by J. H. Croix
“Sure thing,” I replied, feeling a pang of worry creeping up on me over that kid who was a stranger to me. It happened sometimes, the irrational fear for the circumstances of children I didn’t even know. I suppose it was bound to if you were constantly on the lookout for signs that a child was going through what I’d gone through. It was bound to happen when you tried to be the adult who actually could identify what was going on and try to help. There hadn’t been an adult like that around for me, and I’d be damned if some kid was looking up at me, silently begging for help without being seen. I knew all too well what that felt like.
He didn’t say anything else as he finished his fries and paid, packed up his stuff, and left through the glass front door, the bell jingling as the door closed behind him. It was the only cheery sound in the quiet diner as I cleaned up for closing. By the time I got home after my shift, the kid was still in the back of my mind, but he couldn’t be the child I focused on. When I stepped through the front door of the small home I rented, there was only one child who deserved my attention, and she would get it.
“Mommy’s home,” I called as I walked across the threadbare rug in our entrance hall, though calling it a hall of any kind was being generous. I deposited my keys in a basket on the shelf next to the door when I heard Emery cry out.
“Mommy’s home, Mommy’s home!” She came charging around the corner from our living room with energy only a six-year-old could muster, her auburn curls flying.
Dropping my purse, I scooped her up in my arms and hugged her tightly, peppering the top of her head with kisses. “How’s my baby girl doing?”
“I’m not a baby, Mommy,” she pouted, pulling away from me to cup my face in her paint-covered hands. It was going to take a good scrubbing to get the swirls of blue and green off both of us later on, but I didn’t care.
Emery was my whole world. It wouldn’t be long before I couldn’t scoop her up like that anymore and until I would be wishing for the days of having those painted hands all over my face.
I smiled at her, pressing a quick kiss to her forehead as she started squirming to get down. “Oh, I’m sorry, my big girl. How was your day?”
“Lori and I painted after school,” she explained with a proud nod. “I made a unicorn for you to ride to work on.”
My heart squeezed as I looked into her bright green eyes. She was too young to be worrying about how I got to work, yet too smart for me to hide that our car was old and forever right on the cusp of starting for the last time.
I brushed my fingers through her silky hair and blinked away tears that pressed hot at the back of my eyes. “Thank you, sweetie. I love unicorns.”
“I’ll go fetch her. Her name is Glitter.” Emery sprinted away again, leaving me to kick off my shoes.
Looking up, I found Lori leaning against the wall at the corner Emery had just rounded. A sympathetic smile touched her lips. “Rough day?”
I nodded. “My shifts were tougher than usual today with it being Friday. The week is always one day too long.”
“Good thing you have the weekend to recover,” she said, blowing her blue-black fringe out of her eyes. Lori was the kind of girl who drew attention on the streets in a place like Cypress Creek. Not because she was beautiful, though to me she was, but because it never crossed her radar to try to fit into anyone’s mold other than her own.
Her fashion sense was bold and quirky. In an old, faded band shirt and washed-out black skinny jeans with tears at the knees, Lori looked like a rebellious groupie. Looks were deceiving in her case, though. She was one of the most responsible people I knew with a huge heart. She was my best friend, and frankly, I didn’t know what the hell I would do without her. “How was Em today?”
Lori’s blue eyes brightened. “She had a blast painting. Her teacher was right. There’s definitely an artist in there somewhere.”
Lori was as biased about Emery as I was, but I truly was blessed to have such a creative daughter. I beamed at Lori. “Thanks for watching her. I have no idea how we’d survive without you.”
Shrugging, she smiled and shook her head. “You’re a supermom. You would’ve figured something out. Lucky for you, you’ll never have to figure it out. I’m not going anywhere.”
I laced my fingers together and flashed a tired smile. “And you have no idea how grateful I am for that.”
