Hold Me Close

by Rosalind James

  Isabel must have been waiting, because she opened the door within seconds. Kayla had seen her friend only once since Alan had moved them into the big house in the East End. Since he’d convinced her to quit her job at the restaurant.

  He’d been her miracle. Her rescue. And, in reality, the very last thing from either.

  Isabel’s brown eyes widened at sight of her. “Oh, querida. What did he do to you this time?” Her hand went to Kayla’s cheekbone, traced it as Alan had, but with so much tenderness that Kayla almost lost it. Except that she couldn’t afford to lose it. Not today.

  “I can’t stop,” she said. “I didn’t want to come at all. But I need it.”

  “Right here.” Isabel, bent, hefted it, and passed it over. Kayla felt the familiar weight of Kurt’s beloved saddle, got a whiff of leather, and blinked back the tears.

  “Be careful,” she told Isabel. “Just in case. He’s so . . .” Her throat worked. “He’s mean.”

  “I know. You go. Go and be well. How is my Eli?”

  “All right.” Kayla’s hands trembled on the leather. “No. Not all right. But he will be.”

  Isabel nodded. “Go. But if you need me, you know where I am.”

  Kayla turned and fled, her sandals hitting the concrete steps, rat-a-tat-a-tat. Back to where Pam and Eli waited, the car’s engine still running. The trunk popped as Kayla hurried down the sidewalk, and she put the saddle inside, wishing she could have held it. Wishing she could have laid herself down over it with Eli, resting against that final precious remnant of Kurt, and cried.

  But she couldn’t afford to cry. Not yet. She had another stop.

  “Where to now?” Pam asked when Kayla had climbed back in again.

  “A pawnshop.” Kayla read off the address she’d looked up on the computer at the library yesterday, and Pam pulled out into the street again.

  “You got Dad’s saddle,” Eli said.

  “Yeah.” Kayla put a hand out to him and rubbed it over his head. The hair lying neatly, just like his dad’s. “Because that’s yours. From your dad.”

  “I want it,” he said simply, and she closed her eyes in pain that he had asked for something for once, and that she couldn’t give him any more than this.

  It wasn’t a long drive to the pawnshop. Isabel’s neighborhood was that kind of place.

  “It’s better to get out fast,” Pam warned her when she’d pulled into the parking lot, the luxury sedan conspicuous here. “Not to waste any time.”

  “I know,” Kayla said. “Fast as I can, and we’re out of here.”

  She was out of the car again, through a dingy glass door and into a dimly lit, crowded space with a glass counter running along one wall, covering a display case full of the pathetic remnants of the local population’s hopes and dreams. Wedding rings and watches and bits of silver. Stolen goods brought here and exchanged for cash to buy drugs, or treasures pawned for the money to pay electric bills and doctors’ fees. Or for the chance to escape from an intolerable situation.

  “Help you?” the man behind the counter asked. His grizzled goatee decorated a face that looked like it had seen it all and couldn’t be surprised anymore, a tattoo snaked across the side of his thick neck and up onto his shaved scalp, and a white T-shirt strained across a hard belly.

  There was no help to be had here. This would be strictly business.

  “I have these.” Kayla was pulling the earrings out of her ears even as she spoke. She set them on the counter, then reached under her dress and took the small manila envelope out from where it had been resting in the waistband of her underwear, the man opposite watching with detached interest.

  She opened the envelope’s clasp with shaking fingers and tipped out the necklace, a choker of pearls set on silver chains. The only thing she’d dared to take, because it had been in a drawer in a velvet pouch, not hanging from the rack where Alan liked her to display her jewelry. She hadn’t been able to risk him noticing that anything was missing. And anyway, she wanted to sell this. She’d hated it from the moment Alan had given it to her, for the very reason he made her wear it so often. Because it was a collar. And she wasn’t wearing a collar anymore.

  She fumbled the watch off her wrist, its delicate face surrounded by tiny diamonds, and set it with the other items.

