Текст книги "Physical Distraction"
Автор книги: Tess Oliver
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 14 страниц)
Chapter 11
Tashlyn
Everly had labeled it flirting but I’d insisted that it was just two coworkers engaging in meaningless conversation, like people standing around their work cubicles on a Monday morning, chit-chatting over coffee until the boss arrived. Only we’d been standing in a crowded bar, and Jem was definitely no ordinary coworker. It had been the first time that Everly and I had exchanged terse words. Although terse wasn’t really a good word for our exchange in the car, it was more a mild string of warnings from Everly and a mild string of counterarguments from me. The final end to the conversation had come when I reminded her that Jem had saved Finn from drowning.
The smell of bacon coaxed me from bed. I’d come home with a nice pot of money which I’d promptly handed over to Everly for my part of the living expenses. She half-heartedly refused to take it at first, but with my persistence, she gave in and accepted it.
I shuffled down the short hallway to the kitchen.
Everly smiled as she glanced back at me from the stove. “Eggs and bacon?”
“Surprisingly, yes. I was sure I’d wake feeling as green as those apple martinis but I’m fine.” I sat at the table. “Of course, if someone put one of those damn martinis in front of me right now, I would turn green for sure.” I was relieved that Everly had already pushed our Jem Wolfe conversation behind her.
Everly turned around with two steaming plates of food. “Are you still interested in going to Alice’s book shop? I already let my uncle know that I was going to walk you over and introduce you to Alice and that I might be a few minutes late. I’m sure Alice will have no problem with you combing through her newspaper collection. She has everything super organized, so you should be able to find just what you’re looking for. She’s always happy when someone wants to look at the old stuff. Gives her a reason for hoarding it.”
“That would be terrific.” I braced myself to do some detective work, work that would probably include a lot of details about my dad’s death. But I saw no other way around it. I needed to take a look back in time. I needed to find out how I’d ended up here as a lost and scared seven-year-old.
I picked up a piece of bacon. Everly had cooked it to perfection. “Delish. Fried fat. Who knew? Actually, I guess everybody knew. I mean fat and frying does sort of lend itself to deliciousness.”
Everly took a bite of bacon. “Our hearts and arteries might say otherwise, but I figure as long as I’m not chowing on the stuff for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” She poured herself some orange juice. “Did you figure out the bus schedule?”
“Well, there’s not much I can do since the bus schedule and the sawmill hours are off by an hour either direction. But the good news is that Mr. Stevens gave me a key to the office, so I can go in and get started. I’m going to lock up too. That way I don’t have to sit alone at the bus stop for long. And there’s so much to do in that office. Hal said he’d pay me the overtime if I wanted to work and get more done.”
“Great. That works. Thanks again, Tash, for the money. It’ll come in handy, and I’ll use it to buy groceries today. The nights are getting cold enough for hot cocoa and whipped cream, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely.”
We sat uncharacteristically silent for a few minutes while we ate our breakfast. We always had so much to talk about. It was as if we’d known each other for a long time instead of just a few days. I also knew that when Everly paused her end of the conversation, she was thinking about something.
She took a bite of toast and stared at the bread in her fingers. “I did let him cheat off my test.”
It took me a second to figure out what the heck she was talking about. “You mean when you and Jem got sent to the principal?”
“Yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “My uncle was so mad that I got in trouble for that. Especially because it was Jem.” She put her toast down. “I knew I was supposed to stay clear of Jem and Dane, and I always did.” She breathed a quiet sigh. “Growing up, I always felt really sorry for the brothers, especially Jem. Dane was always sort of out there, kind of oblivious to everyone and everything, but Jem was different. You could tell he had a much deeper soul, a scarred soul but a deep one. The day of the math test, I remember he’d come to school wearing the same dirty t-shirt he’d been wearing all week. He had big dark rings under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept. When it was time to go to the lunchroom, he, as usual, didn’t have enough money, so the food service lady gave him the traditional pathetic milk and crackers. When the bell rang to go back to class, everyone walked out of the cafeteria, but I’d forgotten my lunchbox. I went back to get it, and Jem was digging in the trashcan for leftovers. He never saw me, thank god, because even at that age, he would have hated that. But I remember thinking, maybe he was always in trouble because he was always tired and hungry.”
