One minute to ten. I turned the key in the ignition and started driving slowly. I made a left onto one of the winding streets. I was about two blocks from the house, but I couldn’t see it because of the curving road. When I came around the curve, I saw a car behind the truck in the driveway and two more parked by the curb. I stepped on the brake, trying to see if the cars belonged to Roy or Savannah, and that’s when I realized they were cop cars. Three of them. I could hear shouting coming from the backyard. It sounded like a couple of men. Maybe a woman. I saw a cop lead a guy down the front walk, and all I could think was That could have been me. A couple of neighbors were out on their front lawns, watching what could only be a bust. I heard a little kid screaming, running out the front door after the man being led away. It was too dark for me to tell if the kid was a boy or a girl, and by then I didn’t care. I kept on driving, driving, driving, and I didn’t stop until I was back on the beltline.
My phone rang and I grabbed it, flipping it open without even checking the caller ID. “There’s a fucking bust at that house!” I shouted.
“Right,” Roy said. “So plan B. 2:00 a.m. You go out Route 64 to—”
“I want this stuff out of my van!”
“Chill,” he said. “We’ve got it covered.”
“We?” I asked. “Are you and Savannah working together again?”
“Savannah and I’ll be working together till we’re old and gray,” he said.
So Savannah’d been playing me. I wasn’t shocked. Just pissed.
“She’s getting a truck right now,” Roy said. He started rattling off directions and I had to memorize them since I was still driving. It sounded like he was sending me to the end of the earth. I only hoped I had the gas to get me there.
“You’ll come to a clearing with a couple of tree stumps straight ahead of you,” Roy said. “Don’t drive past the stumps or you’ll be up to your hubcaps in the marsh. You’ll see the truck. 2:00 a.m.”
“2:00 a.m.,” I said.
“We know where you are, bro,” he added. “Don’t even think of blowing this again.”
* * *
The place I was to meet Roy and Savannah was a long way off Route 64, clear on the other side of Raleigh. I drove for miles through the darkness, hoping I had the directions straight in my head. Some of the roads were missing street signs and I would have killed for a GPS.
At one forty-five, I reached the clearing. There was no truck, but I was sure I was in the right place. The dirt road ended and my headlights picked up the two tree stumps and the marshy earth beyond. When I turned off my headlights, the only lights I could see were the stars in the sky and the half moon. The place spooked me. It had taken me a long time of driving through nothing to get here. A gunshot wouldn’t even be heard out here. I turned on my headlights again and inched the van forward. It looked like the soggy earth bordered a pond, the water scummy. Tree limbs and a tire stuck up from its surface, and suddenly I could see myself in there. I saw my lifeless body floating in the water after Roy did me in. Why wouldn’t he? He’d have the drugs, he’d have my van, and he could keep the few hundred bucks and get rid of a potential problem—me. A criminal with a conscience. I knew I’d become more trouble to him and Savannah than I was worth.
Ten to two. No way was I going to hang out here, waiting to be killed. I turned the van around and left the way I’d come in, hoping I didn’t pass Roy and Savannah on the road. I took the first turn I spotted and pulled off the dirt road, tucking the van into the woods, waiting in the darkness until I saw what must have been their pickup pass by on the main road and then I took off. Took the hell off.
I was relieved when I reached 64 again but I headed away from Raleigh instead of toward it. I couldn’t go back to the parking lot near the coffee shop, which was the first place I figured they’d come looking for me. Instead, I found a huge Dumpster behind a restaurant. I pulled up next to it, opened the lid and tossed in case after case of formula. They made a satisfying thunk as they hit the garbage.
I felt cleansed when it was over. I’d reclaimed my van. My life. Now I needed to reclaim my daughter.
33
Robin
I walked the half mile to the house where Alissa had told me Will lived with his mother. There was an old Suburban in the driveway, dented on one side, the paint scraped away and a little rust showing. But the house itself looked well maintained, as Alissa had pointed out to me. Someone had planted pansies in the front flower bed.
