Devil's Honor

by Megan Crane

  Merritt’s stomach twisted up into an unpleasant knot at the thought of the locals. Any and all of them; certainly not one in particular. She didn’t want to see anyone she knew. Or anyone who thought they knew her because they’d known her daddy, or had a few opinions about the fact that she hadn’t attended his funeral three months ago. They would have opinions aplenty, she knew. And would happily share those opinions, at length. She’d spent five years completely free of this place and the deeply compromised, morally corrupt, or maybe just deeply unimaginative, people who remained here when there were a million reasons to leave and no good reason to stay. It was killing her that she’d had to come back when she’d sworn up and down that she wouldn’t. Ever.

  But it also might kill her if she didn’t—and not in a figurative way.

  And maybe you’re not quite as lily white and pure as you like to imagine, a little voice inside of her suggested. Maybe you belong right here after all.

  She loosened the death grip she had on the steering wheel because her hands were starting to ache. She glared at the fingernails she’d gnawed off on the plane ride down, like an animal. Then she ordered herself to get ahold of herself.

  Antony wasn’t going to kill her. That was ridiculous. That was the shit she told herself at three in the morning and then wondered why she couldn’t sleep. He was bordering on scary these days, sure, but he wasn’t completely crazy. He wasn’t that far gone. He’d just gotten a little too intense, that was all.

  And it was Merritt’s fault. She knew that. She’d thought he was such a good bet. Such a good guy, when all she’d ever known was the polar opposite. He’d been a celebrated senior associate at the firm she’d joined as a bright and enthusiastic first year and if she’d made a checklist for herself of The Man She Thought She Deserved, Antony would have fit the bill, from his reputation in the criminal defense community to his interest in the arts to his seeming kindness in mentoring her. She’d looked up to him. She’d admired him. She’d thought it was high time she stopped punishing herself for that one time in her whole life she’d run with her heart instead of her head and nearly given up everything that mattered to her, that one summer. She’d worked with Antony for some eight months before she’d gone to dinner with him. She’d thought she knew him. That he was safe. He’d seemed so…sophisticated and settled. Upscale and affluent, like the kind of man she should end up with, after all her fancy schools and the dreams she’d been expected to make come true all her life.

  And most of all, he’d been a major antidote to her previous attempt at something resembling a relationship.

  It turned out she was really, really bad at reading the truth about men. Something she should have known already after that summer, when her high school best friend, Lanie—always a little too wild, even when they’d been kids running around in the mud, so it wasn’t a huge surprise she’d taken up stripping while Merritt had been facedown in her books at Brown—had dared Merritt to take her notoriously uptight ass into Petit Joe’s for an evening, just to take in the show and maybe get over herself.

  Merritt was nothing if not the queen of making seemingly small decisions that actually turned out to be life-altering and terrible all around, then and now. It was her own special gift.

  That was how she knew this Antony situation was all on her. There had been all kinds of red flags and glaring signs she’d completely ignored as she’d tossed herself headlong into her fancy Manhattan relationship. Antony was for all intents and purposes her boss in the firm and yet he didn’t seem to find anything problematic about the potential conflict there. It was something that, in retrospect, made her want to kick herself. Because it pointed to all the other things that he’d go on to find equally unproblematic, like controlling her every move and failing to accept it when she’d decided their relationship was over. There was no getting around the fact that in the end, this was her mess. It might feel a little dramatic, running off from her life with nothing but a hastily packed duffel bag to show for her five years in New York, but she’d decided it was actually the simplest and most efficient way to clean things up.

  No matter how unpleasant it was to be back here. Then again, subjecting herself to Lagrange might just be the price she had to pay for being such a fucking dumbass. Again.

  “And everything is fine now,” she told herself, pretending she couldn’t hear the tension in her own voice, perfectly audible over the roar of the AC that she’d jacked up to high, as if that might combat the encroaching Louisiana humidity. “Antony just needs to focus on something else for a while, and this will all blow over.”

  Out of sight, out of mind. She’d heard that worked on toddlers and vicious pit bulls alike. Merritt had to hope it worked on a celebrated New York criminal defense attorney with one or two obsession issues who was kind of both at once, only with a special interest in drug trafficking cases and a whole lot more money.

  Her plan was to hide out in her father’s old house while Antony calmed himself down, because it was the very last place on earth anyone who knew her in New York would ever think to look for her. She’d mostly lied about where she was from throughout college and law school, and when pressed to be more specific than near New Orleans; yes, the French Quarter is awesome, had occasionally been known to mutter something about Baton Rouge.

  She never talked about Lagrange. She’d been embarrassed by her swamp-rat roots when she was at Brown, trying so desperately to fit in with all that Ivy League sophistication. And when she’d gone off to law school at Columbia she’d just wanted to sink into New York City and forget.

  What had happened here that last summer. Who she’d left behind. How it had ripped her up, leaving her reeling and more than a little bit broken. For years.

  She’d managed a working version of amnesia, more or less, in New York. She’d focused on her studies and her summer internships with a certain religious zeal and she’d put her feelings into deep freeze. But she was back in Lagrange now, where nothing was ever forgotten. Ghosts lurked in the deep shadows of the cypress trees and in the muddy earth instead, waiting. Like the bayous all around and the sharp-toothed, dangerous things that hid there. Not all of them alligators. She shuddered, low and deep, and it wasn’t entirely from foreboding.

