Three strikes, p.22
Three Strikes, page 22
“To Mum’s. Call me if you find anything.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
That was noncommittal. “Look, Neve. I know you don’t particularly trust me or Jake right now, but we didn’t do this. You don’t want to deal with me, fine. Call Jake if you find anything. It’s his property, remember?”
The other woman’s full lips thinned. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. I’d trust you to have my back, but I don’t think you or your boyfriend has any respect for the law.”
Audrey frowned. “Yeah, so little respect that you were the first person I called about this.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t respect me.”
Audrey just shook her head. “Whatever.” She was tired. Too tired for this. She turned and walked away. She heard Neve on her radio calling for backup as she approached Mackenzie’s car. Mac was in the driver’s seat, looking pale and shaken. Audrey went over and knocked on the window.
“Can you drive?” Audrey asked when the glass lowered.
Mac nodded. “I’m okay. Where are we going?”
“My mother’s.” Normally she would have taken her to Jake’s, but with him being laid up, and the threatening note she’d received, her parents’ place was a safer bet. Plus, her mother and father could both fuss over the kid, which was what she needed.
“Okay. I don’t think I could drive back to Calais tonight. I guess I’ll go back tomorrow.” She looked up. “Maybe we should just give up.”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow, okay? You don’t need to decide right now.”
A little while later they pulled into the driveway of the Harte household. It was only shortly after nine, so lights were still on inside. Her parents were still up, and would be for an hour or two.
Audrey knocked before letting them both inside. Her father met her in the foyer with a concerned frown on his face. “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “Is it Jake?”
Anne joined them and Audrey explained to them what had happened at the resort. “Mac needs a place to spend the night, and I knew you guys would take better care of her than I can.”
Her mother smiled serenely. “Of course she can stay here. Rusty, go make some hot chocolate.”
He actually did a little jig at the prospect of sugar. “Sweet. You like marshmallows or whipped cream, kiddo?”
Mackenzie smiled at him. “Both?”
“Right answer.” He trotted off toward the kitchen.
“My room?” Audrey asked her mother.
“Yes, if the color doesn’t turn her stomach.”
Audrey rolled her eyes. “It’s lavender,” she explained to Mac.
“And black,” her mother added.
“And black,” Audrey echoed.
“I like lavender. And black.”
Audrey shot her mother an arch look. Her mother pretended not to notice. Mac’s luggage was only a computer bag and a small suitcase, but Audrey carried the suitcase up the stairs for her and put it in her old room. It really was hideous. She showed the girl where the bathroom was and got her a couple of towels, then told her to come downstairs when she was ready.
Both her mother and father were in the kitchen when Audrey walked in.
“She okay?” her father asked, stirring melting chocolate in a double boiler on the stove.
“I think so. It freaked her out, arriving at the cottage to find all of Maggie’s stuff gone.”
“Is that all they took?” He shook his head. “That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Not if that’s what they were after.”
His mismatched gaze sharpened. “You sure?”
“As I can be, yeah.”
He looked like he wanted to say something, but then he looked at her mother and his expression changed. “Well, that’s definitely not the kind of guy she wants to know.”
“I’m pretty sure she doesn’t,” Audrey told him. “In fact, she’ll probably go back to Calais tomorrow and give the whole thing up.”
Her father went back to his stirring. “That might be for the best.”
“Maybe,” she replied. She’d been ready to do the same thing, but now someone had scared Mac. It was one thing to threaten Audrey but another to threaten a teenage girl. After all that she’d been through since returning home, all the violence and pain, one would think that she’d do all she could to resist more conflict, but she couldn’t let whoever had done this get away with it. She’d send Mac home the next day, but then she was going to find who had broken into the cottage and get Maggie’s stuff back.
Maggie had lost enough already.
When her father pulled into the yard the next morning, Audrey was surprised. She half-expected him to bail on her. She answered the door to see his resigned but smiling face. “Hey, kiddo.”
