by Tess Rothery
Chapter Seventeen
Taylor did not run to the hills or escape to the city.
She didn’t even go to her little house on Love Street.
Instead, she did what so many castaway and angst filled youth had done for the last many years and ran to Sissy Dorney’s house.
Sissy as a friend was overbearing. She was loud and her personality overwhelmed any given space.
As a mother, she was much the same, except that when teens ran to her, they were protected by that big, bold, firm personality. Safe from whatever was out to get them.
Sissy welcomed Taylor as she would any waif on her doorstep. She dragged her into the warmth of her kitchen and offered her a bowl of soup and some crackers.
“It’s not much. I have to run to the store. I’m about out of everything. It’s only Phil, Breadyn, and I right now, but we go through paper products like they’re made of cocaine.” Sissy laughed. “How three people can use up the same amount of toilet paper seven people used to, I’ll never know.”
Taylor counted in her head, Phil and Sissy, Phil’s daughter Tansy, Pyper—whose nickname had been Pyppa till recently—Cooper, Breadyn…perhaps number seven was Cooper’s friend Dayton who seemed to have lived at the Dorney house as often as not. But she couldn’t be sure. Trying to figure out who had lived here was a nice diversion. She tried to imagine living in a house jam packed with noisy, loving people, instead of the home where she’d been an only child for half the time and then almost a second mother the other half.
Sissy set a bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken and a tube of saltines in front of Taylor. “Want to talk about it?” she asked.
“Not really.” It felt like a confession.
“Tough tiddies.” Sissy sat down next to her at the oak table in the little nook off her messy but modern kitchen. “Graham troubles? I knew he was going to hurt you.”
“No.” Taylor pictured him holed up in the hospital room and smiled. Shot in the bottom with a slow bullet. There’s just no pride in an injury like that.
Thoughts of their less than ideal first night together tried to interject themselves but she dismissed them. Compatibility like that can’t be determined in just one night. Surely. And anyway…worse thoughts were fighting for space in her mind. Thoughts about how his career came first, and how that was going to be in Portland, if not bigger, better cities, and never in a little place like Comfort.
“You ever look at yourself while you’re thinking? Everything goes across that skinny face of yours. Eat your soup.”
Taylor had a spoonful. There was something so comforting about the flavors of your childhood.
“So, you slept with him, but you didn’t like it,” Sissy continued.
Taylor stared.
Sissy nodded, knowingly. “I told you, I can read you like a book. Anyone can. Is it a deal breaker? I’ve heard about that Hudson. Tansy and her friends you know. I assume Tansy, anyway. She never came right out and said. But there was a time when a night with him was considered a rite of passage to the girls in this town. So unfair to the less talented men, I say. And poor Graham. He looks like the kind of guy who’d not know a—”
“Stop!” Taylor’s face was on fire. “Please, stop. Graham got shot. In the butt. With a slow bullet.”
“Is that a metaphor for sucks in bed?” Sissy laughed.
“No, it’s the literal truth. He’s in the hospital now. Recovering from getting a bullet pulled out of his pelvis.”
Sissy snorted. “That won’t make things better, you know. Poor Graham.”
“Poor anyone who had to have a bullet excavated from a bone.” Taylor’s shoulder winced. Of course, that bullet had passed easily through her muscle, but her mind wasn’t so picky about details when it decided to remind her she was broken.
“So, you aren’t fleeing Graham. Is it the killer? Is someone on your tail?” Sissy turned to her kitchen window where the dark night loomed outside.
“Family troubles.”
“Ah. You want some tea? It’s decaf.”
“No, thanks.” Taylor crumbled some crackers into her soup. “Grandma Quinny hated my mom.”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t she?”
“Excuse me?” Taylor smashed another cracker in her fist, and let the crumbs fall into her soup.
“How much do you love Jonah for running off and marrying your sister?”
“I don’t hate him, anyway,” Taylor defended herself from what felt like an accusation.
