Repercussions (Siren Publishing Menage Amour)

by Rainey Daye

  “Of course,” Maggie said.

  “Well, don’t. You don’t have to interrupt your routine for us.”

  “But….”

  “No buts, baby. Your mother and I want the three of you to enjoy your movie night. We’ll call it an early night and get some sleep.”

  “With the time difference, you’re a couple hours behind us. You won’t be tired. What if,” Maggie said, holding up her hand to forestall her father, who had opened his mouth to argue, “you and Mom join us for movie night? We’ll even let you choose the movie.”

  Her parents exchanged a look and then turned to her with smiles on their faces. “We’d like that very much, if Alex and Jess don’t mind,” her dad said.

  “I think they’ll be agreeable,” Maggie said with a smile and then led them back upstairs where Jess and Alex were setting the dining room table for dinner. Lois immediately jumped in to help, and Maggie told them of that evening’s plans, which her roommates embraced with genuine enthusiasm, truly fond of her parents.

  * * * *

  Dinner passed companionably, with Maggie’s parents monopolizing the conversation as they updated her on what was going on back home, along with the typical small-town rumors, which they mostly laughed over. No further mention was made of Troy, and since neither Alex nor Jess had a legitimate excuse for bringing up his name, they held their silence as they enjoyed listening to the scandals that were de rigueur for a small town.

  After dinner, Lois tried to help clean up but was waved off to the living room. “We’ve got a routine,” Maggie explained. “We don’t want to break it. Besides, you’re guests.”

  “Nonsense,” her mother snorted. “We’re family. Let me help.”

  Maggie bit her lip, obviously not wanting to argue with her mom but unsure how to shoo her away without hurting her feelings. While Maggie stood indecisive and her mom kept insisting to let her help out, Alex simply started gathering up the dirty dishes while Jess took the leftovers into the kitchen. By the time Lois wound down and turned back to the table to help, Alex was running a wet dishcloth over the table, gathering up spilled crumbs by gathering them up in the cloth and pushing them into his hand. He smiled at Lois and walked into the kitchen without a word while Bill sat back in his chair, tilting a beer to his lips and grinning like a loon.

  “They cleaned up without you, dear,” he said.

  Lois huffed at him and stormed into the kitchen, which Maggie had escaped to while her mother had surveyed the cleaned table in confusion. She stopped on the threshold, apparently overwhelmed with her first look at their gourmet kitchen. Alex was shaking the dishcloth out over the trashcan while Jess was wrapping up the leftovers and putting them away in the Sub-Zero refrigerator, and Maggie was already at the sink, her sleeves pushed up as she ran the dishwater.

  Alex tossed the dirty dishrag on the countertop and straightened, going still when he saw Lois in the doorway. She met his eyes and said, “You don’t have a dishwasher?”

  The question sounded inane even to her ears, but Maggie replied without turning around, “I’m the dishwasher. Go away, Mom.”

  Lois sputtered for a moment, and Alex took pity on her. “We have a dishwasher, Mrs. Conner, but Maggie insists on doing the dishes by hand.”

  “Why?” Lois asked, moving more fully into the room. “Do you know how long I’ve been after your father to buy a dishwasher?”

  Maggie sighed but didn’t stop washing the dishes or turn around. “I tried the dishwasher at first but was never fully happy with it. No matter what detergent I tried, there were always either spots or food left behind on the dishes. Besides, it hardly seems fair that one cooks, the other cleans, and all I have to do is load and unload the dishwasher. So I do the dishes by hand instead.”

  Lois turned to the men. “Do you always do the cooking, Jesse?” she asked him.

  Jesse grinned as he put the last of the leftovers away. “No, ma’am. Alex and I take turns cooking and cleaning up.”

  “And Maggie always does the dishes?” she asked in a funny voice.

  “Since I can’t cook, Mom, the answer is ‘yes.’ I always do the dishes.”

  “Maggie is very particular about the dishes,” Alex said. “We’ve learned to stop arguing with her and let her do what she wants.”

