by Scott, Eliot
Not when her mother died a mere two weeks ago.
I can’t look away.
I track every tear pouring down those flushed cheeks. I match my breathing to her shallow-fast breaths. I note exactly how her shoulders slump like her lungs are collapsing in on her heart. I watch in silence as she trembles—not from cold, but from pain clawing at her from the inside out. The moonlight from the glass-sided boathouse streams over that damn delicious skin. It brings a hint of color to the small smears of bright red blood now drying on the insides of her slim thighs. Her lips are still kiss-swollen sexy. Those long, tangled strands of hair I'd unwound myself from her braid both hide and highlight her curves, framing her face. I’m caught on the marks I made on her neck. I should have been more gentle.
For her first time.
For her birthday.
Today...yes. I am now the kind of man my father hoped I'd become.
I stare while she cries, because though she'd just vowed she'd hate me forever—and God I'd hope she will—I know her well enough to understand that hate won’t come easy for her. Which means the pain on her face proves that she did in fact love me as much as I loved her to push her away like this.
My last words: "Eye for an eye. Pain for pain, and-what-the-fuck-EVER, JoJo. Don't come near me again."
Her last words to me aren’t words at all. Just terrible sobs, but ones she only lets loose after I step outside the door.
I wait in a dark shadow around the side of the boathouse until she’s emerged, fully dressed, without my plaid shirt. I silently follow behind all the way up the six-mile trail behind our house, through our estate and past the lake—our lake, though she or my father still don’t know it’s really hers. I’d given it to her.
She pauses, sniffling a few times at the fishing hole where we met. She wipes at her eyes then straightens her shoulders how she always did when she was acting brave. I follow her more until she walks the last mile home.
I wait until she washes her face in the pump, and I hold on long enough to hear the front door lock of the farmhouse click. As I back away, I see her move through the house, turning off the light her crazy Aunt Shelly, who'd moved in to care for them both as her mother lay dying, always leaves on for her.
I pause until her bedroom light illuminates the upstairs, and the hallway bathroom light goes on, then both lights turn off again.
I sit out here for another half hour or so, straining to hear if JoJo is still crying, because if so, well then I’ll add a whole new layer of self hatred to the noose of despair I’d already placed around my own neck freshman year when I realized I had no way out of this life of “privilege.”
Thankfully, JoJo seems to be done crying. I walk around the house three times to be sure I’m the only Sinclair in the area and that for tonight she can sleep safely, remaining alive.
When I get home, I tell my Dad and Grady the deed is done. I lie about how much it sucked to be with a fucking virgin. I nod in agreement and smile in fake anticipation when they tell me they’ll make it up to me with strippers and prostitutes. And soon.
They both slam my back with their hands, sliding me the shots they’ve saved as they'd waited up drinking a whole bottle of Father's good, thirty-year-old scotch together, knowing I was playing my final card. I drink trying to drown the guilt while they drink in celebration, and when the bottle is empty, the harsh impact of the alcohol keeps me from killing the two people I hate more than I hate myself. I cling to my reason as to why I won’t kill myself.
Jojo. Jojo.
Together, the three of us watch the sun come up—a father and his two perfect sons—Sinclairs working together. For the first time not one argument went down between me and Grady.
That’s because Father and Grady are happy, and I am determined, resolute and still too devastated to feel like fighting any of it. Soon, we begin to talk about the Wallace farmhouse, the only thing Jojo’s mother and father had left her as an inheritance, and how it must burn to the ground.
I, of course, am tasked to make it so.
And, as always—as proven—I won’t fail this task either.
I can’t even pass out from drink. Nothing kills monsters, I guess.
9.
Jojo, Present Day.
I’m used to sleeping with the gun now. I almost don't think I could sleep any other way. It only took seven days for this new norm to set in. I smirk at the thought as I tuck the cold metal gun back into it's safe place, an upgraded case buried under the fourth floor board from the wall—another addition Aunt Shelly insisted Walt take care of for my safety.
I love how they love me, but I can see the worry in their eyes. Shelly does her best to hide it, her eccentric ways and bravado amped up when she's around me. I love her for that even more. She's showing me what brave is supposed to look like. I don't have the heart to tell her I don't need it, so I let her go on and pretend she's the stronger one of the two of us. She's not. I'm fearless. I've spent years training myself because I knew this time would come. I know what brave looks like—it has wild, curling brown hair and bright, blue eyes, and it can shoot a dime being tossed in the air from more than fifty feet away.
My rifle locked securely, I drop the key in my handbag and check the safety on the small pistol I bought from the pawn shop. I couldn't very well carry the rifle around everywhere I needed to go, but I damn sure wasn't about to walk these streets unarmed.
I lock up my apartment and scan the empty alleyway on my way to the garage, lifting the door quickly, backing out, closing and driving away in under fifteen seconds. I've gotten faster. I'm not fast enough.