“What if he wasn’t a millionaire? What if he’d gotten her pregnant, made her drop out of college, then made her get a job and then went back to school so she had to support him?”
“Why would she have to get a job if she was pregnant?” Taylor was confused. It was a well-known fact her parents had married for love. Sure, Todd Quinn and Laura Baker had been teens, but they hadn’t had Taylor till they were twenty.
“You didn’t ask a lot of questions when your mom was alive, did you?”
“No….”
Sissy sighed and took her seat again at the table. “It’s hardly my place to say this, but when it turned out your mother wasn’t really pregnant, all hell broke loose in Comfort. Delma and Ernie and Ingrid and Angus didn’t speak for twelve full months.”
“Mom had a miscarriage?” Taylor swallowed. Her poor mom.
“Far from it. She’d just not been pregnant at all. She told everyone she was, and Angus made Todd marry her. Ingrid was fit to be tied. Pissed as hell, honestly. Then, quit school and got a job, but there was no baby. Laura went to college for an art degree, while he supported her. You’d have thought it was World War 3.”
“But Grandpa Quinny and Grandpa Ernie are best friends,” Taylor mumbled.
“Men.” Sissy shook her head. “They so rarely take sides. Anyway, the marriage stuck so Ingrid had to get over it, didn’t she? Or she’d never see her kid again.”
“That’s awful. My mom must have been miserable. Especially if she’d wanted the baby.”
“What baby?” Sissy held up both hands. “She wasn’t pregnant.”
“But she thought she was….”
Sissy shrugged. “Don’t confuse what she thought with what she said. I was pretty young, but I remember Todd Quinn being sort of, well, sort of like Hudson. All the girls wanted a piece of that action. Laura had to do something if she wanted to keep him.”
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Taylor pushed her bowl of soup away.
Sissy laughed. “Hudson is a child, but Todd Quinn…” Sissy made a satisfied hum. “I’d have paid good money to be one of the girls who got to have a night with that man.
“Disgusting.” Taylor stood. “This was a mistake.”
“No, it wasn’t. You needed to talk. Your grandparents have all gotten over that mess long ago. For heaven’s sake, Laura and Todd are both dead. You’re all they’ve got left of their kids. Be kind to them and forget about whatever is eating you tonight.”
“I think I need to lie down.”
“Not a problem. The downstairs bedroom is all yours. Stay as long as you’d like. I hope you know I’m always here for you.” Sissy took the bowl of soup to the sink and went back to doing her washing up.
Taylor felt like she was wading through mud as she found the guest room. Hudson as the town bike. All the girls wanting to take a ride. Her dad…the same. Her mom…just a kid. Kids do such dumb things. Her poor Grandpa Ernie stuck in that house seething with resentment still.
She had to get him out of there. Sissy may say that was all old news, but it sure hadn’t sounded like it tonight.
The next morning, Taylor went to Flour Sax Quilt Shop for what felt like the first time in years. She gave a cursory nod to Roxy and Clay who were making moony eyes at each other over the cash register and slunk to her desk. She immersed herself in the books as an attempt to drown her worries in numbers, but it didn’t work. After an hour, she slipped out the back door and went to her sister’s house.
Belle and Taylor sat
in the enormous basement kitchen of the made-over mansion. It felt like being in Downton Abbey. Though perhaps that was an exaggeration. The kitchen was around 800 square feet, three walls of which had counters and appliances and one had had floor to ceiling cupboards. A huge workbench that must have come from somebody's woodshop sat in the center with a well bleached and scrubbed butcher block top as the new kitchen island.
Belle passed Taylor a mug of coffee. One of those mugs that the widow of the old Bible Creek Care Home chaplain had made. As always, Belle had managed to do something special. As Taylor looked around the kitchen, she realized it wasn't just the mugs that had come from the local artist, but also all of the mixing bowls and serving bowls and even cereal bowls that were on the open shelving. She recognized the towels as embroidery work done by several of the seniors who met together at the Yarnery on their needlework days. She gave the kitchen island another glance, though she knew the reason she recognized that big old piece of furniture was because it was the one that had sat in the shop at the high school from back when the school had classes like woodshop and auto mechanics and home-ec. This mansion might have been a place to grow online fame for Jonah, but it was so, so much more than that for Belle.
