Prodigal

by TA Moore

  His voice was loud enough that a woman gave Boyd a sharp look as she caught the tinny tail end of Shay’s sentence. She pulled her phone out of her pocket to text as she walked away. Heat scalded Boyd’s cheeks, but he didn’t know if it was embarrassment or anger. He pressed the phone harder against his ear to muffle the other side of the conversation and picked up his pace as he headed for his pickup.

  “That’s not fair. You don’t know him.”

  “And you do?”

  No. Maybe. Not really, of course. Not like he knew everyone else he’d ever dated in town, from who their third-grade teacher was to the time they got arrested, drunk, out at the old mill… because everyone had done that. Boyd had no idea what Morgan had done or where he’d been, but he knew Morgan flushed like a kid when Boyd liked how he tasted and that he kissed Boyd like it meant everything… that he behaved like an asshole to push Boyd away and then second-guessed himself if he thought it worked.

  Boyd might not know Morgan, but he knew he liked him. That wasn’t any of Shay’s business, though. Not now, and not when he’d punched Boyd in the mouth.

  “I don’t know enough,” he admitted. “But at least I admit that. And anyhow, Sullivan didn’t break this story. He’s had bylines in the Washington Post. He doesn’t write for some true crime blog.”

  He reached the truck and pulled open the door, switched the phone from one hand to the other as he climbed in.

  “Yeah, well, maybe he didn’t write the piece, but who gave the blog the story? Now he can cover it, blow the whole thing wide open officially, and still make out that he’s the good guy,” Shay said impatiently. “I know your attention span is shit, but—”

  Boyd hung up before Shay said something that would take more than time and a moved couch to forgive. He tossed his phone onto the passenger seat, half-buried among the old receipts and mail, and ignored it when it rang. Shay could wait until he got back. If they’d cleared the crash, it would be two hours to get back to Cutter’s Gap, less if Boyd put his foot down. Maybe by then he’d be able to talk to Shay without wanting to lay him out.

  The phone kept ringing as Boyd reversed out of the space and pulled onto the road. It took an hour, on and off, before Shay finally gave up.

  BOYD STEPPED into the narrow paneled box of the elevator and pressed the scratched third-floor button with his thumb. He leaned against the back wall as the doors closed and let the plastic-wrapped bouquet dangle against his thigh. He exhaled as the winch mechanism screeched softly and the car started to rise.

  The flowers were a mistake. They were cheap and cheerful, gerberas bought from a sullen teenager in the pop-up florist in the clinic parking lot, and the potent, indiscriminately floral scent of them reminded Boyd of his joyless annual pilgrimage to the Calloway house.

  Guilt and flowers. Boyd absently tapped the plastic against his leg as he watched the floors count off. After all these years, he didn’t know how to do one without the other.

  It was a relief when the elevator stopped and the doors bounced open to let in the sharp smells of antiseptic and boiled water with that undercurrent of sickness. Not particularly nice to breathe, but there were no bad memories attached either.

  Boyd got off the elevator, turned, and hesitated as he saw Shay slouched carefully and uncomfortably in a plastic chair by the nurses’ station. He hadn’t changed out of his work clothes, the oil-stained jeans and battered old band T-shirt. His feet in well-worn work boots were tucked under him to keep them out of everyone’s way.

  He looked exhausted and like he was going to go for a drink the minute he left here. Boyd was still angry, but that didn’t stop the reflexive jab of worry. After a second he folded up his anger and the itch of resentment and tucked it away for later. Right now it didn’t look as though Shay needed anyone else on his case.

  “You look like hell,” he said as he walked over.

  Shay looked up from his knees and twisted his mouth into a humorless smile. There was a fresh stitch in his eyebrow and dried blood on his eyelid.

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t pretty,” he said. “She’d been drinking when… whoever it was called. By the time she called me and I got there, she’d had time to come up with all sorts of ideas. She was hysterical, paranoid. More drunk. Already.”

  Boyd reached up to tap his eyebrow. “And that?”