It's a Saturday, so the streets are filled with the weekend tourists. Shelly's shop will be busy with people in search of artifacts from the real Tacoma. She used to tell me she sold people visions of the past. When I was a kid, I thought it was magical. But I know she gets a lot of those things from a catalogue, or picks them up from Goodwill and refurbishes them to make them look older so she can sell them for five times what she paid to the weekend crowds from afar. The only past people get that's genuine are the parts of her taxidermy collection she places in the store, stuffed and mounted on her walls to stand guard. Those pasts share very common ends—bullets through the heart and head. And luckily, very few people offer to purchase them, because when one sells, Aunt Shelly mourns its loss for weeks and weeks.
I'm grateful for the gullible tourist crowd today, though, as I zip unnoticed down the main drag through the downtown. My rental car blends seamlessly with the others, my hair tucked inside a ball cap and my over-sized sunglasses shielding much of my face.
The Tacoma Planning and Zoning building is on the opposite end of town, and I can't help but chuckle at the irony as I pass rehabbed building after building on my way to the dingiest one near the end, its bricks missing from the corners, tarnished metal framing the windows and mismatched paint from patches and years of wear and tear.
"If they wanted to hide secrets, they should have hidden them in a less obvious building," I muse to myself.
I scan the roadway in front of the building, looking for the alleyway Will Adair, the records clerk I spoke to at least a dozen times this week, promised me would be there. I’m not asking him to do anything illegal. I’m a citizen who wants public records, and Mr. Adair is employed to provide those records. Now…the fact that he’s accommodating me on a Saturday falls a little outside the norm, but Will Adair is not in the Sinclair pocketbook, at least as far as I can tell. And if he is, this is all a big trap, and I’m screwed anyway.
It's nondescript, the passage barely wide enough for my car to fit. But it does, and I find the small opening tucked at the rear that leads to a ten-space garage underneath this building that I'm starting to think should be condemned.
I pull up near the steps that lead back to the front of the building and park, honking my car with the lock and cringing at the sound it makes. The tourists don't come to this part of town. There are no fancy bread factories and coffee shops
to visit; only business gets done here.
Business.
Secrets.
Plotting.
I notice the small, white sedan parked in the far corner, pulled in backward as if it's poised for a fast getaway, and my feet stumble underneath me as I can't help but wonder if I should pull in that way, too. That thought flees to make room for my next one: “Should I even be here?"
My legs work on autopilot, and in seconds I find myself at the door, my finger pushing a buzzer twice, just as Will told me to do.
He's exactly as I pictured him—a bit of a professor-looking type, but not one with money. His hair is combed from one side of his head to the other, covering the massive gap of baldness in between, the thin, brown strands like strings on a guitar. His glasses balance on the edge of his nose, and there's a bit of a limp to his gait as he digs in his pocket for a set of keys, somehow picking the right one out of what looks to be more than twenty keys, and unlocking the door to let me in.
"You must be Miss Wallace," he says, peering at me atop his glasses while his hands work to re-lock the door again. It's strange that he can do this without looking.
"I am. Thank you for meeting me on a Saturday."
Will only grumbles, then stuffs his keys back into the crinkled pockets of his tan Dockers and begins walking to the hallway he emerged from only a minute before. I follow.
"I'm really grateful for your time on my project." I'm striving to hide my pounding heart beats by filling the silence as we move down a corridor, the wooden floors beneath our feet uneven, and the walls discolored from years of dust.
He pushes a door open near the end of the hallway and steps back for me to pass. "I don't want any trouble." A chill hits my spine as I enter, and I press my bag a little closer to my hip so I can feel the little gun—a Beretta—at my side, wishing I'd popped the safety when I parked.
"Now, why would there be trouble?" I say, maybe a hint of flirtation in my voice. Will looks to be in his late fifties, and his lip raises a hair on the right when I speak, but falls just as quickly with a grumble, his eyes following suit as he takes in the wide-open, polished concrete floor between where he stands and where I've set my purse on a desk pushed against the opposite wall.
"Those are Sinclair documents you're looking at there, are they not?" he says, pulling his now fogged glasses from his face and pinching the bridge of his nose before opening his aged blue eyes on me.
Through a faint smile, I scoot back the chair near what will be my desk for the next several hours, take my seat, and cross my legs like a lady should.
"I suppose that's up for debate. Depends on what exactly these documents say...you know...in the fine print?" I mean to laugh, but it comes out in a puff of a breath through my nose.
I don't distrust Will, but I see the fear in his eyes, so I can't trust him either, because I can't trust anyone who's afraid of the Sinclairs, and he seems to be afraid. I don’t blame him.
"I hope you're good at looking at fine print then, Miss Wallace," he says, his glasses pushed back in their place, halfway up his nose. He pulls a wallet from his back pocket and slips out a dollar bill. "There's a soda machine one flight down. I'll be in the office next to it."
"I'll let you know if I get thirsty," I hum, spinning in my seat and sliding the heavy box of documents in front of me, lifting stacks and plunking them on the dented metal tabletop before me.
"A'right then," Will says.
I catch him before his steps fade completely around the corner.
"Oh, and Will?" I look over my shoulder to see him looking over his, and I smirk again, my own black-rimmed reading glasses now in place. "When it comes to reading fine print...there's nobody better than me."
