October Twilight (A Year in Paradise Book 10)

by Hildred Billings

  Sally had the answers to that, but her son was too young to understand the complexities of military culture and old policies that made Candace think twice about enlisting when she was younger. One of the things that inspired her to finally switch careers was the shift in public thinking ten years ago. It was amazing how much had changed in a decade. Sally and Candace used to agree that they would probably see legalized gay marriage before they died, but that was still decades away. The thought that they could be legally married in Oregon, one of the first states to ban it in their constitution, blew Sally’s mind.

  Everything changed like a domino falling at the start of a line. Back when Candace looked at her bride and said, “I’m seriously thinking about quitting my job at the high school and going into the police academy…” Sally had feared not only for Candace’s safety, but that she would be laughed out because of her age. What she hadn’t anticipated was how determined one woman with a love for working out could be. Then again, she had married a woman determined to have four kids before menopause!

  The money for IVF and hospital stays hadn’t been possible without the good insurance Candace got with her new job. Their affording a house big enough to house their growing family hadn’t been possible without it. Sally becoming a stay-at-home mom who didn’t need to pick up a part-time job while the babies were young hadn’t been possible until Candace stepped up and followed her dreams.

  She was someone worth admiring. Hearing that Tucker respected that and wanted to dress up for Halloween was worth the extra work it might take. But… the vampire part…

  He didn’t merely want fake fangs and some pale makeup for Halloween. He wanted a costume that reflected his role as “the underground’s #1 cop!”

  All right…

  They lucked out and found a basic children’s police uniform at one of the seasonal Halloween stores. It came with a plastic hat and pair of fake handcuffs that were easy enough to distress with red paint made to look like flecks of blood. They tossed aside the badge and made a new one out of paper mache, so they could write whatever role Tucker wanted to portray. Whatever makes him happy. Sally was already in plenty of trouble with the twins’ costumes. Anything that made Tucker’s easier was a win in her book.

  She stayed up late the Sunday before Halloween, doing last minute alterations to Tucker’s costume. Her son was the only other family member still up at nine, although she was to shoo him off to bed as soon as she had him try on the shirt again. For now, he hung out in the living room, playing an old video game on the TV. Sally’s only request was that he keep the volume down so everyone could sleep.

  Somewhere between checking up on him at nine and popping back out at 9:15, she realized he had swapped over to that pixelated building game that continued to flummox both of his parents. It’s one thing for me to admit I’m older and don’t understand what kids are doing these days… but I really do not understand this. What was the goal? The end game? How did one “beat” it? Candace had tried explaining to her wife that it was like The Sims, but Sally never understood that game, either. Not even when a friend showed her what happened when one took the ladders out of the pool.

  Tucker’s favorite game reminded his mother that they were supposed to have a talk about internet safety. Because Sally was pretty sure that her wife hadn’t done it, since Candace was beyond busy with the Musgrave boy and his half-admissions about who helped him set those fires. Every night they went to bed, Candace said, “Tomorrow, I’m getting some real answers.” Every evening, she returned home from the station saying, “Tomorrow…”

  Candace was in bed now. So were the twins, and the baby hadn’t kicked up a fuss in a while – so, she was probably due. Sally looked between the back of her oldest son’s head and the project in her hands. When she finished a stitch to make the sleeves a little tighter around Tucker’s elbow, she said, “When you’ve got a moment, Tuck, I need you to come try this on.”

  He whipped his head over his shoulder and leaped up as soon as he realized his mother hadn’t urged him to go to bed. Before Sally could sit back down at the dining room table, her son was in the chair next to hers.

  “What do you think?” Sally showed him the red stitches she added to make it look like blood came out of his front pocket. “Kinda afraid we’re going more zombie than vampire. You sure this is what you want?”

  “Whoa, that’s cool!” Tucker snatched the top out of his mom’s hands and held it up to the chandelier light.

  There were still a few alterations to make, as evident when Tucker futilely tried it on a few minutes later. Sally jotted down some notes on a scrap piece of paper and realized she would be up at least another hour to make the changes. Oh, well. She had slept in that morning. She could afford to lose a little sleep on Sunday mornings.

  “Hey, have a seat.” She patted the chair Tucker had leaped from like a frog attempting to return to his pond. “We’ve got something to talk about.”

  She tried to say it with a sliver of good humor, a reassurance that Tucker wasn’t in trouble. Yet her son looked at her as if he should have run out the back door instead of sitting back down. “Yeah?” he asked. “Whatever Paige and Gage said I did, I didn’t.”

  “They haven’t said anything. Should they have?”

  “This is entrapment, Mom.”

  “How do you know a word like that?”

  “From Mom.”

  “You need to stop watching Law & Order with her.” Candace claimed it was a bonding moment for her and Tucker to watch select police procedurals, but Sally feared her son wasn’t yet old enough to handle the mature themes. This was a boy who still had nightmares from those X-Files reruns he saw in first grade. “No, we need to talk about something else. It has nothing to do with what you’ve done. It’s more like… you’re old enough now to hear some things.”

  “If this is about sex, I already know about that.”

