by Bush, Nancy
When Emily started sneaking out, Jordanna had been torn. A part of her had been frightened because that was the way their mother had died: walking on a solo trip into the Cascades. The other part had cheered on her sister’s rebel spirit, something she hadn’t even known existed. Jordanna had talked to Kara about it, but Kara hadn’t really wanted to hear it.
“She’s seeing someone,” Kara had told her one night, when Jordanna had been in the bedroom she shared with her younger sister and they’d indulged in a tete-a-tete. “She’s always been crazy about guys. She’s screwing half the high school.”
“What! That’s not true,” Jordanna had sputtered. “You always say stuff like that!” Emily was the prettiest of them and Kara had always suffered jealousy over Emily’s looks. It came out in mean ways, and Jordanna refused to listen.
“Well, she’s got a boyfriend,” Kara had insisted.
“Good. Hope she does.” Then, when her younger sister had remained silent: “Who?”
“You think she’d tell me?” Kara had snorted.
“Then how do you know?”
“Because I’ve seen her sneak out with him. She’s not heading off into the mountains like Mom. She’s going the other way, down the driveway, bent over like she thinks that’ll hide her, or something. But I’ve seen her, and I’ve heard his car engine sometimes, too.”
“Does Dad know?” Jordanna had asked, seized with fear for her sister. She wasn’t sure she totally believed Kara, but she wanted as much information as she could garner, and if it was true, then there would be hell to pay with their father.
“If he did, he’d get the .22 out and shoot the bastard.”
“You’re nuts. Dad would never shoot anybody. Why do you think he’s a bastard?”
“Because he’s just using Emily.”
“Well, who is he?”
“I told you I don’t know,” Kara had snapped.
“You act like you know,” Jordanna had pointed out.
“Well, I don’t! But he’s using Emily. That’s what I know.”
“Can’t Emily just have a boyfriend? Someone who really likes her?”
“Maybe, but this one just wants to get into her pants. She’s pretty, and she doesn’t use her brains. She doesn’t have to, and she doesn’t. She uses sex, Jordanna. Wake up. You’re always so blind to her faults. Haven’t you seen the way she walks around? Like she’s begging for it?” Kara had then strutted across the room, exaggeratedly swiveling her hips and bending over suggestively.
“That’s not how she is,” Jordanna had declared witheringly.
“Oh, yes, it is. With my own eyes, I saw Martin Lourde stick his hands up her blouse and squeeze her boob.”
“You did not!” Jordanna had wanted to clamp her hand over her little sister’s mouth, afraid someone would overhear. “Where? When?”
“At the football game at Malone High last year. He was humping her against the snack shack after everybody was gone.”
“You’re full of it, Kara!”
“You just don’t want to believe me, but I saw them.” When Jordanna stood in silence, trying to assess the truth of Kara’s words, Kara had added, “You ever done that?”
“What? Let some guy . . .” Jordanna had broken off, staring at her little sister, who had been barely fourteen at the time, in a kind of suspended wonder. “No.”
“Well, I bet Emily does it all the time. She had her eyes closed and her mouth open and she was making these noises—”
“Stop!” Jordanna had clapped her hands to her ears, not sure whether to laugh or scream. “I don’t care. I don’t care!”
“She’s kind of a ho. That’s what I’m saying, but maybe she can’t help herself, y’know? Maybe it’s the Treadwell Curse.”
That was the first time Jordanna had heard anyone verbalize their family’s affliction aloud, and she hadn’t liked it. She’d slammed out of Kara’s bedroom. She hadn’t wanted to hear about her older sister’s sexual exploits, but more than that, she hadn’t wanted to hear about the disease that ran through their family. And though she’d reminded herself she didn’t believe anything Kara had to say, especially about Emily, she’d found herself observing her older sister more closely. Whenever Emily sleepwalked into her room and woke her, Jordanna didn’t drive her away any longer. Instead, she followed her around the house, realizing more often than not she would make her way out the front door to stand on the porch, her unseeing gaze focused down the long drive toward the road.
