Mr. Write (Sweetwater)

by O'Neill, Lisa Clark

He stared into his glass while he rattled the ice, then fixed his gaze on Tucker. “The Linville boys were living in your place.”

  Tucker’s eyes narrowed. “They were.”

  “You put them up after your grandfather bought their land.”

  “Daddy, for God’s sake.”

  “No.” Tucker held up a hand. “Your father is just wondering how much responsibility I bear for putting Linville in your path.”

  “Well that’s just ridiculous.”

  “He’s your dad. He’s entitled. I can tell you,” he said to John “that before I came here that was just a name on a rental contract. A rental contract that I signed, assuming it’d come about the traditional way. I can also tell you that the agency I used is owned by a company that’s in turn owned by my grandfather. And that Hawbaker thinks my grandfather may have been using his connection with that agency to install tenants – including the Linvilles – to suit his own whims.”

  Sarah sat back in her chair. “You never told me that.”

  He shrugged. “You’re hearing it now.”

  “My son tells me you don’t set much store by your granddad.”

  Tucker gazed at John. “If you’re meaning do I have a relationship with him that might induce me to repeat whatever you have to say, then the answer is no.”

  “You don’t like him much.”

  “I really don’t.”

  That teased a little smile out of her father. “That, and the fact that you’ve taken up with my daughter suggests you have some sense.”

  Fighting annoyance with them both, Sarah stifled a sigh. “Daddy, will you please just tell me why you felt this warranted a visit instead of a simple phone call.”

  “You’d have brushed me off if I’d called you. Anyway.” He rolled the glass between his hands, staring into the depths as if it held the answers to the world’s problems. “I guess Sarah would have told you that I used to be a drunk.”

  Her heart sank. “Daddy –”

  “Now, that’s just what they told you in those Al-Anon meetings. Don’t lie about the problem or try to cover it up. The fact is,” he looked square at Tucker. “I’m more ashamed than I care to admit that I let my kids down the way I did after their mother died. And more grateful than I can tell you that they stuck by me. But my point is, I spent more time than a man with responsibilities should in bars in those days. And there were a couple guys – I wouldn’t call them drinking buddies – but there were a couple other guys with a weakness for the bottle, and I’d end up sitting on a stool next to them more times than not. One of them was Preston Linville.”

  Sarah’s stomach twisted. “Jonas and Austin’s daddy.”

  “That’s right. And Preston, when he had a drunk on, was by turns chatty and mean. When he was chatty, you listened with one ear or you tuned him out altogether. When he was mean, you stayed clear. You stayed real clear. I once saw him beat a man into a bloody pulp for accidentally spilling Preston’s beer. He should have done time for that one, but somehow the charges got dropped. And I know he went home and whaled on those boys. He bragged about having a firm hand, and after seeing him in action, I believed him.”

  Sarah didn’t want to feel the tug of pity for two young boys. But she did. “I guess Austin and Jonas came by it honestly.”

  “Being abused doesn’t excuse becoming an abuser,” Tucker said.

  “No, but’s an undeniable cycle nonetheless.”

  “I can tell you it wasn’t only the kids he was knocking around. Linville was the kind of man that thought women had two places: in the kitchen, or on their backs.” John’s cheeks flushed a dull crimson as he lifted his eyes to Sarah’s. “Don’t mean to be crude, but that was the way of it. He once commented on how I was lucky I didn’t have to go home to the same damn woman anymore night after night.”

  “Oh, Daddy.” It must have been awful for him to have the loss of the woman he’d loved so desperately expressed in the cruelest of terms. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to dredge all this up just to illustrate that Jonas comes from bad stock. I know what he is. I’m not taking it lightly, but I really don’t think there’s any need for this.”

  “No, I’ve been thinking on it, and I need to get this out.” John took a drink of tea to wet his throat. Sarah suspected this was the most talking he’d done at one stretch, maybe ever. “I started suspecting the older Linville boy was giving you problems. You’d always been such a bookworm, but you started complaining about going to school. Of course, given my – I guess you could call it self-absorption – at the time, it took me a lot longer than it should’ve to put it together. And I’m going to say I’m sorry for it.”