  Not entirely.

  The knot in her stomach pulled tighter and shifted into her throat when she drove by Dumb Gator’s, the ratty old bar that still looked exactly the way it had five years ago. And the way it had since before she’d been born, for that matter. Like the next rainstorm might drop-kick it all the way north into Mississippi without having to wait for a real hurricane to happen along and do the honors. Merritt automatically sank down a little in the driver’s seat, as if someone was likely to recognize her behind the wheel of a moving vehicle this long after dark on a warm spring night.

  But no one was around to test that theory either way—or no one was visible, at least. There was nothing but that same old sad neon sign over the door of the bar and the usual unapologetic, ever-present line of Harleys out in front while all the pickup trucks and junkers parked a deliberate and respectful distance away. Because no one was dumb enough to touch one of those bikes, not even by accident. Not even with a random spray of gravel from under a tire, which in any other place would be considered a blameless casualty of hanging out at a low-rent bar on the side of a muddy country road.

  This wasn’t any other place. This was Lagrange, home sweet home of the original Louisiana charter of the Devil’s Keepers Motorcycle Club. The Devil’s Keepers weren’t a weekend warrior, happy-group-rides-with-a-pretty-view kind of motorcycle club. They didn’t do charity unless it benefitted them directly and they were ruthless when it came to collecting any and all debts they figured were owed them, which didn’t stop all kinds of idiots from getting in deep with them anyway. They were outlaws through and through and they weren’t playing around. You messed with a Harley around here, Merritt knew all too well, and you were messing with your own life.

  Club me
mbers split their abundant leisure time between Dumb Gator’s, Petit Joe’s, and their own private clubhouse way out on an otherwise deserted bayou road, where they could party with far less restraint than the very, very little they showed in places the general public could witness it.

  Merritt jerked her attention back to the road before she could start looking for one specific Harley chopper in that lineup. She didn’t let herself look for identifying marks on any of the fierce, gleaming machines she knew the club’s flow of prospects looking to patch into the club kept shiny and bright.

  Because she wasn’t looking for him. She refused. That was nothing but leftover bayou madness and probably a death wish besides. And she had more than enough trouble already, or she wouldn’t be here.

  There was no point thinking about ancient history and that one, long summer she’d been tempted to forget that she’d spent her entire life working to get away from this place. There was the shitty present and a whole selection of brand-new bad decisions to beat herself up over instead.

  That was why she’d come back here. To camp out in her childhood home under the pretense of going through her father’s things all these months after his death, which should give her ample time to figure out what the hell she was going to do with the shit show that was her life. And if she couldn’t figure out a good solution for her life, whatever. At least she could hide from it for a while. There was no place like home, she’d heard. Why not test that theory?

  She’d taken an afternoon flight out of JFK so she would land in New Orleans at dusk, which meant that by the time she’d gotten her bag and the rental car and driven up north and west to Lagrange, it was nice and dark and concealing. Merritt had figured that the only way she could handle coming back to Lagrange at all was if she blacked out as much of it as possible. And then avoided the hell out of anyone she might know.

  Which was everyone, this being a small little toilet of a biker town, where the only growth industry was the motorcycle club itself—and that, of course, only an option if you happened to have a dick as well as an appetite for mayhem and the potential prison terms that went along with indulging that appetite. And could also somehow convince the existing hard asses already in the club that you belonged in their little gang of thugs in the first place. That last was more difficult to do than most of the dirtbags who hung around the club—mostly so they could join the never-ending party and enjoy the women who flocked to all that unapologetic male power like moths to a sugarcane field on fire—seemed to realize.

  She took the turn into town, or what passed for a town this far out in the middle of nowhere, a good four miles from the interstate. Bayou riverways that she knew would be a muddy brown in the light snaked through the village the way they did all over southern Louisiana, as inevitable as the chipped and peeling paint on the storefronts that lined the main drag where the names of the various shops might have changed since Merritt had hauled ass out of here years back, but nothing else ever did. The nail salon next to the pawn shop next to a junky store proclaiming it sold “treasures” when everyone knew it was just tatty old shit the weird owners picked up from yard sales all over the state and then tried to sell at a profit. The diner where the old men lingered and told long and complicated stories about fishing and gator wrestling and Cajun history. The bank, the bakery, and the country store with its long shelves stuffed full of prosaic, practical items next to a counter dedicated to surprisingly gourmet coffee and a shiny espresso machine.

  Merritt turned right at the only stoplight, and then she was on her old street for the first time in years. It made her heart beat faster. She headed away from the small shopping district—such as it was, with exactly one and a half blocks of questionable retail establishments and a pervasive sense of faded glory—back out into the bayous and fields. She passed the mayor’s fancy old plantation style house with its galleried second floor that looked out over the rolling lawn and way, way down on anyone who passed by, much like the Chamblesses themselves always had. She wondered if Mayor Benny Chambless himself, that pompous prick, had ever had anyone challenge him for the position he’d held as long as she could remember. Then she wondered why she was thinking about the mayor in the first place when he’d always been about as toothy and trustworthy as a gator.