I hoped Will was home and not his mother. I was prepared to talk with him, but I wasn’t sure what I would say I was doing there if his mother answered the door. Did she know about Hannah? Did she even know that Will and Alissa had been involved? I had no idea.
I climbed the steps to the front porch. The floor of the porch was a little tilted, enough so that I felt off-balance as I neared the door. I rang the bell and heard a series of low, gruff barks from inside, the kind of barking that had a menacing growl mixed into it, and I was glad there was a screen door between me and the front door.
It took a couple of minutes and another ring of the bell, but then the door was pulled open and Will stood in front of me. Blond, blue-eyed, slender. He looked just as he had on the computer screen in Alissa’s room. He held the collar of a snarling dog that had at least half pit bull in him. I wondered if I was making a mistake. I’d never allow that dog around Hannah.
I opened my mouth to introduce myself but didn’t need to. “Hey,” he said, eyebrows raised. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to talk to you about Alissa and the baby,” I said quietly, in case his mother was home.
“Right now?” he asked. “The timing kinda sucks.”
I didn’t like his answer. “There’s no good time,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. He pushed the door open and stepped out onto the porch, the dog coming with him. I felt a rush of adrenaline as the dog started toward me, but once on the porch, he was friendly, tail wagging, sniffing my hands. My legs.
“He’s cool.” Will gestured toward him. “Bark’s worse and all that.” He sat down on one of the two porch chairs and I sat on the other. The dog rested his big square head on my knee and I scratched behind his left ear. “How’s she doing?” Will asked. “Alissa?” He was wearing jeans. A blue T-shirt. No obvious tattoos. No pierced anything that I could see.
“She’s doing okay,” I said. “But she misses you. She really wants to see you. She doesn’t know I’m here. I came to find out how you feel. If you want to see her and your daughter. Your baby’s beautiful.” I smiled. I should have brought a picture but hadn’t thought of it. “Alissa’s certain you want to see them and I frankly don’t think it’s fair you’re being kept apart, so—”
“You have no idea what’s going on, do you?” he interrupted me. He was leaning forward, arms on his knees, frown lines between his eyebrows that made him look older than nineteen. His smile was small and a little mocking.
I was caught off guard. “What do you mean?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away. He looked away from me, out toward the street. “How much do you know?” he asked.
“I know you’re the father of Alissa’s baby,” I said. “I know you two saw each other for quite a while on the sly. I know she loves you and misses you. What do you mean, I don’t know what’s going on?”
“Your fiancé’s kept you in the dark,” he said. He made the word fiancé sound like something dirty, and I felt the same rush of adrenaline, the same fear, I’d felt when the dog snarled at me.
“About what?” I asked.
He leaned back and rolled his head right, then left as if stretching his neck muscles. “You know my mother used to work for the Hendricks?” he asked.
Ah. I thought I understood. “Yes, she was their housekeeper years ago, right? And I know the family can be…elitist. I know that the fact she’s a housekeeper and your father’s in prison is upsetting to—”
“Smokescreen,” he said. “T
hat might be what they’re telling you is the big issue—” he put air quotes around those two words “—but that’s not it. I haven’t even seen my father since I was three. He’s not in my life. Their big issue with him being locked up is just…” He shook his head. “They’re blowin’ smoke. My father doesn’t have anything to do with why they didn’t want me and Alissa to see each other. Neither does my mother’s work. Or the fact that I dropped out of school.”
“I’m afraid it does, Will,” I said gently. “I’m afraid that the Hendricks family, much as I love them, have their noses in the air sometimes and—”
“Old man Hendricks—James. Mr. Mayor. Him and my mother had a thing.”
“Had a…? You mean a disagreement or—”
“An affair,” he said. “They were screwing each other. Get it?”
I sat back in the chair. “No, they were not,” I said.
