Running Scared (Letters From Morgantown Book 1)

by Tracie Puckett

  “Syd,” he said. “I’m sorry this has happened. I’m sorry that I’ve put you in this position to question what you’ve left back home.”

  “Chris, I’m not questioning anything.”

  “But Jesse—”

  “Is history. It was an excuse, okay? A stupid, stupid excuse, Chris, and it backfired,” I said, giving him more honesty now than I’d ever given him. He deserved that, no matter how humiliating it would be to admit what I’d done in a moment of desperation. “I thought telling you about him would push you away, and I was right. You were getting close, and it scared me, because I don’t want to lose someone else I care about. I tried taking control of the situation before it got out of hand, but then I realized by pushing you away . . . I was going to lose you anyway, and that’s not what I wanted either.”

  “Sydney, you’re not going to lose—”

  “No, please let me talk,” I begged, knowing that if I let myself overthink it, I would only put us in a worse situation. Chris deserved the truth. I had to give him that. “I panicked, okay? I lied to you, and I’m sorry it was so easy for me to do that, because . . . that’s not me. That’s not who I am.”

  “So Jesse?”

  “Was the first name that came to mind,” I said, dropping my head, hating myself for saying Jesse when I could’ve said any name.

  I hated Jesse Crawford. Damn—Jesse—Crawford.

  I couldn’t even look at Chris. I turned my eyes to the ground.

  “Dad was right all along,” I said, wiping away a tear. “He wasn’t worth my time. He was a jerk. Why I even thought to say his name is beyond me. I hate him. He was supposed to be my friend, and yet I never heard from him after the shooting—not once.”

  Chris stood taller. “Shooting? What shooting?”

  “No message on Facebook,” I said. “No e-mail. No text. Nothing. I’d just lost the most important person in my life, and he never called. My ‘friend’ wasn’t there for me.”

  “Sydney?” Chris asked, lowering to meet my eyes. “What are you talking about? What shooting?”

  I closed my eyes. “Please stop looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you care.”

  “I do care,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “I know you think that,” he said. “You want to push me away. I don’t understand why.”

  “Morgantown is temporary, Chris,” I said. “I could be called home any second—today, tomorrow, next week. And the moment that calls comes, I’m on a plane back home.”

  “Why?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does,” he said, taking my hands. “It matters to me.”

  I looked to the ground. “It’s more complicated than you know.”

  “Help me understand,” he said, but there was no pressure in his words. It was an invitation to talk, if I wanted to. But I was fairly certain I’d already said too much. “Why are you scared?”

  “Everything’s conflicted. I’m scared of what I feel for you, and I’m scared of hurting you,” I said, giving him the admission I knew he deserved. “I can’t want this. I can’t want you. It’s going to hurt too much when I have to leave.”

  He smiled in spite of my tears, drawing me closer and into a hug.

  “Syd, you don’t have to go anywhere,” he said. “You have a home here. You’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like; that’s always been the agreement.”

  “This isn’t my home,” I said. “Morgantown is temporary.”

  “You keep saying that,” he said, stroking my hair. “But it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to leave. I want you here. Theo wants you here. This can be your home.”

  “It’s not that easy. I wish you understood.”

  “Can you help me understand?”

  I could. I could tell him everything, because I trusted him. But there was an ever-present doubt, a mocking sound in the back of my head.

  No one can help you now.

  I wanted to tell Chris everything, but even with the facts, he could never help me. The facts meant telling him I’d lied more than the one time, and learning that would only hurt him further. For my own selfish reasons, I wanted to get it off my chest and tell him everything, but that left him vulnerable to the lies I’d told and the dangers I faced.

  I refused to hurt him anymore than I already had.

  I had to fight this war alone.

  No one could help me now . . .

  ***

  Tuesday, November 24

  “We’ll take it from here, Miss Easterling,” Mr. Crawley said. “We’re here to make this is as easy as possible for you and your family. You can trust us. We’ll do everything within our power to give your father a service worthy of the great life he lived. I can assure you, you have nothing to worry about.”

  Except I had everything to worry about.

  I would never forget that day as long as I lived, sitting in the back office of the cold and stale funeral home. It was absurd what they were putting us through—the amount of stress and pain, as if we weren’t suffering enough already.

  The questions were endless.

  Will it be a burial or cremation? Is there a family plot, or will you need to purchase one? If you opt for a standard burial, of course it requires choosing a casket style, size, color, and material. Would you like to see the options available? Are you expecting a large turnout? Are there any religious wishes to consider? We’ll need a change of clothing to dress the body, because it’s important to put your loved one to rest as comfortably as possible. Also, how are you planning to pay?

  It all moved so fast, and it sickened me to have to make any of these decisions. One day I was sitting at the table having dinner with my dad, and the next day I was forced to make his final arrangements. It was unfair. Life was unfair.

  Reflecting on the last twenty-four hours, I couldn’t find a way to justify anything that’d happened.