My stomach soured around my few bites of breakfast as she told the story. “I’ve only had a few encounters with the guy so that doesn’t make me an expert, but I do wonder if this town has judged him too harshly.” For a fleeting second, I was sure I had her joining my side of the Jem Wolfe opinion.
A sharp laugh shot from her mouth. “Like you said, you’ve only had a few encounters. Believe me, he’s owed every harsh opinion. That scar on his chin happened while he was in juvenile hall, or did you forget that little detail?”
Again, disappointment. Her impression of Jem was set in stone, and I wasn’t going to change it. And since she’d known him her whole life, I could only assume she was right.
We cleaned up, changed and stepped out into the brisk morning air. I pulled my jacket tighter around me.
Everly had pulled on a heavy sweatshirt. She looked at my faded denim jacket and shook her head. “That coat is cool, but it’s not going to cut it up at this altitude. Did you bring something else?”
“This is about as winter prepared as my wardrobe gets. We didn’t have much cold weather back home.”
“We’ll have to do something about that soon, or you’ll be freezing your cute little bohemian butt off.”
Aside from thin white clouds, the sky was a crystal blue. The atmosphere over Blackthorn Ridge was so thin and fresh, it almost made you lightheaded just to breathe it in. Wherever your eyes landed, you could find a copse of tall, lush evergreens. “This place must be beautiful in the winter.”
“Sure is. As long as you’re inside by a fire or under a blanket looking out at the scenery. But I can’t complain. I’d rather be up here than down in a smoggy, crowded city.” Her face smoothed, and she drew her lips tight as we reached an intersection.
There was only one vehicle at the stop sign, an old pick-up truck that looked as if it had seen its share of miles on the road. It rumbled loudly as it rolled past. Everly averted her eyes, but my gaze was drawn to the driver. His hair was shaved close to his head and gray beard stubble covered his chin. His dark, angry eyes nearly bore a hole right through me as he rolled slowly past. An unexplained shiver racked my body, and suddenly, the cold outside was nothing compared to the icy feeling in my chest. I startled as the truck roared and sped off.
“Wow, who was that? He looked extremely unfriendly.”
“That, my friend, was Alcott Wolfe, Jem’s dad. And yes, you’re right. Extremely unfriendly.”
We turned the corner. A table of books, bookmarkers and other knick knacks one might find on a shelf sat on the sidewalk in front of Alice in Bookland. I wondered if there were many Blackthorn citizens that frequented the place. We had a bookstore in The Grog that was always crowded. It was sort of a gathering place on Saturdays. From what I’d seen so far, this town didn’t seem very bookish. We reached the shop door, and the place looked empty. I wasn’t terribly surprised.
We stepped inside. There was row after row of old books, their spines neatly lined along each slightly dusty shelf. The books were so tightly packed it was a wonder anyone was able to pull one free. But the most interesting thing about Alice’s Bookland was the fragrance. One would expect the slightly musty smell of yellowing book pages and dried ink. Instead, there was a sweet, fruity aroma that took me a second to recognize.
I looked at Everly. “Is that coconut?”
“Yep. Alice is a big proponent of the health benefits of coconut. And just like the Native Americans used every part of the buffalo, Alice uses every part of the coconut—oil, milk, flesh. She even grinds up the shell for her plants.”
With a shop named Alice in Bookland, an obsessive need to collect old stuff and the unexpected ambience of a tropical island, I expected Alice to be one of those eccentric looking older women with brightly dyed red hair and a purple shawl draped around a flamboyant dress. Instead, a stout woman with a tightly bound school teacher’s bun and incredibly smooth pink skin walked out from the backroom.
“Everly, how nice of you to visit.” She walked out from behind her counter. Her one contribution to my earlier vision of the more ‘colorful’ Alice was an apron with the Mad Hatter printed all over it. Her round cheeks were shiny with what I could only guess was coconut oil.
“Hi, Alice, how are you doing?” Everly asked.
“I’m fine, dear, and how’s your mom?”
