Blue Midnight (Blue Mountain Book 1)

by Tess Thompson

  “Is it your house I passed? The one that looks like a ski lodge?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, that belongs to the youngest brother of our clan. Ciaran. He built himself a ski lodge to go with his international playboy image.”

  “Is he here now, too?”

  “I suppose he’s arrived for our mother’s birthday but I’m not certain. I’m headmaster of a private boys’ boarding school in Ketchum and only spend my summer here. I just arrived two days ago.” He leaned against the tree again and fixed his gaze upon me.

  “Headmaster?” This was said out loud and like a question. I hadn’t meant for it to be said at all but I couldn’t quite reconcile a millionaire, probably many times over, as a headmaster of a school.

  Ardan seemed to understand my question. “You’re wondering why someone with my wealth has a job, let alone one like mine?”

  “Yes, I was. I’m sorry if that offends you.”

  He smiled. “You’re not the first one to ask, including my mother. I believe that all people should do work that matters to them, regardless of personal wealth. Without work, we’re purposeless, even soulless. I teach English and try to be a leader to boys in a way that will turn them into healthy and productive men.”

  “Does being a mother count as work?” Suddenly I felt guilty about my lack of a job, at my abandonment of my photography career.

  “It’s the most important job in the world.” He smiled and suddenly I saw Finn again. As he had spoken to me over the last few minutes, he’d looked less and less like Finn. Finn was a free spirit, always smiling and laughing. It felt like a party when you were with him. This brother was serious and scholarly. His headmaster position must suit him perfectly.

  “Thank you,” I said, softly. “Sometimes I wonder if I should be doing more. Well, I should be. Especially now. I need to. I have to. My ex-husband is an attorney and he hired a great attorney so I’m left without much to show for thirteen years of marriage. I should tell my girls to never give up their job skills to stay home with children because when it all goes to hell you’ll be in deep trouble.”

  “And there’s no mandatory alimony in Washington State, just child support, so stay-at-home mothers are not protected much.” I must have been looking at him in surprise because he smiled gently. “Many of the boys at my school come from single-mother homes. One of the things my wealth affords me is a healthy scholarship fund.” He paused, glancing out to the path and back at me. “Finn spoke about you for years. Did Kevan tell you that?”

  “Yes, and he was kind enough to give me a letter Finn wrote to him about me. Rori gave me a photo of the two of us the weekend we were together. They’ve both been kind to me.”

  “Is that why you’re here, then? Because they’ve been kind to you?”

  My mind raced as I decided how to answer the question. The truth was, it was a combination of Kevan, my own lack of an anchor, and this stirring within me to figure out what happened to Finn. This question of his death and what caused it wouldn’t let me go, like a rash that ebbed and flowed in its itchiness. Out loud, I said, “I can’t seem to let go of Finn.”

  “You have questions about his death?”

  I nodded but didn’t say anything further. The pulse at my neck quickened. I looked away, Rori’s words echoing in my head: There are rumors.

  “How does Kevan seem?” asked Ardan, after a moment or two of silence.

  “Sometimes he seems all right. Other times he seems intense, troubled, like a man chased by demons.” I hadn’t meant to be quite so honest but there was a quality of goodness about Ardan that made our relationship like that of a priest to his parishioner. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “An awful Christmas dinner with the lot of us wherein we all got in a terrible argument and stormed off to our respective houses. None of us, to the best of my knowledge, have spoken to any of the others since, except probably my sister Teagan and Kevan. They’re the only two of us still close, which is ironic because the four of us boys were tight when we were young and she was more like our pretty little pet. She’s blessed with a head of red curls and these big blue eyes. We all adored her. But she’s angry with Ciaran and me. And she hasn’t spoken to our mother in years.”

  “Kevan told me about her falling out with your father.”

  “Right. When Teagan and our father fought about Christopher, my mother sided with our father. It caused a lot of hurt feelings, to say the least.”

