  He was going soft, he thought. All those damned Redstone weddings.

  Not for you.

  And it didn’t matter. He was long past caring. And no matter what Jessa said, he wasn’t about to assume he would never sink into the twisted madness his father had.

  Odd, he thought, that she had more faith in him than he did. But then again, perhaps not. After all, hadn’t she always?

  Only when he was certain he was steady did he dare to look at her again. She was looking off into the distance, although he wasn’t sure at what. The slight breeze had lifted, tousled first her bangs, then the rest of the short, almost shaggy cap of blond hair. Her nose had that same upward tilt at the tip that had made her adorable as a child, and added a youthfulness now that made her seem even younger than the thirty he knew she was.

  He ached to reach out and touch her. Just brush his fingers over her cheek, down that delicate yet stubborn jaw, over the full, soft lips. Need surged through him. He was a man, and no stranger to the feeling, but the power of this wave of yearning stunned him. Suddenly desperate for distraction, he did something he never did; he spoke when he didn’t want to.

  “More than twenty years,” he said.

  She gave him a sideways glance, and something in the changeable eyes made his heart react oddly. He didn’t stop to analyze the reaction as he usually would, he knew the usual rules didn’t apply here, not with Jessa.

  “So I should forget?” she asked. “Just go on as if he’d never existed? Not likely. He meant too much to me.” She looked away in the moment before she added, in a voice barely above a whisper, “He still does.”

  St. John’s breath caught in his throat. Another uncharacteristic reaction he didn’t stop to analyze, although this time it was because he didn’t want to know why he was so off-kilter.

  “Jess,” he said, not sure why he’d been overwhelmed with the need to just say her name.

  She looked up at him again. “What?”

  He shrugged, shaking his head in negation at the same time. There was no way he could explain any of this.

  Not even to himself.

  It was only later that he realized he’d shortened her name in the old way. And she hadn’t even blinked. She’d explained why she didn’t like it back then. He had envied her the reason. And he’d liked that she allowed him the nickname she didn’t accept from others.

  He shook his head. Clearing his mind of memories was not a task he was used to having to do. And even allowing for the fact that some stirring of those images was inevitable, here in this place where every breath he took felt poisoned by that man’s presence, it was unsettling.

  Almost as unsettling as realizing that, just as she had been all those years ago, Jessa Hill was his only antidote.

  Chapter 9

  “Jessa’s not stupid!”

  “I’m not saying she is. I’m asking if she’s smart enough.”

  “She graduated from the University of Washington cum laude, for crying out loud.”

  “But is she the kind of politically smart we need? Besides, she’s not handling her father’s death all that well. Some people are strong enough, some aren’t.”

  “Well, really, it’s only been a few months.”

  St. John stirred his coffee, rather more vigorously than was necessary. He’d come into the small café—the place old man Stanton had banned him from years ago—only for the caffeinated drink. He’d ended up sitting in a booth behind two people arguing the upcoming election. Or rather, the candidates.

  “I saw Naomi the other day. She’s obviously not making much progress, either.”

  “That’s cold of you. You know the Hills were inseparable. She must be just dying inside.”

  “I not saying I don’t feel sorry for her. I’m just saying we need a strong person in that office.”

  “Naomi isn’t running for mayor. And Jessa is strong. She always has been. She took care of her father, now she’s taking care of her mom and keeping the store going. She’ll do a great job as mayor.”

  “Like mother, like daughter is all I’m saying. And there’s that loony uncle, too, don’t forget him.”

  “Larry’s harmless. Even funny. Every family’s got one.”

  The woman who tried to undermine Jessa, in that nasty, vague way that was nearly impossible to fight, had reminded him of someone when he’d first seen her. But it wasn’t until the two rose to leave that he realized she looked like Mrs. Wagman, his old history teacher. With a little shock he realized it was probably Missy, her daughter; the intervening years had not been kind, and the rather glamorous blonde he remembered from when she was twenty and the winner of the annual Miss Cedar River contest now had the look of someone much older than forty, and the
tight, sour expression of someone whose main hobby was finding fault.