  Shay started to mirror the gesture but caught himself before he poked at the raw skin. “I tried to stop her from getting in her truck, and I caught it on the edge of the door.”

  That could be true. Or it could have been from the class ring Mrs. Calloway always wore, the one Sammy’s dad had given her, or from a heavy glass tumbler slung in drunken frustration. But it was probably the car door. That was always the culprit back when things were bad.

  “Mac?”

  Shay grazed his finger over his temple. He shifted to the side and nodded to one of the closed doors in the hallway.

  “The good captain is in there,” he said. “Trying to talk my still-pissed and pissed-off mother out of going to the tabloids with her story of how the three of us…. I don’t know. Some of her theories are worse than others, but none of them are what you want your mom to think about you.”

  “She doesn’t mean it,” Boyd said. He shifted uncomfortably in place for a second and then gingerly took a perch on the chair next to Shay. The flowers ended up across his thighs. “She won’t mean it.”

  Shay leaned back and tipped his head against the wall. The muscles in his jaw worked under the skin.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I think, maybe, there’s some things you can only take back once, you know?”

  “We should have told her.”

  “Yeah,” Shay slowly rasped out. He worked his jaw from one side to the other to make it pop and kept his eyes on the cracked ceiling. “We should have. Except, you know, it wasn’t we, was it? Because I don’t remember any of you asking me to cast a vote.”

  Boyd had thought there was a truce. He was wrong. The discovery left him wrong-footed as he scrabbled for the self-righteous high ground he’d hung on to on the long drive back.

  “The DNA came back—”

  “I don’t care. You shouldn’t have brought him back here,” Shay snapped. He lurched out of the chair and stalked away two steps as he dragged one hand down his face. “People buy cheek swabs on the street. They get other people to do piss tests. He’s not my brother.”

  “You don’t know that,” Boyd retorted. He set the flowers aside as he stood up, unwilling to be loomed over. “And what were we supposed to do, just ignore it? Ignore him?”

  “Yes,” Shay said, frustrated, as though that answer should be obvious. “What good did it do, bringing him here? What could it have possibly accomplished except this? You should have buried it. He should have never come here.”

  The anger that Boyd had banked finally bubbled up. He took a step into Shay’s space and glared at him. Shay was taller than Boyd but shorter than Morgan.

  “And if you’d been sober, that would have been your call to make,” Boyd said flatly. He could feel the high ground slip through his fingers, but right then, he didn’t care. “Or at least you’d have had your say. But you weren’t, so I did it instead.”

  Red striped Shay’s cheekbones, dull and hot under his tan as he curled his lip. “Of course you did, Boyd Maccabee, the Boy That Got Home. Forget Sullivan. Who the hell would you be without my family’s tragedy, huh? What would you have if everyone in town didn’t pity you?” He gave Boyd’s shoulder a rough shove that knocked him back a step. “You four-eyed little shit.”

  It was ridiculous. Childish as hell. Yet the jeer still slid home through Boyd’s defenses and gouged at something raw and vulnerable in there. He’d wondered that before, but he hadn’t thought anyone else had the same questions.

  He shoved Shay back with both hands, and the impact made Shay stagger. Shay might be taller than Boyd, but he didn’t need to deadlift a human body to train for his job.

  “At lea
st I didn’t run away and join the army,” he said. “You think no one noticed that you never came back to town all those years?”

  Shay grabbed him by the collar and yanked him forward, his knuckles digging in under Boyd’s jaw. His eyes were wet and tears were caught on his lashes, and maybe once Boyd wasn’t so pissed off, he’d care about that.

  “You really think this is about you?” Shay said through gritted teeth. “It was still my brother who disappeared. It was my family that didn’t exist anymore. You were just some kid he hung out with because you had a cool dad. If none of this had happened, he’d have found new friends by now, forgotten about you. So next time you want to fuck everything up for me, how about you don’t.”

  He let go of Boyd’s collar and tried to shoulder him out of the way as he stalked off down the corridor. Boyd tackled him before he could go more than a few paces. His shoulder hit Shay just under the armpit, hard enough to jar a grunt out of him, and they went down with a thud on the floor in a tangle of clumsily thrown punches and swearwords.

