“It’s not an easy story to tell,” she admitted, blowing on the steam rising out of her coffee mug. Mike suspected she did it so she could avoid looking at him.
“I don’t want to pry, Shari. If it’s not job related, you’re under no obligation to tell me anything.”
“I’m a recovering alcoholic,” she blurted out forcefully. Her face was red with shame.
“And I’m a Presbyterian,” he said immediately. “So?”
Sharon burst out laughing. Mike decided it made her look even more beautiful than before, and he hadn’t thought that possible. “I’m not sure what reaction I expected,” she said, stifling another round of laughter, “but that definitely wasn’t it.”
“Well, really,” he said. “You’re an alcoholic; so what? Have you been drinking at work?”
“Of course not,” she answered, her face flushing again, this time from anger.
“Then don’t worry about it. Nobody’s perfect, right? The last perfect person to walk the earth died a couple of thousand years ago. Maybe you remember the story. And they hung him on a cross, so if you think about it, things weren’t that great for him, either.”
Sharon scuffled her foot and looked down at the kitchen floor. She still seemed uncomfortable. “Thank you for saying that; you have no idea how nervous I was to tell you. I quit drinking when I left town to go to the FBI Academy. It was the right time to do it. New job, new life, new me. Perfect.”
Mike nodded. It was obvious there was still more to the story. “But . . .”
“But then my dad got sick and had no one to care for him. He was able to live in his home for a while before being moved into a hospice facility in Orono, but only if there was someone here twenty-four hours a day to look after him since he couldn’t care for himself. So I came back. I had to return to the place I thought I had left behind forever, to all the people I knew when I was drinking, all the pettiness and foolishness and crap I thought I had left behind for good.”
Mike studied Shari’s face, her exhaustion outlined in dark circles under her pretty eyes. “But why bother coming back here at all? You said your father basically left you on your own after your mother died. Why not just leave him like he left you?”
She shook her head emphatically, her black hair flying. “I couldn’t do that. I was an only child and he didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I couldn’t stand the thought of him dying all alone. He did the best he could after my mom died; he just wasn’t equipped to be responsible for a child, especially a teenage girl. Hell, he could barely take care of himself, and I didn’t make things easy for him, either. I guess you could say I was a handful for a long time after my mom died, drinking and partying and staying out all night.”
“I guess I can understand you feeling like you had to come back,” Mike said. “You have a strong sense of responsibility and family obligation, and that’s a good thing. But I still don’t see what the relevance is to right now, to tonight, why you feel you need to tell me all this.”
“Because,” Sharon answered, looking miserable. “This is where I grew up, where I did all my drinking before I quit. It’s where I was a wild child, and people like Earl Manning remember me that way; it’s the only way they’ve ever known me. There were plenty of nights I closed the Ridge Runner sitting right next to Earl, each holding the other up as we stumbled out to our cars. I’m sure that’s why he felt so comfortable mouthing off to me.”
“I thought you handled that jackass just fine,” Mike told her, “especially when he climbed out of his truck. I got in his face because I could see he was getting to you, but I’m confident you could have put him in his place with no problem whatsoever.”
Sharon smiled. It was obvious she was grateful for the compliment, as well as the fact Mike was trying to make this as easy as possible. “Thanks. But the problem is, now that I’m back in town, and for who knows how long, I don’t know if I can resist the temptations this place holds. It’s just a little hick town to you, but to me, it’s where I learned all the bad habits I’ve worked so hard to escape.”
She paused, clearly trying to figure out how to continue. Mike sat motionless, letting her work through her issues. She took another deep shaky breath, then exhaled and continued. “I wanted a drink so bad tonight when we were standing in the forest looking at Mr. Crosker’s head in a tree, I could hardly stand it. It’s all I could think about.” She looked Mike in the eyes, shamefaced and nearly in tears. “That’s really why I wanted to go to Mrs. Crosker’s house with you. I didn’t trust myself to be alone.”
“Is that why I’m sitting here now?”
“Partly,” she admitted. “I won’t lie to you, I still want a drink. But after you opened up to me in the car about what happened to you with that little girl . . .”
“Sarah,” he interrupted.
“What?”
“Her name was Sarah. Sarah Melendez. I’ll never forget it, or her.”
“Sarah, then,” she said, nodding. “After you told me about what happened to Sarah, I just felt I had to be honest with you and let you know what was going on. I’ve needed to open up to someone, to confide in someone about how hard it is, but who the hell could I talk to around here?”
Mike stood without a word, walked to the sink, and dumped the remainder of his beer into the ceramic basin. It foamed and hissed as it circled the drain. He stood at the sink until it gurgled out of sight, then reached into the cupboard, grabbed a big mug, and filled it with steaming coffee. Returning to the table, he sat down and took a sip. “I’d like to propose a toast,” he said.
Sharon smiled, intrigued and amused. “What?”
“A toast. You know, where we raise our glasses and I say something corny and stupid. I want to make a toast.”
“I know what a toast is, silly, but what are we toasting?”
“Here’s to keeping the past in the past where it belongs and to making fresh starts.”
“Wouldn’t that be two toasts?”