“Yes, they were. Back when she was working for them. From the time I was ten or eleven to when I was thirteen. I was probably the only person who knew about it and it took me a long time to catch on ’cause I was young and naive, but I finally figured it out. Then Mollie found out and all hell broke loose. They fired my mother, of course, and James gave her this house.” He nodded toward the front door. “Used to be owned by the Hendricks and they rented it out, but James turned it over to my mother so she’d keep her mouth shut. He still pays for the upkeep on it. Check out the new paint job. Nice, huh?”
I shook my head in disbelief. Could he be making this whole ugly thing up? It was too far-fetched not to be the truth, though. I had a sudden thought. “This whole relationship between you and Alissa,” I said, “this wasn’t some sort of…revenge, was it? Do you care about her?”
He let out a long breath and sat back in the chair, his hands behind his head. “When I met Alissa, I didn’t realize who she was. I liked her a lot. She was nice to look at. Cool. I knew she was too young for me, but she seemed older, you know what I mean? We just hung around for a few weeks before I knew her last name. Then I thought, Oh, shit. I told her how my mother used to work for her family and she remembered her, but not real well. I didn’t say anything about what happened with her father, though. I didn’t want to hurt her.” He patted his thigh and the dog moved from my side to his. “You could say I was falling for her then,” he said.
“You love her?”
He leaned over to rub the dog’s chest. “I don’t know if I love anybody,” he said.
Hannah, I thought. He wouldn’t be able to look at Hannah without loving her.
“I didn’t know how her parents would react when we started going out, but I found out soon enough. They nixed it, but by then, Alissa and I were in too deep to just quit, so she got that gay dude—Jess—to play like he was her boyfriend, which worked okay till she got pregnant. Dale called me then. Said I had to stay away from Alissa and the baby. He said his mother had a cow when she found out Alissa was seeing me, because of my mother. The last thing Mollie wanted…probably James, too…was having my mother back in their lives. My mother’s beautiful,” he added. “I mean, she’s forty-two and all that, but you put her next to Mollie Hendricks and Mollie fades away, you know what I mean?”
I could imagine how upset Mollie had been when she found out Alissa was dating Will, but seriously. They had to put Alissa and Hannah first, didn’t they? They had to let go of the pettiness.
“What if I could smooth things out somehow?” How? I wondered. “Would you want that? I mean, do you still care about Alissa? Do you want to be part of your daughter’s life?”
His smile was weird. Sort of…sly. “Do I care about Alissa?” he asked. “Sure. But I can live without her.”
I sat back in the chair, drawing away from him. “That’s harsh,” I said. “What about your daughter?”
“She’ll be just fine with the Hendricks and better off without me. I don’t have any strong, like, paternal pull or anything.”
He stood up and reached into his jeans pocket, taking out a slightly crumpled piece of paper. “You’re not the first person from the Hendricks family to visit me today,” he said. He handed the paper to me and I flattened it on my thigh, shocked to see that it was one of Dale’s personal checks, made out to Will Stevenson for $4500.
I looked over at him. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“Like father, like son.” He shrugged. “James bought my mother’s silence with this house,” he said. “Dale’s buying mine now. I’ll leave Alissa alone. I’ll never go public with what I know about James. I’ll never try to be a part of that baby’s life. Frankly, I’d rather have the money.”
My mouth felt dry as dust. I shook my head. “Did you do some work for Dale, maybe?” I held the check in the air. “Maybe this was to cover the painter?” I nodded toward the house. “He wouldn’t give you this much money for nothing.”
“Staying out of Alissa’s life seems to be worth it to him.”
“Well, $4500 might seem like a lot to you now,” I said, “but having your child in your life is worth a lot more than that.”
He laughed. “Forty-five hundred dollars is a drop in the bucket of what Dale’s given me,” he said.
I couldn’t speak. I had no idea what to say. I felt as though the past two years of my life were falling apart too quickly to ever be put back together.