  After an initial statement at the park, I rode away from the scene in the back of a police cruiser, only an hour after the medics whisked Dad away in an ambulance. I was taken straight to the hospital to meet with Rosa while Dad was in surgery, but there was no time for comfort or solace. The detectives were still on the job, not at all satisfied with what little I’d been able to provide them back at the park. They approached me again in the waiting room, set with their list of routine questions. Tell us again, and this time think a little harder: What did you see? What did you hear? What were the events of the night leading up to the shooting? I struggled with my words, answering them repeatedly, and they continued to ask, over and over again, making notes.

  The police sergeant was on that news that night, giving a short statement.

  A witness at the scene watched as the shooter fled on foot, describing him as a dark-haired male in his late twenties. Our witness is working with a sketch artist to construct a facial composite. We’re working to have that available to the public as quickly as possible.

  I told them everything, everything I could remember.

  I’d turned the corner to find Dad, bloody and nearly unconscious on the ground. I fumbled for my phone to call for help, and I’d only dialed the number when I heard a sound that jolted me. “9-1-1, what is your emergency?”

  The words were washed in the background against the heavy footsteps I heard slapping the pavement in front of me. Thinking I’d find someone rushing over to help, my eyes instead fell to the man running in the opposite direction. Struggling to shove the firearm into the band of his jeans, the shooter stopped to tuck it away. He turned to look back, but only for a second, the fine features of his face washed under the shadows of the night. What I saw of him, what I could make out, it was so vague . . . but there was something familiar about his twisted smile. His face was burned in my memory from an earlier moment in time, from something that’d happened a long time ago. I knew him. At one point in my life, I’d known this man—from a picture, a video, an event—s
omething; I couldn’t place him. I didn’t know how I knew him.

  There were faint words drifting from the speaker of my cell phone, an emergency dispatcher calling out for some kind of response. I opened my mouth, feeling my heart slam against my chest.

  I’d forgotten how to speak.

  “Please,” I cried into the phone, and at my one word, the shooter’s fingers flinched. He reached back to draw his gun from his pants, and I instinctively fell to my father’s side. I clung to his bloody arm and dropped my head, praying that if this was the end, I could die right there with him. If I had to die, I would do it holding on to the person I loved most in the world.

  But as quickly as the shooter revealed himself to me, he disappeared. He’d taken off, running as quickly as he could in the opposite direction. He left me there, alone. Unharmed.

  I talked to the policemen for hours, and their response was the same each time: trust that we’re doing our job. We’re doing everything we can to find this guy.

  I cried to the nurses in the hospital, and each time they tried comforting me with the same words. It’s out of our hands, Miss Easterling. We must trust the doctors to do what they can to save your father.

  And then, again, at the funeral home: you can trust us. You have nothing to worry about.

  But no matter how much they begged me to trust them, no matter how much I wanted to give them the trust they asked for, I’d never felt so hopeless, so alone. I was trapped inside my head, so far from reach. I wanted someone to swoop in and say the right things, to make the pain go away. But there was only silence. No resolution. I was left with pain, and no way to escape it.

  After a gut-wrenching afternoon of planning arrangements for my father’s burial service, I returned from the funeral home to find a second letter taped to the door. Dressed in the same, red envelope as the first, the killer’s message confirmed my biggest fear: no one can help you now.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Good morning,” Theo said, tossing an apple. I caught it as I took a seat in the back of the kitchen, and I watched as he fired up the stove to start breakfast. “You excited for your shopping trip?”

  “I guess,” I said, not thrilled with the idea of spending a morning with Danielle. The only silver lining was that I would have the opportunity to escape the house for a while and avoid the temptation to tell Chris all the things he wanted to hear . . . all the things I wanted him to know.

  After the light show, we’d both come back into the house, quiet. Something in the air had changed; I knew he liked me, and he knew I liked him, but we’d left so much unsaid. When we went off to our respective rooms at the end of the night, there was an odd sense of emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I was certain he’d felt it, too. Our conversation never got the closure it deserved, and neither of us knew what to say or do to squash the awkward tension. He wanted to know things I couldn’t tell him, and while I’d never felt pressured to admit anything, I still felt guilty for the secrets I had to keep.

  I was thankful that I hadn’t bumped into him yet this morning. I still didn’t know what to say if I did.

  “Do you know when you’re leaving?” Theo asked.

  “Soon, I think.”

  “It’ll be good for you to have some girl time and get out for a bit,” Theo said. “But whatever you do, don’t let Danielle buy her Secret Santa gift while you’re out.”

  “She knows the rules,” I said. “We’re making the gifts.”

  “Do you know what you’re going to do yet?”

  “I do, actually.” I wouldn’t have wanted to pick any other name from the bowl, and I was happy when I chose the slip with Theo’s name from the bunch.

  I knew exactly what I wanted to make for him, and on my walk around town with Danielle, I planned to start collecting the bits and pieces I would need. Every piece would have to come from nature before I could assemble it—the leaves, sticks, anything I could gather up that hadn’t been destroyed by the snow.

  “Good morning,” Danielle popped her head through the kitchen door. “Sydney, can I borrow you for a second?”

