by Lucy Connors
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2014 Penguin Group (USA) LLC
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ISBN: 978-1-101-62629-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
This book is for Connor and Lauren (aka Lucy), who taught me everything.
Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1
Victoria
Sometimes even other people’s failures can taste like shame in the back of your throat.
I’d learned this the hard way over the past few days, and now the residue of that shame tangled my thoughts into knots as I watched the sun go down and the miles go by on the drive from the Louisville airport to the ranch.
“How is it? Having the entire family living at the ranch full-time?” I turned to look at Pete, Gran’s foreman, noticing lines on his deeply tanned face that I didn’t think had been there only a few months before during our annual summer visit. “Is my dad trying to tell you how to do your job, as usual?”
The shrill sound of fire truck sirens—lots of them—cut off whatever he’d been about to say. Pete finished rounding the curve around the side of the hill and then slowed and pulled off the road. Now that the view opened up, we could see the orange glow of a huge blaze in the distance and a black cloud of smoke silhouetted in the fading light of dusk.
“What the hell?” Pete switched on his emergency flashers and picked up his phone. “What could be burning like that out there? There’s nothing on that hill but trees. Burning trees look different than that.”
Four fire trucks zoomed past us, sirens screaming and lights blazing, chasing each other to the scene. Pete was firing questions at whoever he’d called, so I took the opportunity to step out and stretch my legs, which had been cramped in first the coach-class airplane seat and then the old truck.
The stench hit me first. The smoke was acrid and, even at this distance, burned my eyes and nostrils when I took a breath. There was something different about it from the scent of an ordinary forest fire; I’d smelled plenty of those. This one was metallic, somehow, and almost acidic—reminding me more of chemistry class than of a bonfire.
The roar of approaching motorcycle engines, which had been muffled by the hillside, blew around the curve of the road. I was well away from the edge of the pavement, but I took an involuntary step back. The lead rider, his long, lean body bent forward as if urging the bike to even greater speed, turned his helmeted face toward me, and a shiver danced down my spine—either to warn or to entice me.
The group of riders raced past me, and my momentary sense of danger vanished with them, leaving me feeling off-kilter and my stomach hollow. I shook my head, impatient with my uncharacteristically fanciful thoughts.
“Victoria! We’ve got to go.”
I turned back toward the truck. Pete was waving his hand, beckoning me to “get a move on,” as he liked to say.
I hurried back to my seat and buckled up. “What’s going on?”
“Big fire over at the old Lightwater place. We need to get over there fast.” His face was drawn in grim lines, and I knew it must be bad.
We headed toward the distant flames, following the path left by the speeding bikers. For the first time since Dad had called to tell me I had to leave boarding school, I felt a glimmer of light cut through the darkness of my mood as the memory of that boy on the motorcycle, turning to stare at me from behind the faceless anonymity of his helmet’s dark visor, scratched at the edges of my awareness all the way down the road.
CHAPTER 2
Mickey
I headed for the fire, my mind on the girl. She’d stood there on the side of the road, staring at me as I passed by, her lips parted and her white-blond hair whipping around her face in the breeze. Beautiful. Elegant, even in jeans and a sweater.
And I had no idea who she was, even though the truck had been vaguely familiar. In Whitfield County, we recognized our neighbors by their cars and trucks even before we saw their faces. The faded blue Ford Focus with the dent next to the left tail light was the guy with the drinking problem who always hung out at the Irish pub just a little too long. The red and white Chevy muscle car was the guy who used to like roughing up his girlfriends. The mint-green Escape was the woman who’d fought back one day. Chevy muscle guy’s nose didn’t look nearly as good these days as it once had.
But the girl? My brain didn’t associate her with any car, but for sure she’d looked like money. Elegant. Understated. Probably rich, in spite of the beat-up farm truck. Almost certainly unattainable, at least for somebody like me. The thought pissed me off, and I took the next curve too fast and nearly went into a skid, forcing me to focus on the road instead of thinking about the girl who’
d probably only been stretching her legs on a trip to someplace—any place—far away from Whitfield County.
When we arrived, having broken all speed limits, the fire was still raging. My half brother Ethan and his friends scattered around me, and we all parked on the open area of ground clear over by the trees and well out of the way. The firefighters on the scene, a mix of professionals and volunteers, were wearing masks, and the deputies who worked for my dad were making sure nobody else got anywhere close to the source of the fire, an old trailer that had seen better days even before the explosion.
