“What?”
“Well,” he rolled his eyes. “I hate to admit it now because it sounds so stupid. I was going to plant drugs in your car, fake arrest you, and then offer you a deal—you give me what I want, and I give you your freedom. I gotta admit, I was a little thrown by the whole Daniel-was-gay-and-I-was-pregnant-with-Miller’s-child revelation. That was my third stroke. I knew you’d be more persuaded if your own daughter was in trouble.”
That was the big question. Was Abby really the little girl Emily handed over to her grandfather nearly fourteen years ago? She always thought she’d know her daughter if she ever got to see her again; she never thought to look for her back home. How could she be hers if she had Wilson’s? Though she could see why Miller would think Hoyt might have hurt her, it wasn’t true. Hoyt was a terrible father to Daniel, but he’d never hurt her. Not unless she was suppressing some horrible memory. Maybe her grandfather gave Miller someone else’s baby. Why would he do that, though? That still didn’t even begin to address the question of why Miller took the baby in the first place. He was still a teenager with a baseball scholarship and his whole life ahead of him. Those were questions that would have to be answered later. She didn’t care whose child Abby was. She deserved better than to be told the truth about her parentage from an idiot like Alan.
“You could have asked me to help you.”
“Huh uh. I don’t ask for help. Not anymore. I decided that morning I woke up and you were gone that Hoyt was right about one thing. The only way to get what you really want is to take it yourself.”
“So you’d rather take the risk with the drugs than ask for help?”
“I said it was messy, but yeah, I would. I’m under a time crunch here. If Hoyt dies before I get what I need, I’m up shit creek.”
Emily pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror to the backseat. Jack was playing with his Legos, unaware of how scared she was over how far Alan was planning to take his control over her. She doubted that there was any “treasure” and wondered if he was trying to manipulate her to get her to sleep with him or something. It was clear, they both knew, whatever he demanded, she would do it to keep him from telling Abby that Miller had been lying to her for her entire life.
Other than Jack randomly blurting out “Leotard!” and laughing, they rode in silence to the house she grew up in, the house she ran away from, the house she wasn’t sure she could even step foot inside. She had to, though, didn’t she? For Abby. For Miller.
***
Emily stood on the back porch of her parents’ house. All she could think about was that Halloween when she was eleven and Seth dared Levi to go into the old burned-out barn everyone thought was haunted. Levi didn’t want to go and started crying. Seth called him a baby. Emily retaliated by calling him a fat ass and then marched up to the old barn herself. She pulled the squeaky metal door open and went inside. Then, to prove she wasn’t scared, she shut the door behind her.
The only difference between then and now was that she knew that barn wasn’t haunted. She wasn’t so sure about her parents’ house. She found the key under a rock in the flower bed, unlocked the door, and froze.
“No more stalling,” Alan said. “Open the damn door.”
She turned the knob and pushed the door open a bit and held her hand out for her son. “Come on, buddy.”
“I’m dying.” Jack looked like a June bug lying on the grass with his arms and legs up in front of him, twitching.
“No you’re not.”
“You said if we don’t keep moving we’re going to die.”
“No. I said we have to get out of the police car because we’re like astronauts exploring a new planet. You can stop pretending now.”
“No I can’t. I’m stuck on Mercury, and I’m dying.”
“Why are you dying?”
“Because I’m burning up.”
“Jack, if you’re too hot, come into the house.”
“There are no houses on Mercury.”
“There’s no oxygen either. Let’s pretend something else.”
“No. I like being—”
“Okay. You’re an astronaut on Mercury, and this house is our base.”
Jack rolled over and stood up. “Okay.”
“We need to go in because a mean alien is after us.”
“What does the alien look like?”
“I don’t know.” Emily eyed Alan, who appeared annoyed with the exchange. “He’s wearing a police uniform.”
“Ouch,” Alan said. “That hurt.”
“What does he smell like?”
“Too much Stetson.” Emily pushed the door open and led Jack inside.
Once they were in, she winced at the smell of bleach and the lingering memory of the room the last time she was there. It was the night she got the call from Verna that Daniel had shot himself, and she ran out of the house without even asking if she could go see him. When she got to the ER, she walked so slowly to get to Daniel that she hated herself afterward—that was another five seconds they could have had together. He was barely conscious and covered in blood. She held his hand and told him she loved him. He squeezed her hand, touched her face, and said, “I’m sorry.” One of the doctors made her step out of the room. A half an hour later he was dead.
When she got home, sick from sadness and shock, her parents and Ma'am were waiting at the dining table with a pregnancy test sitting in the middle like a centerpiece. She knew it was hers, even though she’d hid it underneath the boxes that were in the big metal can out behind the garage. They weren’t alone. Sister Serenity was sitting at the table with them, and Emily was terrified. They stared at her, not with an air of compassion and consolation, but with contempt on their faces and the stench of bleach hanging over them.
