Face the Music: Beyond Jackson Falls Book 1

by Laurie Breton

  His cell phone rang. Mikey pulled it from his pocket. Glanced at it and said, “I’m sorry, I really should take this.”

  “Take,” she said, with a wave of her hand.

  He answered, then stood, taking the phone with him to the restaurant lobby. While a variety of emotions flitted across his face, he paced from cash register to coat rack, from entryway to goldfish tank. Sometimes speaking, sometimes listening. He paused long enough for her to admire the fit of his jeans, the way the tight denim hugged his ass. He had a nice ass. Nice shoulders, too. Broad without being brawny. Hell, who was she kidding? Mikey Lindstrom had a nice everything.

  He caught her staring, and her face went hot. Mikey combed a hand through his hair, said something into the phone, and glanced her way again. The grim face was back. Tucking his phone into his pocket, he strode to the table. “I hate to do this,” he said, “but I need to cut dinner short.”

  “Work problem?”

  “No. A friend problem. Gunther. He’s having a crisis.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “It is to him, so I guess that means yes.”

  He paid the bill, had the rest of the food packaged to go, and they went back outside into a warm summer dusk. “You okay?” she said, when they were in the truck and on their way.

  “Just a little worried. He’s pretty shook up. I can’t remember the last time he called and asked me to come over.”

  “May I ask what the crisis is?”

  His knuckles were white where they gripped the steering wheel. “It’s his daughter,” he said, dimming his headlights for an approaching car. “He hasn’t seen her since she was nine years old. Lots of baggage there, but the short story is that he came back from Vietnam with post-traumatic stress, and when his wife couldn’t take it any longer, she left and took the daughter with her. He went on the skids for a couple of decades. Drugs, booze, women. Sometimes he slept on the street. He finally cleaned up his act. Got a decent job. He scraped together enough money to buy the store, and he called his ex-wife and got Jenell’s address. He wants to patch things up with her. But she’s not interested. You can hardly blame her. All she remembers is a daddy who disappeared from her life. Then he suddenly shows up after thirty years. You can understand why she’s reluctant to let him in.”

  Thinking of her own relationship with her father—the father who’d never known she existed until her mother died—Paige said softly, “Things aren’t always the way they appear.”

  “No. They’re not. Gunther keeps sending letters to her. And she keeps returning the letters unopened. Won’t even read what he has to say. Every time one of his letters comes back, Gunth goes off the deep end.”

  “That’s so sad. For both of them.” She tried to picture how her life would have turned out if she and Dad had never found each other. But she couldn’t. Dad and Casey had saved her, in every way imaginable. “Sometimes,” she said, “life is so hard. So unfair.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. As if you didn’t already know that.”

  “No. I’m glad you said it because it means that for a couple of minutes, you forgot about the leg. Nobody ever forgets about the leg. It’s like a badge I wear, night and day.”

  “The fabled albatross around your neck.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That leg doesn’t define you, Lindstrom. It’s not who you are.”

  “Now you sound like Gunther. When he’s coherent.”

  Softly, she said, “He’s a good friend.”

  “Yeah. He is. We watch out for each other.” They reached the outskirts of Jackson Falls, and he said, “I’d invite you to come with me, but he’s been drinking. By the sound of it, he’s pretty wrecked. I don’t want to subject you to that.”

  “You’re kidding, right? I played in dive bars for years. I tour with a rock band. I’m impervious to drunken behavior.”

  He hesitated. Shot her a quick glance. “You want to come?”

  “Yeah. I want to come.”

  * * *

  A SINGLE BULB lit the stairwell. The wooden stairs had been painted a deep burgundy at some point in the distant past. Patches of color still surrounded the depression worn into the center of each tread by a hundred years of feet walking up and down. Above them, music shook the walls. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Ohio. “Careful,” he said, his hand just touching the small of her back. “They’re steep.”

  At the top, he reached past her and rapped twice, then indicated that she should open the door. She stepped into the kitchen, and music slammed into her like a hot wave, a quartet of voices blending in condemnation of the killing of four students at Kent State University. He pointed her to an open doorway, and she moved toward the music.

  “Halt!”

  The voice, laden with authority, carried over the music, and she came to an abrupt stop. The man who’d spoken, gaunt and bony and grizzled, sat cross-legged on the couch. A bottle of cheap gin rested precariously on a stack of magazines on the scratched coffee table, and the hunting rifle in his hands was pointed directly at her. “Who the fuck are you?” he said.

  Jesus Christ.

  Mikey shifted position so imperceptibly that she wasn’t aware of movement until she realized he’d placed himself between her and the business end of that rifle. “She’s with me,” he said.

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah, buddy. It’s me.”

  “She’s not one of them?”

  His voice as casual as though they were conversing about the weather, Mikey said, “Put the rifle down, Gunth, so I can introduce you properly.”

  She counted down the seconds. One. Two. Three. An eternity passed with each one. “Okay,” he said.

  Mikey turned and shoved the Styrofoam container of leftover food into her hands. “It’s okay,” he said.