  “Smart boys,” Lois said with a grin and then left the kitchen to rejoin her husband, leaving Alex and Jess to stare at each other dumbfounded before they burst into laughter and went out to join them in the living room.

  * * * *

  On Wednesday, Maggie took her parents sightseeing while Jess and Alex stayed home to start getting everything together for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, they got in Danny’s old car and headed over to Troy’s motel. During the car ride from the airport the other day, Alex had met Jess’s eyes in the rearview mirror, each with the same thought in mind. If Troy had gone back home for the Thanksgiving holiday, they could break into his motel room and search it while he was gone. Suddenly things were once again looking up.

  The usual cast of drug users was lounging around, oblivious to the bite in the air, their blood pumped warm with drugs. The skinny guy whom Alex had initially spoken to frowned in his direction, trying to recall a hazy memory, which snapped into place when the two men stopped outside Troy’s door and tried to jimmy the lock.

  Druggie wandered over. “He’s not here,” he said helpfully.

  “Oh?” Alex asked. “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “Nah, man. Dude don’t talk to nobody. But saw him leave a coupla days ago with a suitcase.”

  “Did he move out, then?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Thought you knew everything.”

  “Well,” he drawled out. “He’s left for a coupla days around Halloween but came back. Dinna take no luggage wiv him, though.”

  “Well, it is Thanksgiving tomorrow. Maybe he went to stay with family,” Alex said.

  “Mebbe.”

  “Well, he left me a key so I could pick up some stuff,” Alex said, bluffing big time and digging his car keys out of his pocket, jangling them in front of the greasy guy’s face, hoping he was so stoned he was unable to differentiate between car keys and motel room keys, “But the lock seems to be jammed or something. Think you can help me out?” he added, fishing a couple of twenties out of his wallet.

  “Sure,” the guy said with a grin. He snatched the twenties and stuffed them deep in his pants pocket, and then he leaned down, picked up a chunk of concrete that had broken off the walkway, and smashed it through the window before either Alex or Jess could stop him. They stared at him, dumbfounded, while the drug addict reached through the window and threw the bolt on the door. “Not a problem,” he said as the door swung open.

  “Uh,” Alex said, still shocked at the suddenness of the crime.

  “Hey, windows get broke ’round here alls the time. Be fixed in no time.” And he unsteadily walked away with a wave and a lopsided grin.

  Alex and Jess exchanged looks and then entered Troy’s room, closing and locking the door behind them. “We better make this search count,” Jess remarked. “Troy isn’t likely to continue to stay here if he finds out his room has been broken into.”

  Most of Troy’s clothes were gone, but there was still food in the old fridge that was badly in need of being defrosted. They looked through the bedside table and found a notebook with a list of Maggie’s classes, detailing days, times, and locations, along with a map of the campus. The men looked at each other, grim faced.

  “Fuck,” Alex said. “Guess it was too much to hope that he wasn’t following her on campus.”

  “At least we’re circumspect on campus,” Jess pointed out. “Nothing to see there.”

  “Only bright spot in this whole sordid mess,” Alex grumbled, flipping through the notebook to see what else he had written down.

  Jess reached in the drawer and pulled out a scrap of paper. “Oho, at least we now know what the M stands for.”

 
; “Huh?” Alex said, looking up.

  “Maria. This paper has the name ‘Maria’ on it and a phone number. Wanna bet it’s the brunette he’s been doing?”

  “What are the odds that he’s having sex with more than one woman while he stalks our girlfriend?” Alex asked. “Sick fuck.”

  “Yeah, I agree. Give me something to write her phone number down on.”

  Alex pulled a receipt out of his coat pocket, and Jess scribbled down the number before he moved on to other parts of the room. They searched under the bed, in the cabinets, and the bathroom. They even took the lid off the back of the toilet and looked inside. Nothing. They opened all the dresser drawers and even felt underneath them to see if Troy had taped anything there. The closet was empty. The only thing interesting was a rather old mouse nest on the top shelf next to a Bill Clinton Halloween mask, and Jess hazarded a guess that that was Troy’s disguise at the Halloween party. “At least the fucker was clever enough to make sure we couldn’t spot him,” he pointed out as he tossed the mask to the floor before pulling a chair over so he could get higher and make sure there was nothing else hiding on that high shelf.