  “Yeah.” I dropped the uneaten apple on the table and followed her out. “What’s up?”

  She dug into a shopping bag on the couch. “I cleaned out my closet this morning and collected some things I don’t use anymore. I thought you’d want to take a look, see if there’s anything you could use.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I don’t know what you like or what your style is,” she said. “But hopefully there’s something in here that’ll work.”

  I looked down to my outfit, wondering if she thought style was something I considered. When it came to fashion, I was happily clueless. Still, it would’ve been nice to have something more than what little I had right now.

  When I’d fled home, I left straight from the police station, and I hadn’t had a moment’s notice before we took off. I left with the shoes on my feet and the clothes on my back. One uniformed lady dropped off a fresh change of clothes during my motel stay, and I kept recycling that outfit along with my original during the duration of my time on the run.

  “It’s all used,” she said. “There are some sweaters, some jeans. I brought some old boots, too. You can try it all on, and if you don’t want any of it, or it doesn’t fit, that’s fine. I thought you’d at least want to try.”

  “Thank you,” I said, watching as she lifted a sweater out of the bag, piling it on top of a mountain of others. She claimed they were all used, but it didn’t seem as if anything had been worn more than once or twice.

  “Shopping’s still on the table,” she said. “But I wanted to give you some other options first. This may help ease the financial burden, because Theo mentioned you weren’t eager to part with your savings.”

  “Right.”

  She moved to the second bag, lifting another stack of clothes onto the couch.

  My mouth gaped as I watched her organize the pieces into outfits, putting together combinations. The more she pulled from the bags, the more I wondered if she’d left a single piece of her wardrobe back in her closet.

  “Do you wear dresses?” she asked, holding one against me, and I couldn’t look down to observe what she saw. I was too busy watching her, searching for some kind of hidden agenda.

  What was going on? Why was she suddenly being so nice to me? Before, she’d seemed so indifferent, but now it was as if she’d actually taken an interest in me.

  It seemed out of character, until I remembered the drastic change in demeanor over the last few days—a nicer side, a less frantic side, especially with the arrival of Amy and Eli. And now, with this kind gesture of goodwill, I wondered if I was finally getting a glimpse of the girl that Chris’s grandmother had grown to love and respect. If that was the case, it was easy to see why Kathy had enjoyed her company.

  Maybe I’d come into the picture at the wrong time. Maybe it was the stress of the B&B reopening that had gotten to her, and she’d snapped under pressure. It was possible that I didn’t know her at all, that this newer side of her was the real Danielle.

  “This is great, thank you,” I said, running my fingers across the shirt at the top of the pile.

  “Well, like I said, you don’t have to keep any of it,” she said. “I thought you’d want to try some of this before you go out and spend too much money.”

  “Oh, did I hear something about spending money? I’m game,” Amy said, taking the last few steps to the first floor. “Good morning, ladies.”

  “Good morning,” Danielle and I said together.

  “Are you going out?” she asked, looking to the bags. At the sight of the outfits sprawled across the common room, her lips twisted. “Or are you coming back? Did I miss a shopping trip?”

  “No,” Danielle waved a hand. “I brought by some old things for Sydney to look through. We’re still going to town in a bit. Right?” She turned to me.

  “Yeah,” I nodded, agreeing, though I doubted we would need to make a hu
ge day of it. After all the stuff Danielle offered, I didn’t see much of a need for more. She insisted I try things on to make sure I liked them first, but I wouldn’t need to. I’d make it work, and I was grateful for all the options she’d given me. The only thing I needed to worry about now were the basics—socks, bras, and underwear. I could pick those things up in a mere matter of seconds and be done.

  “Can I join you?” Amy asked. “I’d still need to grab a shower and have breakfast, but if you’re not in a hurry? There’s nothing I love more than a weekend shopping in Morgantown.”

  “Sure, the more the merrier,” Danielle said.

  It still felt strange; I wanted to assume Danielle had only brought her old clothes over so that she could avoid going out with me at all. But that didn’t seem to be her motive since she was still offering her time out of the house. She wanted to go. And now that Amy was tagging along, I felt that same sense of belonging I’d felt with them yesterday. They weren’t just tolerating me; they were accepting me.

  It was overwhelming to realize that there were two girls standing in front of me, both eager to go out and enjoy the day together. And though I knew the risk of forming friendships in this temporary chapter of my life, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to take what they were offering: time away from the house and away from Chris. Girl time.

  I had a chance to do something I hadn’t done in a long time, to spend a day out—free from nagging thoughts, free of boys, and free of worry. Freedom from everything.

  A break.

  I needed a break.

  ***

  “Bella’s Boutique,” Amy said, holding the door as I crossed the threshold into a small shop. “Have you been in here yet?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s my favorite store in Morgantown,” she said. “I used to come in every day after school. You remember all those times they had to shove us out at closing?”

  “Oh, God, I do,” Danielle said. “And now they’re paying me to stock shelves and take inventory. Funny how things change.”