Start Me Up

by Victoria Dahl

  She wanted to find a way to be with him now, and grieve his loss.

  Despite the rutted dirt road, the ride along the river was soothing. She wouldn’t think about what it might look like lined with huge houses that would stand empty for months at a time. She’d only think of her dad standing hip-deep in that cold river, stained fishing cap pulled low on his brow, hands flicking the delicate fly in and out of the water.

  She could almost see him, so at first she wasn’t surprised to see an ancient pickup pulled off to the side of the lane, its tires nearly hidden by deep grass. For a moment, as she slowed and pulled her truck in behind it, she thought that she would get out and really see him there. Not a visiting ghost, but real life after a bad dream.

  But when she switched off the ignition, she came back to herself. It was his old truck, but he hadn’t driven it here. She’d given Joe that truck five years before and he’d been driving it longer than that.

  Lori stared at the open tailgate in surprise. When she’d had to shut down the garage, Joe had told her he was going camping. No surprise. Joe camped a lot. But she had no idea he’d been camping here.

  She slid out of her truck and walked on down the road until it narrowed to nothing more than a trail. The narrow path through the grass rose up a hill before curving out toward the river. Thunder rumbled as she edged carefully along the cliff. The water jumped and swirled below her. About a hundred feet on, the land opened up again and the trail dipped back down to the meadow that stretched out from the riverbank. When Lori spotted the small tent near the water, she felt her throat close up. She was glad Joe had been spending time here, since she hadn’t.

  A narrow spiral of smoke drifted up from the side of the tent. As she drew nearer, she saw Joe, hunched over the fire, a whole fish roasting on a stick.

  He glanced up at her approach, eyebrows not even rising in surprise.

  “Lori,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

  “I didn’t know you camped here, Joe.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a beautiful place. Your dad sure knew this river. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not. I’m glad someone’s getting pleasure out of it.”

  Joe pulled another stump close to the fire and motioned her to it. A wave of contentment crept over her as she took a seat and lapsed into silence. Sitting with him here was almost like sitting with her dad. This was what it would have been like had he still been alive.

  Joe shifted in his seat. “No more trouble, I hope.”

  “No,” she answered. “None.”

  “How’s your hand?”

  “It’s good.” Actually, she hadn’t thought about it once today, aside from the inconvenience of trying to help wash dishes, so it was obviously healing.

  “Chief Lawson find anything?”

  Lori stretched out her legs with a sigh. “Nothing. But I think I know what it’s all been about. The land.”

  He turned slowly to face her. “The land? Why would you say that?”

  “Someone wants me to sell. Quickly.”

  His lips parted, jaw hanging open for a moment before he shook his head and closed it.

  “I can’t be sure,” she assured him. “I heard a rumor. Ben’s trying to chase it down now.”

  Joe sighed and looked up at the sky, then he swept a long, lingering glance around them. He looked at the campsite, the meadow, the wide sprawl of river. Then he nodded. “I’m sorry, Lori. I’m sorry for everything.”

  “Thanks, Joe.”

  He pulled the charred fish out of the flames and set it carefully on a rock. “It’s not right the way you’ve been living here, and I couldn’t seem to convince you to go. I thought you needed a little nudge out of the nest, you know?”

  She paused in midnod, frozen solid as ice. Unease prickled up her arms like an army of fire ants. “What…what do you mean, Joe?”

  “I could hardly bear watching you take care of him for all those years, but I kept telling myself you’d be fine. Eventually, you’d be fine. After he died, I thought you’d go back to school, but you didn’t even want to talk about it. You should never have gotten caught up in all of this. I had to do something.”

  “Joe,” she breathed. Her head buzzed with adrenaline. “Joe, are you saying…Were you the one vandalizing my garage?”