“By God, I guess you’re right,” he said, clinking his mug into hers twice. Their fingers grazed lightly on each pass, and after the second one, Mike left his cup next to hers, the contact between them electric. Sharon slowly raised her gaze to meet his, her blue eyes impossibly large, her moist lips parted and inviting. Neither one said a word as Mike stood and pulled her into his arms and kissed her, hard and passionate and filled with need.
She tasted like cinnamon and they melted together.
17
THE WORST PART ABOUT being a traveling rep for a struggling replacement computer parts firm was having to drive through the God-forsaken north country, which in some ways seemed to Frank Cheslo like it couldn’t possibly have changed at all over the last several thousand years. Of course, that notion was ridiculous and Frank knew it. For one thing, there were no paved roads thousands of years ago in the God-forsaken north country. Or anywhere else for that matter.
But if you used your imagination just a little, Frank thought it was easy to see exactly what this area looked like way back when, and that was something he was still trying to come to grips with. Traveling didn’t bother Frank—he had been a salesman his entire adult life and at 44 years of age that meant he had done a lot of traveling and a lot of selling over a lot of years. The thing he had a problem with at this point in his life was where he had to do that traveling.
As the newest sales rep for Computer Solutions of New England, Frank had been issued the least desirable sales territory. He understood how things worked in the corporate world and knew that before too long someone higher up in the food chain would die or retire or contract some terminal illness or move on to bigger and better things, and when that happened Frank would have the opportunity to inherit a more lucrative—and less remote—sales route.
In the meantime, though, Frank was stuck schlepping around the northeastern United States in his company-issued Ford Focus sedan. His sector of responsibility included the entire geographical area north of Boston all the way to th
e Canadian border which, by Frank’s calculations, wasn’t too terribly far away at the moment. For a guy who enjoyed the nightlife and the company of as many different women as he could sample since his divorce, the assignment was roughly comparable to having an eyeball sucked out of his face with a vacuum cleaner hose.
Now, to make things worse, this excruciatingly bad weather was causing Frank Cheslo to question his decision to drive all the way home to his apartment on the outskirts of Boston, rather than waiting out the storm in a motel and continuing on after the weather cleared.
He had started out in Presque Isle, Maine, after concluding his business at seven o’clock in the evening when the driving conditions were poor but not unmanageable. The intervening seven hours had seen the weather deteriorate drastically, until now it was all Frank could do to keep his car from sliding off the road in an uncontrolled spin. He prayed that wouldn’t happen because if it did, way out here in the middle of nowhere, probably no one would find him until next May.
Any thoughts of driving home had vanished in a solid wall of freezing drizzle. All Frank wanted now was to find a motel—any rotting piece of crap would do—on the side of the road and wait out the storm. But of course there were no motels because he was driving through some of the most desolate goddamned land this side of frigging Death Valley. He was currently motoring slowly along a lonely two-lane blacktop at two o’clock in the morning with no sign of human habitation in sight. Never mind motels; hell, there weren’t even any towns around as far as Frank could see.
He tried to puzzle out exactly where in the vast wilderness of northern Maine he might be, but this territory was still new to him, and he couldn’t pinpoint his location with any degree of accuracy. Goddamned company ought to provide their sales staff with GPS units, Frank thought, but of course, as was the case with small and medium sized companies everywhere, money was tight and GPS units for ordinary working stiffs just weren’t in the budget. Undoubtedly the big shots at the top of the corporate ladder had all the fancy shit in their cars, and they didn’t even drive all over New England like Frank did. Pricks.
“So here I am,” Frank muttered to himself, as was his habit, in between trying to keep his car on the road and attempting to find a radio station that would come in as anything other than toneless white noise. “I’m lost, I’m tired, and I have no freaking clue how far I am from a decent sized town. Or any town. God, I hate this job.”
Frank continued cautiously along Route 24 because, really, what choice did he have? Pull over to the side of the road and hope someone would stop and take pity on him? Not goddamned likely, especially way out here in the boonies. Another car might not come along for ten hours, especially in this weather, and if one did, it would undoubtedly just cruise on by, its owner intent on getting home and out of the storm as soon as possible.
Plus, and here was the cherry on top of the ice-storm cake, Frank’s car was dangerously low on gas. He had badly underestimated how much extra fuel it would take to drive so slowly in such poor conditions, and now he was paying the price for that miscalculation, or soon would be, anyway. Freaking job.
Tree limbs and even entire centuries-old trees were down everywhere. Frank could see shiny ice coating them and it appeared in places to be three or four inches thick. Considering the difficulty he was having just keeping his car on the pavement, Frank believed it was entirely possible that was exactly how much ice was on the branches, on the road, on the power lines, on pretty much everything.
The car’s headlights fought a losing battle against the looming blackness as gale force winds whipped rain over and around the vehicle. It rocked on its springs from the force of the heavier gusts. Frank fought the steering wheel, cursing himself under his breath for his stupidity in trying to get home tonight. He resolved to stop at the very first opportunity and sleep in the car if he had to. He would wait wherever he parked the car until the sun came out.