Aside from the short account of her mom living in a group home for recovering alcoholics, Everly never talked about her. “She’s doing really well. Hopefully she’ll be home for Christmas.”
Alice nodded half-heartedly as if she doubted it. She reached down and took hold of Everly’s scarred hand. “Have you been rubbing coconut oil into these burn scars like I suggested? I think you’d find a significant improvement in the elasticity of your skin.”
Everly tapped her forehead with her free hand. “Keep forgetting. But I’ll definitely give it a try.” Everly shot me a quick eye roll.
Alice looked at me over the metal rims of her glasses. “And who is this?”
Everly reached back and took hold of my arm. “Alice, this is Tashlyn. She’s new in town, and she’s staying with me. She is very interested in looking at old newspaper articles.”
Alice’s oily pink face lit up at the mention of the old newspapers. “Wonderful, a historian. I’ve got papers that date all the way back to the mid fifties.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “But I’m mostly interested in papers from the late nineties.”
Her soft, white eyebrows knitted together. “The 1890’s?”
“Actually, the 1990’s.”
Her brows remained pinched but then she laughed. “I guess for a young person like you, the 1990’s are history. They seem like just yesterday to me. But I’ve got those as well.”
“Well, I’ll leave you to your research,” Everly said. “Afterward, come by the market, and we can have some lunch.”
“Sounds good.”
Everly walked out and I followed Alice down a long corridor that was lined with stacks of magazines. The rich, oily fragrance of coconut swirled around everything. We stepped inside a room where a faded floral print sofa, a coffee table and a fake green fern were completely surrounded by shelves packed with boxes. Each box was labeled with a month and date.
Alice traveled along the shelves and pointed up to a box. “That box with the yellow label is January 1990. That’s where you can start.” She walked farther along the shelf and shook her head as she pushed several boxes back on the shelf. “The 1990’s are popular today,” she mumbled to herself. She pointed to a three tiered stepladder leaned up in the corner of the room. “Be careful when you climb up there. Oh, and watch out for spiders and cockroaches. They love to climb inside the old boxes.”
“I will definitely keep my eyes open for crawly things.”
“I’ll be at the front counter if you need me.” She left with a big grin, taking most of the coconut aroma with her. But it seemed that the fragrance had penetrated everything in the store.
I walked past the first boxes. I was seven and just about to start second grade when my dad died. I remembered it well because instead of returning to my old school with my old friends, I’d had to start a new school near Aunt Carly’s house. Social services had made me go through a doctor’s physical and a series of visits to a lady with rectangular black glasses and a wall aquarium that took up half her office wall. The tiny pink seahorses swimming in the tank almost made the awkward visits to her office bearable. She was always chewing on the end of her pen as we sat and played games and talked. I figured out years later that she’d been a psychologist, but she’d never been able to unlock those lost days from my memory. While there was no real physical evidence of trauma on my body, the doctor had theorized that something so terrifying had happened to me, I’d buried it deep. Aunt Carly had finally stepped in and put an end to the sessions. She decided what I needed most was to feel secure and loved and then everything that was supposed to surface would come out naturally.
I spotted August 1999 on the shelf. Fortunately, it was on top of other boxes. I grabbed the stepladder and climbed up. I sneezed twice from the dust. I pulled the box off the shelf and noticed right away the handprint in the collected grime on the lid of the box. The layer of oily dust seemed consistent with a box that had been untouched on a shelf for sixteen years. But the large handprint looked fresh.
The descent down the rickety stepladder was much harder with an unwieldy box. I reached the floor and carried it to the table. I was never one to run screaming from a room if a spider crawled across the floor, but I made sure to lift the top carefully. The papers were even in order by day, with the first of August right on top. Apparently there had been a small brush fire on the side of the highway the day before, and it had made front page news. That seemed like a perfectly respectable headline for a small town like Blackthorn Ridge, only now, after Everly’s horrifying tale of the missing girls, I knew there was a lot more to the place than an idyllic setting and sawmill.
August 18th. Most of that terrible period of time was a blur, but I knew the date that my dad died. It had been etched on the small marble plaque they put on his marker in the mausoleum. The fire in the truck had been so complete and consuming, there were hardly any remains left to bury. Several of his coworkers, truckers for the same company, had made the burial arrangements. The rest of the details were smeared away with the lost chunk of time.