  His white hair whipped across his forehead in the wind, then pressed back close to his scalp, the pink showing through. “It was just small stuff. The hydraulic lift. The torque guns. The doors. And then…I never thought you’d get hurt in the oil spill. I liked to have died when I heard that, Lori. I just thought if things got a little more dire, if your bills were too much, you’d have to sell the land to me. Then you could pay off that debt and move on. I even thought maybe you’d leave the garage in my care. I could keep running it, and you wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.” He gave her a pained smile. “You’ve got to fly away, little bird.”

  Little bird. He hadn’t called her that since she was twelve. Tears burned her eyes. This made no sense. Joe loved her. How could he have done these things? “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “You wanted me to sell the land to you? Give you the garage? That’s what you wanted?”

  “No. It wasn’t about the land anymore. I’ve been saving up for thirty years. I’ve saved a lot since your dad…Well. I’ve got nearly a hundred and twenty thousand now. I wanted you to have it.”

  “In exchange for the land?” she demanded. Her muscles were aching now, her hands trembling. Not Joe, her mind insisted. Not Joe.

  “I was going to give the land back to you! I don’t want it, not anymore. I was going to leave it to you in my will, and then you could sell it again, you see? I’d pay you for it now, while you need the money, and then you could have it back, Lori. I didn’t want it for myself, I swear.”

  It actually made perfect sense. And yet it didn’t. “Why didn’t you just tell me your plan? Why do it behind my back?” And terrify me in the process, she left unsaid.

  Joe threw one hand up in exasperation. “You wouldn’t have agreed to that in a million years. You’re too proud, always have been. Nothing like your mother. That woman would take help from a person before he’d even offered.”

  He was staring into the fire now. Joe picked up a stick and poked thoughtfully at the edge of a charred log. “That time she wrote to me? She wanted money. She’d been gone so many years and it didn’t bother her at all, reappearing like a ghost.”

  Her neck had tensed into a burning knot. Her broken hand remembered that it was supposed to hurt and started throbbing. “I thought she wanted to check up on me.”

  Joe didn’t seem to hear her. “I wouldn’t send the money. I couldn’t do it. Despite everything, I never thought she’d leave you. It’s hard to see the truth sometimes, and I just didn’t want to see she was that bad of a mother.”

  “Joe.” Lori stood. She wanted to leave. Run until she was so exhausted that her brain would cease to think. She could forgive Joe for wrecking her garage. She could. He’d had good intentions, despite being totally misguided. But there was something else in his voice now. Some deeper sorrow. An older memory.

  “Joe,” she choked out. “You’re scaring me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, the words scratchy with unshed tears. “I’m so sorry. She didn’t want to take you with us, and I couldn’t leave without you. So I stayed and she moved on, and good riddance to bad rubbish. I couldn’t have loved her after that anyway. What kind of woman could leave a little child behind?”

  Lori clutched her broken arm to her chest. “Joe…” Oh, no. Oh, no. “Joe, did you…Were you with my mom before I was born?” The truth suddenly seemed obvious, but Joe’s brow furrowed with confusion. Looking up at her, he shook his head.

  “No. That’s not it. I’m not your daddy, even if I wish I was. But I did love her. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did. After they were married and you were born—” Joe’s shoulders slumped “—it seemed like she’d gotten what sh
e wanted out of your dad. She was bored and pretty, and I was young and stupid. I’m so sorry.”

  This is a motive, her brain was spelling out to her in slow and careful tones. A classic love triangle. Except that her mother had run off thirteen years before her dad had hit the asphalt of that parking lot.

  Her foot slid back. She inched away. “I’m going to go now, Joe.”

  He stood. “No.”

  “Joe,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “It’s been killing me for a long time now, Lori. This is my chance to tell you the truth.”

  “No,” she begged him.

  “She wrote to me. She’d been gone more than ten years, and here she just up and waltzes back in from out of the blue, looking for money. I wouldn’t give it to her. I wrote back and told her how amazing you’d turned out to be and how much she’d missed out on by being stupid and selfish. I guess that didn’t sit too well. She called me and told me she was going to tell your dad everything.”

  Her tears were blinding her. Lori tried to wipe them from her eyes, but they kept coming back.

