The Ground Beneath (You and Me Book 1)

by Stephanie Vercier

  “I appreciate this,” he says when the waitress takes our menus away, a steaming cup of coffee in front of him. “I know you felt kind of pressured to come, but it really does mean a lot to me. It’s been really strange around here since you left.”

  Forcing a smile, I say, “Well, it’s only been a month, Micah. And I really don’t think I had that much of a presence in town.”

  “But you did.” He leans forward. “At least for me… and your parents of course. They really miss you, can’t wait for you to come back.”

  “I don’t know that I’ll be coming back,” I say honestly, already anxious for Hunter to return and pick me up, now unsure if he’ll be able to meet my parents like I’d planned. “But I am less than two hours away.”

  He swallows hard and cups his hands around the small coffee cup. “I don’t get much time off, but I’d love to see you in Seattle… that is… if you’d like to see me?”

  Oh, no.

  “I don’t think that’s a great idea, Micah,” I say in a voice I try to keep both strong and compassionate. “I’m so sorry my parents have sucked you into this belief that we should be together—the pressure they’re putting on you isn’t fair.”

  He looks surprised, stunned even, opens his mouth to say something, then closes it just as quickly and eases back into his seat.

  And I realize, of course, he doesn’t seem to mind the pressure at all. He wants us together, even if maybe it’s just to make something good come out of something so bad as his brother dying.

  I reach my hand across the table and take his because I can’t stand the idea he might be hurting. He was Wyatt’s brother after all. “I’m so sorry, Micah. I really am thankful for all that you’ve done for me and my family, but I’m afraid it would just be too weird, you know, to date you when I was with your brother?”

  “But not too weird to date Hunter Lawrence if you wanted to?” He’s returned the hold on my hand with a tight grip.

  I shake my head. “No. Quite frankly, it’s not. He doesn’t have anything to do with our families.”

  “But he’s from this county, from Mountainside. If you were just trying to get away from this place and start fresh, then why tempt yourself being so close to a guy like that? I mean, are you with him, Allison? Have you let him touch you?”

  It takes a fair amount of strength to pull my hand from his grip. “What business is that of yours?”

  He lets out a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry, okay? Yeah, you’re parents have been building things up, telling me to get some alone time with you today. If I knew it was just going to upset you, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “I’m not… I’m not upset.” That’s not exactly true, but at the moment, it’s more because of my parents than Micah. “Why don’t we just try to start over? We can talk about Wyatt, like you said. And maybe Abe too.”

  “And Olivia? Are you ready to talk about her?”

  It actually takes me a moment to register the name, to believe he’d actually said it. Olivia is not a name spoken around me often, not since the accident, not since I found out just what my new husband had been up to. Our food arriving gives me more time to consider, more time to try to decide just why Micah uttered her name. Is he trying to hurt me? Or does he actually believe ignoring the woman will never allow me to truly heal?

  “She moved to the Tri-Cities not long after you left town,” he says, digging into his omelet. “Richland I think. She should have left a hell of a lot earlier than that if you ask me, you having to run into her at the grocery store or the post office. Just the thought of you being subjected to that has always made me sick.”

  “She’s gone?” I don’t pay any attention to the food in front of me, my mind still catching up to the idea that Olivia Robison, the woman who’d played a pivotal role in making my world crumble around me, is out of Coalton.

  Micah takes a drink of coffee to wash down the food he’d just put in his mouth. Then he smiles. “I put some pressure on her, nothing that would get me in trouble, but just enough to get her to reevaluate her living situation. Her dad’s kind of a drunk, you know? He’s had his scrapes with the law, and I told her I was keeping an extra eye on him.”

  “Are you saying you forced her to leave town?” I probably wanted Olivia gone more than anyone else had. At my worst, I’d been tempted to let go of all decorum and give physical violence a shot, but months after Wyatt and Abe’s deaths, I’d learned to deal with her close proximity, taught myself how to ignore her, to remind myself she’d not acted alone, that she wasn’t the only person to blame.