I paused for just a second to gain my composure and then thumbed down through the pile to the eighteenth. I pulled it out. It wasn’t front page news. The story that had grabbed the headline was the arrival of several federal agents who had been newly assigned to the missing girl cases. I looked closer at the faded yellow photo. Two men in severe black suits were shaking hands with another man. I glanced down at the picture caption. The other man in the picture was Mayor Landon Gregory. On closer inspection, it was easy to see that it was, indeed, Everly’s uncle.
I flipped through the pages and saw no mention of a death on Phantom Curve. Then it occurred to me that the paper had probably been printed in the early hours of the eighteenth. I needed the nineteenth. I reached back inside and grabbed the next paper. It was the twentieth. There was a short mention of the clean-up of charred debris from the truck, but there had to be more. I looked through the entire stack. The nineteenth was the only paper missing.
I could hear Alice singing along with the radio and decided she wasn’t too busy with customers for a quick question. She had her elbow on the counter as she perused a magazine. She looked up. “I don’t know where my manners are. Would you like some coffee while you look through the papers? Just be careful not to spill.”
“I’m fine, thanks. I had breakfast before Everly and I walked over here.” I walked to the counter. “Alice, I was looking for a specific newspaper, and it’s not where it should be. Is there someplace else—”
“No, dear, you must have just missed it. Every paper is in place. Let’s go look.” She glanced back at me as I followed her down the narrow corridor. “You certainly are a pretty little thing. And that complexion. You should rub coconut oil into your skin every night. You’ll be glad when you’re my age.” She chuckled as she stepped into the newspaper room. “Now, let’s see where that paper is.”
I led her to the box on the table. “I was looking specifically for the paper from August 19th, 1999.”
She leaned into the box and flipped through each paper reciting the dates as she went through the stack. “August 18th, August 20th.” She paused and went back through and then to the bottom. She straightened and looked genuinely puzzled and a little upset about the missing paper. She glanced around the room as if the paper might just have flown from the box unseen.
“When you showed me the boxes, you said something about the 1990’s being popular today. Maybe there was someone else in here before me?” I suggested.
“Yes, but—but my nephew knows better than to remove anything from my collection.”
“Was your nephew looking in this decade too?”
“He must have been. The box was sticking out. The one I pushed back.” She looked down at the front of the box. “Yes, it was 1999.”
I lifted the box top to show her the fresh handprint.
“Well, look at that. I’ll have to call him later and give him a piece of my mind.”
“Do you think it’s possible for me to get a hold of him and ask if I could see the paper?” There were thousands of papers surrounding us, and the one paper I needed to see had left the room for the first time in sixteen years. It couldn’t just be a coincidence. I’d found my first real clue.
Alice didn’t have to mull over my request. “No, dear, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’ll give him a call later and tell him to bring it back. Check back here next week. Was there anything else you wanted to see?” she asked with an edge of disappointment. It seemed she was hoping I’d spend more time looking at her vast collection.
“No, I just really needed to see that one. But thanks so much for letting me see your papers. It’s wonderful how you’ve managed to collect them all and keep them in such perfect order.” My compliment seemed to wipe away some of her disappointment. I helped her return the box to the shelf and followed her back to the front of the store.
I desperately wanted to know her nephew’s name and had to think fast. “Alice, I can save you the trouble of contacting your nephew. I work at the Bucktooth Sawmill. Maybe he works there?” I asked hopefully.
“Oh my, a pretty thing like you with all those dirty, smelly sawmill workers? That Hal Stevens, I always credited him with more manners than sense.”
I decided to ignore the usual conclusion jumping that I shouldn’t be working amongst a group of men and the automatic assumption that I had no true job skills. “Does he work there? I could just ask him.”
She waved her hand. “Gosh no, Hal would never let my nephew work there. Alcott is sort of the black sheep of the family. But his sons work at the mill.” She laughed. “They’re sort of the gray sheep, if there’s such a thing.”
“Alcott?” I asked, and steadied my hands in my pockets. Could there be two Alcotts, I wondered briefly.