  Joe hung his head. “I waited for the explosion. I knew if he found out, he’d ride me out of town on a rail. I’d have lost my best friend and I’d never have seen you again. I was scared to death, Lori, but nothing happened. She never called or wrote again. I thought it was over.”

  Lori took a step back and stumbled over a clump of grass. With the cast on her wrist, she couldn’t catch herself in time, and landed hard on her butt. Joe rushed over and pulled her up and right into his arms.

  “I’m sorry, Lori,” he whispered, and she began to sob. She cried for what he was saying and what it meant. She cried because she was scared of him, and yet she buried her face in his chest and sobbed while he held her.

  “He was going to sell me the garage,” he explained. “We’d had a plan from the time your mama walked out. I was going to work for him, put in my time and then buy him out. He could retire then, buy his land and spend his days fishing. At some point we stopped talking about it, but I guess I just didn’t notice.”

  Joe’s hands rubbed over her back in a soothing rhythm. “One day I heard he bought a piece of land off the bank. He kept putting me off when I asked him about it. Wouldn’t say a word when I tried to talk about buying the garage. I’d put twenty years into that place, and I wasn’t going to work as a damned mechanic until the day I died. He’d promised me, Lori. And all of a sudden he wouldn’t answer one damned question.”

  Lori breathed in the scent of wood smoke on his clothes, tainted by the metallic stench of fresh fish. How many times had she smelled this exact combination on her father’s shirt? “Did you kill him?” she asked on a whisper. “Did you do it?”

  His deep breath roared in her ear. “I’d been drinking. I drove past and saw his truck, and I was so pissed at him. I waited for him to come out. He’d been drinking, too. It didn’t take much to get us screaming at each other. I accused him of screwing me over and going back on a promise. I told him he was a goddamned liar and a greedy one at that. He just looked me up and down like I was trash. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘I didn’t want to have this discussion, but you won’t let it go. I’m not selling you the garage, because I’ll be damned if I’ll let you buy the roof you were fucking my wife under.’”

  She pulled away. She had to.

  Joe let her go. “She’d told him after all. I wasn’t mad. It wasn’t like that. I was scared. He was like a brother to me, and the thing with your mom seemed like a whole other lifetime. But I saw in his eyes that he’d finally decided he couldn’t live with it. You and your dad were my only family and I was full of terror and I panicked. I don’t even know why, Lori, I swear. I just saw that rock and I wanted to stop him from walking away.”

  She must have been backing up, because Joe reached toward her and she scrambled back faster. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Ah, God, Lori. I’m so sorry. My little bird. It’s been killing me, all these years.”

  “Don’t,” she sobbed. In between the hard beats of her heart, Lori suddenly registered a new sound. The distant grind of tires rolling on gravel.

  Joe stopped. His eyes rose over Lori’s shoulder. She kept backing away, and then she turned and ran. She didn’t want to hear any more.

  QUINN WASN’T SURE what the hell he was doing. At first, he thought he’d just drop by and find out how Lori was doing. A man could drop by his sister’s house any time he wanted. It wasn’t weird.

  But she hadn’t been there. And Molly had given him directions to Lori’s land as if it were natural that he would come find her here. When the dirt road had disintegrated to ripples and ruts, he’d snapped out of his mental auto drive.

  What was he doing, following her to this private spot? He wanted to see her, yes, but he didn’t have any right to intrude. She didn’t want his help, didn’t even want his company.

  Quinn pressed his foot to the brake, reconsidering. He had no right to interfere. He should go back to his place and console himself with the little bits of information he could glean from the Tumble Creek Tribune. The week before, Miles had finally linked Quinn’s name with Lori’s. Sadly, the sight of their names together had made Quinn’s heart spasm.

  Staring aimlessly out the windshield, Quinn caught a glint of the sun against metal ahead. He squinted. Her truck was there, pulled over in the high grass.

  Stopped in the middle of the dirt road, Quinn stared at her purple truck.

  He should go. He should.