His belly jerks with a chuckle, and I watch as he shuffles the few more steps out of my view.
Fine print.
Lies. Lies they used to trick me back before I even knew what a lie really was, because my family raised me to tell the truth. My father expected me to mean what I say and to say what I mean.
But not the Sinclairs, they're the opposite. Even with all of the signs given to me, even with all of the warnings Alex spoke, trying to make me stay away from him—them—I wouldn't listen. And now I'm like them.
Lying. Lying. Lying to everyone. About what I'm doing here.
About Emily.
Lying is what makes up the Sinclair blood, but it still tastes bad on my tongue and is taking it's toll on my sleep and on how my stomach won't stop hurting ever since the day of the funeral. It's because I miss Emily so badly it's slowly killing me, but it's also because all of this deviousness and secretiveness is not my natural state. I'm used to walking in and saying what I want, what I need, and going after it directly.
But I can't do that here. Not yet—because I'm still unsure of where I stand, and what exactly I need.
I suddenly get that even my Alex lies to everyone he meets, yet I don't know if he's doing it for good or for evil like the rest of his family does. And for Emily, I need to know. I also need to understand why the Sinclairs want us Wallace girls to all be dead and gone.
Most of all I need to understand where Emily fits in this twisted puzzle, and what exactly will keep her safe for the rest of her life. If that’s at all possible.
I feel like my mother’s last few words hold the key. “Search for the documents. The deeds. There will be answers in the boxes—the Sinclair boxes.”
It was meaningless rambling when she spoke those words years ago, but over time they started to hold meaning. She had a secret, or she knew a secret. And this secret was the key to everything. It’s in this room. I feel it. I feel her spirit guiding me. I just need to listen so I can find it—whatever it is.
10.
Alex, Present Day.
My phone buzzes, the caller ID letting me know it's the Tacoma Building and Planning Commission, and my only friend, Will Adair.
“You better be serious about paying me for my time. I didn't expect Jojo to take so damn long in here. She’s as sweet as I remember—and for some reason spying on her hour after hour is making me feel bad. Should make you feel bad, too, because you owe me like five hundred bucks already.”
I’m instantly annoyed that I can’t just ask him for the favor. That I have to pay him.
My only friend. Fuck.
“Christ, I'll pay you double if you'll stop whining about it and make sure she wasn't followed here by anyone. And remember, you’re more bodyguard than spy, got me?”
He laughs. "Followed by anyone other than you, you mean. Stalker. I see you out front in that cheap rental car.”
“Damnit. Busted.”
“You’d make a crap-ass cop. You must still want a piece of that—if not, what’s the point of both of us spying on her?”
His snark and the fact that I have to pretend Will is funny right now is irritating me even more. “Protecting my…interests, that’s all, and stop psycho analyzing me. What is she looking for—which files has she been pouring through?”
I know in my gut. But I also know she’s not going to find what I’ve been hiding all of these years. Father never found it—and Jojo won’t either.
"She's into the county property deeds from what I can tell, but the hasty remote camera I set up isn't as clear as I'd hoped.” His voice is tinged with stress. “My name is on as much illegally signed shit as yours is down there. I’m just saying with your father gone, I don’t feel safe with anyone digging around. Makes me want to put my house on the market and move before the next person comes digging. Or the fucking feds show up.”
“She's not looking for any of that kind of stuff, asshole. Besides, Jojo’s the most trustworthy person I've ever known. She’ll be looking for information about her family; that’s all she’s ever cared about.” It feels right to say something good about her out loud. Everything I’ve said about Jojo since that day I ruined her has been cruel—part of the act—and it’s always felt like acid on my tongue. The truth is soothing, if not brief.
"You sure about that? Your father didn't have a bullet between his eyes until she came back around. Who’s to say she didn't come back for the sole purpose of doing him in and fucking with us all?” His accusation is laughable, but also credible.
"Didn’t we all have the right to murder him? Even you, Will. Even you."
The line crackles when Will doesn't respond to that.
The way my father ruined Will’s family to keep them in line, like he'd done to half of Tacoma’s families, is something he and I don't talk about ever.
“Call me if she does anything interesting—or if she makes for the door—in case I fall asleep out here, would you?”
"Sure.” His response is curt. I reminded him of the past.
As I hang up and try to slouch in the uncomfortable seat, my thoughts spin with more fucked-up memories. I don't like the way Will's words have filled me with shreds of doubt about a girl—now a beautiful woman—who I think I know.
I shouldn’t be worried about her digging through county records. I’ve hidden the one file that would be of interest to her—hidden it for years. I also can’t afford for her to find it just yet, even though the document means I owe her a shit ton of land and money now that my father is dead. A shit-ton of explanations, too.
It was impulsive on my part to ever set that document in stone. Brave. And stupid. My one great and secret rebellion against my father. My whole family.
When my father found out, he nearly beat the life out of me but even then, I never told him I still had the original deed. I’d sworn to him that I had no clue where it had gone—told him that maybe I’d put it into the mail along with the copies the night it had been signed.