"The first thing we did was prepare an apartment for Gramps," Belle said. "It's on the ground floor as is our room. It has an en suite and a small kitchenette. It will feel like a kitchenette to him, anyways. It has a coffee maker, a convection microwave, a mini fridge. Oh, basically anything someone like grandpa would want."
"A toaster?" Taylor asked picturing the way her grandpa always had his raisin bread toast with his medicine in the morning.
"For sure.” Belle sighed and sat down at a stool at the giant kitchen island with her sister. "I'm not trying to steal him from you, but I am jealous. Taking care of grandpa has been a part of my life for almost as long as I can remember."
"And it's ready now?" Taylor asked.
"Yep." Belle sipped her drink. "There's a room for you, if you want it. I know it sounds silly, but this is a really big house. It was the biggest house ever built in town, and that was before the addition. I expect you don't want to live here with a bunch of internet influencers, but we're not rushing that part of the plan yet. I have a few other ideas first."
"I really do like my house on Love Street. It’s our family house."
"Yeah," Belle said. "I really like it too. I wouldn't want you to sell it. But if you ever needed to get away or got tired of being alone. You know, you could come here. I'd like to have you around. We never want to have more than six influencers living here at a time. But we have twelve bedrooms. We don't have twelve full suites or anything crazy like that, but we have enough room for you and for Gramps. Shoot, we could have Roxy if we really wanted to."
Taylor laughed. "Imagine Roxy and Clay, me and Grandpa, you and Jonah all living together. We’d be a proper compound."
"I never said we had room for Clay," Belle laughed. "I was actually thinking… what if you rented the house to Roxy and Clay and then moved in here with us?"
"How about I stay here for a little while to help Grandpa Ernie get settled. And then I go back home and enjoy some alone time for the first time in my entire life."
Belle shook her head. "Maybe it's having been mostly an only child, but alone time does not have the same attraction for me as it seems to have for you."
Taylor believed it. And anyway, she was mostly lying about the pleasure of being alone. When she pictured her future, she pictured it with Graham. That poor man laid up in the hospital recovering from that bullet wound to his bottom. In her heart, she was bringing him to her house and nursing him till he was all better. He could write the story of the death of Molly Kay from Grandpa Ernie’s recliner. She could be his feet and his ears. Whatever information he needed, she’d find.
But what exactly was that information? Molly’s notebook said she was excited about getting a raise. But from whom? The school or Coco or the men? And had that had something to do with her death? There was one person Taylor needed to talk to, and that was Grandma Quinny, the woman who hated her mom.
"What's eating you, Taylor?" Belle asked.
"I need to talk to Grandma. She knows some things I need to find out."
Belle shook her head. "Don't bother. When you're mad at someone, it's almost impossible for you to have a healthy conversation with them."
"What are you talking about?" Taylor asked.
"I remember the fights you and mom used to get into. You might've thought I was little, but I saw and heard everything. I'm sure from your perspective you were being perfectly reasonable. We all think we’re reasonable when we’re teenagers. But when I was little, I saw mom's point of view. And you were a nut job. You’d get so mad at her, that you couldn't hear a word she was saying. That's what it would be if you talked to your grandma right now.”
"I'm not going to address your entirely false accusations that I was anything but a completely reasonable and delightful teenager." Taylor laughed. "That said, maybe I can give you some of these questions. You could pester the Juvies for answers for me."
"Speaking of the Juvies," Belle got up and refilled her coffee mug, "Jonah had some new information yesterday. I meant to call you, but it has been a little crazy both for you and for us."
Taylor pushed her mug away and got out her phone to take notes. "Please fill me in."