Instinctively, Emily ran out of the house. Partly because Daniel had begged her to run enough times that it finally sunk in. She mostly ran because she was scared of what it would do to the baby. It was only when she crossed the Texas state line that she felt safe enough to pull into a gas station to use the restroom. She didn’t realize until she looked in the mirror as she washed her hands that Daniel’s blood was on her face. She threw up and then sobbed uncontrollably as she washed it off. When she made it to Dallas, she called her granddaddy and told him everything. He came to her, got her an apartment, and found her a doctor. He helped her get away from her family. He helped her start a new life. He helped her by finding a good home for her baby.
“I’m thirsty,” Jack said, holding the refrigerator door open. “There’s no water in here.”
“Yes there is.” Emily pulled a plastic cup from the cabinet and filled it with water from the sink. “They don’t have water bottles here. They don’t need them. Here.” She offered it to him. “They have really good water. It’s from a well.”
Jack closed the refrigerator and took the cup. He sniffed the water. “Smells like dirt.”
“That’s what makes it good.”
“No.” He put the cup on the counter. “I wanna water bottle. Does this place have any kids?”
“They used to.”
“Do they have Legos?” he asked, blinking.
Levi used to play with Legos. Surely her parents had cleaned out their rooms by now. She wouldn’t be surprised if they had boxed and burned her things the day after she left. It was a long shot that they’d find any Legos. However, she needed to try so he could have something familiar to stabilize him while everything around them was so out of control. “Let’s go upstairs and see.”
Alan seized her arm. “You’re wasting time.”
“Have you ever seen an autistic child have a meltdown? I’m pretty sure you haven’t, cause if you had you’d understand that if I don’t take care of Jack first, I’ll be too busy trying to keep him from hurting himself to be able to look for some key to Hoyt’s stupid treasure.” She took Jack’s hand and led him out of the kitchen and through the living room, past the brown leather recliner she and Levi crammed themselves into afte
r school to watch reruns of The Brady Bunch and The Cosby Show. She touched the chair, hoping it would somehow touch her back. It was the closest she’d been to Levi since she got into town.
“Go faster,” Alan prodded.
“Believe it or not, this is harder for me that it looks. I ran away from this place for a reason.”
Once they were up the staircase, she showed Jack the room on the right. “That’s Uncle Levi’s old room. He used to play with Legos. They might be all gone.”
Jack pushed his way in, scanned the room, and then checked the closet. “Ah man!” He threw his hands in the air and let them fall to his side with a clap. “Nothing!”
“I’m sorry, buddy. I said it might be empty. You wanna see if they have any good cartoon channels?”
Jack pointed to the door across the hall. “Whose room in that?”
“That used to be my room. I didn’t play with Legos.”
“What did you play with?”
“Nothing. I liked to draw.”
“I like to draw.”
She didn’t want to go into her old room, didn’t even want the door open. “There’s nothing in there. I’m sure it was emptied out a long time ago.”
Alan stepped back into the hallway and motioned to her bedroom door. “You better hope to God there’s at least one thing in there—my key.”
Jack made a beeline for her room but stopped when he reached the closed door. “There’s no knob.”
“I wasn’t allowed one.”
“That’s weird.” Jack’s eyes twitched and fluttered. “Why? Was it broken?”
“Yes. It was broken.” Emily pushed the door open.
The room wasn’t empty. It looked, as close as she could tell, like it did the night she ran away. She swallowed back the urge to cry. Her bed was still made. Her pink canvas Keds sat in the same corner of her room. The blinds were still pulled up from when Daniel climbed out of her window that night–he always came to her room when he visited because Levi’s was next to her parents’. Even though she was pretty sure it was her imagination, the smell of bleach still burned the back of her throat. The hand-drawn pictures of flowers were still taped down the side of her mirror. Anyone who paid any attention to the drawings would have noticed Miller’s initials, MA, that she hid within the petals of the flowers.
The light pink ribbon draped over her mirror hit her the hardest. It reminded her more than anything else that she was a kid when she left. Why didn’t someone protect her? Wasn’t she worth the bother? She was forced to make decisions she was much too young to understand weren’t isolated moments of commitment to one choice or another. They were seeds, planted deep in the earth of her life, which sprouted and grew into massive trees that lined the path between her past and her future. Some trees gave shade, others stood dead and rotted, growing dangerously close to falling over and destroying everything when the winds blew too hard.
“Where’s the paper to draw on?” Jack was on his knees, holding up the bed skirt to her bed. “What’s this?” He held up the wooden wedge Levi made for her in wood shop so she could shut her door after her parents took her doorknob away.
“That’s nothing. The paper should be in here.” She pulled a pencil and paper out of her drawer. “Here.”
“I’m gonna draw a picture for Miller. When are we going to ride the horses again?”
“I don’t know,” she answered as she pulled out some map pencils and handed them to him.
He took them, sat at her desk and said, “Retard Leotard. That’s my new catch phrase.”
“I don’t think so, Jack.”
Once he was settled, she sat on her bed and looked at Alan. “There’s obviously no key in here, and even if there is, I don’t know where it is.”
Alan leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “Tell me what happened the last time Daniel was here.”