During Emily’s waking hours, Jordanna had tried to talk to her about her sleepwalking . . . and her sneaking out. In no uncertain terms, Emily had told Jordanna to mind her own business. When Jordanna said, “I’m just worried about you,” Emily had answered, “Don’t be. I’ve given myself to the Lord.”
This had been news, and then Jordanna had understood what she’d meant and said drily, “Oh. Martin Lourde?”
“Who?” Emily’s blue eyes had been blank.
“Kara saw you and him after a game last year, at the snack shack.” When Emily continued to look confused, she’d added, “You were making out and he was . . . all over you.”
“That wasn’t me. I’m not with him.”
“Kara said you were.”
“Well . . . oh . . . maybe . . . but not anymore . . .” She’d trailed off for a moment, frowning.
“Who are you with now, then?” Jordanna had pressed.
“I just told you.”
“The Lord?”
She’d looked at Jordanna, her eyes glowing as if lit from within. “Yes.”
“The Lord isn’t the one picking you up in a car,” Jordanna had pointed out drily.
“No . . .” And then a faint smile had crossed her lips at that, but she wouldn’t say anything more except, “You have to stop worrying about me. I’m on the path, and you and Kara need to be on it, too.”
The next day Jordanna had told Kara about what Emily had said, but Kara had shrugged and said, “You expected her to tell you who he is?”
For a while, Jordanna had tried to learn whom Emily was seeing, but then she’d begun having her own high school crush, a friend of Martin Lourde’s, Nate Calverson, and she’d lost interest in her sister’s romance. She’d been daydreaming about handsome, wealthy, athletic Nate, and working hard to find ways to “accidentally” run into him. This seemed to be a pattern, Jordanna could admit now with faint amusement, thinking of her behavior with Jay Danziger.
Luckily, nothing had ever come out of her teen obsession. Nate Calverson had ended up marrying Pru Briles, who had been rumored to be pregnant, though that was either small-town gossip or she’d miscarried because she hadn’t given birth in the allotted time frame. Nate had taken over the ranch, the biggest around, and that was saying something, as his father’s health had begun to decline. Jordanna wasn’t sure if Gerald Calverson was still alive or not. Martin Lourde had also followed into his father’s business, but they raised dairy cows and it wasn’t on the scale as the Calverson Ranch.
Jordanna’s crush on Nate had dissipated over time, and no other boys around Rock Springs had ever interested her. Somewhere in her junior year she began using her spare time for other endeavors, one of them being to learn how to shoot a gun. After school she would take the .22 out to the backyard and blast cans off fence posts. Shooting kind of relaxed her, even while her mind began coming up with stories that she would later write down. One such story, about a girl who was stalked and captured by a killer only to grab up his rifle and aim for him as he was running away, becoming a smaller and smaller dot on the horizon that she dead-eyed and shot squarely, intrigued her English teacher, who’d praised Jordanna’s writing style—and then asked if everything was all right at home.
Then came the night that she’d heard noises from her father’s bedroom, the kind of noises she imagined Emily and Martin Lourde making as he humped her against the snack shack wall, an image wholly in her mind that wouldn’t seem to go away. She picked up the .22 as a matter of course,
her heart pounding. Was her father with some woman? Should she care? Maybe it was best to just let it happen. Their mother had been gone for several years and there was nothing wrong with her father wanting some companionship—at least that was what everyone said.
But Jordanna had seen the way he looked at Jennie Markum when he didn’t think anyone was watching, and the way Jennie looked back. Rage and injustice bubbled through her blood, and though a cool part of her mind warned her that she was being irrational, that her father didn’t have to be true to their mother’s memory, that people moved on, the thought of him with Jennie burned into her brain and she was half convinced they were in bed together.
With her father and Jennie Markum’s images superimposed over the ones in her mind of Emily and Martin Lourde, Jordanna had quietly used one hand to push open the door to her father’s bedroom. In her head, she’d formed the words she was going to say: “Get the hell out of my father’s bed, you pious little ho.”