  “It’s a pretty thing, isn’t it?” Alan had asked her when she’d opened the box. The day after she’d set dinner on the table at seven instead of the six thirty he specified, and had paid the price. “This way, you won’t be late anymore. You can remind yourself instead of forcing me to remind you.” He’d closed the watch around a wrist that had still held its own painful reminder of where he’d grabbed it. Just before he’d thrown her against the wall.

  Yeah. The watch was going, too.

  “That it?” the man asked her now.

  “Yes.”

  He pulled out a jeweler’s loupe from under the counter, put it to his eye, and examined the earrings.

  “They’re real,” she told him.

  “Yeah. Everybody says that. But these are.” He held up the necklace next, rubbed the pearls between finger and thumb, and examined them, too, before setting it down to check the make on the watch.

  Kayla tried not to shift her weight. Hurry, she begged silently. But she needed this money, and there weren’t going to be a lot of opportunities to unload this stuff on the road. Besides, she wanted it gone.

  “Three hundred,” the man said at last.

  “Three hundred? The earrings alone are worth eight. I just got them two days ago. They’re new!”

  “No. They’re used. This is a pawnshop. You want to return them to the store . . .” He shrugged.

  “I can’t. Please.”

  “Three hundred,” he said again. “Take it or leave it. You can try someplace else, but it’ll still be three hundred.”

  She swallowed. “OK.” What choice did she have?

  He pulled twenties out of a cash drawer, and she reached out a hand to take them. He looked at the bruises decorating her upper arm, the clear pattern of fingers and thumb, then at her face. At the mark of a fist, the bruise that no amount of makeup could disguise. “You leaving him?”

  “Yes. With my son.”

  He sighed, pulled five more twenties out of the drawer, and added them to the pile in her palm. “Don’t tell anybody I got soft,” he warned her as she stuffed the money hastily into her manila envelope and put it into her purse. “And don’t you get soft, either. Don’t go back. He could put you in the ground next time.”

  “I know. And . . . thanks.” She could barely get the words out.

  He waved a beefy hand. “Go on. Get out of here.”

  “One more thing,” she said.

  He sighed. “I knew it. What?”

  “Do you have a pair of scissors? And a wastebasket?”

  He looked at her, reached under the counter again, and silently handed her a pair of heavy shears with black handles, then a plastic wastebasket.

  “Thanks.” She set the wastebasket on the floor, leaned over it, grabbed a length of pale-blonde curl and snipped, then began to hack hastily at the rest of her hair.

  “Oh, hell, no,” she heard. The next minute, he was around the counter and taking the scissors from her. “Hang on.” He put a big hand on her shoulder, but when she flinched, he took it off again. “Hell. Let me do it. You look like you’ve gotten your hair chewed off by wild animals.”

  Another minute, and he was stepping back. “Still not good. But better. Here.” He went over to a rack, grabbed a blue baseball cap, and tossed it to her. “Mariners. Stop at Walmart and get yourself some shorts and a T-shirt, though. You stick out in that.”

  She glanced down at the pale-yellow dress that buttoned down the front and flared at the hem. Much too feminine, and much too noticeable.

  “And now, get out
of here,” he said. “That’s all I can do for you.”

  “Thanks.” She picked up her envelope of cash, then hesitated. “That jewelry,” she told him, because he’d been kind. “Don’t keep it here. Get rid of it.”

  He nodded. “Figured that.”

  She was back at the car, and it hadn’t been one minute, it had been more like ten. And she still had something to do.

  She opened the rear door and tossed her purse inside, but she didn’t get in. “Last thing,” she told Pam, then grabbed the laundry bag, upended it, and began to shake the contents onto the floor of the car. “Help me,” she told Eli. “Grab out your clothes and mine.”

  They sorted through them fast. Her clothes and Eli’s on the seat, Alan’s tossed to the pavement. Thirty seconds, and it was done. “Put them back in the bag,” she told Eli, and he hurried to comply. She scooped up Alan’s things, then had another thought. One last hasty bit of sorting, and she had run across to the dumpster in the corner of the lot, opened the creaking metal lid, and tossed Saxx underwear and Ralph Lauren undershirts onto rotting fruit and cardboard boxes.