  It didn’t look okay to her. Gunther was clearly drunk and despondent, and he was holding a deadly weapon. What could possibly go wrong?

  “This is Paige,” Mikey said. “You’ll like her. Can we turn the music down?”

  With rheumy and suspicious eyes, Gunther stared at her, but he didn’t argue when Mikey walked to the stereo and clicked it off. Silence rushed into the void. She wasn’t certain it was an improvement.

  Moving slowly and with confidence, Mikey approached his friend and held out both hands for the rifle. Gunther hesitated, then sighed and handed it to him. Mikey opened the magazine with a loud click and spilled out the ammunition into his palm. The tight band that had been holding her breath at bay released its hold, and she realized her hands were trembling.

  “Why the hell were you sitting here holding this thing?” Mikey said.

  Gunther finally took his eyes off her. “They’re outside,” he said. “I can hear ‘em talking.”

  “Who’s outside?” Mikey crossed the room to the gun safe, opened it and put the rifle away.

  “The Cong. They’re everywhere.”

  Mikey’s eyes met hers, held for an instant. “Nobody’s out there, Gunth,” he said. “You been hitting the wacky tobacky tonight?”

  “Only a little.”

  He reached up, felt around on top of the gun safe, and pulled down a key. Locked the door and slid the key into his own pocket. “And the booze, too, I see. You keep telling me to stay away from that stuff, old man, but I don’t see you abstaining.”

  Gunther wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Your mother’s an alcoholic,” he said.

  “Yes, she is. And so are you.”

  “Fuck you.” He turned back to Paige and said, “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Paige,” she managed to squeak out. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare you, Miss. With the gun. Kid didn’t tell me he was bringing anyone with him.”

  “She’s fearless,” Mikey said. “You didn’t scare her.”

  “You really sure they’re not outside? Because I coulda sworn I heard ‘em talking out there.”

  “We jus
t came in from outside. The parking lot’s empty. You’re safe here with us.”

  “He telling the truth?” Gunther asked her.

  “Absolutely. If there’s one thing you can set your clock by, it’s that Mikey Lindstrom won’t lie to you.”

  “We brought food,” Mikey said, and Paige held up the leftovers as evidence. “When was the last time you ate?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t feel much like eating. I’ll probably just have another drink and call it a night.”

  “Not happening. You’re cut off for tonight.”

  A single tear worked its way down the older man’s cheek. “I did something stupid.”

  “We all do stupid shit. It’s not the first time, Gunth, and it probably won’t be the last. Hey, I put on a pair of rubber boots the other day and got into a kayak. Now, that was really stupid. Whatever stupid thing you did, it couldn’t be as bad as that.”

  Gunther sniffed. “You mean them ugly-ass rubber boots you wear fishing?”

  “Those would be the ones. Not only did I wear ‘em, but I did it in front of a woman.”

  Gunther’s gaze returned to her. The haze caused by booze and pot and psychosis wasn’t enough to cover the shrewdness in his eyes. He studied her, then his head swiveled back to Mikey. “Jesus,” he said.

  “Exactly. You getting hungry yet?”

  Gunther drew in a raspy breath and scrubbed at his cheek with a bony hand. “I could probably eat something.”

  “I figured you could. Let’s go on out to the kitchen. We’ll put on a big pot of coffee, heat up these chicken wings, and then we’ll talk about it.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS A coziness to being alone with him, in the dark, in the cab of his truck, that brought back memories of that aborted elopement all those years ago. The cross-country trip in a rusty Ford pickup, and the planned stop in Vegas to get married, had been the adventure of a lifetime to a seventeen-year-old girl in love. It had all come to a crashing end when his truck quit and they ran out of money somewhere in the Midwest. That was when she’d come to her senses and realized that their plans simply weren’t feasible. They were too young. She hadn’t even graduated from high school yet. The whole thing had ended badly, but the boy, and the trip—right up until the moment when the truck died—had been the culmination of a young girl’s romantic dreams.

  She lay her cheek against the vinyl upholstery. Studying the clean line of his jaw, she said softly, “You think he’ll sleep?”

  “He’ll sleep. He always does after an episode like this.”

  They’d poured enough coffee down Gunther’s throat to keep an entire Army platoon awake for three days. It hadn’t done much to sober him up. He’d spilled his tale of woe, and after a mix of sympathy and recrimination, Mikey had finally talked him into going to bed, where he instantly started snoring loudly enough to shake the rafters. “How often does this happen?” she said.

  The lights from a passing vehicle moved across his face, emphasizing his prominent cheekbones. “Not that often,” he said. “Believe it or not, more than half the time, he’s the one taking care of me, and I’m the one getting the lecture.”

  “Considering that she won’t even read his letters, phoning her probably wasn’t the best judgment call he’s ever made.”

  “I’ve tried to tell him he needs to back off. Let it go. She knows where he is. If she has any interest at all in reconnecting with him, she knows where to find him.”

  They drove in silence for a while. Still studying his profile, she said, “I can’t believe you did what you did.”

  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple riding up and down. Said, “What?”

  “Don’t be coy with me, Lindstrom. You know exactly what. You stepped in front of me. If he’d pulled the trigger, he would have shot you.”