“Alcott Wolfe. Jem and Dane are his sons.”
“I see.” My throat was suddenly dry, making it hard to talk. The coconut fragrance had started out pleasant, but it was closing in on me, and I was feeling as if I desperately needed fresh air. “Well, if you could find the paper, that’d be great. Thank you again.” I walked out onto the sidewalk and gulped in the cool, clear air. It was my first clue, and it was a doozy. Alcott Wolfe was somehow connected to my dad’s death.
Chapter 12
Jem
With Finn out on sick leave and only Hal’s nephew, Stan, a complete numbskull who only had a job at all because he was Hal’s nephew, to help out on the water, I was having a hard time getting the day’s work finished. Out on the pond, I could usually clear my mind of any of life’s crap that liked to follow me around, but this week, I’d been preoccupied with something that was irritating the shit out of me. Our newest office helper, the girl who’d been stuck in my head since the first moment I saw her in the granite ravine below Phantom Curve, had hardly looked my direction all week. And it wasn’t just an attempt to ignore me. It seemed, suddenly, that she flat out despised me. I was sure Everly had filled her head with all kinds of details about Jem Wolfe and now, Tashlyn had made her mind up that I was trash to be avoided. Or maybe I’d just been kidding myself and she’d hated me all along. There just wasn’t that much to like.
I’d left Stan in charge of gathering debris to send to the chipper, a job that didn’t need as much supervision, and I climbed off the logs to take a lunch break. There were only two hours left until the end of the work day, but there had been too much for me to do to take the break earlier. I preferred the later lunch. It meant everyone else was already back at the job, and the break room would be empty. Most of the time, I wasn’t in the mood to listen to everyone’s bullshit.
I headed across the yard toward the main building. Most workers were busy inside the mill. Steam from the machinery moistened the air with its sticky, harsh smell. A truck had carried in some massive, specially ordered eighty-foot logs, and the high-pitched screams of the saw in first cut to remove bark echoed off the surrounding peaks.
Tashlyn’s slim silhouette went past the front window. Stevens had her running circles to get the office organized. He seemed pretty damn pleased with himself for hiring her. Couldn’t blame the guy.
I walked in through the back door of the break room. Hadn’t really prepared myself to run into her, but there she was, standing in the light of the fridge and that unexplained glow that seemed to follow her around naturally. She was wearing worn and tattered cowboy boots over her tight jeans, and my eyes went straight to her perfectly sculpted ass.
She reached inside the fridge but hadn’t looked around to see who’d entered. I crossed the room. I wasn’t big on giving a lot of thought to shit. Especially when it was something that had been twisting me up inside, and her cold shoulder treatment had been doing just that. My mind was made up right then to talk to her, and there was no room to question my decision.
As she closed the fridge, I pressed my palm against the door and finished shutting it. She gasped and spun around, wedged between the fridge and my body. I fucking hated the look she was giving me.
“You’re avoiding me, Woodstock.”
She shook her head, drew her eyes away and scooted to the side. I pushed my other hand against the fridge. She was trapped, and it was killing me not to touch her. Her long lashes lifted, and she peered up at me like a frightened, blue eyed kitten. Her lips were so damn bitable I had to clench my jaw tight to stop thinking about kissing her. Kiss, hell, I’d be lucky to get out of the lunchroom without her handprint on my face. But I was never one for common sense when a beautiful girl was involved. And this girl had knocked me fucking senseless.
“I’d like to eat my lunch, please.” There was a slight tremble in her tone, as if she didn’t trust me, which I hated even more than the angry way she was looking at me.
“Just figured since you’ve seen me naked and everything, we should at least be friends.”
Her blue eyes flickered with sudden shyness as I brought up that day in the locker room. It had been locked down tight in my thoughts. I could still feel her fingers pressing against my skin as if she was touching me right then.
She lifted her shoulders, pushed out a defiant chin and tilted her face up toward mine. “Nope, I’m pretty sure seeing someone naked doesn’t automatically qualify them as a friend. Hope that clears up any misconception.”
I stared down at her. “There she is—the other Tashlyn. One minute you’re Cinderella, waiting shyly in the corner for your prince to come, and the next, you’re fucking Xena the Warrior waiting to cut down any man in her path. Lots of layers, darlin’.”