Ethan stood next to his bike, arms folded over his chest. A picture of casual indifference to anybody who hadn’t been at a “welcome home from jail, Ethan” barbecue with him an hour earlier, or hadn’t seen him and his lowlife buddies take off like bats out of hell when he’d gotten a phone call. He’d shouted “fire” but nothing else before roaring out of there. I’d followed him with some idea that the fire might be at his mom’s place, racing him for the lead in an echo of years-gone-by sibling rivalry, until I’d seen the girl on the side of the road.
But this wasn’t his mom’s place, and old trailers didn’t blow up like that without a reason.
It was a meth lab, in spite of the fact that he’d told me not two hours earlier that he was out of the business.
“Going straight, little brother,” he’d told me.
What a load of horse shit, and I was a fool for even thinking about believing him.
I walked over to him, forcing my hands to unclench. Ethan was older than me, bigger than me, and surrounded by his cold-eyed thugs, all of them covered with tattoos and most of them convicted criminals. But starting a fistfight in full view of my dad, the sheriff, who was pulling up now in his official car, was a bad idea, no matter how much I was itching to do it.
“One quart of ether has the exploding power of a stick of dynamite,” Ethan said as I approached. “Did you know that, little bro?”
His face was all harsh angles in the reflected light of the fire, but his voice was quiet. Almost serene. As if he’d been talking about the weather instead of one of the main ingredients for cooking meth.
“I figure there were maybe sixty quarts in there, give or take,” he continued, still in that dreamy voice.
“Give or take? Give or take? Are you insane?” I was shouting, but I didn’t care. “Somebody could have been hurt, Ethan. You promised Pa—”
Ethan’s harsh bark of laughter shut me up. He was still staring at the fire, still not meeting my eyes.
“Somebody could have been hurt? Look closer, Mickey. They’ve pulled at least five bodies out of that fire,” Ethan said.
My gut clenched. “Five? You—are they yours?”
But he was shaking his head. “This isn’t my place. At least four of them aren’t from around here, but there’s a rumor that a local was in there. Somebody took advantage of my vacation behind bars to move into my territory. Now we’re going to find out who.”
He stood up fast as a rattlesnake strike and grabbed my arm. “You won’t want to mention any of it to Pa.”
I yanked my arm out of his grasp. “Don’t tell me what to do. You did this, didn’t you? To destroy the competition. Only out of jail since yesterday—”
“And I’m not about to go back. So shut your damn mouth. Or are you planning to put me in the hospital like you did those boys at school?”
He waited a beat, as if judging whether he’d unleashed something darker than irritation, but I’d learned my lesson. I kept a white-knuckled hold on my self-control these days, because if I didn’t, I was afraid I’d go too far. If I let the rage loose, I might hurt somebody beyond reason or understanding. Beyond repair or redemption.
They might not end up in the hospital this time—they might end up dead.
“Don’t push me, Ethan,” I finally said, with what I thought was admirable calm. “You might not like what happens.”
“Welcome to my life. I don’t know how to do anything else but push, baby brother,” he said.
When I didn’t reply, he shrugged, dismissing me, and headed off toward Pa.
I followed him, wondering why it had taken Pa so long to get here, when he’d been at the same barbecue as the rest of us. The answer became clear when another man stepped out of the passenger side of Pa’s sheriff car.
This guy was no deputy. He stood ramrod straight like he had a stick shoved up his ass, and the suit he wore fit him perfectly and probably cost more than my bike. Nobody held themselves like that around here unless they were ex-military or blue-blood horse folk who’d had lessons on posture fed to them on silver spoons along with everything else in their lives.
Ethan stopped dead so abruptly I almost ran into him. “What the hell is old lady Whitfield’s son doing here?”
“That’s Richard Whitfield? Are you sure?”
Ethan shot me a scornful look. “I’ve met him before, when Pa used to drag me along to county fairs and crap like that before you came along.”
I caught the unspoken accusation. Ethan and Jeb blamed my mom for taking Pa away from their mom, even though Pa hadn’t even met my mother until a year after he’d divorced theirs. They also blamed me for taking Pa’s attention away from them and their sister, and there was probably some truth to that. In the early days, Pa had just wanted to get as far away from Anna Mae as possible, although he’d tried to stay in touch with the boys and his daughter, my half sister, Caroline.