“He delivers it in dribs and drabs,” Will said. “Did you ever study those rat experiments when you were in school?”
“Rat experiments?” I shook my head, numb from head to toe.
“Yeah. If you reward them irregularly—you know, different amounts of rat food doled out at random times—they do more of what you want them to do than if you reward them on a schedule. I think that’s Dale’s philosophy. I never know when the next check is coming or how much it’ll be, but I do know it’s coming. And he knows if it ever stops coming, the deal is off.”
I wanted to shout at him. Call him a liar. Suddenly, a woman about my age appeared at the screen door. She pushed it open a few inches and I could see her spiky blond hair, her long bare legs, her tight T-shirt. “Hey, baby,” she said to Will. “What’s going on?”
“Business,” he said to her. “Wait inside.”
She looked at me. Assessed me. I could see her deciding if I was a threat, and I could tell the moment she decided I wasn’t. She closed the door.
If there was a threat in this whole mess of a situation, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t the pit bull. It wasn’t even Will.
It was the man I was about to marry.
34
Erin
Bella and I spent another quiet morning in the coffee shop, and my brain hurt from trying to figure out what had happened to Travis and what I should do. We were going stir-crazy, both of us, so at eleven I gave up on JumpStart and drove Bella to the lakeside playground by my apartment complex. I liked that small playground because Carolyn had never been there and there was little to remind me of her other than the feeling of pushing a child on a swing.
When we’d tired ourselves out at the playground, I didn’t even bother checking out JumpStart again. The coffee shop wasn’t the answer. How could I turn Bella over to Travis now, knowing he could just dump her on a stranger?
Back at my apartment, we ate tuna sandwiches and played Chutes and Ladders and then I tucked her in for a nap. I lay next to her on the bed while she slept and opened her pink purse to stare at the picture of Robin. “Do you have any idea what’s happening with your daughter?” I whispered to the photograph.
I pulled the shades to darken the room, then climbed under the covers, Robin’s picture still in my hand as I drifted off. Suddenly I was back on the playground, only it was Carolyn I pushed on the swing. As she swung away from me, she turned her head to call out. “It was a mistake, Mommy!” she squealed at me as I waited for the swing to bring her back to my hands. When it did, I caught her. Held on to her. Buried my face in her soft blond curls. “You thought I was dead but I’m really alive!” she said.
/> I jerked awake, my breath in my throat and a huge smile on my face—until reality hit. I looked at Bella, whose fist was curled beneath her cheek. Her lamb peeked out from beneath the covers. I lightly touched her hair. “Where is your mother?” I whispered to her. “Does she dream of holding you in her arms?”
I turned on the night-table lamp and stared at Robin’s picture in my hand. I would give anything to have my daughter back. Anything. Is that how she felt?
Beaufort. Not far. Two hours? Three? I had Robin’s picture. I knew where she was. And Beaufort wasn’t very large. Someone in that town would recognize her.
I got out of bed and began packing. I’d have to stop at the grocery store for snacks for the road. And JumpStart. Really, Bella and I should stop there one last time, just in case.
* * *
“Is Daddy here now?” Bella asked as I unbuckled her from the car seat and helped her out of the car the next morning. I’d parked right in front of JumpStart.
“I don’t think so, honey,” I said, “but I want to check before we go on a little trip.”
“To the swings?” she asked, taking my hand.
“No, farther away than the swings.” I planned to make a quick stop by my old house. In the attic was the portable DVD player we always used when we took Carolyn on a trip. I’d thought it was a terrible idea in the beginning, plugging my child into a DVD for hours, but Michael had said, “Why not? Don’t you wish you could pass the time in the car watching a movie?” The DVDs had kept Carolyn entertained and happy and I was sure they would do the same for Bella.
As I’d expected, Travis wasn’t in the coffee shop. I stopped at the counter where Nando was working alone. The new barista hadn’t lasted long. “Coffee, OJ and a muffin?” Nando asked.