  She simply reached out and took his hand. His trembled, then firmed against hers.

  “Anyway, I’d had just enough liquid courage when Preston came into the bar one night, that I thought it seemed reasonable to tell him to keep his little bastard away from my daughter. We fought over it. He had the advantage of being mostly sober, whereas I had the edge of fatherly rage. I guess you could say neither of us won, particularly, since we both ended up in the tank for it.”

  “You went to jail?”

  Her father smiled ruefully at the shock in her voice, but it was fleeting. “Just for the night. But it was the longest night of my life. I used my one call to get a… friend to come over and stay with you and your brother, and it made me realize in a way that hadn’t fully hit before that I was all you had. And that I was falling down hard on the job. So I paid my fine – money that should have gone to seein’ to your needs – and attended the counseling classes they ordered. I guess you could say it was a turning point for me.”

  “Daddy.” She was both humbled and grateful that he’d told her. “You don’t really think that Jonas has been giving me a hard time because of some… altercation you had with his father.”

  “There’s more,” Tucker said, and had both Sarah and John’s heads turning toward him. His eyes were cool, in a way that brought back her initial impression of him as a force to be reckoned with. “Isn’t there?”

  John nodded. “I said when Linville wasn’t mean, he was chatty. Most of the time he was flat broke and complaining, but from time to time he’d strut in like he was the cock of the walk, flashing wads of money. Wouldn’t say how he’d got it, or else he’d make up some malarkey about a dead aunt leaving it to him or winning it in a hand of cards.”

  “You think he was doing something illegal,” Tucker surmised.

  John took another long drink of tea, eyed Tucker over the cobalt rim. “You’re pretty quick at putting stuff together.”

  “One of my skills.”

  Her father rattled the ice in his glass. “Would you like some more tea, Daddy?”

  “That’d be nice, Sarah.” He looked around as she got up. “Meant to tell you, it looks real pretty, what you’ve done with this place. Wasn’t more than an old shed last time I saw it.”

  “Thank you.” She poured tea, glanced at the simple white and blue color scheme she’d settled on to make the space seem more open. “I like it.”

  “Are those… your grandmother’s old pie tins on the wall?”

  “That’s right. I just painted them blue.”

  “How about that.”

  When she turned back, it was to see a look of barely disguised frustration on Tucker’s face. He looked so cute, sitting there trying to keep his long legs from bumping her father’s under the table, and very clearly resisting the urge to demand that they get on with it already.

  “Daddy, I’m afraid that Tucker doesn’t understand our round-about way of storytelling.” When Tucker shot her a killing look, she merely smiled, very sweetly. “Which is rather ironic, considering he earns his living telling stories.”

  John sniffed. “You write books.”

  “I do.”

  “Worked as a carpenter, too.”

  “I like to build things. Physically, with my hands. And on paper, with my imagination.”

  “How
do you feel about fishing?”

  “Daddy.” Taking pity on Tucker, Sarah laid a hand on his shoulder as she sat back down. “Why do you think that Mr. Linville’s possibly illegal activities have any bearing on Jonas’s behavior now?”

  “Preston Linville worked for Coastal Construction before his liver gave out on him, and I guess you know both boys worked there until Austin got sent over to the county jail and Jonas took that medical leave of absence.”

  “You’ve done your homework,” Tucker commented.

  “I may not live here any longer, but I keep my ear tuned to what’s going on in this town. Especially now that both of my kids are here permanently again.”

  “Question.” Tucker held up one finger. “Is Coastal Construction affiliated with my grandfather?”

  “Coastal is actually affiliated with the Hawbakers,” Sarah told him. “Or it used to be, anyway. Their grandfather had a half share that he left to Harlan. It wasn’t a terribly profitable operation, as I recall, and he sold out completely when things started to go south.”

