Paranoid

by Lisa Jackson

  Rachel’s stomach turned over. “So . . . what’s in this cleanse?”

  “Lots of good stuff.” Harper looked around the kitchen countertop, found her phone on the counter, then added, “Like, y’know, lots of juices . . . Tea maybe, fresh stuff, no sugar . . . y’know to detox your body.”

  Rachel frowned at her daughter’s cup, now filled with enough sugar to cause a diabetic coma. “Now you’ve got toxins?”

  Harper made a sound of disgust. As if her mother were the most stupid woman in the world. “Everybody does,” she said and took a sip of her coffee, scowled, and found the sugar bowl again. Another heaping teaspoonful went into her cup.

  “You could always take up sports again.” Harper had been a track star just a year earlier, one of the fastest runners at Edgewater High, but as her interest in boys had increased, her dedication to the team had waned and this year she hadn’t bothered with track. No amount of talking had convinced her otherwise.

  Rachel said, “If you don’t want the doughnut, we’ve got granola and yogurt or eggs or just the whites or fruit or multigrain bread for toast.”

  Harper scowled, giving Rachel a look that said more clearly than words: You just don’t get it, Mom.

  Probably not.

  “I think since I’m starting Monday this would be okay.” She opened the bag with Reno looking on, hoping that Harper would drop a crumb or two.

  “Your brother up?”

  “Dunno.” Harper shrugged.

  “Dylan!” Rachel glanced at the clock, saw that they were going to be late. Carrying her own cup, she made her way down the hall and rapped on the door. Ignoring all the dire warnings glued to the panels, she pushed the door open. “Hey, bud,” she called, annoyed when she saw him in the same position he’d been in an hour earlier. He was breathing steadily, his lips parted, his thick eyelashes sweeping his cheek. His head was propped on the wound-up corner of his duvet, his pillow having slid to the floor to settle onto a paper plate that showed the leftover crust of a take-out pizza. “Time to get up.”

  He moved, pulling the covers over his head.

  “School.”

  A groan as he threw back the coverlet and squinted open one eye. For a second he looked so much like his father, Rachel blinked. He wasn’t Cade’s doppelganger by any means, but the Ryder genes were evident in her son. Cade and his brothers had been blessed with strong jaws; heads of thick, dark hair; sharp features; and intense hazel eyes that seemed to vary in color with the light. Dylan was no exception.

  If only he’d been blessed with some of his father’s work ethic.

  “I think I’ll pass,” Dylan said.

  “On school? Nope.” Leaning a shoulder against the doorjamb, she took a swallow from her cup. “Get up, bud.”

  “It’s almost the end of the year.”

  “All the more reason to finish with a bang.”

  “Ugh.” Again he yanked a blanket over his head.

  “It’s Friday. You know what that means. I’ve been to the bakery.”

  He grumbled, “Don’t care.”

  “If you say so.”

  Rachel left then, returning to the kitchen and hearing the thud of bare feet hitting the floor behind her, then uneven footsteps as Dylan stumbled out of his room to the bathroom. She could always count on his empty stomach and full bladder to force him from his lair filled with video game consoles, computer monitors, and bobble-heads of sports figures. His bed was secondary to his equipment.

  Now, thankfully, he was up. Step one.

  In the kitchen, Harper sat at the table, her “coffee” forgotten, the doughnut half eaten as she texted rapidly, her fingers flying over the screen of her phone.

  Rachel heard the groan of old pipes and the rush of water as Dylan turned on the shower. Less than five minutes later, his hair wet, Dylan showed up in a hoodie and ripped jeans. He made a beeline for the white bag and ate the maple bar in three bites. “You gonna finish that?” he asked Harper, eyeing her half-eaten doughnut as he opened the refrigerator door to find the carton of orange juice.

  “You can have it.”

  “Good.” Before she could change her mind, he swept the uneaten half doughnut from the table and into his mouth in one swift motion. Afterward, he washed down the donut with juice he drank straight from the carton.