Lori watched Emery for me every day after school until I got home from work. She crossed her arms and gave me a long once-over. “I’m worried about you. You look exhausted. You’re working too hard. Working two jobs isn’t sustainable. You can’t keep this up.”
Sighing, I chewed on my bottom lip and shrugged. “I don’t have a choice. The janitorial work pays for our rent and utilities, while the waitressing puts food in the fridge and clothes on our backs.”
“You need to find a job that will make things easier on you,” she said gently, her brow furrowing as she regarded me.
“I would, but I don’t have time,” I replied. A while ago, I was on the lookout for a new job but between sending in applications and going for interviews, I couldn’t get to my existing jobs. “I need both jobs to cover everything. I can’t let go of one of them while I look for something else.”
“I know, and I get it. I just worry.” Pushing away from the wall, she disappeared into the living room, and I heard the low murmur of her saying goodbye to Emery. I was hanging my jacket when Lori returned with her purse. “I have to go, but call me if you need anything over the weekend, okay?”
“Okay, but you know I won’t.” Lori did enough for me already. Asking her for more would feel like taking advantage.
She gave me a quick hug and called another goodbye to Emery. “I know, but I’ll keep offering anyway. I’ll speak to you later?”
“Sure. Thanks again for watching her.”
Lori winked. “All in a day’s work. It’s no problem.”
After Lori left, I fixed dinner while Emery chatted a mile a minute in the kitchen. She told me all about her day, her friends, and painting with Lori. Even though I was beyond tired, I enjoyed every minute with Emery and laughed at a few of her dramatic retelling of small events in her day.
When she started winding down after we ate, the two of us went to the living room where she crawled onto the couch with me and snuggled up beside me. Glancing down, I found her staring intently at me. “What are we going to do this weekend?”
“Whatever you want,” I promised her. I tried to devote most of my time over weekends to her, but occasionally, errands would get in the way. “We have no adult stuff to do this weekend, so you get to decide.”
She sat up, her eyes widening. “Really? It’s been forever since I got to decide.”
“It’s been two weeks,” I told her, laughing. “But it does feel like longer.”
“It feels like forever,” she said, dragging her words out before telling me how she wanted to paint a friend for Glitter.
“If that’s what you want to do, then that’s what we’re doing.” In-between our sentences, her eyes were drooping. She was like that—wide awake one minute, dropping to sleep the next. I glanced at my watch and saw it was nearing her bedtime. “Let’s get you ready for bed, it’s almost time.”
Emery looked like she wanted to protest but nodded and took my hand to follow me to the bathroom. Once we were both in our pajamas with our teeth brushed and our faces washed, which took longer than usual thanks to the paint, we went back to the living room.
“What do you want to watch?” I asked her, settling her under a pink blanket she’d had since birth and refused to part with.
She scrunched up her nose as she thought, holding her hand in front of her mouth. Choosing the movie on Friday nights was a serious thing for her. Since I limited her television time, Friday nights were the only guaranteed movie she would get to watch for the week. She would likely fall asleep halfway through, if not sooner.
Finally, she made her decision. “The one with the dragon.”
&
nbsp; We’d watched the movie so many times, I knew exactly what she was talking about. “You got it.”
I queued the movie up to play and settled in under a blanket of my own. Emery wasn’t the only one who might fall asleep before the movie ended. As it was, I was running on fumes, my eyelids weighted.
Emery was sure to have me running around by the crack of dawn. I really needed to get a little sleep before that happened.
Chapter Three
Evan
Sitting bolt upright in my bed, my heart pounded and my head spun.
Alone. I was all alone in my bedroom.
My curtains rippled in a breeze coming in from outside, parting to reveal the early morning sun cast across the yard, light glistening on the dewy grass. I slid my eyes to the clock on my nightstand, falling back onto my bed when I saw it was only seven thirty. On a freaking Saturday.
Staring up at the ceiling, I listened to the soft, consistent drone of the air conditioning while I waited for my heart to stop racing. Rolling over, I punched my pillow into submission and wondered what the hell had woken me up.