But the woman atop her father wasn’t Jennie Markum. Jordanna sensed it right away, and for a moment she stood there, blinking, her gun coming up almost of its own accord. The woman somehow sensed someone else was there—a subtle change in air pressure? A noise Jordanna didn’t hear?—and she suddenly whipped around, still astride Jordanna’s father. Emily! Her nightgown was hiked up to her thighs although her father was still in pajama bottoms, a piece Jordanna didn’t see in her moment of shock and outrage. “Dayton!” Emily had screamed at the same moment Jordanna, who’d lifted the gun sight to her eye, had aimed and fired.
If Emily hadn’t thrown herself sideways, Jordanna might have shot her sister. As it was, Dayton Winters took the bullet wound in his left shoulder.
Now, looking back, Jordanna wondered, as she always did, if she truly had lost her sanity just long enough to pull the trigger. She didn’t remember doing it at all. What she remembered was her sister with her father, the blam of the rifle, Emily’s screams as she awoke from another bout of sleepwalking, and then her fury as she’d realized what Jordanna had done. She’d continued screaming, shrieking bloody murder at Jordanna, while they’d both tried to staunch the flow of blood from their father’s wound.
Dayton had been taken to the hospital by ambulance. Though he hadn’t blamed Jordanna for the shooting, everyone else had. Before the ambulance arrived, her father had demanded Jordanna and Emily tell the same story: that Jordanna had mistaken her sleepwalking sister’s footsteps for those of an intruder, that she’d been certain someone else was in the room, choking her father, that it was all a terrible, terrible accident, and Jordanna had fired the gun to save her only living parent.
Kara had slept through the scene entirely, having taken a heavy dose of her mother’s sleeping medication, claiming afterward that she couldn’t bear the bad dreams she’d begun to suffer from. Even after Emily and Jordanna had shaken her, she’d barely managed to come to before the EMTs arrived.
Jordanna had struggled to recount her script when she was questioned by Chief Markum, which had left him to wonder about her even though his good friend, Dayton, insisted they were all telling the truth. Because of the two men’s friendship, the issue was dropped. When asked later, Jordanna would admit she’d shot her father with a .22. When asked why, she never fully explained because Emily and her father were both invested in the script, so people ended up thinking what they wanted. Some felt Dayton Winters’s middle daughter had a screw loose, and most of those whispered about the dread disease that followed their family.
In January of her senior year, Emily drove into the foothills and along the icy, ridge road that doomed her to her death when her car plunged over the edge, down a steep cliff side, rolling over several times. There was talk that she’d killed herself over a bad love affair; there was other talk that she’d inherited Gayle Treadwell’s fatal disease and decided to end her life early. Kara told Jordanna she believed foul play was involved, but she only had wild theories that couldn’t be proven. Eventually Emily’s death had been ruled an accident and labeled an unfortunate tragedy, the latest on a long list involving the Winters family. Over the years Jordanna had often recalled Emily’s assertion that she was “giving herself to the Lord,” and she still wondered what had really been going on in her sister’s life prior to her death. Had her sister lied about Martin Lourde? Had he really been her boyfriend, the one Kara had insisted she was involved with? Or, had fear of the Treadwell Curse had some bearing on the accident? Some kind of religious sacrifice to escape the dread disease that ran through their family like slow-acting poison? Or, was it, as it was classified, simply a case of an inexperienced driver on a treacherous ice-covered road?
She was still musing on her sister’s death when a couple walked through the swinging saloon doors and the man stopped short and declared, “I heard you were back in town.”
Jordanna swiveled around and stared at them. It took her a moment before she realized it was Nate Calverson and his wife, Prudence Briles.
Chapter Nine
Seeing Nate in the flesh, Jordanna couldn’t believe she’d ever had a crush on him. Looking over his cold eyes and smirky smile, she thought she must have been blinded by obsession. It sent a frisson down her back and she shivered a bit. And she didn’t think she would have recognized the big-busted woman, who clung to one of his arms as if she expected him to run away at the first opportunity, as the Prudence Briles she’d gone to school with, had she not been with him.
