Steadfast (True North #2)

by Sarina Bowen

  This was true. They were harassing me already, but I wasn’t going to worry her about it.

  “Anyway, he’s helping me with a question. It wasn’t a date or anything.”

  It sure looked like one. Somehow I managed not to say that out loud. It would sound jealous as fuck. I took a deep breath. “Soph, you should go on as many dates as you want. With people you don’t have to pretend not to recognize.”

  There was a deep silence on her end of the line. “I don’t want to date anybody, Jude.”

  “You don’t want to be with somebody nice and normal? That can’t be true.”

  “Fuck normal! Normal is dull. That’s what you told me when we were seventeen.”

  “Yeah? I was a bonehead when I was seventeen.” Still am. “Don’t try to sugarcoat this, okay? I can’t be that guy sitting at the bakery with you. We can’t go out for coffee and go to the movies. So we’re just torturing each other right now. We fuck on Wednesdays and pretend that it isn’t going to end badly.”

  “Jude!”

  “What? Tell me how this ends.”

  “I don’t want it to end at all.”

  “Really? You want to spend the rest of your life meeting me for ninety minutes on Wednesday nights? That’s not living.”

  “Things could get better.”

  “How, Soph? How is that possible?”

  “I haven’t figured it out yet.”

  I snorted. “We are so fucked, and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise.”

  There was dead air between us, and I knew I’d been an ass. But it was for her own good. The silence stretched on. Later I would realize that the silence between us was the only reason I caught on to what was happening upstairs.

  Over my head, I heard a creak. Which meant that there was somebody in my room. “Sophie,” I whispered. “Where are you right now?”

  “Sitting in my car behind the bakery. Why?”

  “I gotta go,” I said quickly. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”

  “We will? How?”

  Another creak sounded above me. “Gotta go for now, babe.” I hung up the phone. Then I yanked a lug wrench off the wall.

  Standing still, I listened again. I heard another creak. And a thump. Then the sound of feet running down shoddy wooden steps.

  That got me moving. I exited the garage and crept toward the back just in time to see someone in a black hoodie running down the alley away from me. My chin snapped upward to look at the door to my room. It was standing open. But nobody else emerged.

  With my heart in my mouth, I climbed the steps and flipped on the lights. My room was trashed. Again. It had been searched in a hurry. My drawers were empty, the contents strewn everywhere.

  Rage pulsed from my chest and through my limbs. I mean—what the fuck? Did the cops do this? Or those fuckers who came into the garage to ask me about some stash of Gavin’s?

  My fingertips twitched, and then I had a drug craving so powerful that I had to just stand there clenching my fists, my eyes screwed shut.

  Fuck. When I was released from prison, people told me to “stay out of trouble.” But what the fuck do you do if trouble comes looking for you?

  I didn’t straighten up my room. I closed the door and locked it again. Whoever searched the place seemed to be able to come and go at will. I walked down the stairs and got into the Avenger. Then I drove straight out of town toward the Shipley Farm.

  Do not pass Go, do not score a hit.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sophie

  Internal DJ tuned to: “Breakdown More” by Eric Hutchinson

  After that horrible conversation with Jude, it was hard to put my game face on and walk into my house again. The police report that Officer Nelligan had lent me was zipped into my book bag. And even though neither of my parents had searched my things since high school, I was careful to carry the bag upstairs and deposit it on the floor of my room before starting a homemade noodle soup for dinner.

  Chopping onions at the kitchen counter made me think of Jude. Hell, everything made me think of him. He’d sounded so angry on the phone. And so discouraged.

  The covert nature of our affair didn’t bother me very much, because the people in my life weren’t honest with either me or themselves. My father buried his grief in anger and misplaced blame. My mother crumbled under the weight of hers and refused to talk about it even with someone trained to help.

  My honesty was a gift that I chose to bestow on the people who deserved it. And lately, Jude was the one who best fit that description.

  But I’d seen that hurt look on his face when he’d spotted me in the bakery. Until today, I don’t think I understood how hard it was to be Jude. Sometimes I chafed against the label of That Girl Who Dated the Druggie. But the judgment on him was so much worse. He walked around every day under the weight of having killed a man.

  At the bakery, he was stung when I couldn’t acknowledge him. But if I hadn’t been sitting with a cop, I would have.

  Probably. If my father suspected that Jude and I were in contact, he’d freak. I needed a little more time to figure how to get out of my father’s orbit without abandoning Mom.

  My diced onion chunks weren’t nearly as precise and uniform as Jude’s, damn it. I wanted to stand next to him in a kitchen somewhere and watch him work, without having to disguise my interest. Hell, I wanted to stand together in our kitchen. Wherever that mythical place might be.

  Jude didn’t think it would ever happen. I wanted us to be more optimistic than that. I wanted him to try.

  Feeling blue, I sautéed the onions with carrots and celery. Then I added chicken stock, broccoli, noodles and water. I left it simmering for a bit, then I added leftover chicken, because my father bitched whenever I didn’t put meat in a meal.

  Feeling like Cinderella, I brought my father his portion in the den. It’s not that I enjoyed waiting on him. It’s just that I didn’t want to have a sit-down family meal.