  “Oh, gross! Jesus, Dylan, you’re a frickin’ Neanderthal. Don’t you know about backwash?”

  “Don’t care.”

  “Obviously.” She gave a mock shudder and cast her mother a disgusted glare. “Can’t you do something about him? He’s like this . . . this . . . mega embarrassment.”

  Rachel said, “Hey, Dylan, you know better.”

  He made a disgusted huff. “I just don’t know what’s the big deal.” He returned the carton with a minuscule amount of OJ to the refrigerator.

  “You don’t know?” Harper repeated. She slipped her phone into her pocket. “You’re beyond disgusting. More like disturbing.”

  “Ah, ah, ah. No insults,” Rachel cut in, then pulled out the pill bottle that had been burning a hole in her pocket. Without saying a word she placed it on the counter.

  The kids exchanged glances.

  Not a good sign.

  “What’s that?” Dylan finally asked.

  “My Xanax, or what’s left of the prescription.”

  He frowned, his eyebrows slamming together while Harper had gone chalk white.

  “So?” Dylan asked.

  “So, I think some pills are missing,” she said and waited for a reaction.

  “What do you mean?” Her son again.

  Harper sent her brother a how-can-you-be-so-dense look. “She means she thinks we took them.”

  “Us?” Dylan said, and his face fell. As if he were shocked.

  Real emotion?

  Or a well-practiced act?

  At fifteen, Dylan was almost impossible to read. As a younger kid, her son had been an open book. Now? Not so much.

  The same could be said of his sister.

  “We didn’t steal your damned drugs,” Harper said, recovering. “What do you think we’d do with them? Like what? Sell them at school?”

  “What?” Dylan said, apparently shocked.

  Rachel shook her head. “Geez, I hope not.”

  “Mom. Really?” Harper was pissed.

  Fabulous. So far the morning was on a roll.

  “I’m just letting you know.”

  “And accusing us.” Harper let out a sigh. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Neither can I,” Rachel said, refusing to be baited. She hadn’t accused them, not really. She’d just let her kids know what was happening. “Okay.” She pocketed the bottle once more. “Come on. Get your backpacks and let’s all get into the car.”

  “So now we just forget about it?” Harper raised a dubious eyebrow and pursed her lips in disgust.

  “No way. Never forget about it. Xanax can be dangerous. You know that.” She was serious.

  “Yeah, I do. So does he.” Harper hooked a thumb at her brother. “Oh, God, forget it. Okay? We’ve heard this all before. From, like, everyone. Teachers, and Dad, now you. We get it.”

  So . . . that was that. Rachel decided she’d made her point and didn’t want to push it. So she changed the subject and said to the dog, waiting expectantly at the door, “You want to go for a ride?” Reno’s tail swept the floor frantically. “See, he’s ready,” she said to Dylan as she opened the back door and Reno shot through.

  Harper rolled her eyes. “God, Mom, he’s a dog. He’s ready to go anywhere.”

  “Take a lesson.”

  “Yeah, right.” She shoved her phone into her backpack and stormed out, letting the screen door slam behind her. “I’m driving.”

  “Not this morning. We’re late.”

  Dylan, tiny earbuds already in his ears, camo backpack slung across one shoulder, walked past the refrigerator without grabbing anything for lunch. His head bouncing to some silent beat, he ignored his jacket hanging
on a rack near the back door and strode outside.

  “Not your problem,” Rachel told herself as she headed for the detached garage and her ten-year-old Ford Explorer. If he got cold enough or hungry enough, he’d learn. Both kids knew the rules. Once they were in high school, they had to take some responsibility. Still she had to bite her tongue and refrain from announcing that the temperature wasn’t going to get out of the fifties this morning.

  Surely he’d learn. Surely.

  They piled into the SUV, Harper stung that she wasn’t allowed to take control of the wheel, riding shotgun, the dog and Dylan claiming the backseat.

  The morning, as usual, was off to a fantastic start.

  CHAPTER 4

  Kayleigh called.

  Not a text, but an actual phone call.