  Back to the car, then, where she scooped up the rest of the pile and hit the door of the pawnshop again.

  The man looked up in resignation. “No. We’re done.”

  She dumped the pile onto the counter. “Five Turnbull & Asser shirts. Three hundred fifty dollars apiece.”

  “I don’t know how to sell these.”

  “Get them cleaned and pressed, take them to one of the high-end consignment shops, and you’ll get good money for them. Forty bucks easy.”

  “Still. Not what I do. You want the money, you sell them.”

  “I don’t want the money. I want to throw them away. But I pay my debts, so they’re yours. All you have to do is wash the scum off.”

  She didn’t wait to hear his answer. She was out the door again, back to the car, and climbing inside.

  “Now,” she told Pam. “Go.”

  Pam nodded, pulled out of the lot, and took the turns that would lead to 55 and finally onto 95, the north-south highway that would follow the Little Salmon up the state toward the rolling hills of the Palouse.

  “Where are we going?” Eli asked her.

  She took off her baseball cap, ran her hands through the ragged ends of her shorn hair, and laughed. It wasn’t steady, and it wasn’t strong. But it was a laugh. And then she told him.

  “We’re going to Paradise.”

  LONG HOT SUMMER

  Luke hated to admit how often his thoughts turned to the little dog during his workday. Was she barking at the back gate and wondering why she’d been left alone, or sleeping on the cool grass in the shade with a full stomach at last?

  It wasn’t just that, either. His mind kept straying to everything else sweet and frivolous, everything that didn’t have to do with test scores and student-teacher ratios and classroom assignments and all of the other minutiae of a high school principal’s life, even in July.

  The sky outside his office window was a perfect robin’s-egg blue, and the leaves on the maples in front of the Methodist church across the street moved just a little in the gentle breeze, dappling the shade on the sleepy sidewalks beneath. The air coming in through the open window beyond his shoulder was warm and soft, drifting across his cheek, tempting him to abandon it all and play. He had the radio tuned to a country station, because the office beyond was empty, and there was none of the background noise he was so used to, no echo of young voices, no ringing phones, no clanging of locker doors. And, anyway, it was that kind of day.

  A hot, lazy summer Friday, a day when any right-thinking educator would be tubing down a cool river with a beer in one hand. Or lying in a hammock in a shady backyard, sipping on something sweet and strong, all tangled up with a willing woman in a pretty white sundress. Kisses as soft as her skin, touches as tender as her smile, until soft and tender turned into something wilder and hotter, and you were making that hammock rock.

  Damn. It had been too long. He needed to get out of town for a night at a bar where nobody knew his name. He was going to have to find himself a brand-new friend, because Cherise had gotten herself seriously involved with somebody local, somebody who wanted the whole enchilada. That was good for her, if it was what she wanted, but it sure had put a crimp in his sex life.

  “Got tired of waiting for you,” she’d told him when he’d called a few weeks earlier and asked if she wanted to go to dinner.

  “I thought . . .” He’d been stuck for once, and she’d laughed.

  “Just messing with you,” she’d said. “Don’t worry about it. Eyes wide open here. We had fun, but you aren’t the right guy, and I’ve found somebody who is. So I’ll see you around. But . . .”

  “Yeah.” He hadn’t been able to avoid feeling a bit hollow inside. “A nod and a hello to show him that I don’t know you that well. I got it. I hope he’s good to you. You deserve it.”

  “I’d feel bad, except that I know it won’t take you long to find somebody new, and I know she’ll have a real good time.” The sigh had come right down the line. “It wouldn’t work nearly so well if you weren’t so damn pretty. If you didn’t have that gorgeous smile and those sexy eyes, not to mention that killer body.”

  “So you didn’t love me for my beautiful soul after all. I’m pretty crushed here.”