  “Gunther wouldn’t shoot me.”

  “I’m glad one of us is that confident. You would’ve taken a bullet for me. Why the hell would you do that?”

  “I’m a Marine. It’s what we do.”

  “This isn’t the Marines. We’re not at war here. This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. I can’t imagine doing something like that.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said, “by the things you’ll do when you have no choice.”

  “You had a choice.”

  “That’s your perception of the situation. And you’re entitled to it. But it doesn’t happen to coincide with mine.”

  “It’s not your job to protect the entire world, Mikey. Nobody woke up one morning and appointed you official caretaker.”

  “Again, your perception.”

  “It’s too much to take on your shoulders while you’re still healing.”

  “I’m healed.”

  “I didn’t mean physically.”

  “My shoulders are broad. Look—” He punctuated his words with a quick glance in her direction. “It’s just the way I’m wired.”

  She wondered what had happened in his early development to wire him that way.

  He must have read her mind. “I took care of my mother,” he said. “From the time I was a young kid.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She never drank in front of me, and I was too young to understand what was going on. But I knew something was wrong. Sometimes, she acted perfectly normal. The rest of the time, she was sick. Things were off. I also learned early that this wasn’t something we shared with Dad. He must have known, on some level. But she did a good job of hiding it, so maybe he really didn’t know. But I understood, early on, that I was all she had. Dad was…not there emotionally. I think he felt trapped. There was no great love between them. But I loved her. And I didn’t want her to be sick. So I took care of her, as well as a kid can do.”

  “That’s heartbreaking.”

  “It’s life. Stuff happens. To all of us. You either learn and grow from it, or you let it destroy you.”

  “And you grew.”

  “I survived. After she left, Dad raised me to be responsible. To understand my duty to my family, my school, my community.”

  The light bulb went on over her head. “Football. You were the star quarterback.”

  “That, among other things. Yeah, I loved football, and I wasn’t immune to the ego boost I got from it, although I never let it go to my head. But mostly, playing was a responsibility. I was good at it, and I knew the school, the entire town, depended on me to play the best damn game I could possibly play. To win. To keep winning. There’s no way I could’ve quit, even if I’d wanted to. Because I would have let down all those people who were counting on me.”

  “Jesus, Mikey. When did you get the chance to just be a kid?”

  His face lit up. “After my grandparents sold the house to Dad and moved to Arizona, I used to spend a month with them every summer. They spoiled me rotten. Grandma took me to the pool whenever I wanted to go. Grampa and I camped out in the desert. The rest of the time, I just ran loose with other kids my age. They lived in this little desert town where nothing much ever happened, and we were safe running around like that. Nobody worried about where I was or when I’d be home, because everybody watched out for everybody’s else’s kids. It was the most incredible freedom I’ve ever known. Four weeks of bliss, every summer.”

  “And then you came home and got boxed right back into your preplanned role.”

  “It wasn’t as bad as you make it sound.”

  “That’s why you joined the military. Why you picked the Marine Corps instead of the Army or the Navy. Because they were looking for a few good men. And you knew you were one of them.”

  “If you say so.”

  It explained a lot about him, about his relationship with Gunther, about his protective instincts. She’d thought she knew him, but in reality, he was a stranger. A good-looking, kind, complex stranger who thought he was Superman. Mikey Lindstrom wanted to save the world. But who would save him?

  He pulled the truck into his driveway, parked beside her little yellow car, and turned off the engine.
“I’m sorry,” he said, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. He flexed his fingers, then returned them to the wheel. “About the gun. I had no idea. If I had, I wouldn’t have taken you there.”

  “It’s all right. I mean, it wasn’t all right while it was happening, but it ended okay.”

  “I’d never let anybody hurt you.”

  With a buoyancy she was far from feeling, she said, “It’s a little too late for that.”

  “Legend wasn’t good enough for you, Paige. The guy was a weasel. You could do so much better. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but he did you a favor.”

  “I loved him.”

  “I know.”

  The darkness enveloped them, silent and fraught with something inexplicable, something that lent reluctance to their parting. Their eyes met and held. How had they wound up here, in this dangerous place? Hours ago, this place hadn’t even existed. “I should go,” she said, and reached for the door handle. “Thank you.”

  “For?”

  “For not letting Gunther shoot me. For letting me inside your head for a little while. For being my cheerleader in times of trouble.”

  “Happy to be of service.”

  She opened the door, slid down from the cab, found her footing. “Goodnight,” she said.

  “Goodnight, Paige.”

  She slammed the door shut and walked to her car. Unlocked the door and got in. Her breathing was labored, her heart tripping along at twice its normal speed. Paige fitted the key into the ignition and started up the car. The night had turned cool, and she raised the convertible top. She shot a glance at his truck. He was still sitting behind the wheel, watching her. One word—the right word—and she would have stayed.

  It would be a mistake of epic proportions. She needed to get away, needed space, needed time. Space, so that she wouldn’t do something life-altering and idiotic. Time, so that she could pull her thoughts together, tether them in place and try to make sense of the Something that lay between the two of them.