He aimed an imaginary rifle at her and made a soft “puh” sound with his lips as he squeezed the trigger. “Gotcha,” he said as Pru squeaked in protest.
“Nate,” she cried, scandalized.
Jordanna wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but settled on this being Nate’s politically incorrect way of connecting. “Want a drink?” she invited calmly, holding up her glass.
“We come for the little burgers and lemonade, I’m afraid,” Nate said, his smirk permanently etched on his face, apparently
“Little burgers as in sliders?” Jordanna suggested.
“That’s right,” Pru said, her gaze still lingering on her husband’s round face. “We all have lemonade as there’s no drinking at Green Pastures. Not that we would anyway.”
Jordanna met Nate’s eyes. There’d been a helluva lot of drinking when they were underage. “You belong to Green Pastures,” she said, recalling it was the church where her father and Jennie had married.
“Oh, yes,” Pru said eagerly. “You know Reverend Miles, I’m sure. He’s good friends with your father and Jennie.”
“Ah . . . well . . . I don’t keep up with their social life that much,” Jordanna admitted.
“Why is that?” Pru asked.
“Pru,” Nate admonished, trying to surreptitiously peel her hand from his elbow, which she was having none of. She was clamped on like a vise. “There’s bad blood between Jordanna and her father, don’t you remember?”
“Of course she remembers,” Jordanna said.
Pru looked trapped. “No, I don’t.”
“Pru, it’s okay.” Jordanna decided to be magnanimous. There was no escaping her past in Rock Springs. “Everybody remembers that I shot him.”
“Well, it was an accident,” Pru said, defending her as Jennie had, which was kind of surprising in itself.
Nate kept on smiling and said slowly, “Yeah, an accident.”
She didn’t remember Nate being such an out-and-out ass in high school, but then, she thought despairingly, she seemed to be continually fooled by good-looking men. Jay Danziger being no exception.
Not that Nate Calverson was so good-looking any longer. He’d definitely gone to seed over the years. The once-hot football player’s waist had expanded and his iron jaw was puffy and surrounded by a patchy light brown beard. His eyes had sunken and there was also something about him that made her think he might be tippling something a little stronger than lemonade behind his wife’s back.
Pru said, “You really shouldn’t talk like that, Jordanna. People
will get the wrong impression.”
“She knows exactly what she’s doing,” Nate said, eyes lasered on Jordanna. “She’s a reporter now. It’s all part of the game, isn’t it?”
“What game is that?” Jordanna asked.
“Acting like you don’t care. Like you’re above everything. You go run off from Rock Springs like we’re just small-town jerks out here, all hot to make your way in the newspaper world. How is it getting into other people’s lives and ripping ’em apart for a story?”
Pru was looking at Nate like she’d never seen him before.
“Not sure where you got that idea,” Jordanna said. “I’ve written some human interest stories.”
“That what you call them?” Nate retorted.
Jordanna wondered where this was coming from, and truthfully, he was really starting to piss her off. She’d steered clear of Rock Springs to avoid exactly these kinds of encounters. Turning to Pru, she said with false interest, “So how are the kids?”
“We’ve only been blessed with our Joshua,” Pru said. There was a touch of bitterness in her voice that she tried to hide by adding, “The Lord has His plan and He’s seen fit to enrich our lives with just one child, our sweet boy. You’re not married yet?”
“Nope.”
“Boyfriend?” she asked hopefully.
“Just an obsession . . . with work,” she tagged on, when Pru’s brow furrowed.
“You remember Martin Lourde,” Pru said, as if she’d just been waiting for a way to insert his name.
Martin Lourde . . . she hadn’t thought about him all that much until this afternoon’s reflection, but here his name was popping up again. “Ahhh . . . only by reputation. He was older than I was, my sister’s grade.” Taking a stab in the dark, she added, “Actually, Emily was dating him for a while.”