  He looked up in surprise when I carried in the tray.

  “I have a headache and an exam to study for,” I explained. “I’ll be in my room.”

  “Your mother?” he asked, taking the tray.

  “I set her up in the kitchen. She’s reading a magazine.” She never speaks to us, anyway.

  Having satisfied everyone to the best of my abilities, I went upstairs with my own bowl of soup. I cleaned all the schoolwork off my desk and closed the door. After pulling out the police file, I ate my supper while examining the file’s exterior. The tab listed a date from three-and-a-half years ago and simply, Haines, Gavin.

  Pushing my empty bowl aside, I took a deep breath and then flipped open the cover. I was afraid there would be photographs. But I didn’t see any yet. The top page was a neatly executed summary. Report: Fatal Accident Investigation.

  I’d never been told exactly how it all went down. But now the order of events was spread out in front of me, as tidy as the outlines my high school teachers used to demand for research papers. At 7:53 a motorist had made a 9-1-1 call from the two-lane highway heading north out of town. At 7:55 two of my father’s deputies were dispatched, along with an emergency vehicle (The Lifeline Highliner) from the fire department.

  The first responders arrived all around the same time. They found one Gavin Haines in a prone position in the ditch. He’d been thrown from the vehicle and was not breathing.

  One Jude Nickel was trapped inside the vehicle. He was non-responsive.

  At 8:10, seventeen minutes after the first 9-1-1 call, a second ambulance was dispatched.

  Ten minutes later the LifeLiner departed the scene for the trauma unit at Montpelier Medical with Gavin Haines onboard. He would be pronounced dead on arrival.

  The report didn’t have much to say about the next hour. The door of a Porsche 911 was “forcibly removed,” and Jude Nickel was extracted. He was taken into police custody when officers left the scene at 9:12. There were no notes about Jude’s condition or about any medical treatment he recei
ved.

  I turned the page.

  Interview Record: Jude Nickel. At 9:14 Mr. Nickel was read his Miranda rights and verbally waved his right to both silence and an attorney.

  I shivered when I read that statement. Jude had told me that he came to in an interrogation room with Newcombe hitting him. So on page two, I was already reading lies. Jude had also said that no cop in Vermont would take it easy on the guy who killed the police chief’s son.

  If Jude read this spotty account of that awful night, would he even be surprised?

  I kept reading. There was a medical report for a blood test “done at the scene.” The result was consistent with “prescription opioids.” There was an affidavit by the county’s DRE (Drug Recognition Expert) swearing that he had evaluated Jude at the station house and found him to display symptoms of “profound intoxication.”

  And yet he’d waved his Miranda rights. How were those two things compatible?

  I got up and walked away from the file, as if the distance from the pages would help me think. I’d noticed there was no mention of my father anywhere in those notes. But he’d been there that night—he’d gone into the station a while after the terrible knock had come at our door. He’d waited for Father Peters to arrive. And then he’d strapped on his gun and left the house. I didn’t see him until the next day.

  Just thinking about that night made me tremble. I’d dialed Jude’s phone over and over. I probably tried a hundred times. The officer who came to tell us that Gavin was dead hadn’t said a word about Jude. So I’d called the station house, but my father hung up on me when I asked him.

  I’d spent the night crying and shaking in this very room. Alone.

  Now I found myself staring out the window at our darkened street. But that wasn’t going to get any of my questions answered. I went back to the police report and examined every last page. There weren’t any photographs at all, which was weird. Maybe Nelligan had left them out intentionally to save my feelings. That was something I needed to know, so I fired up my laptop and wrote him an email. But before I hit “send,” it occurred to me that I didn’t want my questions hitting a station email account. And I didn’t know Nelligan’s private email address.

  But I did have his phone number.

  I sat down on the floor between my bed and the exterior wall. This is where I’d always parked my ass when I needed to have a private conversation with Jude.

  Nelligan answered on the second ring. “Hi there,” I said.

  “Hi, Miss Sophie. How are you on this fine evening?”

  I chuckled at his cheesy greeting. “Fine, thank you. And I called to tell you again how much I appreciate that you brought me this file.”

  “I hope it’s not too tough to read,” he said.

  “It’s not easy, honestly.” I had to tread carefully. “I mean, I know that Gavin is gone. And now I know a little more about that awful night, and that’s important to me.”

  “Good.”

  “I was wondering if you edited out the photos to take it easy on me, though.”

  “Well, I would have considered it, except there weren’t any.”

  My neck tingled. “None?”

  “My guess is that they’re stored somewhere else, in deference to the chief.”

  That didn’t sound right to me, though. The file said that my brother was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. So photos taken at the scene would not have shown anything graphic or bloody. “Maybe,” I said. Asking Nelligan to snoop wasn’t a good idea. He was a stranger, and I couldn’t push him to sneak around behind my father’s back. “Thanks again, Nelligan.”

  “You’re welcome, Miss Sophie.”