  “Coastal used to be the biggest outfit in the area,” her dad corrected her, “but that was a little before you’d have been aware of that sort of thing. And when I started thinking on it, I realized there were a string of projects Coastal was involved with that had some… I guess we’ll call it bad luck. Setbacks, delays, on-site injuries. There was even some talk about the company being cursed for building on a burial ground near that old Indian shell ring. They had the contract for the medical center, and right about the time they got it completed, the whole thing burned to the ground.”

  “Arson?” Tucker said.

  “The fire marshal said it was faulty wiring.”

  “Which should have been caught in a routine inspection. But things happen. And I’ve worked enough construction jobs to know that occasionally an inspector can be bought off.”

  “There was talk of that, and I believe it caused Coastal some trouble, and cost them some reputation. Their profit margin, like you said, Sarah, began to suffer.”

  “And you think that Mr. Linville was somehow involved? But that makes no sense. He was just an employee. Why bite the hand that signs your paycheck?”

  “Maybe someone wanted to insure that the wiring was faulty, and that it went undetected,” Tucker said slowly. “Maybe someone wanted that building to go down.”

  “For what, insurance? The Hawbakers were flush back then.”

  “People do all kinds of things, Red. For all kinds of reasons. Did one of Linville’s sudden windfalls happen to occur around the time of Coastal’s bad luck?”

  “It so happens.” John nodded. “And I probably wouldn’t have made the connection, except for the fact that a couple days after that incident, Linville comes into the bar with bandaged hands. Said he picked up a pot off the stove without realizing the burner had been turned on. I already mentioned how he felt about women. And I can all but guarantee he never picked up a cook pot in his life.”

  “So maybe he helped the faulty wires along.”

  John eyed Tucker. “I wondered.”

  “But the police,” Sarah exclaimed. “Surely they would have made the connection. I mean if…”

  “If a drunk can figure it, why couldn’t they?”

  Sarah could feel the color drain out of her face. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I know you didn’t.” He hesitated, then leaned over to kiss her cheek. He smelled like sun and mint and the aftershave his wife Sandy had gotten him for Christmas. “And you’re right. But it seemed to me that the police missed a lot of things where Preston Linville was concerned.”

  “You think he was a stooge.” Tucker said. “Working for somebody with enough clout to insure those things continued to be missed. Which in Sweetwater means Pettigrew or Hawbaker.”

  “Your granddaddy never cared for old man Hawbaker – that’s the Judge’s father. Or for the Judge, come to that. There seemed to be some real bad blood between them. He bought up a smaller construction outfit, one of Coastal’s minor competitors. Oddly enough,” John said evenly “it started doing real well for itself about that time.”

  “Daddy –”

  “No,” Tucker said. “He’s probably right. You’ve obviously spent a lot of time piecing this together.”

  Her father sat his glass on the table. “When my wife took ill, we ended up with a lot of medical expenses. I struggled, trying to keep everything together. I fell behind a couple months on the rent. I called the agent, tried to explain, see if I could work something out. Next thing I know there’s a bailiff at the door with an eviction notice. Knowing I was losing my wife was devastating. Lying to her, with her laying there in the hospital, about being able to keep the roof over our kids’ heads was unmanning. And I might be a simple man, but I’ve got pride, and I’ve got a brain. And being out on the water leaves plenty of thinking time. And more to the point, I’ve never quite forgiven the landlord for forcing that eviction.”

  “Shit,” Tucker rubbed a hand down his face. “My grandfather owns it, doesn’t he?”

  “Your brain works some quicker than mine does.”

  Sarah wished she could ease the turmoil she sensed brewing inside him. “Daddy, I understand your feelings, your concerns, but as you can see, none of this has anything to do with Tucker.”

  “I don’t need you to defend me, Sarah.”

  “I simply wanted to –”

  “Don’t.” But he squeezed her hand before he faced her father. “I’m not going to apologize for my grandfather. That would suggest I have some tie, some responsibility to or for him that simply isn’t there. But I can tell you that, if he comes back around, this Linville asshole won’t touch her.”

