Woodbury, Minnesota
After Midnight © 2011 by Lynn Viehl.
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First e-book edition © 2011
E-book ISBN: 9780738727929
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For my daughter, Katherine Rose,
with all my love—as promised.
One
Family secrets are like terrible birthday gifts. They’re always stuff you never wanted but have to keep anyway because someone you love gave them to you. Like a black velvet painting of Justin Timberlake or a jean jacket with a sequined unicorn on the back. You can stick them under your bed and pretend they’re not there, but someday you know someone nosy will find them, and laugh at you, and tell everyone.
Then there are the secrets that are so terrible that your family hides them from you. Funny thing is, no matter how well they keep those secrets, you still know they’re there. You can hear them in the conversations that stop as soon as you walk into the room. You can see them when they won’t look you in the eye. You can feel them, like monsters hiding under your bed, waiting for you to find them.
No matter what kind of family secrets you have, the one thing they never do? Is go away.
My alarm went off at six a.m. on my first day at Tanglewood High School. School didn’t start until seven-thirty, but I wanted an extra hour to work on Trick. I’d rehearsed everything I planned to say the night before in the shower; like how tired I was of going to a new school every year, all the problems we could avoid if he homeschooled me, and how much I could help out with the horses and around the house if he didn’t make me go.
If that didn’t work, I had a Plan B. I was almost sixteen, practically an adult, and old enough to drop out of school if I wanted. Trick couldn’t stop me.
It wasn’t because I hated school. I just didn’t see the point in going to another one that I’d have to leave in six months or a year when we packed up and moved again. I’d already gone to fourteen different schools since first grade, and I was sick of forever being the new kid.
It was time for me to take charge of my life.
I went downstairs and found Trick in the kitchen, fishing black-edged waffles out of the toaster. He was five-ten, like me, but twice as wide and fifteen years older, so people always thought he was my uncle or something. Working outdoors with the horses tanned his skin pretty dark, and kept the muscles in his arms and legs huge. He shaved his head and wore a plain gold ring in his left ear, and no matter how hot it was, he always dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, like a priest on steroids. Trick said it was because black hid stains, but all his clothes were black, and he wasn’t that messy.
We never talked about it, but I think before Mom and Dad died my brother had been a biker.
Trick didn’t turn around or look at me, but when I opened my mouth he said, “Put the orange juice on the table, Cat, and go wake up your brother.”
He sounded like he was talking through a mouthful of gravel, and only one thing did that. He’d been up all night again working out in the barn while he worried about stuff. Trick hadn’t done that once since we’d moved here.
I decided I could argue about going to school tomorrow. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.” It must be pretty bad, I thought. “No way you’re getting a cold.” Trick never got sick. Ever.
He turned away so I couldn’t see his face. “I’ll tell you when Gray’s up.”
My brother Grayson lived in what had been used as the garage by the previous owners. Trick had converted it to a bedroom because the farmhouse only had two bedrooms and he said we all needed our privacy. That was fine with me. Of course Gray’s room was five times bigger than mine, plus he had a private entrance. He also didn’t have to climb the stairs a hundred times a day to get to his room like I did; he only had to walk through the laundry room. But he had no closet, and had to sleep with the water heater, the well pump and the noisy window shaker Trick had put in that mostly blew around the hot air.
Gray didn’t care. If Trick would have let him, he’d have slept out in the woods or in the barn with the horses.
I knocked on my brother’s door three times before I tried to open it and found it locked. I couldn’t yell—one of Trick’s house rules was no yelling at all no matter what—but as long as I used my fist I could hammer as much as I wanted.
So I did. “Grim.” He hated that more than Grouch, Gross, Gripe and all the other nicknames I’d given him, but I pounded the door three more times just to be sure. “Get up.”
I heard a low groan, mattress springs springing, and a jingle of keys, and stepped back.
The door opened a crack, and a single blue eye buried in a lot of messy blond hair glared down at me. “What?”
“School. Trick says we’re going.” I folded my arms. “He’s in the kitchen burning breakfast right now.” I looked over my shoulder before I lowered my voice and added, “He was up all night again.”
The eye closed. “Great.” The door thudded shut in my face.
I wasn’t offended. My brother Grayson made brick walls look friendly and talkative.
I took my favorite pair of jeans out of the dryer before I went back to the kitchen. Trick had piled two plates with his singed waffles and some sliced peaches. At his place were a cup of black coffee and the weekly issue of Lost Lake Community News, a free local newspaper he picked up whenever he went into town for supplies.