Frank rounded a corner and gasped as a massive upended oak tree filled his field of vision. The huge tree lay on its side blocking most of the road and he slammed on his brakes, praying the car would somehow find enough traction to come to a stop before he plowed into it. The car slewed sideways as the back end tried to pass the front. All Frank could do was hang on for dear life and hope the damage to the car would not be so extensive the tiny piece of shit stopped running.
He had a fleeting vision of himself slowly freezing to death in his disabled car, a passing motorist discovering his dead body days from now lying on the front seat, alone and stiff from rigor mortis, and then he slammed into the big tree with more force than he would have thought possible considering how slowly he had been driving. Metal crunched and shrieked, the crash sounding incredibly loud even over the screaming wind, and Frank found himself pulled taut against his safety belt for what seemed like hours but was probably only a second or two. Then everything stopped and silence covered the accident scene like a wet blanket; even the wind seemed to subside for a moment.
Frank sat absolutely still for a few seconds, taking unconscious inventory and discovering to his surprise and delight that none of his body parts seemed to be broken. His chest hurt when he took an experimental deep breath and he figured the upper-body restraint portion of the safety belt must have bruised his sternum. Under the circumstances, Frank decided, he had been damn lucky.
Of course, now that the accident was over and Frank was alive and more or less unhurt, the concept of luck seemed relative. He was okay physically—if you excluded his frantically thudding heart and the adrenaline now coursing through his body—but unless the damage to his car was a lot less serious than it appeared at first glance, he was going to be stuck here in the middle of nowhere in freezing temperatures at two o’clock in the morning. Wonderful.
Frank’s hands shook as he grasped the key in the ignition. He wondered whether the shaking was from the adrenaline rush or from the possibility of being stranded here for who knows how long. He wasn’t a religious man, but he said a quick prayer—more like a desperate non-denominational plea just in case someone up above might be paying attention, as unlikely as that seemed—and turned the key.
The Focus’s engine had stalled when the car slammed into the fallen tree, but now it started up on the first try and purred like a kitten. There was no guarantee it would continue to run, of course, what with the fact that the front grill seemed to be crumpled backward into the engine compartment, but Frank took the fact that the damned thing started at all as a very encouraging sign.
He pictured important fluids spraying out of the engine as he sat doing nothing and decided he’d better find out if the car would actually move. Frank could see a miniscule opening on the far side of the two-lane road between the downed tree and the edge of the thick forest that looked like the car might be able to squeeze through. Branches tumbled across it but they looked relatively small, and Frank thought if he got up a little bit of speed and tried to crash through that the car might actually make it. He had no idea what hazards the road held beyond the tree of course but at the moment was focused only on getting out of his current predicament. Everything else could wait.
Frank shifted into reverse and eased his foot down on the accelerator. The transmission caught with an audible THUNK, and the Focus lurched backward away from the tree trunk. Something screeched under the car’s frame and then stopped. Frank realized he was sweating, although the temperature inside the car’s cabin had already begun dropping.
Now that the car was moving backward, Frank was hesitant to stop in order to shift into drive. He had an irrational fear that if he changed anything he was doing at this very moment, anything at all, the damaged car would give up the ghost; it would simply sputter to a halt and go belly up right there in the middle of the road, never to move again.
He said another quick makeshift prayer to the same unknown being who had answered his first one, and then stepped on the brake. The car shuddered and ground to a halt, the brake pedal vibrating violently. Frank t
ook aim at the opening on the far side of the road—it looked a lot smaller all of a sudden—and stomped on the gas. He knew he needed to build up enough speed to blast through the branches if he wanted to avoid getting stuck in the tangled mess.
The Focus hit the upper portion of the tree doing close to thirty, a dangerous speed on these icy roads even if he wasn’t navigating directly into a downed hardwood tree. Frank put the odds at roughly fifty-fifty that he would spin off the road into the woods and end up even worse off than he already was but figured worrying about that was irrelevant now because he was committed.
The car rocked and squealed as branches grabbed at its front and sides like the grasping dead hands of a band of marauding zombies. A particularly large branch smashed into the windshield and cracks spider webbed in front of his eyes as Frank instinctively ducked. He kept going. The car was slowing rapidly with the tree clutching and grabbing, unwilling to give up its newfound prize.
Then he was through. The little Focus burst through the tiny opening just as Frank had hoped it would, and even though the car slewed dangerously on the ice, miracle of miracles, it was sliding into the middle of the road, not the woods. Finally, Frank had caught a break!
His stomach felt like he had eaten too much of his grandmother’s chili and sweat poured down his face. He realized he had been holding his breath and he chuckled tensely, his voice sounding strangled and foreign. The road ahead appeared relatively clear, at least for the short distance he could see, and Frank allowed himself a glimmer of hope that maybe things were going to work out okay after all.
He straightened the car out, pointed the crumpled nose down the middle of the deserted road, stepped on the accelerator, and—
—And the car ran out of gas. The engine sputtered and coughed, sounding exactly like his mother’s Craftsman lawn mower when he forgot to fill the tank before cutting her grass. It almost died, caught for a second, almost died again, caught again, the little car lurching comically, before finally giving up and shutting down altogether, rebuking Frank with one final angry BANG!
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