“You want me to relive the worst night of my life?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I think Daniel hid something in here.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To keep Hoyt from getting it.”
“If he did, he didn’t tell me about it.”
“I think he did. You probably didn’t know what he was talking about.”
“You swear that once we find whatever it is you’re looking for, you’ll never tell Abby she’s adopted?”
Alan made an X mark over his heart.
“I don’t believe you.”
“The only thing keeping me in town is Hoyt’s money. Once I get what I want, I’m outta here.”
“I still don’t believe you.”
He shrugged. “It’s funny that you think that even matters to me.”
“Okay. Fine.” She’d never talked about that night, not even with Levi. She would now, though, if it would help Miller. She owed him that much after abandoning him. First, she needed to do one thing. She needed to scope out a means of escape because she didn’t believe for a second Daniel would hide anything in her room without telling her, and she had no idea how long Alan was going to make her search for a phantom key. “I’ll tell you every detail. Let me go to the bathroom first, okay?”
“That’s bullshit. You went at the restaurant.”
“Jack went. I didn’t.”
“Fine.” He took her by the arm and led her to the bathroom down the hall. “I’m standing right here the whole time.”
She went in, closed the door, and locked it. She opened the cabinet doors hoping to find some old razor blades or something she could stash in her pockets that could help her if the opportunity to get away from Alan came up. The sight of all the decades old makeup and cheap perfume her mother had stashed in there made her want to scream. Unless she was going to force Alan to let her go by throwing tubes of expired lipstick or out-of-date blue eye shadow at him, she was out of luck.
“I don’t hear anything,” Alan called out.
“Jesus, Alan. Hold on.” She flushed the toilet, turned the faucet on full blast, and rummaged through one of the baskets. A spray from an atomizer of perfume in the eyes could do enough damage to get her and Jack out the door. Elizabeth Taylor and her White Diamonds were Emily’s best hope. Great.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
Miller
Miller was finding it difficult to be as mad at Emily as he wanted to be because he kept seeing her face when she looked at him. That sad look always incapacitated him. No doubt he was the reason for it. Was he the reason for it when they were younger? Everything Alan said bounced around in his head like a thousand echoes. Alan was telling the truth about the two of them having sex. It was obvious she didn’t want to see him or hear his side of the story. What was he going to tell Abby about why Emily was gone?
He’d have to let Abby down easy. He’d tell her he asked Emily to leave because it wasn’t going to work out. She’d see right through him, of course, and tell him to stop babying her. Then he would look at her and see Hoyt where Daniel used to be, and he’d still love her.
On his way home he drove by the diner and stopped in the middle of the road. Emily had ignored his call before Alan showed her the tape at the police station. Sure she was mad at him for bringing her baby back to where she ran away from and for saying all the things he said about her to Levi. Something was already wrong, though. Something that would have caused her to call him not long after they parted that morning and then frown when his name showed up on her caller ID. What was she doing at that diner with Alan when she was supposed to be at the hospital? Did she even go to the hospital?
While something was definitely off, Miller couldn’t put his finger on it. He pressed the accelerator and went left at the next intersection. He hadn’t been to the hospital since Abby was a baby. It was time to go back. When he got to there, he went to the ICU unit and found Gail in the waiting room, standing over the coffee pot.
She looked up at him and asked, “Have you seen the bleach?”
�
��No. There’s probably some in one of the cleaning closets. Why?”
“We’re all out of bleach.”
“You don’t need bleach to make coffee.”
“I know what’s wrong now. We clean her with it, but we have to clean ourselves too.”
“Who?”
“Emily.”
“Was she here earlier today? A few hours ago?”
“Yes.” Gail nodded slowly.
“What did the two of you talk about? Was she upset?”
“Mother said he was defiling her.”
Miller led Gail to the line of chairs along the wall and helped her sit down. Then he pulled another chair out from the wall and sat facing her. “Are you talking about Hoyt?”
Gail’s back stiffened as she sat up, her eyes wide. “Now that boy’s dead.”
“Yes. Daniel’s dead. Do you know why Emily ran away? Was Hoyt hurting her?”
“It’s all my fault.” She covered her face with her hands and sobbed.
She’d gotten bad fast. Just this past winter, Gail had shown up at his place at three in the morning carrying a bottle of bleach. Miller thought she was drunk at first. When he didn’t smell any alcohol on her breath, he thought she must have been sleepwalking. He put her in the truck to take her home when Norman pulled up, yelling at her like a madman, telling her to stop pretending she was going crazy like her mom and making him drive all over the property looking for her. Gail didn’t even notice him. She kept saying she needed to go into Miller’s house for the cleaning. He thought she wanted to clean his house. Norman loaded her up into his car and peeled away so fast his tires threw gravel on Miller.
“Gail,” Miller peeled her hands off her face, “I need you to talk to me. Was Emily here earlier today?”
Gail studied his face and nodded.
“What did you talk about?
“I didn’t want her to come back here.”
“Then why did you call her?”
“He took my phone and dialed her number. He handed it to me because he said she should be here.”
Secondhand Sinners Page 17