She stepped back, and when he moved past her, she caught a whiff of disappointment. “You’ve been drinking.”
He didn’t even try to deny it as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his baggy jeans. “I had a shot of rum before I left the house.”
Rum, their shared poison of choice. “Needed a little courage, did you?”
John nodded. There was nothing left of his smile. “You still want to do this?”
Audrey felt a tug of conscience. “If Bertie is still open to talking to me, I would like to know what happened.”
“Tell me this isn’t just about you being nosy. Tell me you really think you’re doing this for a good reason, because there are people who are going to get hurt, kid.”
She hesitated. “Who, Dad?”
He shook his head. “Why won’t you leave this alone?”
“Because Maggie kept this from me. She knew everything about me, but she had a secret. It’s eating at me and I can’t stand it. She said I owed her for her taking the blame for killing Clint. If I can find out who Mac’s father is, maybe I can finally feel like we’re even and let go of her. I can’t carry her with me for the rest of my life.” That was about as succinct and honest as she could be when she wasn’t even completely sure of the why herself.
Her father stared at her for a moment. She could feel his gaze prodding inside her soul, weighing whether or not to believe her. “Go get a sweater. It’s cold. I’ll visit with Jake.”
Effectively dismissed, Audrey ran upstairs and dug through the dresser for a sweater to pull on. When she came back down, her father and Jake were talking quietly in the living room. Jake was sitting up, his back supported by a pile of cushions. Their conversation ended when she walked in.
“You two plotting?” she asked, feeling a tiny bit paranoid.
“Nosy,” her father stated, but there wasn’t any censure in his tone. Once again she was struck by how tired and drawn he looked. His color was off. Normally his cheeks had some pink to them, but they were pale, and his eyes lacked their usual brightness.
Jake smiled at her with that little hint of amusement that was both endearing and infuriating depending on her mood. “We were talking about you, of course. Can’t do that when you’re in the room—wouldn’t be seemly.”
Was he making fun or telling the truth? Half the time she wasn’t sure, and usually it didn’t matter.
“You could just talk to me instead,” she suggested.
This time his smile was more genuine—but not complete, as his battered face was too swollen and stiff to fully cooperate. “Sometimes it’s like talking to the wind.”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s pick-on-Audrey day.” She grabbed a coat from the hooks in the back hall. “Do you need anything before I go?”
Jake shook his head. “No. I’m good.”
Audrey grabbed a scarf too, and was just about to head out to the kitchen to get her boots when he stopped her. “Aud.”
Her father passed her. “I’ll be outside.”
She frowned. “What? Are you in pain? Do you need some pills?”
There was that amusement again. He held out his hand. “C’mere.”
For a second, she stared at his abraded knuckles and thought about just walking away. Running—even though she said she wouldn’t.
But she didn’t walk—or run—away. She crossed the floor and twined her fingers with his.
“No matter what that head of yours tries to tell you, I am always on your side.” He looked deep into her eyes as he spoke. “Even if it doesn’t feel like it.”
She nodded. “I know.”
He squeezed her hand. “You’re my reason.”
Audrey frowned. “Your reason for what?”
Jake smiled. “Everything, woman. Everything.”
God, he killed her. He knew just what to say to her. Anyone else and she’d wonder if he was trying to manipulate her, but Jake didn’t need to use those tactics. “You’re stoned.” She crouched down and kissed him on the mouth—softly because she didn’t want to hurt his lip. “I’ll be back soon,” she told him.
“Good, because I want to talk to you. It feels like we haven’t had any time alone in days. At least, none that I’ve been lucid for.”
“We haven’t,” she confirmed. “You’ve had too many people fussing around you. Even Lincoln.”
“Yeah, it’s a little late to play the protective big brother, but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts. Now go. Rusty’s waiting.”
“He better not be behind the wheel.”
“It was one shot.”
She shot him a knowing look. “It’s never just one. You and I both know that.” Then she left, promising not to be long.
