“Leah Jones,” Grayson said to a man across the road.
“Is her mother’s name Patsy?” the man asked.
“No,” Grayson said. “It’s Sheryl.”
The fact that Grayson knew my mother’s name set off tornado sirens in my head, but I didn’t know what they meant. I just listened through the trees as Grayson made his way down the row of trailers. Nobody had heard of me. On his fourth or fifth try he got wise. Now I was not just Leah Jones. I was Leah Jones, walks down this path to the airport every day, tiny eighteen-year-old girl, “dark hair like this.” I pictured the motion he made with his hands as he pantomimed the explosion of my curls in the coastal humidity.
“Oh, I know what girl you mean,” said a woman. “She lives right there.”
For thirty seconds I expected Grayson to walk past the palm fronds that framed the road, into my yard. I still jumped when he did appear because he was so shockingly out of context. He crossed the dirt to my chair, kicking up hardly any dust with his flip-flops, and stood right in front of me.
I looked up at him. He was a lot taller than I remembered.
He stared down at me like a stern state trooper, eyes inscrutable behind his sunglasses. His straw cowboy hat mashed his blond curls against his head, and a drop of sweat trickled from his hairline down his cheek. “Can we talk?”
Politely I inclined my head, inviting him to sit in the other plastic chair. Behind my own sunglasses, out of the corner of my eye, I caught another glimpse of the makeshift ashtray and wished for a cigarette, any distraction to fumble with.
He sat down and slapped a mosquito on his arm. “Does your mom know you fly?”
It seemed like an innocent question, a friendly conversation starter. I knew better. After three and a half years of basically pretending I didn’t exist, Grayson had not come through the fence and searched for me just to have a casual chat.
“Of course she knows,” I lied, staring now where he was pointing. He’d taken a sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it on his thigh. My mother’s ironically neat and upstanding signature, underlined with a flourish, was at the bottom of the form Mr. Hall had wanted her to sign when he started giving me flying lessons.
Grayson’s broad fingertip tapped the paper, denting the signature, which seemed more delicate with every strike, as if every tap were a hammer blow, until it dawned on me what he meant. I had forged my mother’s signature on that form, and somehow he knew.
I grabbed for the form.
Before I could touch it, he snatched it away and held it above his head. “I have copies,” he said. “In fact, I mailed one home to Wilmington, so don’t bother.”
Slowly I sat back in my plastic chair and tried to wipe the emotion off my face, whatever it was—surprise, fear, horror, blind panic.
He relaxed too. He brought the form back down to his thigh and smoothed the wrinkled paper with his palm as if it were the original Declaration of Independence. “I’m sure this signature looks exactly like your mother’s. You signed it carefully. I have a lot of experience forging my mother’s name on report cards, and even I wouldn’t have noticed this if my dad hadn’t marked it with a sticky note.” With his thumb and middle finger he thumped the yellow square hanging off one side of the form. An arrow drawn on the note pointed to the forgery. “Like he suspected what you’d done, and then decided to let it go.”
“There’s no way you could prove that,” I said quickly. “You’d have to pay for a handwriting expert or something, and the FAA doesn’t care. Nobody cares that much about me.”
“I care about you, Leah,” he said sarcastically. “But luckily, I don’t have to hire a handwriting expert or report you to the FAA. All I have to do is show this to your mother.”
five
I sucked in a breath. Then realized that sucking in my breath had revealed to Grayson just how right he was, and how much I did not want him to involve my mother. “She’s out of town,” I said as evenly as I could. “Good luck finding her.”
“She’ll be back,” he predicted. “But if not… My dad just died. For the moment, I’m loaded. I’ll hire a private detective to find her.”
I blinked at Grayson. He was so handsome, and sitting so close in his chair, that my heart went into overdrive. I blinked again and he was the devil, sent here to seek out my every hope and crush it, my every fear and make it come true. I had never found my mother when she went missing, but I had never tried. I imagined it would be easy for a professional. A private detective would be friendly with the police, and my mother’s boyfriends were usually on parole.