  As a kid, Merritt had found the mayor vaguely unpleasant. As an adult woman who’d spent too much time dealing with the underbelly of New York City and all manner of questionable characters who were nonetheless entitled to an ardent and vigorous defense in court, she understood that the self-satisfied and smug mayor of a biker town like this one couldn’t possibly have held that position for even a single term unless he was in the club’s pocket. Much less, so many terms in a row that Merritt could only vaguely remember that there had ever been a mayor before him.

  It wasn’t too far from the Chamblesses’ house to her childhood home, down the same long road with ancient oak trees pressing in on all sides and the odd, old house reminding her that this had once been a French settlement, but it was long enough for her to remember how very much she didn’t want to think about her own father’s relationship with the club. As the only doctor in town, her daddy had allowed a whole lot of late night visits to the back porch that he didn’t talk about during the day. Ever. Merritt hadn’t wanted to think about what that had meant five years ago, when she’d found herself a lot more interested in the club in a more personal way than she ever had been before. She didn’t want to think about it now, either. It made something strange and shivery track its way down her spine.

  But Lagrange was a town built on secrets exactly like the ones her father had kept, propped up on top of all that dark shit like the stilts they used in the low country. And she’d been back all of five seconds and there it was again, the reason she’d left. The club all over St. Germain Parish like one more creeping vine, choking out the South. The darkness that lurked in every last one of the shadows, ghosts and regrets and things far more dangerous than either. The impossibility of setting one foot in this town without getting sucked down into the thick muck of it like everyone else.

  Not, of course, that she’d done such a great job of avoiding corruption outside of Lagrange when she’d had the opportunity.

  Merritt blinked back a sharp surge of heat that threatened to mist over her eyes then, horrifying her. Fuck that. She’d let her emotions get the best of her once. Once. Five years ago. She was never doing that again, especially not here. That was more than simply asking for trouble—that was painting a target on her back and begging for someone to take a shot. If she’d wanted that, she could have stayed in New York and let Antony play out his increasingly sick little game with her to its inevitable, hideous end. She scowled at the familiar, old road instead.

  Doc’s house, as her childhood home was known to everyone including her, was a tidy little three bedroom affair with only a nod to the old plantation style, set back from the road under a tangled canopy of live oak trees. Merritt bumped her way down the cracked and torn-up driveway, then pulled around back, hiding the rental car from any curious eyes out there on the road. She didn’t think Antony could have tracked her here just yet, especially not so fast. She’d laid a deliberate trail in the opposite direction, so if it had worked, he should be on his way to the far reaches of northeastern Maine to look for her right about now. But hiding the rental car had nothing to do with Antony. She didn’t want to advertise her presence here. To anyone.

  Merritt knew there would be no hiding it for long. That was the nature of small towns, this one in particular. But she’d stopped in a suburb south of Baton Rouge and stocked up on some groceries on her drive in. She figured she could take a few days to ease herself into the fact that she was back in Lagrange before she had to deal with anyone from around here who would likely have a lot to say on that topic.

  She realized she’d been sitting there too long. Moths and a selection of decidedly southern-sized insects were performing rapturous acrobatics in her headlights. She switched
off the car, then climbed out into the thick bayou night before she could talk herself out of it.

  Then she stopped dead.

  Out of the air-conditioned car, standing there in the wedge of the open door, the Louisiana night tackled her, thick and close. Merritt had forgotten, somehow, how alive the nights were out here, so far away from the cities. She’d forgotten the smell of home, rich earth and rough salt and a deep, dark kind of green. She’d forgotten the particular sound of a Louisiana night, crickets and frogs and birdcalls, here and there in the wet night. The air felt heavy and sweet. She felt her skin prickle, then start to gleam a bit from the sudden press of humid warmth after all that air-conditioning. And if she tipped back her head, she could see a great mess of stars through the tree branches, up high above the house.

  It made her feel dizzy and small, the way she had as a little girl when she’d thought the sensation meant hope.

  Grief kicked at her then, dark and fierce, as she stood in the small backyard with a curtain of oak trees all around her and stretched out lazy and gnarled above her. But she didn’t let it take her down. She refused to let it break her like that.

  Merritt had never been close to her father. She’d spent years justifying that fact by telling herself neither one of them wanted something different, but that was crap. He hadn’t wanted it, something he’d made abundantly clear in a thousand ways over the years. She’d rationalized it. She’d told herself stories to make it hurt less. Maybe he hadn’t known what to do with a little girl after her mother had died from a shockingly fast and brutal cancer when Merritt was still in grade school. Maybe Merritt had reminded him too much of his late wife after that, the way her aunts had always claimed, making it all seem romantic in some tortured sort of way. Or maybe she hadn’t been enough like her mother in whatever way had mattered most to him. Merritt would never know. What she did know was that she hadn’t realized she’d missed her daddy at all until right here, right now, staring up at the dark house and understanding he wasn’t going to be in there, scowling and muttering and berating the local news anchors all night long while he kicked back in his favorite chair.