  “Yeah.” Micah actually laughs, his smile growing wider, more food and coffee going into his mouth.

  He thinks he’s done me a favor, that this will win him points. But it doesn’t. It only makes me surer that the wariness I’d always felt around Micah was for good reason. I’m not sure what to say, though, how to convey to him that what he’d done probably wasn’t okay, but a familiar voice saves me from having to figure it out.

  “Allison Briggs? I thought that was you.”

  I look up to see the one-time editor for our school newspaper and current reporter for The Mountain Gazette, Daniella Schaffer, standing at the end of our table. She looks just as I remember her, dirty blonde hair pulled back from her face with a few loose tendrils escaping. She’s only a couple years older than I am, but the way the features of her face are arranged has always made her look older and so much more serious.

  “Hi, how are you?” I say, glad for the interruption, even if it’s Daniella, just one more person from Coalton who’d breached my trust.

  “Oh, I’m okay. I didn’t realize you were back in town.” She nods at Micah. “Sheriff.”

  “Just for a few hours actually. I’ll be heading back to Seattle as soon as my ride gets here.” I’m not sure how long the appointment for Hunter’s father is gong to take, but it feels like the end of it can’t come soon enough.

  “Well, that’s too bad. I was actually hoping to talk to you about something.” She raises her brows at me, a hopeful glint in her eye.

  There’s good reason why she should only be hoping I’ll talk to her. She’d sensationalized my brother and Wyatt’s accident and their deaths, using the tragedy to sell newspapers and increase traffic to the paper’s website. The story had even been picked up nationally as the perfect click-bait headline for websites, small town football hero dying in a tragic accident on his wedding day, brother of the bride dying with him, rumors of infidelity swirling all around. I was sure Daniella had been ecstatic that her stories received so much attention.

  “I suppose I could after I finish here.” Agreeing is one way to get this meal with Micah to speed up. It might be a case of jumping from the frying pan and into the fire, but I’m actually looking forward to being strong enough to shut Daniella down if she tries dragging a few quotes out of me the way she did when I’d been in the depths of despair.

  “That would be great! I’ll be in my office, still the same old building. Come on over after you’re done, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agree.

  “See you later, Sheriff,” she says.

  “Sure.” He doesn’t turn to look when she heads toward the counter to pick up a to-go order.

  “You sure you want to talk to her?” Micah wipes his mouth with his napkin, then eases back again, as if he’s lost his appetite. “I don’t think anything good can come of it.”

  I shrug, finally taking a quick bite of my fruit and then drinking down some orange juice. “I’m not the same weak girl I was after the accident. She’s not going to get anything over on me this time. And I guess I’d like to see what she has to say. Who knows… she might just want to apologize.”

  Micah laughs again, though it’s not with amusement. “Doubtful. Hasn’t she hurt you enough?”

  “You going to run her out of town too?” I say it with sarcasm, not at all meaning it to be taken seriously.

  “I’d do anything for you, Allison,” Micah says, so seriou
s that it’s frightening, before he goes back to eating.

  I check my phone just before I walk into the old Gazette building. I’d convinced Micah that I was fully capable of navigating the two blocks by myself. He’d again cautioned me on meeting with Daniella, trying to remind me I didn’t need the stress. But he was stressing me out too, his quest to rid Coalton of anyone that offended me more than just a little over the top. And when he rather unexpectedly hugged me just outside the diner, I slipped out of the embrace as fast as I could.

  There are no messages from Hunter yet, and I’m tempted to be the one to text him, to ask when he thinks he might be here. But I don’t want to sound like I’m hurrying him along on his father’s appointment when I know it’s been a long time since they’ve seen one another. So, I open up the door and head up the stairs to Daniella’s office.