“What would she do if she knew you’d forged her signature so you could start taking flying lessons at such a tender age?” Grayson asked.
She would kick me out of the trailer for forging her name and—more important to her—for lying to her about where my money was going. The trailer wasn’t much, but I had a month and a half of high school left, and nowhere else to go. Molly would offer to let me stay at her house. Her parents wouldn’t understand. Rich parents didn’t kick their children out. Molly’s folks would assume I’d done something truly awful and that I was a bad influence on her. They would make sure Molly stayed away from me. That would be the end of our friendship. And then—
“Would your mother pitch a fit at the airport office?” Grayson prodded me. “My dad’s dead. There’s nobody for her to sue. Does she understand that? I’ll bet she would try to lay the blame somewhere. Everybody at the airport would get dragged into it—everybody still alive who could have written you recommendations for jobs and flight schools and college in the next few months. You were planning to go to college at some point, right? You’d have to, if you want a job as an airline pilot.”
He had me there. College was not an option for me right now. Every dime I hadn’t given over to my mom, I’d blown on flying. I’d been counting on flying for Mr. Simon and saving up money for junior college tuition. After a few semesters, I would use my stellar new GPA and glowing recommendations from Mr. Simon and the Admiral and everyone else I knew at the airport to get a scholarship to a decent college that offered an aviation degree. But if Grayson ruined those recommendations for me—
“You know what else you need to get that airline pilot job?” Grayson asked. “Good moral character.”
He’d done his homework to blackmail me. He was quoting the FAA rules for an airline pilot’s license. I’d never known what “good moral character” meant, but I was pretty sure it ruled out forging my mother’s name to take flying lessons.
“All right,” I said through my hand, which I’d clapped over my mouth at some point while he was talking.
“All right, what?” he prompted me.
“All right, I’ll work for you.”
“Great,” he said calmly, like he didn’t think it was great at all. He just folded my entire future, sticky note and all, and shoved it back into his pocket.
“For how long?” I asked weakly.
He shrugged like he hadn’t thought about it. But his words betrayed him. He’d thought about this a lot. “Definitely this whole week of spring break. Most weekends after that, because Alec and I will be coming over from Wilmington to fly too. Not the next weekend after spring break is over, though. That’s our high school’s prom. My dad didn’t schedule any banners then, like he expected Alec and me to want to go.”
He turned his head toward the road as if listening for something, but the pit bull had stopped barking.
Grayson went on, “And after school lets out for the summer, we’ll reevaluate.”
I took a swig of beer, considering. Grayson would drive the business into the ground way before school let out. So I would fly for him this week. He would go back to Wilmington. The following weekend, his dad had given him the excuse of the prom to skip flying. There would be more excuses after that. Grayson and Alec would not come to Heaven Beach again, at least not to fly. They’d stay in Wilmington and forget all about me, and it would be like none of this had
ever happened.
In the meantime, I could start looking for another job flying. I hadn’t expected the crop-dusting job to drop in my lap. The imaginary crop-dusting job. Maybe an actual job would come up too. My prospects looked brighter than they had an hour before, when I’d buried my head under the pillows. Honestly, I didn’t want to fly for Grayson, but my spirits were lifted at the thought that I would finally fly a plane again. Or maybe it was the beer. I took another long pull and set the can down on the stump.
“I want you to pay me at the end of every workday,” I said.
Grayson’s brows went down behind his shades. “Why?”
“This is a day-by-day operation. I don’t want to walk over there one morning and find out you’ve packed up and run back to Wilmington without paying me.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Grayson said so firmly that I almost believed him. “But sure, if that’s what you want, I’ll pay you every day. And there’s one more thing.” His fist gripped and relaxed. “I need you to date Alec this week.”