  Turning the wheel hard, Quinn started to swing the car around. Midturn, he braked so hard that his head snapped forward.

  There was another truck there, parked just in front of Lori’s. Well, hell.

  He popped open the door without even thinking, and started toward her truck. One raindrop hit him, then two. Then ten. The raindrops became music on the river, barely audible over the water rushing along the rocks on the banks. Just as he reached a bend in the road, he heard another sound, high-pitched like the call of a hawk.

  Glancing up toward the clouds, he saw nothing but the rain falling toward him and hunched back down to avoid it.

  “Quinn!” the hawk cried, shocking him to a complete stop.

  He raised a hand to his brow to shield himself from the rain, and his eye finally caught sight of movement ahead of him. Dark curls whipped in the gusts of wind. Lori.

  She was running toward him—running!—and he started to smile just before he registered her waving hands and panicked eyes.

  Fear exploded through his veins, and Quinn sprinted forward.

  He could hear the strain of her lungs even from twenty feet away.

  Finally, she was right in front of him. “Lori!” he yelled, as she held her good arm straight out to push him back. His hands were on her. She wasn’t bleeding.

  “It was Joe,” she panted. “It was Joe.”

  Quinn shook his head. “What was Joe?”

  Stumbling, she pulled him toward her truck, clearly exhausted from running through the knee-deep grass. Quinn glanced back, but he followed her to the road. “What’s wrong? Why were you running?”

  “I just have to get out of here. And I think…I think I have to go to the police.”

  Alarm flared back to life under his skin. He put an arm around her shoulder and ushered her toward his running car. “Are you okay?”

  Shaking her head, she yanked the door open and nearly fell inside. Tears flowed down her face.

  He slammed the door and jogged to the other side. As soon as he was in the driver’s seat, he grabbed Lori’s hand. “What happened?”

  “Joe…He was the one who attacked my father.”

  He pulled his phone from his pocket. “He’s here?”

  “He’s camping on my dad’s land. He just…confessed. Everything. He and my dad got into an argument and…Jesus, I just freaked out and ran, and…”

  “There’s no reception,” Quinn said with a frustrated curse. “Let’s go. We’ll tell
Ben. It’ll be okay.” He reached for the gearshift just as Lori gasped. When he followed her gaze to the top of the trail ahead, Quinn saw a man standing in the distance, his features blurred by the falling rain.

  “Is it Joe?” Just in case something awful was about to happen, Quinn eased the car into Drive. But the figure only stood there, watching. Then the man raised a hand and gave a little wave, as if he was seeing them off before he turned to head back up the trail.

  “Lori?” Quinn murmured.

  She nodded. “Go. I think you can get service near the highway.”

  Not liking the flat tone of her voice, Quinn took her cold hand again and squeezed it tightly.

  “He did it,” she whispered. Rain dripped off her nose. “He killed my dad. He said he didn’t mean to.”

  Quinn’s body jerked in shock, but he tried to speak calmly for Lori’s sake. “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  She was shivering hard, despite the heated seats. “But…he was his best friend.”

  Those were the last words Lori spoke for a long time. She huddled silently in Quinn’s front seat as he cranked up the heat and drove as quickly as he could back toward civilization. They were nearly to the highway before his cell phone showed signs of life. Lori didn’t even look up as he called Ben and explained what had happened.

  Ten minutes later, Ben arrived along with what seemed to be the entire Tumble Creek police force. The trucks raced past them, heading toward the campsite. Quinn just waited silently, cradling Lori’s hand in his own. Her shivering finally stopped. The rain faded to a mist and then ended altogether.

  They waited.

  By the time Ben pulled up next to them in his truck, the sun had emerged to glare off every wet surface.

  Quinn got out and opened Lori’s door, frowning at her stiff movements. “Did you arrest him?” He didn’t understand the careful look Ben shot him, but he put his arm around Lori’s shoulders just in case.

  “He wasn’t at the campsite,” Ben said. “You say you last saw him on the trail?”