  The Mountain Gazette only employs a few people, Daniella the only full time reporter. It used to put out a daily paper, but now it only produces two weekly editions, Wednesday and Sunday, more timely news being reported on the paper’s website. During my senior year of high school, Daniella had come to me with an offer for a part time job, a “junior reporter” she called it—she was two years ahead of me and had been the editor of our school paper my sophomore year. Her offer meant she believed in my journalistic skills, and I’d be able to work while I went to Coalton Community College. I’d jumped at the opportunity and would have started work there last fall.

  But that changed after the accident, after Daniella decided to turn the events of my wedding day into a three-ring circus.

  The door to the second floor of the building is wide open. Daniella’s desk and that of Mr. Turner, the ancient editor and current owner of the paper, sit in different corners, while a few other desks for part time employees are in the middle of the large room. It’s disorganized and even a little bit messy, but it seems to suit the place. Daniella is the only one in the office, hunched over her computer and eating out of the to-go box she’d picked up at the diner.

  “Hey.” I knock on the open door before walking in, and she immediately turns in my direction, mid bite of something.

  She finishes chewing, then wipes her lips and stands up. “Oh, I’m so glad you came! Come on over and have a seat.”

  I want to say something like I think I’ll stand actually, but I don’t. I just walk over to her and take the seat across from her, trying to remember how we used to be friends, how I used to look up to this woman.

  “Can I get you something? Coffee? Tea? Water?”

  “No thanks. I’ve had plenty to drink already.”

  “Oh, of course, at the diner. No surprise seeing Micah dote on you. He’s been a fixture in your and your parents’ lives ever since—”

  “I don’t really want to talk about Micah,” I tell her, imagining her reporter mind speculating about my relationship with him. “You said there was something you wanted to discuss, and I don’t have a lot of time.”

  She sighs, blinks, and then nods. “Absolutely. I’ll get right to the point.” She rifles through a stack of newspapers on her desk, takes a slightly yellowed one out, opens it up to the inside, folds it over and hands it to me. “Have you ever seen this before?”

  I take the paper, my eyes drawn to a story that takes up about a quarter of the page. Local Teacher Among Victims in Deadly Car Accident, reads the headline. “Am I supposed to know this story?” My breath catches briefly at even the mention of a fatal crash.

  “We all know this story,” she says, stretching her finger across and tapping it on the page. “It’s Hunter Lawrence’s mother and aunt there—it’s about the car accident that killed them twenty years ago.”

  “Oh.” My heart skips several beats, my stomach starting to ache. It’s one thing to be aware of something happening, but it’s another to be so close to the details. And it’s especially heartbreaking considering my feelings for Hunter.

  “Happened on the highway south of town, Allison, not more than a half a mile from the spot where Abe and Wyatt went off the road.”

  I’d not even read the first line of the article when that stomachache turns into a heavy weight. I look up at Daniella. “What do you want from me? Is this your way of making me re-live that day all over again?”

  “No, not at all! I never wanted to hurt you with any of my reporting, Allison. I was only doing my job, getting to the truth.”

  She and I have had this conversation before, about what kind of reporting was necessary and what kind of reporting crossed the line. She believed it was journalistic integrity that guided her to tell every facet of my tragedy, something I’ll never agree with her on.

  “But this has nothing to do with that,” she continues. “It’s more… well… for one, it was Wyatt and Abe’s accident that got me thinking about the one that killed Hunter Lawrence’s mother and aunt all those years ago. I finally did some digging in the archives, found some similarities, but it’s what I didn’t find that got me really thinking.”

  There’s so much going through my head that I can’t quite think straight. The only thing that’s really bubbling to the surface right now is the fact that Daniella is asking me anything at all to do with Hunter Lawrence. “What do I have to do with Hunter?” I ask, deciding Daniella wouldn’t have me in this office right now, wouldn’t be talking about his mother’s accident if she didn’t think I could get information out of him, couldn’t fill in some blanks for her.