She armed the alarm, locked the door, and stepped out into the cold, gray morning. Her father was in his truck—on the passenger side. Normally Audrey would insist on taking her car, but Ridge Road was sometimes like a land mine of potholes and the half-ton was better suited for it. What the hell had she been thinking when she got that Prius? She’d thought she’d be driving it around Boston, where they had decent snow removal; that’s what she’d thought.
She climbed into the driver’s side. The key was already in the ignition. “Thank you for doing this,” she said.
“Don’t thank me. Let’s just go get this over with.”
“God, you are so dramatic.”
He didn’t say anything—just stared out his window, which worried her. Silent was not her father’s usual mode.
Bertie Neeley lived in a trailer just before the Stokes homestead. It was painted a bright and cheery pale yellow with blue trim. It wasn’t a look Audrey would have associated with Bertie, but the place was cute. There were even flower boxes, although they were empty for the winter.
A white curtain parted when they pulled in—Bertie’s face through the glass. When Audrey climbed the front steps behind her father, Bertie opened the door. He looked freshly showered and wore a crisp but faded plaid shirt. With his hair slicked back from his face, there was a glimpse of the man he used to be. She remembered now, that Bertie hadn’t been a bad-looking man when she’d been young. When had he gone to hell?
“I put the kettle on,” he said by way of greeting. It was starting to whistle in the background.
John Harte simply nodded at him. Audrey made herself look him in the eye. “Thanks for seeing us, Mr. Neeley.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Listen to you being all formal.” He walked to the stove and turned off the burner. “Don’t need to be so polite just ’cause you’re intruding on my privacy, Audrey Harte.”
It was said kindly, but she felt snugly put in her place. “Okay.”
Inside the trailer was as much a surprise as the outside. Bertie wasn’t much of a fashion plate, and sometimes his hygiene was suspect, but his house was tidy and neat, if a little run-down. An old chess set sat on a small table in the living area. He didn’t have much money, if Audrey’s memory served. Most of what he had came from a pension and doing odd jobs around the community. He’d been married once, she thought. Had a kid or two who had left with their mother decades earlier.
A sad little life, Audrey would have thought, but Bertie’s place didn’t reflect that. The cups that he put on the table in front of them were white with embossed flowers in the ceramic. Old, but in good shape. Elegant, even. Sugar and milk were in matching containers, and the teapot he placed on the table was part of the set as well. It looked as though the handle had been glued back on at one point. A plate of cookies followed.
Bertie sat down at the head of the table. Audrey and her father were across from each other. Audrey placed a napkin on the table and put a cookie on it. Molasses. She’d wait for the tea to steep before eating it.
Her father surprised her by speaking. “Bertie, I know my girl is going to ask you stuff that isn’t any of her business, but I want you to know that she’s not going to repeat anything you tell her. This visit is just so she’ll leave you and the past the fuck alone.”
Audrey started, her eyes widening.
Bertie nodded, his expression solemn as he gazed at Audrey. “She’s got the Pelletier in her.” He made it sound like a disease—or a parasite. “Won’t lie—I wasn’t going to tell you anything I didn’t want you knowing, but I remembered what you’d done for that little girl, and it makes sense you’d want to do right by her daughter.”
The two men seemed to expect her to respond to this, judging from the expectant way they watched her. Audrey raised a brow. “Thanks.”
“Well, girlie, what do you want to know?”
Where the hell did she start? “You used to spend a lot of time back the Ridge with the kids that partied back there.”
“Yup.”
“Someone got Maggie pregnant. I think it was someone young. Do you have any idea who that might have been?”
Bertie glanced at her father. “There were several young men around that year who took a shine to little Maggie. My best guess is that it was one of them.”
“What about Mike LeBlanc? Could it have been him?” It wasn’t her imagination—Bertie stiffened at the boy’s name.