Caro’d gone a little wild in her teens, though, and now she was a single mom to two sweet, angelic little girls who looked like their fathers. Their two different fathers, neither of whom had been seen or heard from after knocking Caro up. We didn’t see much of Caro, either, these days. A twinge of guilt ran through me at the thought.
Pa must feel like a failure sometimes. He was the sheriff, but his daughter was an unwed mother living on welfare, and his two oldest boys were running drugs with their mother. No wonder he’d lost his mind when I’d had my . . . incident . . . at school.
My steps slowed down as we got close. My father was not happy to see us, if the scowl on his face was any clue.
“What are you two doing here? This is a crime scene,” he snapped. “Out of here, now.”
He moved his stocky body as if to block us from Whitfield, but it was too late. The man’s gaze flashed from Pa to Ethan to me, burning holes of contempt along the way. He pointed at me.
“Another Rhodale in the litter, Sheriff? When is this one going to end up in jail?” His voice was like a whiplash.
Ethan laughed in his face. “Louisville not work out for you? We heard you had to tuck your tail between your legs and run home to live with your mommy.”
I had a moment to wonder why Ethan would be so knowledgeable about what the Whitfields were up to before Pa knocked him back with a hard shove to the shoulder.
“Why don’t you get out of here? Mr. Whitfield is here to identify the body of one of his employees, not to get in a pissing match,” Pa said, shooting a hard stare at me when neither of the other two were looking.
That stare was the “Mickey, I know you’re the youngest, but please do something with your brothers” expression he’d given me since we were all kids rolling around in the dirt together. I hadn’t seen it since the incident, so he must have been desperate.
Somehow, with Ethan, any ordinary conversation or disagreement could instantly turn into a dangerous brawl. He’d sent my brother Jeb and me to the hospital at least a half-dozen times between us. Finally, when Ethan was sixteen and attending my eleventh birthday party, I’d lost my temper and broken his nose after he’d smashed my cake. It had taken several minutes for them to calm me down and peel me off him, but he’d been too big for me to really hurt him after I’d gotten in that one good shot to his nose.
My mom had cried, drunk half a bottle of wine, and made me write an essay on the
evils of violence. Then she’d called Anna Mae and told her Ethan was banned from our house.
Peculiarly enough, that also had been the first time Ethan had ever shown me any respect. And now? Now people painted me with the same brush they painted him:
Just another violent, dangerous, worthless Rhodale, in spite of our father’s job as sheriff. Some reputations were harder to shed than others. And, after all, I had put two guys in the hospital not so long ago.
But I’d do it again.
There was a shout from one of the firefighters.
“Ethan, Mick, you should go. Let my guys and the firefighters do their jobs,” Pa said, moving subtly so he was standing between Whitfield and my hot-tempered brother.
“I’ve heard about you,” Whitfield said, pointing now at Ethan. “Your stellar rise in the criminal underworld. Your time in jail.”
“I think you’ve been watching too many Godfather movies, Mr. Whitfield,” Pa said. “This is Kentucky. We don’t have a criminal underworld. Ethan had a spot of trouble, but—”
Ethan viciously shook off my restraining hand. “Don’t apologize for me, Pa, especially not to this asshole. What was his employee doing at a known drug-cooking location? Are you turning to crystal after you bombed in Louisville, Whitfield?”
Whitfield’s face contorted and I thought he was going to throw the first punch, but after a few tense moments he exhaled and backed down.
“Maybe you should keep a better grip on this lowlife son of yours before he ends up right back in the cage he weaseled his way out of,” he told Pa. “Now, are you going to direct me to the body or not?”
He stalked off toward the fire trucks, where, I now saw, a row of plastic-sheet-covered bodies had been laid out, waiting for the ambulances or the medical examiner to pick them up. I swallowed, hard, past the lump that was suddenly lodged in my throat.
Ethan snarled something under his breath, but he headed the other way, toward his bike.
“Five dead bodies, and I’m pretty sure one of them was Caleb Stuart,” Pa said grimly, as he watched his eldest son stalk off. “The other four I’ve never seen before, although one of them was too badly burned for me to be sure. We’ll have to wait for ID.”