  Sally dropped her pen and piece of paper. “Excuse me?” She did not recall discussing sex with any of her children! Where was he hearing this? From Candace? Yeah, right. Even if she got it in her head to tell their oldest about the birds and the bees, how did she find the time? “How, pray tell, do you know about that?”

  He shrugged. “Law & Order.”

  Yeah. All right. Sally wasn’t digging into that, but she made a note to talk to Candace about what their son was exposed to on TV. There’s a reason they have to watch PG content with a babysitter! Sally always stayed on top of what they were watching on TV and YouTube. Preferably, to prevent this awkwardness whenever possible.

  “This isn’t about… that.” Sally picked up her phone, which was already down to 10%. Damnit. Hold out on me, phone. She unlocked the screen and brought up the browser tab she never exited. “I want to talk about the kind of people you might talk to on the internet.”

  Tucker shifted in his seat. That wasn’t guilt on his face as much as it was dread. No matter what, he thinks he’s in trouble. When a boy thought he was in trouble with his mom, things could go one of two ways. Either he would blab about whatever she wanted to know, or he would clam up. With Tucker, there was no way to tell which way this would go.

  “You know I don’t have a problem with you looking up stuff about your games. Why, in my day, we didn’t have…” Sally cleared her throat. “I mean, it’s quite extraordinary what you kids have access to these days. This whole internet thing is pretty new. I know you’ve had it your whole life, but your moms didn’t have internet in the house until a couple years before you were born.” Paradise Valley hadn’t been hip with fiber until 2008, and that was only because a major telecommunications company ran wires between Portland and the coast, anyway. “But that means you’re getting to do things I don’t know much about, and I want you to explain something to your old, dumb mom.”

  Tucker perked up again. Oh, good. He thought this was his chance to be a know-it-all.

  “You left this window up the last time you used my phone. Remember, in the craft shop? Anywa
y, I was wondering how it was you got to talk to other people. Do you know who these users are? Are they from school? How would you find people like that to talk to on a website?”

  Tucker stared at the chatroom, left static since the old conversation a couple weeks ago. When he spoke, it was with the tone of a boy who knew he had to tread carefully. “I don’t have an account for that, Mom,” he said. “I found it when I was looking something up. See, sometimes your stuff catches on fire, and you have to figure out how to keep it from spreading and ruining all your progress. But I guess some people make it happen on purpose because they think it’s cool.”

  “So you don’t know who these people are?” Sally faked a sigh. “Too bad. I was hoping I could find some crafty people to talk to.”

  “No, I don’t know them. They’re from all over the world, I guess. Although…”

  “Hm?”

  Tucker sucked in his cheeks and chewed on his bottom lip. The boy had answers, huh? What was keeping him from sharing anything? He knew he wasn’t in trouble, right? Or had something bad happened in one of these chat rooms? Sally knew that the boogeyman of some pervert luring her son away from home was so unlikely that she was better off worrying about car crashes, but wasn’t it strange how he acted like he had said something he shouldn’t have?

  “There are kids at school,” Tucker began, “who use chatrooms like that to meet people. You can actually set your location so you get people in your area. I say they’re from around the world, but if you have your location available to the website, they match you up with people in your town, I guess.”

  “Wow. You know all that, huh?” It never ceased to amaze Sally how smart kids were these days. Seemed like the more computers they grew up with, the more likely they were to learn rocket science before fifth grade! “That’s amazing. So you can actually find some kids from this town talking about topics from visiting a few websites?”

  “Oh, yeah. Not just kids from here. It’s mostly Portland kids because it’s the big town. Everyone uses usernames, though. I don’t know who they are, honest.”

  “Interesting. You know not to talk to strangers, right? Not without making sure you keep all your personal information…”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Rolling his eyes, Tucker hopped off his chair. “Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t use my real name. Don’t tell anyone where I live or go to school, or who my parents are. They tell us all this stuff at school.”

  “That’s good.” Sally watched after her son as he marched back to the living room. “Make sure you wrap the game up in ten minutes, Tuck. You’ve got school in the morning.”

  He still put up a fuss ten minutes later. Apparently, something in his game had caught fire, and he couldn’t shut it down until it was finished ruining his hard work.

  Sally felt for him. Really. He still needed to go to bed.

  After ensuring the game was shut down and her son was in his room, Sally returned to the dining table and opened her phone, which only had 6% battery left.

  “PV has the best kindling.” That was a message Sally conjured when she scrolled back up through the conversation. She felt like there was something here. Something she could show her wife and say, “See! Go get these kids!” Yet her inability to make sense of her own phone most days made her bite her tongue and resign herself to more research – when she had time. God, she never had the time.

  Chapter 14

  CANDACE

  Didn’t matter if Halloween fell on a Monday or a Friday. The first day of that week heralded the return of smartass shits who thought it funny to egg and TP houses between Paradise Valley and Roundabout.

  Did Candace have something better to do with her precious time? Of course! Yet she was the one radioed to respond to non-emergency calls about eggs on an old man’s porch and a bag of dog crap that refused to stay alit.

  …Yet the old man still stepped all over it.