“No, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Michael.” Bertie’s hands trembled as he poured the tea. It could have been nerves, or the DTs—delirium tremens. “He didn’t chase skirt like those other boys.”
She thought about what Dwayne had insinuated about Mike not liking girls. “How do you know?”
He stared at the cup in front of him, curving his big-knuckled fingers around it. “Because the only person Michael had sex with around these parts was me.”
Tea sloshed over the side of Audrey’s cup as she started. Of all the possible confessions Bertie could have made, this was not the one she had expected. “You?”
He nodded, peeking at her out of the corner of his eye. “I wasn’t too bad-looking back then. I was in my early forties, divorced. Heavy drinking hadn’t ruined me yet, and I did physical work, so my body was strong and lean. Michael was eighteen—almost nineteen. He was much more comfortable about his sexuality than I was. I admired that—no damn way was I letting anyone in this place know I liked men. Can you imagine?”
Unfortunately, she could. The locals were much more forgiving now, but back then they wouldn’t have been. The kids probably would have been the worst too. Young, testosterone-riddled men often despised anything they saw as a threat to their own masculinity. Audrey nodded.
“So, we met in secret. He was here every weekend he could get down, him and those friends of his who didn’t know how to hold their liquor and competed for the attention of Barbie and her friends.” He smiled faintly. “Was like something out of one those romance movies—a perfect little world of our own—secret and just for us. We were terrified of anyone finding out, but we weren’t going to stop. Your dad walked in on us once.”
Audrey’s gaze snapped to her father, whose cheeks had turned red. “I promised you I’d never tell, and I didn’t.”
Bertie nodded. “And I won’t ever tell your secrets either, you old bastard.”
Secrets? What secrets? One look from her father warned her not to ask. Did she really want to know? Okay, so Mike wasn’t Mackenzie’s dad. The kid was going to be so disappointed. But there was another mystery around Mike LeBlanc. “How did he die, Bertie?”
A flicker of pain tightened his features—intense enough that she regretted asking, even though she wanted to know. “One night the sweet little fool told me he loved me. I knew right then that I had to end things, even though I didn’t want to. I was more than twenty years his senior and so deep in the closet I smelled of mothballs.”
Audrey smiled at his choice of words. No one used mothballs anymore, did they? “So, you broke it off?”
“Not right then. See, I wasn’t in any hurry to give him up, but then Wendell made some crack about Michael being my ‘bum buddy.’ Everyone laughed—thought it was a great joke—but I knew it would be only a matter of time before they figured out it was true. I started pulling away from Michael, made excuses not to see him. He knew what I was doing and he wasn’t going to let me get away with it.” He smiled a little. “He cornered me back at the shed one night—that’s where Wendell and I grew our weed. Maggie was with him. She was all bristled up, telling me I couldn’t just use her friend and toss him aside.”
That sounded like Maggie. She could be very protective of people she cared about—when she wasn’t using them to her own advantage. “She left so the two of you could talk?”
“Mm. I told him it was over. He didn’t want to accept it. I knew I had to hurt him to make him walk away, so I told him that while he was good to f … sleep with, he wasn’t worth throwing my life away.” Bertie swallowed. “I laughed at him.”
Audrey couldn’t help but think of her brother, and how brave David had been to come out to the people of this town. “Did it work?”
Bertie stared into his cup. “Yep. He started crying, and then he ran away. I knew he didn’t know the woods and that it was dangerous at night, so I chased after him. When he heard me behind him he ran faster—didn’t want anything to do with me. I yelled at him to stop—I knew he was getting close to the edge—but he didn’t listen.”
Audrey swallowed. “He fell.”
A tear leaked from Bertie’s eye. He brushed it away. “He did. Snapped his neck. I called the police and waited with him until help arrived—not that there was any help for him. I was too much of a coward to tell the truth, so I just told them I’d heard a shout, and that I’d found him on the bank. When they searched the area, they found evidence of kids drinking up there and assumed he’d been one of them. They never found the grow.”