  She lowers her gaze, and for the first time today, she looks guilty. “I read about Hunter volunteering at Children’s Hospital in Seattle. There were pictures, and you were there. I didn’t have to do more than a few clicks to figure out you’re working for his agent, Sheila Andrews. She was once a friend of the family, right?”

  I don’t offer her anything but silence.

  “You know, I was actually going to run a special interest story on it. The locals would love to see Hunter stepping up and doing something really good with his fame, and your connection to him would have been the icing on the cake. But seems like everyone but me missed finding that photo of you with him, so I figured I’d keep it to myself, that I owed you some privacy.”

  “And you want my thanks for that?”

  “No. I just want you to listen to me. I want you to take seriously the questions I’d like to pose to you.”

  “About the accidents,” I say. “What, are you going to try to make something out of their similarities, that they took two irreplaceable lives each?”

  “Well, there is something strange about the similarities,” she says. “If you read the reports, there aren’t the type of skid marks you’d expect for either of them, and—”

  “Please, Daniella. I don’t want to hear the specifics of how my brother and Wyatt died, okay?”

  “Fair enough,” she says, deflating a bit. “But will you at least hear me out about the first accident? You’ve got a sharp mind, and I’d love to bounce this off of you.”

  “Fine,” I relent. “Tell me.”

  Her eyes sparkle just the way they did when she was editor of the school paper and onto a good story. “Okay. Here’s the deal. There’s hardly any reporting at all on the accident that killed Hunter’s mom and aunt.” She points to the paper again that I’m holding. “I’ve researched all of the archives, and other than the obituaries, that’s the only story about that crash.”

  I’m about to argue that Hunter wasn’t famous then, that he was just a kid—there was no reason to put any extra weight on a story about two local women who were killed in a car accident. But then I remember we’re talking about a rural county where slow news days fill the calendar, where things that are mundane in Seattle get headlines here.

  “It should have been bigger news,” I say in agreement. “Considering the women were local, it should have gotten the front page, maybe even multiple times. A lot of people, especially in Mountainside, would have known them, would have been curious to know what had happened.”

  “Exactly! And
Hunter’s mother was a teacher, a very popular teacher. The Methodist church up in Mountainside that her funeral was held at keeps very detailed records of all their services, funerals, weddings and memorials, and Mrs. Lawrence’s funeral was packed to the rafters. Same thing goes for her sister’s funeral a few days later. These were women who meant a great deal to that town, to this entire county even, and all they get is a quarter page in the Gazette?”

  “It’s odd,” I admit, “but what are you trying to get at for the reason why? And if you’ve just brought this whole thing up because you want me to ask Hunter about it, then you’ll be disappointed. I’m not going to trudge that up for him.”

  “No, of course not! I don’t expect you to, but there are some serious questions that need to be asked here. When I brought it up to Mr. Turner, he told me to leave it alone, said I should let those women rest in peace. Can you believe that? What kind of news person dismisses a potential story?”

  Perhaps a person with decorum.

  “Maybe there’s good reason. What if Hunter’s dad asked him to keep things quiet out of respect, because he didn’t want the details of his wife’s death all over the newspaper?”

  She turns away at the look I’ve given her, one that is likely hard and accusatory, but then her eyes pop right back to me. “There’s something here, Allison, something rotten that I can smell a mile away.”

  “You can’t let it go, can you?” I rise from my chair, deciding that if I’m going to give any further thought to her suggestion about something being awry with that accident twenty years ago, it will be in my own time.

  “What can’t I let go?” she asks, standing up too.

  “The attention you got when Wyatt and my brother died. You loved it, especially when you brought Olivia into it. You didn’t have to do that, but you knew it would make your stories more salacious, that websites would pick up your bylines because your articles were like gossipy soap operas.”

  She crosses her arms over her chest and lifts her chin. “How could I not? Sure, it added another layer, but Olivia was one of the reasons they died. If your husband hadn’t been—”