I laughed shortly. The alcohol rushed to my head and heated my skin in the warm evening. I couldn’t make sense of what Grayson was saying. “You want me to what?”
“Date Alec.”
Date Alec? All day I’d fought my long-standing crush on Grayson. The idea of dating Alec, who was so different from Grayson, was a one-eighty, and I felt dizzy with the turn. “I haven’t even seen Alec since the fune—” Even drunk, I was able to stop myself, almost.
“Come to work tomorrow morning,” Grayson said as if I hadn’t spoken. “Flirt with Alec. He’ll ask you out. You’re local and it’s spring break, so it should be easy for you to show him a good time.”
“Grayson, that’s nuts!” I was yelling now, and the pit bull barked viciously in response. I lowered my voice. “Why in the world would you want me to date your brother?”
“I can’t tell you,” Grayson said simply.
“Then I’m not doing it,” I told him just as glibly.
“Then I’ll hire someone to deliver this forgery to your mother when you’re not around to stop it.” He leaned forward to stand up.
“No!” I exclaimed. “Sit down.”
He seemed to be watching me as he eased back into his chair.
“I’ll do it,” I said, “but you have to tell me why.”
“No.”
“Grayson!” His name set the pit bull off again. I whispered, “Is it for something illegal?”
“No.”
“Or something else that will screw up my commercial license?”
“Nothing like that,” he assured me. “It will get you out of trouble, because I’ll give you back this form and all the copies I made.”
And I would burn them. “Why do you think Alec’s going to ask me out just because I flirt with him? He hardly knows me.”
“But I know him,” Grayson said.
I shook my head. “Alec would not go out with me.” He might never have seen my trailer, but he knew. Everybody at the airport knew.
“Yes, he will,” Grayson said. “I’ve seen you in action. That oh, you’re a big strong man thing you do. Do that.”
I was tired of Grayson basically calling me a slut. “Why do you keep telling me I have to sleep with people to get a job? It’s a fourteen-year-old boy’s wet dream about how the business world functions. Grow up.”
Even though I couldn’t see his eyes, I could tell my words had finally affected him. He shifted backward in his chair like I’d slapped him.
Then I realized where I’d gotten that “grow up” line. From Mr. Hall himself. It was his favorite thing to yell at Grayson when he forgot to lock the hangar door or left a banner out in the rain. Mr. Hall didn’t mind yelling it across the tarmac for the Admiral and the other pilots and me to hear. Grow up, son.
“I said I want you to date him, not sleep with him,” Grayson said sharply. “If you assume you’re going to do everybody you date, that’s your problem.”
The palm tree above us swayed violently in the breeze, and my feet ached, two things that should not have gone together. I had been flexing my feet in my flip-flops as if pressing the foot pedals in a plane, stabilizing it against the buffeting wind.
“And”—his voice was soft now—“you’re a beautiful girl. If you show the slightest interest in Alec, he’ll want to go out with you. I know I would.”
My skin prickled with goose bumps, a chill in the hot April evening. My brain knew Grayson didn’t have the crush on me that I’d imagined when he got mad at me at the airport that afternoon. He wouldn’t have asked me to date his brother if he’d been interested in me. But my body didn’t know this, or didn’t care.
“Tell me why you want me to do this,” I said, quietly this time.
“It’s for his own good.”
I laughed, because that was a ridiculous thing for Grayson to say. Grayson and Alec were twins, exactly the same age, yet Grayson sounded like their father.
Grayson didn’t laugh. And as I watched him, he bit his lip nervously, gripped and relaxed his fist, kept himself barely under control. Convincing me to date Alec mattered to Grayson. A lot. Almost as if he were trying to do something for Alec’s own good, for once. As if someone needed to fill those shoes now that their father and their older brother were gone.
I understood why Grayson had recruited me for this job rather than sending the smoother Alec, and why irresponsible Grayson seemed to be the one in charge. For some reason having to do with the business and their dad’s death, Grayson was manipulating Alec.