  “Asshole.”

  “Bastard.”

  If it had been a fair match, Boyd would have lost. He knew that. Shay actually knew how to fight and had been barred from half the bars in town for winning them. But this hardly even qualified as a fight. It was just two men in a scrap on the floor.

  Shay drove a short, bony-knuckled punch into Boyd’s upper arm and got an elbow jabbed into his chin as payback. Knees and elbows slid on the scrubbed tiles as they both tried to get the upper hand.

  “What the fuck—”

  Mac grabbed them each by the collar and dragged them apart. He caught a badly aimed kick against his thigh, grunted, and left Shay sprawled on the tiles as he pulled Boyd to his feet. The shirt caught under Boyd’s arms as Mac shoved him into the wall.

  “I expect better from you,” Mac said, one finger leveled at Boyd’s nose.

  Still on the floor, Shay laughed bitterly and propped himself up on his elbows. He ducked his chin to wipe his bloody mouth against his shoulder.

  “Yeah, Boyd, I’m just the fuckup. Nobody expects anything from me.”

  Mac turned to glare at him. “You’re a civilian,” he said. “Boyd’s a firefighter.”

  “Yeah, well, not for long, from what the blog said,” Shay said. “And just in case it matters, he started it.”

  “It doesn’t,” Mac said. “Get up.”

  Shay scowled but did as he was told. “How’s Mom?” he asked as he dusted himself down. “Is she….”

  He trailed off. Boyd could tell from Mac’s face that there wasn’t a good answer to that question right then.

  “She wants to see Sammy…. Morgan,” Mac said as he took his hand off Boyd’s shoulder. “Otherwise she’s going to the papers with everything she thinks we did.”

  Shay pushed his hair back from his face. “Except we haven’t done anything,” he said. “It’s all in her head. Sammy was my brother. I didn’t hurt him.”

  The silence that hung after that statement made Shay set his jaw, a flash of old, sullen resentment in the expression. He licked his lips and laughed bitterly, “And fuck you too, Captain.”

  Mac looked tired. “It’s not like that, Shay.”

  “It never is.”

  Boyd had been on the wrong side of cryptic comments about the most important things in his life. He’d grown up there, always aware there was something behind the looks people traded over his head but never quite sure what. It sucked.

  Now he was on the other side of the looks, and it sucked too. Whoever passed for the great and good in Cutter’s Gap had already gotten Boyd slapped with a suspension just for Morgan being back. They wouldn’t be happy with the sort of publicity Mrs. Calloway’s darkest imaginings would produce. By the end of this, whatever the truth was, they might all end up being run out of town.

  Boyd didn’t want that. Neither did Shay, not really.

  “I can talk to her,” he said. “I’m the one who went to meet Morgan. I can expla—”

  “No,” Shay said flatly. He avoided Boyd’s gaze and hunched his shoulders as he stuffed his hands into his jeans. “You’ve done enough. Leave it to family.”

  Boyd’s defenses should have already been raised, but the jab still slid through and pricked that raw spot over again. He sucked in a deep breath and started forward. Mac stepped in front of him and blocked him with an upraised hand.

  “Enough. It’s not the place or the time,” he said. “Let Shay deal with his mom, and you go and get Morgan. The cat’s out of the bag already, so… it can’t hurt to let Donna meet him. Who knows. It might jog Morgan’s memory.”

  Guilt undercut Boyd’s anger as he remembered Morgan’s confession from the night before. He was pretty sure that was something Mac would want to know, but it wasn’t Boyd’s story.

  It would be better, he told himself as he backed away from another confrontation with Shay, if it came from Morgan himself.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll talk to him.”

  Mac gratefully slapped him on the shoulder and then turned the gesture into a shove to send him on his way.

  “Go on.”

  Boyd gave Shay one last look—half-glare and half-regret—and went. He jabbed the button to call the elevator and waited for it to make its slow way up. A young doctor, sample bottle in one hand, joined him. Boyd absently rubbed his arm, and they steadily didn’t look at each other.