  “You know what?” After a long moment, her father nodded. “You might be a Yankee. And you might be a Pettigrew. But I think I might like you, after all.”

  HE liked John Barnwell, too, but not nearly as much after the man decided to stay on an extra couple days and sleep on Sarah’s porch bed.

  Tucker didn’t think of himself as particularly oversexed. He enjoyed sex, was always happy to get it. But he wasn’t the type to turn twitchy if he had to do without.

  On the third day of her father’s visit, Tucker cornered Sarah in her office.

  She looked up from behind the battered old desk, surprised, when he rapped his knuckles on the door. A sleek little laptop hummed in front of her, with two tidy stacks of papers at her elbow. Her gaze was a little fuzzy, the way it was when you’d been interrupted. Evening sunlight streamed through the open blinds at her back, setting her hair to gold-tipped flame.

  There was a pencil tucked behind her ear.

  “Tucker.” Her voice was distracted. “Hey. I was just…” she gestured at the papers “going through some invoices.”

  “I know.” He shut the door behind him. And casually flipped the lock. “Allie let me in, told me you were back here. She said to tell you that she had to get home. She’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s later than I thought. I’ve been sort of putting things off, what with my father here, so I’m playing catch up.” She smiled vaguely. “You want some coffee? I brewed a pot to get me through the paperwork. You’re welcome to help yourself.”

  “I don’t want coffee.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well…” The look on his face must have finally gotten through. “No. Oh no.” She spread her arms protectively over the paperwork. “I am not having sex with you on this desk.”

  “Who said anything about the desk?”

  “Knowing your penchant for hard horizontal surfaces, I… Tucker!” She scrambled, rather comically, out of the chair when he advanced. “My father is practically right outside that window.”

  “He’s napping on your back porch.”

  “You spied on him?” Using the chair like a shield, she pointed the pencil at him.

  “I saw him from my office.” And had wasted no time shutting his comp
uter down. The man, after all, was like a hawk. “Just remember how exciting it was when you were a teenager sneaking boys into your room.”

  “I never snuck a boy into my room.”

  He paused. “Really?”

  “I was a virgin until I was twenty-three.”

  “Really.”

  Intrigued, Tucker feinted left. Then grabbed Sarah when she tried to dart past him. She squealed, laughing and cursing him in equal parts as he pinned her with his arms.

  “You really are repressed.”

  “What I am is hardworking, motivated by things other than my glands, and very selective.”

  “I had you in bed inside of a month.”

  “Clearly, I lost my head.”

  “Lose it again.” More turned on than he cared to admit, Tucker lowered her to the rug.

  And did his best to relieve her of any lingering inhibitions.

  UTTERLY spent, Sarah lay partially beneath Tucker’s weight.

  And thought, Wow. Wow.

  Her muscles were like water, her skin throbbing vaguely where he’d bitten her neck.

  He’d bitten her. And she wanted him to do it again.

  With a groan, he rolled off of her, sat up. And as he ran his fingers through the hair she’d tangled with her hands, winced when he spotted her neck. “Jesus.” His tone was hard, but his fingers gentle as he touched what she thought might turn into a light, but interesting, bruise. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I got a little carried away.”

  “’s okay.” She needed water. And maybe an extra hand to pat herself on the back. She’d just had sex on her office rug. And it had been spectacular.

  “I’m thirsty,” she mumbled.

  “You want that coffee?”

  “Water.” She rolled onto her back. “A gallon of it.”

  With a smile that managed to be both indulgent and smug, Tucker patted her hip. “I’ll get it. You look like you need another minute to recover from not being motivated by your glands.”

  “Smartass,” she called after him as he pulled on his clothes and sauntered out. But she felt too satisfied to be annoyed with him.

  Her eyes drifted closed, and at the sound of ringing, it took her a moment to realize it was the phone, and not her ears. It was after hours. She should just let the machine pick up.