  “Nah. I was just using you, pretty boy. Just like you were using me. But then, if you’re going to be used, might as well get it from somebody who knows how. I’ll say one thing for you, you can use a woman real good. Kept me going on the memory from Saturday afternoon all the way to Friday night. But, you know—six more days in the week.”

  So that had been that. He’d done some dancing and a little bit of flirting at the Cowboy Bar, but despite the pretty brunette grad student who’d been doing some local talent scouting of her own the previous weekend . . . no. Better to conduct his private life at a safe distance from the office, even though it was getting old, driving up to Spokane or down to Union City to—well, to have sex. Cherise had been right about that. Friends with benefits had always been how he rolled. He was a good friend, and a pretty good lover, too. He’d never seen why they couldn’t go together.

  What had changed? Maybe seeing his older brother so happy, as much as he’d always resisted following Cal’s lead. Maybe too many birthdays. Or maybe just not being quite the wild man he used to be.

  But even if he wanted more, how was he supposed to find it around here? Paradise was too small a town, and he was too visible a part of it. When you were the principal of the town’s only high school, you were careful, especially if you liked it hot and dirty and right up to the edge of the line. In his responsible life, sex was the one place he could still be that wild man, could still live his life for fun. But he didn’t need his parents—or his students—knowing about that. Especially not the female ones.

  And that principal was supposed to be working right now, not thinking about long, tanned legs in short summer skirts, or pretty round breasts in bikini tops with skinny little straps you could thumb right off her shoulders . . .

  Work. He tore his gaze away from the window and clicked the button on his mouse. He’d go through the applications for the unexpected vacancy in the English department, set up a few interview appointments, then go home and check on the dog. He’d fed her cereal and tuna for breakfast—not the best choices, probably, but all he’d had in the house—made sure she had plenty of water, and left her in his fenced backyard. Plenty of shade for her there, and she’d be fine until he got home. Of course she would.

  He could have just called animal control, he realized. He could do it right now, and they’d come pick her up. She could be gone before he even got there. But he wanted to take her to the vet first, make sure she was all right. Maybe feed her for a couple days, get her looking a little better. Give her a fighting chance to get adopted.


  A couple days, and that was it. Strictly temporary.

  DISCOVERY

  “Where’s the manager?” Alan Yeomans asked.

  The heavyset woman barely looked up from where she was folding clothes.

  “Hey. I’m talking to you. Where’s the manager?”

  “How the hell would I know?” She shook out a T-shirt and laid it on the table, and Alan’s hands were starting to shake.

  “Did you see a woman and a boy here this morning?” he asked.

  “Saw a few people.” She shrugged and continued folding. “What’s it to you?”

  He wanted to grab her and choke it out of her. A couple other people had looked up now, and he turned to them. “A woman and a nine-year-old boy. When did they leave?”

  Nothing but blank stares, and he softened his tone. “Look. I’m worried. I was supposed to meet my wife and son here.” It was only partly a lie. “She wouldn’t have left without telling me. It looks like her laundry basket’s still here, too.” He picked it up and showed them, shoving down his anger at the fact that she’d left all those expensive wooden hangers—the only ones he permitted for his good shirts—out here for anyone to take. “Somebody must have seen them leave. They’d have been here for the last couple of hours.” He focused on a skinny guy in a baseball cap who was sitting on one of the plastic chairs. “Pretty. Blonde. You’d have noticed her.”

  The guy shrugged. “Nah, dude. I just got here.”

  Alan swore and looked around. Security camera on the wall. Ah. He took a hasty picture of the “Call for Service” number, picked up the laundry basket, and hit the door. He sped back to the house, laying on the horn as a pedestrian stepped off the curb at a corner. That was all he needed, some moron getting himself hit. He was going to be lucky to make his ten-o’clock meeting as it was.

  He swung into the driveway, got out of the car, and slammed the door with some extra force. Damn her. He’d explicitly told her to wait for him. What did it take to make her follow a simple instruction? When he found her, he was going to take one of those hangers and give her a good hard dose of poetic justice. Maybe that would get the point across.