With Me Now

by Heather Hambel Curley

  Evernight Publishing ®

  www.evernightpublishing.com

  Copyright© 2015 Heather Hambel Curley

  ISBN: 978-1-77233-401-2

  Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

  Editor: Melissa Hosack

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  Nothing I write could be accomplished without my core support team, Billy, Tommy, Jimmy, and Mom—you guys keep pushing me and are enthusiastic over every semicolon. I love you!

  To Sara Lower, Jocelyn Allenby, and Lindsey Loucks: You’re more than friends, you’re sisters! I value your encouragement and friendship—and sense of humor—every day.

  And, as always, to Dad: I miss you.

  WITH ME NOW

  The Lazarus Society, 1

  Heather Hambel Curley

  Copyright © 2015

  Chapter One

  The man next to her might have been dead.

  Madison Monroe rubbed her bleary eyes with her fist, the grinding pain of her contact lens against her cornea enough to partially jar her out of the alcohol induced haze. Had that frat bastard mixing drinks slipped her something? Probably.

  She balanced her red plastic cup on the armchair behind her and scooted closer to the man beside her. His eyes were half open, his stare fixed in the general region of his belly button. Was he breathing? She wasn’t a med student. Even if she was, her eyes felt like they were swimming in her head and she couldn’t tell for sure if his chest was actually rising or falling, or if it was her head drooping and lolling from all the shots of Jim Beam she’d thrown back.

  She decided to ask him. “Are you dead?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Madison giggled. Christ, she couldn’t even remember his name. It wasn’t liked she’d fucked him—she hadn’t, had she?—so it probably didn’t matter, especially if he was dead. Well, it might matter to someone if he was dead. She remembered making fun of his shoes, ridiculous plaid loafers with a clashing plaid shirt. Alternating patterns of plaid; fucking hipster engineering student. And his name was Arty. That was it, Arty.

  She shook him. “Arty. Arty, are you dead?”

  He groaned. Good, not dead.

  She slumped back against the wall next to him and fumbled for her drink. The music was still pounding, the thump of the base reverberating in her skull. Going to a frat party was a bad idea, obviously, but this was finals week. Mild mannered Madison—everybody should be able to cut loose once in a while, right? She was really only worried about her Skeletal Forensic Anthropology final, but it wasn’t until Thursday. Or was it Wednesday?

  The music downstairs shut off.

  The sudden scream of silence was jolting. She squeezed her eyes closed and opened them, as if that would somehow help her hear more efficiently. People were yelling about something, about the mops. Who the hell cared about mops?

  The dim light of the bedroom was pierced by alternating blue and red flashes from the window. Shit, they weren’t saying mops. They were saying cops.

  Someone had called the cops.

  “Damn it.” She slid back over to Arty and shook him harder. “Dude, it’s the cops. We’ve gotta split.”

  She jumped to her feet and careened toward the door. The room tipped and turned; overwhelmed by dizziness, she stumbled sideways and slammed against the footboard of the bed. Now was not the time to pass out. Come on, Madison, get with it.

  Cops were yelling downstairs. Christ, they’d be upstairs any minute. She kicked Arty again, panic welling up in her chest. She couldn’t get arrested for underage drinking, not with the trip already planned. No. No, this was bad. The summer trip to France was going to be the crown in her double major history/anthropology undergraduate degree. This was the ticket to get her in the accelerated and combined Master’s slash Doctoral program. The history department frowned on underage drinking. Hell, the history department frowned on everything fun.

  She dropped to her knees and squeezed under the bed, pressing herself as far back against the wall as she could. They’d see Arty. Maybe they wouldn’t see her.

  The sound of footsteps echoed down the hallway; a figure paused outside the open bedroom door. “Got one, looks like he’s out cold.”

  She could see a second pair of black boots in the doorway. “I’ll take him out to the truck. Come on, buddy, wake up. Can you hear me, son? Wake up.”

  “Just drag him out.” The first cop spoke from the doorway. “I never get tired of frat busts. Check out those shoes, man. Kids these days.”

  Madison shrank back, almost as if she thought by doing so she could disappear into the baseboards. That’s it, Arty, distract them with the mind boggling power of plaid.

  As the cop leaned over to hoist Arty to his feet, Madison felt a strange vibration from her back pocket. She froze.

  Her cell phone.

  Before she had time to fumble for the phone, the melodic sound of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik rang out. The ringer sounded thirty times louder than it did when the phone was next to her face. She moved her arm backwards to shut off the phone, slamming her elbow off the mattress’s metal box spring. Shit.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her face to the cold tiled floor. The scrape of boots crossing to the bed shrieked in her ears. It felt like it seared into her brain and through the alcohol to jab her and announce, “Busted.”

  The cop’s voiced seemed like it boomed from the heavens, the voice of God himself. “Why, hello there.”

  She didn’t look up. “Hi.”

  “How about you come out from under there? I think we have a few things to talk about.”