On weekdays, I made a point of getting into the shop early. Often, I was there before the sun rose. The same was true for weekends when I had to work.
Over the rare weekend I didn’t work, I slept in. Or I tried to unless I woke up as I just had, feeling like I’d been ripped from a nightmare. It was a weird feeling since I didn’t even remember dreaming and couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually had a nightmare.
I was drifting off again when my phone started ringing. A hard rock song I liked up until that very minute blared out in my room, bouncing off the walls and giving a thud to my developing headache. I groaned, throwing my arm out to silence the thing. Whoever was trying to get ahold of me could wait. There was nothing I could do for anyone at seven thirty on a Saturday morning that I couldn’t also do at nine.
The room barely descended back into its peaceful silence when my phone went off again. Frustrated, I reached for it blindly and croaked my greeting into it. “What?”
“Good morning Mr. Lovett. You have a collect call from the Cypress Creek Penitentiary. Do you…” The voice was way too chirpy for me. I didn’t need to hear the rest of it to know what my answer was going to be.
“No, I don’t accept the charges.” I hung up without another word. I lay back on my bed and tried to get back to that place I was only a few seconds ago where going back to sleep was inevitable.
Unfortunately, I was too awake. There was no drifting off. Frustration pricked at me, unease rolling through me. Suddenly uncomfortable as all hell, I got up and took a long shower. No matter how many times I washed, I couldn’t shake my unease.
I dallied in the shower as if the hot water itself could chase away whatever was weighing on me. The whole business with my dad was pissing me off and getting annoying. I had no idea why my dad would think I would answer his calls.
Jeremy, my second youngest brother, went to see our dad fairly regularly. He’d even gone to him for help when Jeremy’s fiancée and her son were being stalked by her ex. I was still sketchy on the exact details, but it seemed like our father had been of some kind of assistance to him in that situation—until my father’s dodgy history caught up with Jeremy
It had resulted in Marie’s ex being murdered by characters looking for money my dad had stolen. Funny thing was, the guys who killed the ex apparently did it because they thought he was Jeremy’s friend since he was around Jeremy and Marie so often. Stalking her. Making her life a living hell with a frivolous court case to win custody of their son where he lied through his teeth.
The murderers thought they would scare Jeremy into leading them to the money they claimed they were owed. We learned later that they hadn’t wanted to come after any of us to ‘take us out permanently’ only because they didn’t know which one of the five of us knew what. They didn’t want to risk offing the brother who might end up having what they wanted.
Sonny, our youngest brother, was a cop. Jeremy eventually told him what was going on with our father’s business associates who had kept popping up everywhere, and Sonny had arranged for Jeremy to help the police with a sting operation to catch the guys responsible for the murder.
That was the kind of bullshit mess our father had left behind. We’d be dodging the shady characters he stole from for years probably. A bitter taste crept onto the back of my tongue. Why the hell would I answer his calls?
Despite everything that happened, Jeremy still visited him. If our father needed anything, he could easily ask Jeremy.
Sonny also got down to the prison occasionally. Unlike the rest of us, Sonny believed our father might be innocent. He was convinced our father might’ve been set up as a fall guy for a much bigger illegal operation. As much as I loved Sonny, he was delusional if he thought our father was innocent. Just because other people might have been involved behind the scenes didn’t absolve our father of guilt.
The facts were simple. Our dear father was an esteemed member of the Cypress Creek community. He was revered and respected and even managed to get himself elected to local office and then to state office. He had all the money a man could need, but it wasn’t enough for him.
In a monumentally stupid move, the man I’d once thought was intelligent got caught and locked up for extortion, theft, and all those other clichéd crimes. He was the stereotype of a crooked politician. The trial had been a damn nightmare for us to have lived through. My brothers and I had to face the withering public exposure, the loss of our family’s standing, and complete financial ruin. All that only a few years after our mother had passed away. In short, it sucked.