  This time Cade picked up. It was stupid to keep avoiding her.

  “So what? Now you don’t respond to texts?” she asked, and he imagined her green eyes sparking with a mixture of amusement and irritation. She’d always had a keen sense of humor; that had been part of the attraction. That and long nights when they’d been forced together during stakeouts. They’d both been detectives with the sheriff’s department. That, like so many other things, had changed. Unconsciously, he rubbed at the scar on his neck, a reminder that he’d nearly lost his life.

  “Busy,” he said, which wasn’t really a lie. “Just trying to get settled in at my desk ”

  “Well, don’t.” She was all business. “We’ve got something going down here and I think you’ll want to check it out.”

  “What? And down where?”

  “Homicide. At least it looks like that. In Hillside Acres, on Bonaventure Boulevard, at the end of the cul-de-sac.”

  Hillside Acres was a development that had never been annexed to the city.

  Kayleigh told him the address and added, “I know it’s not your jurisdiction, but I thought you’d want in.” He was already out of his chair and reaching for his jacket.

  “The victim is a woman. Violet Sperry. Husband was out of town, came home early and found her in the foyer. ME’s already here and they’ll be packing her up soon, so you’d better get over here.”

  “Jesus. I know her.”

  “Knew,” Kayleigh corrected.

  “Yeah. Right. Knew. She went to school with Rachel.”

  “And everyone else in town, I gather.”

  “Yeah. I’m on my way.” He clicked off and headed down the short hallway and through the tiny break area to the back door. It was starting to rain, the wind kicking up, and as he drove out of town he caught a glimpse of the river, white caps roiling as if it were November instead of May.

  Someone had killed Violet Sperry? Why? He didn’t know much about her, other than she’d been in Rachel’s loose group of high school friends and had testified during the trial. She and Rach weren’t close, as far as he knew, even though Violet, like so many others, had settled in Edgewater. He drove past the high school on his way out of town, thought about his kids for a second and his own misspent youth for another couple of beats before passing the old cannery where Luke Hollander, another victim of homicide, had died. Cade, a couple of years older and in college at the time, hadn’t been involved in the tragedy that night, but both his younger brother, Court, and, of course, Rachel, had been there. Rachel had even been charged with her slain brother’s murder.

  Even she believed it.

  At least they’d reduced the charge to negligent manslaughter, but even that crime had been washed from her record, the judge citing her age, disorientation, and conflicting testimony of everyone who had been there.

  Had she done it?

  Made a mistake and killed the half brother she’d looked up to?

  Cade wasn’t certain, but as the sprawling, ramshackle building disappeared in his rearview he wondered if some of the rumors had been true, the most damning being that Rachel’s father, a detective who’d been the first responder, had hidden evidence or at the very least had been negligent at the scene in an effort to save his daughter.

  A mystery, to be sure.

  And one never completely solved.

  He thought of the article in the paper, written by a woman who had been at the crime scene that night. Why would she dredge it all up again? Was it just a case of bringing a sensational crime back into the spotlight?

  A sensational, unsolved crime.

  That wasn’t exactly true, he thought, flipping his wipers to a higher speed as the storm increased. Though the case hadn’t been officially closed, it wasn’t exactly open, either. Maybe cold was the right way to describe it. Ice cold.

  * * *

  On the way to school, Rachel brought up the reunion meeting.

  Surprisingly her son actually heard her. “Wait . . . we have to go?” he asked from the back seat. For the first time he showed some interest in the conversation and pulled one earbud from his ear.

  “Yeah. It’s at Lila’s house.” Even after all these years she could not refer to Lila as her kids’ grandmother. It just felt wrong.

  “Stepgrandmama,” Harper said, needling her mother. Then, “Will Lucas be there?” Harper was gazing out the passenger-side window, running her finger along the glass.

  “I don’t know. Probably.” Lucas had yet to move out of the historic house on the hill owned by his stepfather, the home where Cade and his brothers had grown up. The place where their mother had died.