  After we hung up, I went back to the file. I read every scrawled note in the margins and every line of the copy. I found two more odd things that didn’t sit well with me. Someone had scrawled “tox screens for Haines and Nickel” into the margin of the file’s index page at the back. But there was only one blood test in the file—Jude’s. And who would test a dead passenger? Maybe that was an error.

  The other odd thing was that it said “door forcibly removed to evacuate passenger.” That should have read driver. My brother was thrown from the car through the windshield, and Jude was stuck inside. But one line of the report had it backward.

  Feeling like Encyclopedia Brown, on a fresh sheet of notebook paper I began to list every detail that bothered me.

  1. Jude waives rights, but Jude is wasted.

  2. Where were they going that night?

  3. No photos of the car. Why?

  4. No mention of drugs found? Yet Jude was charged with possession.

  5. Two tox screens?

  6. Wrong door/side in notes

  I read over the list again, certain that this report was fishy. Maybe it was only shoddy work. But seriously? Which employee of my father’s would want to do a lousy job on the most important police report of the year?

  Using my phone and a faxing app, I took pictures of every page then emailed them to myself.

  Then I tucked the forbidden file away in my bag again, zipping it shut tightly.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jude

  Cravings meter: 4 and holding steady

  On the following Wednesday afternoon—after polishing off a sandwich I’d bought for myself—I went back to work on my new customer’s Prius.

  His bright green paint had arrived, so I’d had the customer drop the car off yesterday for prep work.

  “Can I get you to put the decal on when the paint job is done?” he’d asked.

  “Probably,” I said. “I don’t have any experience with those, but if I can get enough information about the process I’ll do it for you.”

  The guy nodded. “The nearest dealer of these custom decals is fifty miles away. I couldn’t find anything closer, so I’ll probably need your help.”

  “Okay, man.”

  That was something I should look into. It wouldn’t hurt to have another line of business to offer. Another skill. Another way out of Dodge.

  The first morning with his car I’d primed the panels. Now, with a block of 600-grit sandpaper, I smoothed everything out.

  Body work was a strange corner of the auto repair market. Instead of making the car perform better, you’re only making it look nicer on the outside. When I was a teenager it seemed so pointless. Fix the dent in a little roller skate of a car? You’re still stuck with a little roller skate of a car. I would have rather rebuilt engines until they roared like beasts.

  These days I was more patient with bodywork. I liked the idea that rough patches could be sanded out and that bumps could be smoothed again. If not in my life, than on a car. I’d set myself up near the window, with a lamp over my other shoulder. The two sources of light helped me to suss out any tiny imperfections in the surface.

  The Green Day CD I’d been playing in our old stereo box ended, leaving me in silence. I heard only the sweep of the sanding block and my own breathing.

  And a bump against the back wall.

  I froze, the sanding block hovering over my work. A bump could be nothing. But I was feeling paranoid these days. Not only were the cops on my ass, but I was worried about the drug dealer who’d stopped by to pay me a visit. My gut told me I wasn’t rid of him yet.

  Silently I set the sanding block onto the panel and slid out from behind my workspace. Yanking my goggles off, I set them down.

  There was another bump, softer this time. It was possible I was about to bust an alley cat or a kid with his soccer ball. But better safe than sorry.

  I slipped out of the front door and walked quickly up the driveway between my father’s house and the garage. When I peered carefully around the corner toward the back, the first thing I saw was the tenting of the tarp over the Porsche.

  Someone was fucking with my wreck of a car.

  “Hey!” I said loudly, stepping into the alley.

  A startled gasp accompanied the perpetrator’s leap away from th
e car.

  It was…Sophie?

  With my pulse racing, I cursed under my breath. “What are you doing back here?”

  “Jesus.” She put a hand over her heart. “Do you always leap out from between the buildings?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “Thought you were…” A drug dealer still looking for his stash. “A vandal.”

  Sophie crossed her arms, looking guilty.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just looking,” she said quickly. “At the car.”

  “God, why? I’ve been trying to get that thing out of here so you wouldn’t have to look at it.” Shit. The last time we spoke it had not been a good conversation. And now I was practically yelling at her. “Do you want to come inside?”

  She gave the car a sideways glance and then smoothed the tarp down on its crumpled front. “Sure.” She followed me into the garage. “Happy Christmas Eve Eve,” she said with a little smile.

  It was true—I had almost survived the holiday season. “Back atcha, babe.”

  “You’re not going to get rid of the car right away, are you?”

  “Uh…” I didn’t understand why she’d care. “It’s taking me a while. I’ve been selling some parts on eBay. There will be some money coming your way from it.”

  “Money?”

  “Sure. Maybe two thousand bucks if we’re lucky. Could be less, though. Depends on how much I can salvage. You can put it in your music school fund.”

  “I don’t have a music school fund.”

  “You should.”

  Sophie sighed. “You’re getting me off topic.”

  “What is the topic?”

  “You don’t mind if I look at the car, right? I have questions. There’s something I don’t understand about what happened that night.”

  Fuck. “I don’t see what good could come of thinking about it.” There were too many people in my life asking all the wrong questions. Some shit should just stay buried.

  “Jude.” She crossed her arms and cocked a hip against the grungy counter.