If I could figure out why, I could blackmail Grayson right back.
I swallowed. “So you’re saying I’m for Alec’s own good.”
Grayson looked me up and down. He moved his head enough that I wouldn’t miss the tilt of his hat, and the provocative meaning behind it. “Ridiculous as that sounds, yes. Trust me, I have an excellent reason. You trust me, don’t you, Leah?”
“I thought I had made it very clear that no.”
“And Alec can’t know I told you to do this. If he finds out, I will make your life as difficult as I possibly can.”
Not if I made his life difficult first. I let out a frustrated huff. “Is this all because I didn’t say yes to your job in the first place?”
“No. I was always going to ask you to do this too. But when you didn’t say yes in the first place, you made me mad, and I went and found something to hold over your head. Now I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.” He took off his straw cowboy hat. I saw his hair so seldom that it always surprised me: how blond it was, almost as light as Alec’s, and how curly, whereas Alec’s was board straight. Grayson’s hair reminded me how young he was, even though he was acting like a boss, a manipulator, a god.
He passed the back of his wrist across his sweating brow, then put his hat back on. “You kicked Mark out, right?”
I frowned at Grayson. “What? Why?”
“Because you’re out here drinking beer. Let me guess. You asked Mark about the crop-dusting job. You found out he made it up, like I said. So you broke up with him. Is that what happened?”
I ground my teeth together, squeezed my eyes shut behind my shades, anything to keep from sobbing in front of Grayson.
“Hey, Leah, seriously.” His voice was soft and sweet like the spring wind. “He didn’t threaten to hurt you or anything, did he?”
I put one hand up to my temple, which had begun to ache. “No, but thanks for asking.”
Grayson nodded. “We talked about you for a while this morning. I thought he was lying to you about that job, but I don’t think he could fake the way he feels about you.”
I took the bait. “How does he feel about me?”
“Very strongly.”
I flared my nostrils in distaste. “I think he could fake that,” I muttered. “He was cheating on me anyway.”
“Doesn’t matter with Mark,” Grayson said. “My mother warned me about girls like you.”
I sighed the
longest sigh. “Girls like what, Grayson?”
“Girls with crazy boyfriends. She says girls like you are bad news. I need to know whether you really are. I want my brother to fall for you, but I don’t want to get him killed.”
The back of my neck prickled with danger, something the pit bull did not sense for once, because he was silent. This was the second time today someone had warned me about Mark. I didn’t know him that well, honestly. He hadn’t gotten violent when he left. But I knew he’d repeated his final semester in high school because he’d been suspended so many times for fighting.
“Last year we played a pickup basketball game at the hangar,” Grayson said, “and I beat him. Later that afternoon when we were both trying to land, he cut me off.”
“In the air?” I asked.
“Yeah. He didn’t announce himself. He came in right underneath me. It could have been bad. Of course, nobody was outside watching. I should have told my dad, but he would have blamed it on me and told me to grow up.” He balled his fist and tapped it on his knee. “I wanted you to work for me, Leah, but I also didn’t want you to take a job where you’ll be around that guy.”
“You said there was no job.”
“There isn’t,” Grayson insisted, “and if you double-check with Mr. Simon about it, you’re going to be embarrassed. Anyway, you have a job now.” He closed the distance between our chairs and stood over me again. “Tomorrow morning at seven.”
My stomach was doing flips. I reached for my beer on the stump.
He snagged it before I did and poured the rest on the dead palm fronds behind my chair.
“Hey,” I protested.
He crumpled the can in one fist. Then he crossed the yard, jogged up the cement-block stairs, and swung through the aluminum door.
“Grayson!” I yelled. But I didn’t run after him into the trailer. The only thing worse than him rooting around in there was watching him while he did it, and seeing his expression of pity. I kept my eyes on the door, and waited, and wished for that beer back.