  He stepped back from the bed to allow her room to maneuver. She slunk out like a pitiful muskrat slinking from a hole. Rumpled. Sweaty. Pathetic in her inability to execute a coordinated movement.

  The cop reached out to help her to her feet. “I’m Officer Jamison. This is Officer Burke. Can I see your driver’s license?”

  She had to think. Frat parties didn’t typically require people show identification to be served alcohol.

  The cop leaned forward. “I’m going to need to see your identification, Miss.”

  Jamming her hand in her back pockets, she withdrew her cell phone and her driver’s license. She handed him the license and waited.

  His response was almost immediate. “Looks like you have a birthday coming up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not going to turn twenty-one for a few more weeks, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, Miss Monroe, party’s over.” He handed her the license back. “Let’s go downstairs and have a little chat. Do you need medical assistance? Are you okay to walk on your own?”

  “I’m fine.” She shoved her license back into her pocket and rested her hand on the doorframe, steadying herself before creeping down the hallway. Her ankles twitched and quivered as she strained to walk in a straight line over the dull wood floorboards. The thought of tripping in front of the cops made her feel even clumsier and dizzier. Brain overload. At this rate, she would probably stumble over an empty floor, fall down the stairs, and break her neck.

  At least she wouldn’t go to jail.

  The front yard of the fraternity house was boarded by thick hedges, now being utilized by the police to corral students who were too slow—or drunk—to get away. The
cop who’d examined her license circled around her and rushed up to another cop with a clipboard. She raised an eyebrow and giggled. It certainly hadn’t seemed like a race when they started downstairs.

  It was impossible to make out what he was saying. She caught a few random comments, mostly remarks pointedly made in her direction: “…hiding under the bed…” and, practically guffawed, “…will be twenty-one in like, four weeks!”

  Awesome.

  The cop beckoned her to him with an over-exaggerated wave and she shuffled forward, feeling like a six-year-old stubbornly refusing to go to bed. She dragged her feet and resisted the urge to pout. Pouting probably wouldn’t help at this point.

  “This is Officer Richards.” The cop flashed an obviously forced smile. “Do you consent to a breathalyzer test?”

  “I think we all know I’ve had too much to drink.” Madison winced. What a dumb thing to say.

  Officer Richards calibrated the breathalyzer device. “Can you tell me a little about what happened tonight?”

  “It was a fraternity party. I had too much to drink.” Madison shrugged. “Am I going to need an attorney for all this?”

  “Do you want an attorney? You have the right, you know.”

  “Yeah, uh, I’d rather keep this as easy as possible.”

  “Do you consent to the test?” Officer Richards held up the device. “It only takes a few seconds. Then we can see where we’re at and go from there.”

  “Okay.”

  He held the device up to her mouth and waited while she positioned her lips over the mouthpiece. “When I tell you to, start blowing as hard as you can. Ready?”

  She grunted.

  “Okay…blow. Blow. Keep going.” He studied the end of the gage. “Keep going. Stop.”

  The other cop peered over his shoulder. He shook his head.

  Officer Richards put the breathalyzer down and filled out a few lines on a form. He circled something and then signed the bottom, clipping the pen to his front pocket with a flourish. “Very good. Now, Miss Monroe, why don’t you just head to the officer set up by the cruiser—yes, that’s right, just over there—and he’ll get everything processed for you.”

  Madison pursed her lips together. She was drunk. She wasn’t a child; she couldn’t miss the folding table and chair set up next to the police SUV. “Aren’t you supposed to give me some kind of percentage? Or fractionated decimal? Some kind of hardcore, quantifiable objective finding of how drunk you presume me to be?”

  “Officer Godwin will go over all of that with you. Do you need help getting over there or can you make it on your own? If you need medical assistance, I can call the paramedics.”

  “I think I’ll survive.” She jammed her hands into her pockets as far as the tight denim would allow. Or I’ll trip and kill a cat. Wobbly, but in a reasonably coordinated manner, she picked her way across the yard to the seated officer.

  He cocked his head to the folding chair set up across from him. “Go ahead and take a seat, Miss. Name?”

  “Madison Monroe.” She slumped down in the chair and almost slid off the edge. She groaned; her sudden inability to master the art of taking a seat was not going to win her case against underage drinking. Obviously.

  “Oh, like Marilyn Monroe.” He held up a digital camera and leveled it in front of her. The whirling shriek of the zoom adjustment irritated her more than his apparent incompetence at using it correctly. “You can smile if you want.”

  The last thing she wanted to do was smile.

  The flash was blinding. She blinked, the negative-like apparition of the flash floating across her line of vision. “Um, not actually like Marilyn Monroe. Like James Monroe.”

  The cop looked at her.

  “You know, James Monroe. The fifth president of the United States?” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Obviously you weren’t a liberal arts major.”

  “Madison is nice. You ever been to Madison, Wisconsin? Nice place.” He slowly penned her first name on a form. Even through her quickly sobering haze and reading upside down, she could make out the bold printed word on the top: Citation.