“Yep, I’m complicated and—” She paused and pulled her eyes away, the shy Tashlyn returning without warning. “I can’t—We can’t be friends.” She moved to duck under my arm, but I mirrored her step.
“Ask me anything,” I said. I was digging my own fucking grave here. Normally, I would just have said fine—not friends—big fucking deal. But I couldn’t just let this go. “I know Everly has filled your head with all kinds of shit about me. Ask me.”
She finally lifted her face to mine. Her attention went to my scar. “How did you get that scar?”
“I was spending time in juvenile hall, and I mouthed off to the wrong guard. He smashed my face into the chain link fence surrounding the yard. In all fairness to the guard, I deserved it, and he didn’t see the sharp barb sticking out of it. The upside was that I got to spend three days in the infirmary where the food tasted less like shit and more like cardboard, a taste bud step up for sure. The downside was that the infirmary doctor was an old guy who’d retired from medicine decades before but decided to volunteer. His eyesight was bad and his fingers were shaky.” I lifted my hand long enough to point at my scar. “That’s why it’s so damn pretty.”
Her face softened some for the first time since I’d kept her captive against the fridge. “You were just a kid,” she said softly.
“Sixteen.”
“The guard was pushing around a kid. Don’t think he deserves any fairness qualifier.”
I looked down at her. Some of the tension was easing. “Shit, Woodstock, never know exactly what’s going to come out of that beautiful mouth of yours, but you never fucking disappoint.”
Her face was just inches from mine, and my will was breaking fast. I leaned closer and was sure she’d slide out under my arm and flee. She didn’t. As my mouth got dangerously close to hers, her soft breath caressed my lips as she spoke again.
“What were you in juvenile hall for?”
It was a question that stopped the kiss . . . for now. “Robbery.”
Her gaze hardened again. “So, Everly was filling my head with the truth about Jem Wolfe.”
“Sort of. But not everything is as it seems sometimes, you know?” I wasn’t about to tell her that I’d taken the fall for Dane because he was eighteen. He’d been the one to steal the cash from a gas station, but I’d confessed to it. Sending Dane to jail would have ended in tragedy. He couldn’t have survived it.
She stared back at me. “I don’t know. As far as I can see most things in life are pretty black and white.”
“Really? Cuz it seems there is nothing black and white about you or why you ended up in this town.”
Her eyes flickered with an emotion I couldn’t quite recognize. I lowered my arms. I was sure she’d walk away. She stayed there tucked between me and the white, whirring refrigerator. There wasn’t one inch of her I deserved to touch, but fuck, did I want to.
She took a deep breath as if she was steeling herself for something else, another question. “Sixteen years ago, my dad’s truck went off the side of the road. He burned to death in his truck.”
“I’m sorry about that, Tashlyn. Really, I am.”
She shook her head. “That’s not my question. You said to ask, so . . . What the hell does your dad have to do with his death?” She’d braced herself, but her voice trembled as she spoke.
I stared down at her and tried to figure out what she was asking. “What are you talking about?”
“I went to Alice’s shop to find the local newspaper article about his death. In a strange, and frankly, scary coincidence, your dad had come in just before me and taken that one paper. Out of all the damn papers in her collection, he took that one.”
Each word was sucking the wind from me, and my gut rolled into a hard knot. I couldn’t speak. Inside, I was always being eaten up by pieces of crap from my past, ugly stuff that was easier to ignore than explain, stuff that I’d pushed out of my head to save my sanity. But I had no fucking clue why my dad would have taken that paper.
Tashlyn blinked up at me waiting for a logical answer, but there was nothing fucking logical about my dad. “Wish I knew what to say.” My voice cracked from my dry throat. My appetite was gone.
I turned and walked out. I reached the metal shed where the saw blades were sharpened. I stood and stared at it for a long moment. My own reflection stared back at me, warped and hazy between the wavy metal walls. I lifted my arm and threw my fist into it, leaving a hand-sized dent in the aluminum siding. My knuckles throbbed and thin lines of blood trickled between them. My hand hurt like hell, but throwing my fist into that wall felt fucking good.