“How come Grim and I have to eat breakfast and you don’t?” I asked as I sat down and began trimming off the burned parts of my waffles.
“I had breakfast earlier.” Trick came over with a bottle of syrup for the waffles. He looked at the jeans I’d draped ove
r the back of my chair. “You’re not wearing those old things to school.”
“I can’t go in my underwear.” I sipped some juice. “Think of all the detentions I’ll get.”
Trick sat down and opened the paper. “I just bought you five new pairs of jeans.”
That he had, along with five new T-shirts and five new flannel shirts. Unless Trick let me wash them a couple hundred times, I wasn’t planning to wear them anytime soon.
“They still have the tags on,” I mentioned. “If you let me stay home this year, you could return them and get your money back.”
Two brown eyes looked over the top of the paper. “You’re going to school, Catlyn.”
I really hated my name—everyone thought you were supposed to pronounce it like Caitlin or Kaitlin, and forget about spelling it right—but the only time Trick used it was when he wanted me to know that what he said, he meant. It was better than him yelling or swearing at me, which he never did.
Sometimes I wished he would—yell, of course, not swear. Trick never lost his temper, or made a mistake, or did anything wrong. No way was I ever going to be half as perfect as he was.
A shadow fell over the table as Gray came in, sat down and began to eat. He ate like he did everything, fast and in total silence.
When he wasn’t sleeping Gray spent every minute he could outside, so his tan matched Trick’s, and the sun had streaked his blond hair and turned his eyebrows and eyelashes white. He hated getting his hair cut—among the ten thousand things he didn’t like, strangers touching him ranked pretty high on the list—so he wore it in a ponytail or shoved it through the back of one of his baseball caps. Gray had been taller than me since the fifth grade, and bigger than Trick since two Christmases ago. I had a fuzzy memory of him being skinny like me when we were little, but that hadn’t lasted.
Since we’d become teens the kids at school had started teasing my brother and calling him things like The Hulk and Terminator, but he didn’t care. The only things that mattered to Gray were food, sleep and being left alone.
I felt a little better when Grayson was around. He might have been a big, moody grouch, but he never made me feel like I wasn’t good enough.
When Trick got up to refill his coffee, I slid my plate over to my brother, who forked the scorched waffles I hadn’t eaten onto the pool of syrup left on his plate.
I waited for the big announcement, but Trick just stood gazing out the window at the south pasture. I knew he really liked this place; he’d been in a decent mood all summer.
Finally I couldn’t wait another second. “So do we need to start packing?”
“No.”
If we weren’t moving, then it had to be about money. “Are we broke or something?”
“I’ve been saving up for a couple years. We’re okay.” He drank some of his coffee. “It’s time we put down some roots.” He glanced over his shoulder. “We’re staying here, Cat.”
Because of Trick’s work, we’d never stayed anywhere. For a minute I didn’t know what to say. “Why here?”
“I think it’s a good place for us.”
We’d lived in other good places, like California and Wyoming. Very good places, in fact. So why would he think living in a backwoods country town in the middle of Nowhere, Florida was better?
“What about your job?” I asked. Trick had worked for a big computer company that had sent us all over the country. They never needed him to stay at a branch office longer than six months.
“I resigned a couple of weeks ago.” He turned around to face us. “Working the farm and breeding horses is going to be my job from now on. The barn’s almost ready, so I’ll be buying more stock.”
I bit the inside of my lip. Wherever we’d lived, we always rented a little house in the country, with a barn and stalls and pasture for our horses, but I’d thought that was only because Trick hated the city and didn’t want to sell the horses. He’d never once mentioned breeding them for a living.
“You check it out?” Gray asked.
Trick nodded. “Nothing but corn fields and cattle ranches.”
They were talking around me again, the way they did whenever they meant something I didn’t know about or understand. Sometimes I had the feeling that Grim and Trick kept a lot of stuff from me; probably because I was a girl or the youngest. It wasn’t fair because Gray was only a year older than me, plus I hated being treated like the baby of the family.
“What did he have to check out?” I asked Gray. When he didn’t answer, I turned on Trick. “Well?”
“Just the neighborhood, Cat,” my brother said mildly.
I shoved my chair back from the table, but before I could stomp out of the kitchen I heard a faint mew from outside. I went to the window and saw a little shadow hiding behind the gardenia bushes we’d planted around the porch.
“If you keep feeding him,” Trick said, “he’ll never go away.”
“Hear that, Grim?” I smirked at my brother. “You’re going to live with us forever.”