  “Yeah, no, it has nothing to do with Madison, Wisconsin. It’s like James Madison, the fourth president of the United States…” She let her voice trail off. “My parents were kind of like studious hippies…I guess.”

  “What’s your address, Miss Monroe?”

  “Eighty-four Montpelier.”

  “Is that on campus?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about your parents? Where do they live?”

  “In Greengate. Fourteen sixty-one Grace Crest Court.”

  “Their names?”

  “Richard and Joyce Essington.” Madison leaned forward, resting her fingertips on the edge of the table. “Are you going to call my parents? Seriously?”

  “No, you’re going to call your parents.” He glanced up. “Seriously. What’s your current age and date of birth?”

  She’d let him do the math. “My birthday is May 10th. I’m twenty.”

  A smiled spread across his lips, but this time he didn’t look up. “All of this and you would have been twenty-one in a couple weeks?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He shook his head. After a few more swipes of his pen, he flipped the paper around and pushed it across the table to her. “Okay, Miss Monroe, you’re being cited for underage drinking. You are required to respond to the citation within ten days. At which point, you will be required to appear before a Magisterial District Judge. Underage drinking is considered a ‘summary crime’ in the state of Pennsylvania. However, it is still listed in the Pennsylvania Crimes Code and therefore is considered a crime. It will be listed on your record. Do you understand everything I just told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since you’re over the age of eighteen, it’s up to you to notify your parents of your citation. Did you drive here tonight?”

  “No. I walked from my dorm.”

  “Good, that’s one less thing to worry about. Do you have someone you can call to come pick you up? We can’t let you leave on your own.” He slid a granola bar and a bottle of water across the table. “You can take as much time as you need.”

  “I’m feeling pretty sober now as it is.” She folded the citation in half and carefully stood, holding on to the table with one hand as she gathered the snacks in the other. It was humiliating enough to be cited for underage drinking less than a month before she turned twenty-one. The last thing she needed was the humiliation of tripping and face planting on the sidewalk.

  “Maybe try and make better decisions next time.”

  She ignored him, instead shuffling down the sidewalk and easing down into a sitting position on the curb. Unscrewing the cap from the water bottle, she took a quick swig and then pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. The light flashed on: one-thirty in the morning. Her roommate was not going to be happy.

  Tapping the face of the phone, she dialed Cora’s number and waited. The rings seemed endless, longer than normal. Voicemail.

  Madison swore under her breath. Scrolling through the contact numbers in the phone, she tapped the number for her dorm room. Where in God’s name was she? She’d refused to come to the party, insisting she had to cram for her Advanced Tax Calculations final instead. Anyone who was willing to skip out on the always entertaining gentlemen of the Tri Chi Fraternity was no doubt snug and warm in bed at that hour—alone.

  “Hello.”

  “Cora?” Madison peeled the wrapper back from the granola bar. Oatmeal raisin: disgusting. Her bad luck continued. “It’s Madison.”

  “What time is it?”

  “One-thirty, look, I need you to come pick me up.” She took another swig of water and judged the steadiness of her hand. Her coordination seemed fine; who was to say she couldn’t walk back to her dorm?

  “Pick you up? Where are you?”

  “I’m, ah, funny story actually, I’m still at the frat house. I kind of got a citation for unde
rage drinking.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Cora was silent for so long that Madison thought the call dropped, but finally, she responded. “You don’t ‘kind of’ get a citation. Your birthday is next month.”

  “Yeah, that’s been pointed out a couple times already. I just really need you to come and get me.”

  “Did they call your dad.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Step-dad.” Madison balled up her fist and pressed it to her forehead, pounding it in time with her pulse. “That’s what I’m trying to avoid. Can you just come get me? It’s like, a thirty second drive.”

  “You seriously want me to drive three blocks to frat row? Just walk.”

  “I’m fairly sure the police won’t let me walk.”

  Cora huffed into the phone. “You owe me. I’ll be there in a couple minutes.”

  The call disconnected.

  Madison took another swig of water and rubbed the back of her neck with her hand. God. The last thing she needed was her step-father to find out. It was inevitable and when he found out…she didn’t want to think about it. She was also fairly sure she had, in fact, fucked Arty the hipster douchebag and she didn’t want to think about that either. Hopefully she’d had some semblance of sobriety to at least point out to him it was a one-time thing.

  Fucking hipster. This was somehow his fault, it had to be.

  A familiar white Volvo crept down the street and slowed to a stop in front of her. It took several moments for Cora to roll down the manual crank window; her brow was knitted in a frown. “Do I need to sign something to bail you out?”

  “For a citation?” Madison eased to her feet and checked her balance. Not bad. “As far as I know, I’m free to go. Well, at least for ten days.”

  “Then what happens?”

  Madison shuffled around the car and crawled into the passenger’s seat. “Then I have to respond. Oh, and go to court. I’m sure my step-father will be especially pleased with that part.”