  Jessa’s defender he didn’t recognize at all, although he made note of her appearance; before this was over, they would need to know who their friends were.

  Especially, he thought as he took a sip of coffee finally cool enough to drink, if this was the beginning of the kind of campaign he’d expected all along.

  It would be just like his father. He would never be content to let the voters simply decide. He wouldn’t risk that. Clearing the playing field was more his style. But his father wasn’t a fool, he wouldn’t be blatant about personal attacks, not when sympathy was naturally with the woman who’d just lost her father, who happened to be their much-beloved mayor of thirty years. But he would plant ideas here and there, masked by a facade of gentle concern. Just enough to sow the seeds of doubt in enough minds to shift the balance.

  Just as he had done with his wife, subtly laying the foundation, then building on it, until everyone was whispering about how unstable she was, how unfortunate he was, yet how noble it was that he refused to abandon her despite her delusional behavior.

  And how sad it was that he had such a wild, incorrigible, ungrateful son.

  Now, as an adult, looking back, it was so easy to see how he’d done it, how it had worked. But then, for years, he’d been convinced they talked that way because it was true. There had to be something inherently bad in him, something awful. The evil his father had first tried to beat out of him, then—

  He stopped the train of thought before it could build up any steam. He was getting better at it, he thought. Soon it would be as easy as it once had been. He was out of practice, that was all.

  The waitress offered him a refill, and he shook his head. She shrugged and walked away, wearing an expression he remembered, and that he suspected was common to many small-town teenagers, an expression that said “I hate this place, and as soon as I can leave I’m out of here!”

  Funny how he’d never thought of escaping Cedar, not like that. He’d thought only of escaping from his father. But he’d known that without him there as a buffer, to take on part of his wrath, his father would kill his mother. He couldn’t abandon her to that.

  Later, in cool, dispassionate retrospection, he had realized she had abandoned him long before. When he’d realized she’d known what was happening to him, had chosen to deny it. Or worse, ignore it.

  And then she’d made her own kind of escape, completing the abandonment, leaving him to the harsh mercies of the man she knew too well. For a long time her son had wanted nothing more than to follow her into that oblivion. Only a golden little girl held him by a thread—but that thread had turned out to be as strong as tensile steel as she repeatedly made the one argument that ever could have worked.

  Don’t let him win! He may be bigger, but you’re smarter.

  You don’t know him, Jess.

  I know you. You can figure a way out. Just don’t let him win.

  And in the end, he had. He’d taken his barely acknowledged desire to follow the path his mother had to end the torture forever, and turned it into a way out. He’d prepared, considering idea after idea and discarding them, all the while making what plans he could, studying maps, bus routes, staring at the names of faraway places, all of which seemed inviting for the simple reason that his father wasn’t in them.

  He took a long drink of coffee, hoping the caffeine jolt would help him focus. It was starting to irritate him, this necessity to force something that had been easy habit for so long.

  He glanced at his watch. Jessa would probably be arriving at the store about now. She didn’t open up until nine—unless a customer had an emergency, something he wouldn’t have thought possible for a feed store had he not known how many other adjunct items they carried, from first-aid materials to basic medical supplies for various animal ills—but she was always there by eight, just as her father had always been.

  He finished the coffee, left a five on the table—about a 200 percent tip for the bored teenager who asked him once about the refill and otherwise left him alone—and headed down the street he’d once avoided at all costs, weary of the suspicious glances that followed him every step of the way. Now the looks he garnered were simply curious, the kind you’d see in any small town directed at a stranger in their midst.

  He felt no anger about those long-ago glances. People were only reacting to what they’d been told, to the fiction his father had so elaborately, carefully spun. He had wished then that some would have seen through it, but he realized later, from the vantage point of safety, that it was too much to expect, that his father was too good, too smooth, too polished. So there had been only Jessa to believe in him.

  He’d never been able to repay her for that.

  He would now.

  The heavy storage barn door suddenly began to move easily, startling her. She looked over her shoulder and saw…St. John, she reminded herself. If that’s who he wanted to be, that’s who he was. And she could certainly understand why he’d want to leave any trace of this place and the boy he’d been behind.