  “It would help if we knew what we were looking for,” Jess pointed out as he gave up on the closet.

  Alex could only agree. He looked under the bed again, this time feeling on the underside of the box spring to see if anything had been taped or pinned there. When that search proved fruitless, Jess said, “Hey, I heard about how some businessmen leave porn behind for others in motel rooms by stuffing it under the mattress.”

  “Worth a shot,” Alex said, not feeling optimistic. They both knelt beside the bed and lifted the edge of the mattress, glancing down to see if anything was there. Nada.

  In a fit of pique, Alex picked up a pillow and shook it, only to have a picture flutter out of the pillowcase. He tossed the pillow aside and picked up the picture, his face slowly twisting into a scowl. With a feral growl he tossed the picture down and turned away. Jess picked it up and frowned. “Oh, he’s got it bad, man,” was Jess’s opinion before he took the picture of Troy and Maggie posing under a balloon arch at their senior prom and dropped it back on the bed. “Bet he pulls it out and kisses it each night.”

  “Fucker,” was Alex’s succinct opinion.

  “So, okay, what now?” Jess asked.

  “Go out to the car and get the camera. We’ll take pictures of the schedule he wrote down. Maggie’s sure to recognize his handwriting, at least. If nothing else, we can show him proof that we know he’s following her and try to get him to back off.”

  “On it,” Jess said and hurried back to the car.

  They then snapped a picture of the photograph and the pillow it had fallen out of along with pictures of every page of the notebook detailing Maggie’s weekly schedule. Alex flipped through the pages and came across some writing in the back. Turner House was written in big block letters, and Alex now knew how he had found them. All you had to do was ask anyone in town if they knew where Turner House was and you’d get the street name and a general description of the house. Or you could go to the library and look it up on the old microfiche files of newspaper clippings, since Aunt Ida’s defection from her family so many years ago had caused such a scandal. There you could find stories in the gossip columns detailing the early years of her turning her back on her family because she fell in love and eloped with a man from a blue-collar family, a background that made her family’s blue blood run cold. Stories in later years even had pictures of the house along with the address, telling how her family finally forgave her and admitted that they could no longer stand in the way of “true love.” That part was a crock. Aunt Ida had simply been too wily for her parents and had refused to leave Uncle Owen in favor of the society matches they had lined up for her. Her family finally caved after her fifth son was born and none of the matches her parents hoped she would make were interested in marrying a divorcee with five children. And with Uncle Owen being bribe-proof and refusing their many attempts to pay him off and ditch his wife and kids, her family was forced to concede defeat. Thus they grudgingly reinherited her since she was an only child and they didn’t want their fortune to fall into the hands of distant family members who had been attempting to mooch off them for years. As a welcome-back, no-hard-feelings gift, her parents had built a house large enough for her large brood and gifted it to her. Aunt Ida had immediately christened the house with her married name, rather than her maiden name as her parents obviously wanted, and when her five boys entered their teens, she and Uncle Owen had remodeled the study downstairs into a bedroom so they could monitor their five rambunctious sons as they tried to sneak in or out of the house past curfew, moving their eldest son into their old master bedroom and thus gifting each son with his own room so he could suffer through the trials and tribulations of puberty in privacy.

  Alex and Jess now occupied her original master bedroom and had turned Aunt Ida’s first floor bedroom back into the study it had originally been designated as, with a full-size portrait of the formidable woman hanging on the wall opposite the door, above the large mahogany desk, a constant reminder to them to follow their hearts.

  So, yeah, come to think of it, if Maggie had mentioned the name of their home to anyone in her hometown last summer, then Troy would have found them fairly easily.

  “Tell me, Jess,” Alex said, thinking out loud. “If Troy wants Maggie back and has been following her around campus, why hasn’t he approached her? Why not just walk up and say, ‘Hi’?”