"Coco's website wasn’t very secure. It was the simplest thing for them to hack it and get all the client files."
Taylor whistled. "That's insane. Can we get that information to the police?"
"I don't think they can use hacked data, but I'd be happy to call and offer it."
"As much as I'd like to learn all of the names of all the men in this general area who have a penchant for young ladies, I'm not sure that it's really helpful right now."
"Oh, we didn't leave it at that. We know that Coco’s been dating old Robert Jessup. He funded the website start up. And whatever he has to say about him just investing, the data support’s Coco’s free admission that he was her paid lover. There were not only dinners out, but weekends away. He might try to call it mentoring or something like that, but we know they were just dirty weekends away."
"I hate to say that's not news, but…"
"Don't worry, that's not all I have to say. Molly Kay was dating Jack Groening pretty steadily. We know that she went on a few dates with Charles Holden, that very unbalanced man. But for the most part she dated Jack. Don't interrupt, I know that's not news. Here's the news: Jack's ex-wife Sarah Harper is really close friends with Robert's current wife Charlotte. Really, really close friends."
"It's almost like you could read my mind. Grandma Quinny has some theories about Charlotte. She thinks Charlotte's practically confessed."
"Brilliant. Here’s the deal: Ponderosa Financials is absolutely a family business. Not only are the two branches run by Jack's sons, but the entire staff is either a cousin or an old college buddy, and they haven't hired anyone new in over five years. Any growth in Jack’s family, be it a step-son or new wife, would take a cut out of his sons’ pie. I suspect Sarah did not like that one bit."
"I could see that making Molly a threat to Jack's ex-wife. But how does Coco’s sugar daddy’s wife, Charlotte, come into the picture?"
"Perhaps she was killing two birds with one stone. Pardon the insensitive phrase.”
Taylor thought about this for a moment. "And Grandma Quinny was sure that Charlotte did it to leave a message. Perhaps that message was simply, don't mess with our families."
"I suppose if prostitution is the oldest job in the world, then that is the oldest message in the world. Anyway, we've seen in our own families what kind of damage a jealous mother can do."
Taylor and Belle locked eyes, unspoken deep grief bonding them forever. After all, the woman who had killed their mother had done it because Laura Quinn had been a threat.
"You wouldn’t mind asking Grandma Quinny some of this, would you? She�
��s kinda taken a shine to you lately," Taylor said. "I'll go with you and pack up Grandpa Ernie. Better get him settled now while I'm still all fired up about it."
"Getting mad because Grandma Quinny hurt your feelings about our mom doesn't make you a bad person. Even wanting to bring Gramps here instead of leaving him there doesn't.”
Taylor frowned. "I know that. I wouldn't be mad if I didn't think I was in the right."
"I just wanted to say it now." Belle poured her coffee down the sink and rinsed the mug. "Because later you’ll think you're the worst person in the world. That's a part of the pattern I saw when I was a kid. And I don't want you to think that, because you're not.”
Chapter Eighteen
Taylor thought about what Belle had said as her sister drove them to her grandparents’ little strawberry farm. Belle was right. These fits of righteous anger, rare now that she was a good deal more mature, had always been followed by great pits of self-disgust. And remembering that feeling seemed to be bringing it on. She hated how mad she was right now, even though she was still mad. It was a vicious spiral of angst, and she hated that too.
On the way to Grandma Quinny's house, Taylor got a text from Graham. "They’re setting me free."
Taylor responded, "do you need a ride?"
"I was thinking of chartering a plane."
Taylor rolled her eyes. "I'll see what I can do."
"What news?" Belle asked.
Taylor regretted that Belle was driving. If she had her own car, she could swing by and get Graham. "Graham is getting released from the hospital and was hoping we could give him a ride.” She stared out the window, torn between rescuing her grandfather from the other meaner grandparents and rescuing her lover from the hospital.
"He can wait. We’d better finish one thing before we start the next." Belle sounded just like their mother.
Taylor snickered a little bit. "Yes, Mom."