I grabbed a paper plate and the bag of cat food I kept stashed in the pantry and went outside onto the back porch. As soon as I closed the door the little stray crept out of the bush and jumped up beside me. He purred as he rubbed against my legs and tried to get his head under my hand. That made me spill some of the cat food, and I bent down to scoop it back onto the paper plate.
“Look what you made me do,” I scolded, and then laughed as he jumped onto my lap and butted me in the chest. “Okay, okay. I’m glad to see you, too.”
He was dirty, smelly and thin, and his ears had bald spots from rubbing against the wrong things, but he had the sweetest gold-green eyes. A tiny fleck of white fur on his chin always made me think of a soul patch. He wouldn’t touch the food until I went inside, so I took a minute to give him a gentle scratching around the ears and under his neck.
“Now eat your breakfast,” I told him after I put him down and stood. He always tried to follow me inside so I had to slip into the house quickly. Even when I closed the door he sat outside on the doormat as if waiting for me.
“Don’t leave that cat food sitting out there like you did yesterday,” Trick told me. “I saw raccoon tracks in the yard. Once they smell it they’ll start coming here every night to scrounge.”
“Sorry.” I saw Gray had already gone back to his room. “Are you taking me to school?” Sometimes Trick’s motorcycle, an ancient Harley that was forever breaking down, wouldn’t start. With a little luck I might get to stay home anyway, and then I could find out why after all these years of bouncing from town to town he’d decided we needed to settle in Lost Lake.
Trick ruined that idea, too. “I have to go look at a couple of brood mares today. Gray will take you.”
That was another thing that seemed so unfair. Grim already had a license and had been driving for almost a year. Trick wouldn’t even let me take the test to get my learner’s permit.
“When am I going to be allowed to drive?” I asked for the hundredth time. “When I’m thirty?”
For once Trick didn’t say yes. “Bring home straight A’s this semester, and we’ll talk about it.”
“Seriously?” I couldn’t believe it. He knew I always got straight A’s. “Will I have my own car? Do I get to pick it out?”
“We’ll see what we can afford.” Trick glanced at the clock. “Go and get dressed now. You don’t want to be late.”
Not anymore, I didn’t. I grabbed my jeans and ran upstairs.
I didn’t have much in the way of nice clothes. We weren’t poor, exactly. Trick worked hard and always made sure we had what we needed. It had more to do with me being the youngest and the only girl in the family.
Up until last year Trick had bought all my clothes, which had been tragic because he really had no idea what girls were supposed to wear. When I was little I didn’t mind the jeans and the T-shirts he bought, but by fourth grade I started noticing that the other girls at my school didn’t dress like me. I wasn’t crazy about skir
ts, dresses and the frilly lacy stuff some of them wore, but I didn’t like looking different, either.
Things changed when my sixth grade gym teacher sent home a note asking Trick to buy me some bras because I was “blooming” and starting to show through my T-shirts. I had to explain the blooming part, which really embarrassed me and him both. That night he took me to Wal-Mart, handed me a bunch of money and left me in the lingerie section. Luckily there was an older lady clerk working there, and when I asked her about the sizes she measured me and helped me pick out what I needed.
“Your mother should have come with you,” the clerk said as she took me back to the dressing room.
“I don’t have a mom,” I told her. “I mean, she’s dead. So’s my dad.”
Her stern face softened. “Oh, you poor thing. Who’s taking care of you?”
“My oldest brother, Patrick.” I didn’t like to talk about our parents because all people really wanted to know was how they died. I didn’t remember the car accident and my brothers never talked about it, so I didn’t really know much. Plus strangers never seemed to have a problem with asking a kid for all the gruesome details. I held up one of the stretchy sports bras she’d given me to try on. “Does this come in beige?”
Since then Trick let me buy my own clothes, and I had a couple of dresses and skirts, but I was too self-conscious to wear them often. I definitely didn’t want to show off how skinny my legs were on the first day of school, so I put on what Trick called my uniform: faded jeans, a white T-shirt and a blue plaid flannel shirt. I didn’t have pierced ears, and the only jewelry I owned was an old silver St. Christopher’s medal that I wore on a chain tucked under my shirt, so after I put my sneakers on I just had to do something with my hair.
Unlike Grim I didn’t inherit my mother’s fine, fabulous blond mane; my dad had stuck me with his thick, stick-straight dark brown hair. I wore it parted on the side so it fell over my left eyebrow, which I thought looked better than parting it in the middle, but that was about all I could do with it. It wouldn’t hold a curl or a wave unless I slept in wet braids, and even then the crimps would fall out as soon as I showered.