  “Good.” Lately Harper had taken more of an interest in her older cousin. They’d been closer as younger kids, drifted apart during Harper’s time in junior high, but now, with Lucas attending the local community college, and Harper in high school, they had connected again, which Rachel saw as a good thing. Harper, starting at the end of her sophomore year, had started drifting. Her grades had slipped, but just a little, and her circle of friends had changed. Lately it seemed as if she’d been harboring secrets and that was a worry. As for Dylan . . . who knew? He’d become a mystery to Rachel.

  As she’d become to her own parents at that age.

  “I thought we were goin’ to Dad’s,” Harper said, cutting into her thoughts as Dylan plugged in again, out of the conversation once more.

  Rachel explained, “You are, but he’ll be home late.”

  “Can’t he pick us up?”

  “Look, this is just easier. For me. So go with it. I’ll drop you off after the meeting. Okay?”

  No response.

  Rachel added, “So when you get home from school, pack whatever you want to take to his place.”

  “You won’t be there?”

  “Maybe not.” She didn’t elaborate.

  Harper let out a sound of disgust. “Great.”

  “That a problem?”

  “I, um, I have plans tonight.”

  “With whom?”

  “Does it matter? If I have to go to Dad’s?” She pulled a face that looked as if she’d just sucked on a lemon.

  “Take it up with him,” Rachel said, though it kind of killed her, giving up control of the kids. Just didn’t seem right. And Harper, at seventeen, was on the cusp of danger, just as Rachel had been at that very age. Harper was “old” for her class, just missing the cutoff because of an October birth date. At the time Rachel thought it would be a blessing and allow her daughter to be the most mature in her class. Now she wasn’t so sure. Harper seemed bored with school and interested in God only knew what.

  “He never lets me do anything,” her daughter grumbled. Radiating disappointment, she leaned her head against the passenger window.

  Not true, Rachel thought. At least not all the time. Despite the fact that Cade was a cop, he could be a lot less strict than she was. It all depended on the situation. He seemed to trust the kids’ instincts more, allowed them to make mistakes on their own while she’d spent most of her adult life ensuring their safety, making certain they didn’t get hurt, probably, she admitted grudgingly to herself, to the point that she did clip their wings or make them less confident.
/>   One more thing to work on. Great.

  “You know, Harper, it wouldn’t kill you to lighten up.”

  “How would you know?”

  That hit home.

  “At least I try.”

  “Do you?” her daughter asked and rolled her eyes before turning her gaze past the window to the sidewalks of the small town, where pedestrians, shoppers, dog walkers, and skateboarders milled in front of storefronts.

  The rain had started again, and Rachel flipped on her wipers as she stopped at the one light between her home and the high school, the same brick-and-mortar two-storied building she’d attended twenty years earlier. A new gym and science wing had been added about five years ago, and there had been work to earthquake-proof it retroactively, but otherwise the building, constructed between the two world wars, hadn’t changed much.

  Just like the rest of the town that had been booming after the Second World War. Logging camps, sawmills, and the fish cannery had been working around the clock, she’d heard from her grandparents. And then in the late seventies things had begun slowing down, the bustling town no longer growing, but stagnant.

  As they approached the school, Dylan said, “I think I’ll pass on going to Lucas’s with you. I’ll just stay home and then you can pick me up and take me to Dad’s.”

  “Not an option.” Dylan spent too much time alone as it was. It seemed he spent more time hooked into the Internet, where he connected with other gamers, rather than with real, flesh-and-blood friends. And then there were the missing antianxiety pills. If any more went missing . . .

  “Ah, man,” Dylan complained. “I hate going over there.”

  “You’ll survive.”

  Rachel made the final turn onto the street where the high school stood. “Besides, the meeting shouldn’t last too long.”

  Dylan was craning his neck to peer around the front seat where his sister was still moping as she stared through the rain-splattered windshield. “This is good,” he announced, meaning he wanted to be dropped off a block from the school rather than suffer the indignity of being driven into the drop-off area near the front doors. “Right here.”