  The doors finally opened to let them in. The doctor was going to the second floor. Boyd hit Lobby and stepped back to claim the corner. Before the doors could close all the way, Shay stuck his arm between them to stop it.

  “Wait,” he said as the bumpers of the door bounced off his forearm. For a second, Boyd thought he was going to apologize. Maybe Shay thought that too, from the expression on his face as he stared at Boyd. Instead he licked his lips and squared his shoulders. “Tell Morgan that he knows what the right thing to do is. If he tells the truth about who did this, it’ll pay off for him.”

  He stepped back. It was Boyd’s turn to stick out his foot to stop the elevator from leaving the floor.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  Shay shrugged. His face was more or less unreadable as he stepped back, set in the stiff mask that meant he wanted to hide something.

  “People who do the right thing reap the rewards,” he said. “That’s all. And the sooner this is over, the better. Right? We can put this behind us.”

  Boyd took his foot out of the door. “Some things you can only take back once,” he said.

  For the first time, Shay let something like regret touch his face. “I know.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE COVER of Missing Eight-Year-Old didn’t depict the grainy security-camera still of Sammy Calloway that Morgan had gotten used to. Instead it was a picture of him on holiday somewhere, tanned and happy, with a gap in his grin where he’d lost his baby teeth.

  “… went to Yellowstone one year with me and my dad,” Boyd had said, his voice faintly wistful. Maybe the photo had been taken then. If it had, it couldn’t have been long before Sammy disappeared. The kid in the photo looked like he could be seven or eight.

  Morgan snorted to himself—like he could tell a six-year-old from an eight-year-old without some sort of field guide—and stuck the book back on the shelf. It slotted in neatly between the other books in the “Bad things happen to kids” section.

  “He’s from here, you know,” someone remarked at his shoulder.

  Morgan flinched in surprise, an ache in his ribs a reminder it had been a bad few days, and looked around. It wasn’t the bookstore clerk. He was still hunched down over the computer he’d spent the last fifteen minutes focused on in a determined attempt not to acknowledge that customers existed. Instead it was a wiry-looking older man with faded blond hair and an angular, curious face. He was in running gear, T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, and smelled of sweat and nearly overwhelming cologne.

  “Ben Sullivan,” the man explained off
Morgan’s blank look. He leaned in—and Morgan shifted to the side as his skin crawled at the warmth of the man against his side—and tapped a finger against the spine. It left a wet print against the paper. “He was born and raised in Cutter’s Gap before he left for the big leagues. One of the town’s golden boys, the ones you always knew would make something of themselves.”

  “Didn’t ask,” Morgan said.

  The man chuckled and stepped back. He slicked his sweat-matted hair back from his face, wiped his hand on his shirt, and stuck it out.

  “Don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure,” he said. “Nate.”

  Morgan glanced at the damp, soft hand, a muted gold wedding ring on the relevant finger, and curled his lip. He’d always been catnip for old closeted guys, although what they wanted from him had changed after he grew out of twink.

  “I’m not interested.”

  Nate mugged a look of surprise that didn’t quite reach his eyes—he didn’t expect Morgan to believe him; it was just plausible deniability—as he turned the handshake into a wave at the books. “You were just looking at his books? Unless you’re more interested in the story, but round here, that’s old news.”

  “Not on Twitter,” Morgan said.

  Nate chuckled, shifted position, and scratched the back of his neck. His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes either. “Well,” he said, “the masses’ appetite for the sordid is insatiable. That doesn’t mean we have to feed them any more than we already have. Ridiculous, isn’t it? We have lawyers and doctors in town, even a few heroes, but it’s the boy who ran away from home who’s got two books written about him.”

  For a second, Morgan let himself smirk. His jealousy of a dead kid was twisted enough that it was weirdly satisfying to hear from someone else who didn’t think Sammy Calloway was all that. Maybe Nate wasn’t that much of a small-town dickhead.

  “Yeah, well, they’ll lose interest sooner or later,” Morgan said with a shrug. “It’s not like the kid was a Kardashian.”