  “Cause he’s a psycho?”

  “I’m serious, Jess.”

  “So am I,” Jess said, exasperated. “What type of loser can’t take no for an answer and apparently ditches school to travel across the country to live in a cheap motel room while following his ex-girlfriend around?”

  “A loser we’re trying to protect her from,” Alex said earnestly. “Come on, it’s not much, but let’s snap pics of everything he’s left behind before we put it away.”

  “Shouldn’t we leave the room trashed?” Jess asked. “To explain the broken window,” he added at Alex’s incredulous look.

  “According to our buddy out there, windows get broken around here all the time, remember? Could be from something as simple as a couple of drug-dazed guys playing catch with rocks. A broken window does not necessarily equal a break-in around here. And with any luck, the window will be repaired before Troy gets back and he won’t even know.”

  “You’ve got a point.” Jess found himself agreeing. “Let’s get our photographic evidence and put this crap back where we found it.”

  They did just that. Thankfully, Troy hadn’t accumulated a lot of possessions in the months he had lived here, and it was fairly easy to return everything to its original position. Within minutes they were closing the door behind them, and Alex reached back in through the broken window and threw the dead bolt. He then swerved over to where greasy guy was toking on a joint with a couple of equally unsavory guys and said, “Appreciate it if you forgot we were ever here,” and gave each of them a twenty as a parting gift as they all did their own impressions of amnesia before clutching their sides in drug-induced giggles at the laugh riot they perceived themselves to be.

  The ride back home was spent mostly in silence, as they were too depressed over the apparent failure of their snooping. Their thoughts were their own, which they chased around silently in their minds. Did Troy have a master plan, or had he truly gone over the deep edge on them? Was he unstable? Was Maggie in actual danger? That last thought had Alex’s stomach clenching, and he felt bile rise in his throat. He loved Maggie with everything he had and would do whatever it took to protect her. He glanced at Jess and noticed that his usual jovial face had a hard edge to it, and he knew Jess would willingly do the same. Gripping the steering wheel tightly, he drove them home in uneasy silence.

  * * * *

  Maggie took her parents to all her favorite places that day. She gave them a tour of the almost deserted campus, she to
ok them to her favorite coffee shop on the north side, she drove them into the city, and they wandered the streets like the tourists they were. She pointed out the dinner theater that Jess had discovered and told them that both Alex and Jess had taken her there for her birthday back in September.

  By the time they got back to Turner House, all three were exhausted. Jess and Alex were channel surfing and announced that they were going to call out for pizza and asked what everyone wanted on it. Her parents smiled gratefully and said they had no preference as to toppings and then excused themselves to go upstairs and freshen up. Jess looked at Maggie as he pulled out his cell phone, and she told them it was true, the works or plain, her parents wouldn’t complain, and to order whatever they were in the mood for.

  Jess wisely handed the phone over to her once it was ringing and told her to order, just in case. Laughing, Maggie took the phone from him and ordered a large supreme pizza and breadsticks with a variety of dipping sauces. She then gave Jess back his phone and plopped down on the end of the sofa, asking about their day.

  “We cooked,” Alex said. “Tell us about yours, instead.”

  So Maggie launched into a retelling of the places they had gone and the sights they had seen. “Did you know there is a tree-lighting ceremony in the center of town Friday night? Mom and Dad both said they’d like to see it. Will you two come?”

  “Sure,” they replied automatically, unable to deny her anything.

  “Cool. Mom wants to get an early start with her Black Friday shopping, so we’ll probably be back in the afternoon to take a nap, and then the five of us can head back out around five so we can catch the ceremony at seven.”

  “Sounds like a plan. There’s this great bistro near the square that we can eat at,” Jess said. “I’ll call now and see if we can make reservations for around 8:00 p.m. so we don’t have to wait in line.”

  “That sounds great,” Maggie enthused as she leaned over and kissed them both on the cheek before going into the kitchen to get paper plates and napkins for the pizza.