  “I’m telling you, I’ve had enough of all these destructive urchins!” Mr. Graham wagged a wrinkled finger in Candace’s face as she took his statement and tried not to roll her eyes. The crisp autumn air grew colder with the passing days, and all she wore beneath her jacket was a short-sleeved shirt and her bra. Suppose I should put on my bullet-proof vest for these fine occasions. Would they protect her from an ovular projectile? “When they’re not out there lighting everything on fire, they’re egging my house!”

  Candace would go out on a limb and say they weren’t the same kids, but she also wouldn’t say that in front of Mr. Graham, who was on a tear. Besides, her job was to show up, take a statement, and assure him that they would keep looking into it. Should the culprits be found, she’d give them the sternest talking to and highly suggest that they drop by Mr. Graham’s place and help him clean up.

  “It was that Doolittle kid,” Mr. Graham insisted. “The one with the red curly hair and the pants down by his ankles.”

  “You mean Chester Doolittle?” Candace laughed, flipping her notepad closed. “Why, he graduated and moved away a few years ago. Last I heard, he was in California.”

  “California! They’re the ones sending their kids up here to make a mess of everything! Did you know my new neighbors are Californian? They totally tore up that nice forested property, laid down the foundation for some summer home, and then left it! Packed up their tools and left the foundation to rot in the rain. How many Californians are gonna keep doing that, huh? We don’t have unlimited resources for them to come in and…”

  Candace checked out after that. The only rants I hear more than “these darn kids” are “those damn Californians.” As a born and bred Oregonian, Candace had heard those rants forward and backward for half her life. Sally had heard them, too, since she came from one of the trendier – yet poorer – areas of the coast, where before the housing crash, Californians (and Arizonans, and Texans…) bought up tracts of land for residential development, only to leave everything barren and half-finished after losing everything in 2008. Some wounds never healed with the locals. Especially when the half-finished development jacked up property taxes.

  “Who’s gonna help me clean this up, huh?” Mr. Graham followed Candace to her cruiser. “You gotta find those kids and make them clean it up!”

  That was the last thing she heard before saying farewell and driving to her favorite end-of-the-month speed trap spot. While the location never changed, the day of the week did. I remember, before social media, it was a lot easier to surprise the locals with speeding tickets. Now, however, she also received group texts along the line of, “Saw Greenhill behind the mileage sign by the Pump ‘n’ Go! Watch out!” She only had about an hour to keep any element of surprise once she parked, speed gun out and a bottle of La Croix attached to her hand.

  She’d get something good. At this time of day, after school got out? She always did.

  She didn’t expect to have someone speed by so soon, though. That was like Christmas coming early, since Candace enjoyed nothing more than firing up her siren and pulling out onto the highway like she had lived her whole life for this moment. It wasn’t that she wanted to scare the people in the old 2002 Ford Taurus, but she bet they had a nice and good oh shit moment when they saw the lights and heard the sirens bidding them to pull over. Now.

  They weren’t in any hurry to pull over, though. One head turned around and looked through the back windshield. In a crazed fashion that suggested either drugs or guns, two kids in the backseat scurried to hide items Candace was probably very interested in. Because why wouldn’t she be? If they were interested enough to hide it, she was interested enough to find it!

  Eventually, the car pulled onto the shoulder. Candace double-checked her dashcam before getting out of the cruiser and slowly approaching the Ford Taurus.

  Three… no, four teenagers. All boys. Their dark hoodies were the norm for the area, but not the nice, torn jeans that looked like they could house a circus. Well, one boy had jeans so tight that Candace was half-concerned for his private parts. Don’t they gotta
breathe? Whether the pants were huge or tight, however, didn’t matter. What mattered was how guilty they looked.

  Candace didn’t see anything damning, though. No spray paint bottles. No alcohol. Not a carton of cigarettes or a vape pen. Just a lot of empty junk food packages.

  “Good afternoon.” She put her hands on her hips, thankful that the driver kept his hands at ten and two. At least they were still teaching that in driver’s ed. “Have any idea how fast you were going back there, young man?”

  The kid in a black hoodie and with a plethora of pimples on his face couldn’t have been older than seventeen. Maybe sixteen. Old enough for a license, not old enough to be carting around a ton of friends who were probably more distracting than texting on his phone. Come to think of it, none of them have their phones out. Interesting.

  “No idea, officer,” the driver said.

  “Do you know the speed limit on this stretch of highway?”

  “Um…” He barely glanced at her. “Fifty-five?”

  “That’s right! Now, how fast do you think you were going?”

  “Fifty-five?”

  “Try sixty-five.” Candace chuckled. “Where are you going in such a hurry? You and your friends got some video games to play? None of them look to be in labor.”

  One of the kids in the backseat laughed. Candace shot him a look. He shut up.

  “Sorry. I… I didn’t…”

  “License and registration please, young man.”

  All of this was routine, thank God. Candace had to wait thirty seconds for the teenaged boy to root around his glove compartment for his registration. His license was freshly printed at the nearest DMV. Roundabout, huh? He must go to Clark High. So why don’t I know him? There was no way all four boys were so unknown to her. Even if they had moved there at the start of the new school year, she would have met them by now. I make a point of memorizing most of the kids I see come through here, after all.