  She only wished she could leave the girl she’d been behind. The girl who had had such childish dreams about the dark, troubled boy she’d befriended. But there was nothing boyish about this man, and nothing childish about the things he made her think about, not anymore.

  Not for the first time since her stunned realization, she wondered exactly what he was doing now. “Facilitator” was no longer enough answer for her. He clearly had enough money to come here, to stay. His clothes, while they didn’t scream wealth, didn’t indicate poverty, either; they were more classic, the kind of thing that wore forever and never went out of style.

  Not, she guessed, that the man known as St. John cared much for that.

  So much made sense now. Why he was here, why he wanted to help her defeat Albert Alden. His father. The man who had been the instrument of his pain, his confusion, his despair all those years ago.

  But how had he even heard about it? Had he somehow been tracking his father’s actions? She supposed she couldn’t blame him for that, although it made her even more curious about his life now.

  “Thank you,” she said as she flipped up the chock that held the door open during business hours. The familiar scent, sweet feed mixed with the fresh green of alfalfa hay, rolled out at her, a pleasant constant to this part of her morning.

  He made a small, low sound that could have been “Mmm-hmm,” but was more likely just a very male grunt of acknowledgment.

  A sudden memory clicked into place. Adam, telling her he talked to her differently than anyone else. She’d thought at the time he meant “differently” in that he talked to her at all. But now she realized he must have meant he literally spoke differently. In complete sentences.

  It made sense now, his manner of talking. He’d told her once that he wished he could just become invisible around his father, wished his father just wouldn’t see him. It wasn’t a huge leap from that to the idea that unheard was unseen.

  The thought that this was a holdover from that time, that to this day he spoke this way as part of the legacy of agony his father had left him, made her heart ache, even as it warmed her that she had apparently been the exception, that he had been careful to talk normally to her. Perhaps only to her.

  Anger filled her at the thought. And made her more determined than ever that the man with the polished exterior and the heart of a vicious predator would not succeed. And if he did, she told herself as she double-checked the hay bale count, she would shift her focus, dedicate herself to making his tenure as difficult as possible, raising questions at everything he did, fighting him every step of the way. “Fierce.”

  She blinked, looked at him, realized he’d been watching her face, which told her her thoughts must have been reflected there. “If that’s what it takes,” she said, not bothering to tamp down the intensity she’d been feeling.

  “Will,” he said. “It’s started.”

  “Wh
at has?”

  “His real campaign. Rumors. Suggestions. Hints.”

  Her brow furrowed. “What do you—You mean about me?”

  He nodded. “Can’t be proven. Or easily disproved. Nebulous. Ridiculous. But stick in people’s heads.”

  “Like what?”

  He seemed to hesitate, as if he didn’t want to repeat whatever he’d heard. Which meant it was likely nasty. It seemed all expectations of civility went out the window when you were dealing with a monster like Alden.

  “Not smart enough,” he finally said, with obvious reluctance.

  Her brows rose. “Really? Interesting, considering this town sent me off to college with a party, for having the highest GPA in our high school’s history.”

  “Remind them,” he said.

  She sighed. “What else?”

  “Weak,” he said.

  “I feel that way sometimes,” she said with a shrug. “Doesn’t everyone?” When he didn’t answer, her mouth quirked. “Okay, doesn’t everyone, present company excluded?”

  She saw that twitch at the corners of his mouth, and barely managed to hold back a smile of her own.

  “Next?” she asked instead.

  “Unstable.”

  She nearly burst out laughing at that one. “Please. Who’s spent more time in stables than me?” He didn’t laugh at her awful pun. “Joke, St. John,” she said.

  “Serious,” he countered.

  “How can I take that seriously? Me, the most boring, un-neurotic person on the planet?”

  “People will wonder. Question.”

  “But they know me,” she said in protest.

  “They knew…his first wife.”

  She might not have noticed a fraction of a second’s delay in his answer, so slight was it, had she not known what she knew. His mother.

  Memories flooded her. The adults in her life had been careful about talking around her, but like any child she’d heard and understood more than they’d thought.