Tyson, our oldest brother, was a district attorney and part of the team who had prosecuted our father. That little tidbit was like fodder for the press to eat up. He’d sure earned a reputation for himself as a DA for that case, but I knew it all still haunted him.
Beau recovered the fastest after the whole fiasco went down, publicly at least. But he had always been the kind of guy who came up smiling, no matter what kicked him down. He put it behind him, and as far as I knew, he’d never looked back.
Jeremy changed after everything happened. He kept his head down and worked hard, just like me. It was only after he met Marie that I saw the man he used to be slowly resurface. Without Marie, I wasn’t so sure Jeremy would have bounced back. He’d idolized our father, as we all had, and it had hit him hard to have that image tarnished so completely.
As for Sonny, he’d faced the toughest scrutiny. The cops he worked with still didn’t trust him fully. How could they? Rumors had run rampant that we had to have known what our father had been doing. Sonny was staring down colleagues who arrested men like our father, and he had to work with them day in and day out.
Yet Sonny was determined to find out the “truth” about what happened with our father. He’d damn near gotten himself killed over it and ended up stumbling face-first into a case handled by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Yet another politician was up to no good. Shocker. Although I hadn’t talked at length to Sonny about it, I knew the man they were sniffing after was suspected of having connections to our father.
Tyson, Beau, and I had never been to see dad in prison and didn’t plan on it. I hadn’t spoken to my father in over in a year. I wasn’t about to start then. He had two sons who regularly visited him, and he could call them if he needed anything, two sons who, despite every warning and every hardship they’d suffered because of him, chose to speak to him.
He didn’t need me. Thankfully.
I finally shut off the shower and got dressed. When I checked my phone before heading to the kitchen for breakfast, there was a message from Sonny asking if I wanted to meet him for pancakes in thirty minutes.
I tapped out my reply—I was always up for pancakes—and took off to meet him. Sonny was already at the diner when I got there, sitting at a table on the sidewalk under a big green umbrella. He was wearing dark sunglasses and grinned when he saw m
e, pushing a waiting cup of coffee to my side of the table.
“Well, well.” He smirked. “Look at what the cat dragged in. You look way too pissed off for this time of the morning or for being, well, you.”
I laughed dryly. Among my brothers, I had a reputation as being the chilled, laid-back one. I used to be something of a hothead, but I’d learned to let things roll off my back instead of letting them get to me.
“Dad’s been trying to call me,” I told Sonny, being completely straight. He already knew something was up with me, so I didn’t see any sense in avoiding it.
Sonny’s brows shot together, a furrow appearing between them. “Did you answer?”
“What do you think?” I dropped my chin and shot him a defiant look.
“You didn’t answer.” It wasn’t a question. Good man.
“I didn’t, and I don’t plan to.”
He frowned. “You should. It could be something important.”
“If it were important, he would’ve phoned you,” I pointed out.
“Not necessarily. Dad knows I’m still looking for Ken. He also knows I’ve made detective. Both of which could be reasons why he wouldn’t want to talk to me about some things.”
Sonny wasn’t entirely wrong. Ken was the big bad corrupt politician the GBI was trying to catch. Thanks to Sonny’s efforts, the town learned that our former chief of police was in his pocket. However, at the chief’s first court appearance, he killed himself. Right there in the freaking courtroom. Sonny was convinced Ken was responsible for the chief’s suicide and had arranged for him to be supplied with a weapon.
After it happened, Ken had approached Sonny in the courthouse and delivered a thinly veiled threat. I lifted a brow at Sonny, watching him scowl into his coffee. “You’re still after Ken?”
“Of course I am,” he said. A waitress approached our table and took our order. When she was gone, Sonny turned back to me. “My promotion to detective means I get to investigate on a much more official level. I know what Ken looks like now, but if Dad has any information on him, it could be useful. If he calls again, maybe you should answer.”