  I knew not to press him further. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It was utter nonsense for us all to try and have a civil Christmas dinner, but my mother is one who must be obeyed and we all gave in to her wishes. But there’s too much between all of us boys at this point.”

  “Too much what?”

  “Mistrust.” His fair skin turned pink as he turned away from me, silent. A slight breeze came then, rustling the leaves above. A strand of my hair moved, tickling my cheek. He played with a tuft of grass near the edge of the blanket, his eyes focused upwards. Did he gaze between the branches to the sky above or did he see nothing, lost to the sight of his memories? After a moment, he looked at me. “I don’t know why I feel compelled to tell you this but I do. There were tracks in the snow and on the road that indicated another car was involved in the accident. This fact has caused our relationships to be difficult.”

  My heart thudded. “You can’t think it was Kevan, do you?” The question escaped before I could pull it back. I was in dangerous territory here.

  “Ciaran and I suspected that Kevan was driving after them in a jealous rage. We thought he might have accidentally run them off the road.” He stopped speaking and put up his hand as if that would control the emotion that his face and voice betrayed.

  “How do you know about the other car tracks?”

  “This is a small town. There are rumors,” he said, startling me with his echo of Rori’s words. He continued, “People talk. One of the deputies shot his mouth off about it at a bar one night when he was flirting with one of Ciaran’s girlfriends. The deputy hinted about the second car and that someone with influence had covered it up. She couldn’t get him to say anything further, except to say that it was someone who had something on someone in the police department.”

  “But why would he cover it up, if it was an accident?”

  “The law wouldn’t see it that way. It would be vehicular homicide if he caused the accident by chasing them. He would want to cover it up to at least salvage some kind of life for Rori. Her mother was dead and the last thing she needed was for her father to go to jail.” He paused. “We’d all been drinking after the funeral and Ciaran’s always had a hot head and it all just came tumbling out of his mouth, these questions that sounded like accusations.” He held up his hands again. “We were crazed with grief is the only excuse I can give you for our actions. Finn was the favorite of all us. He was the kindest of us—the one who always had our backs—the one we all went to with our problems. Our parents were both cold growing up and Finn was a substitute, for all of us, even Kevan, maybe especially Kevan. Finn had this personality that made everything seem a little more hopeful.”

  I nodded and murmured, “I remember.”

  “When he died, and the way he died, leaving town with his brother’s wife, it changed us all. Not only were we grieving for our favorite brother, we were trying to reconcile what and who we thought he was with the man who would steal his brother’s wife. It made us insane for a few weeks. When someone you love dies you try and find someone to blame. We looked around and all we found was Kevan. But after the funeral, thinking it over, I could see that our conjecture was just that. There was never any evidence whatsoever that he had anything to do with it. It could have been any number of others with a vendetta against either of them. We don’t know and we probably won’t ever know. Regardless, our accusations wrecked what was left of our family. There doesn’t seem to be any way to repair it.”

  I looked at him, hard. Did he truly believe t
hat Kevan had nothing to do with it? “But who would do such a thing? Who would have that kind of vendetta against either of them but Kevan?”

  He met my gaze, looking as long and hard into my eyes as I had into his. “I believe in my heart that he didn’t have anything to do with it. Regardless, whether Kevan did or didn’t have something to do with Finn’s death doesn’t change anything. Finn wasn’t the man we all thought he was. And Kevan’s life is ruined.”

  I shook my head vigorously. “I don’t believe Finn was capable of having an affair with his brother’s wife. He didn’t have it in him or he would’ve come after me all those years ago.”

  He hesitated, as if searching for the best way to say it. “There’s something you should know. Meredith was Finn’s girlfriend before she was Kevan’s wife. Finn dated her for about six months, then he brought her here to meet us one weekend. He told me that weekend he felt it was a mistake to bring her here, that he knew there was no future with her.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He suspected she was only interested in him for his money. But something sparked between her and Kevan that weekend, apparently. When they got back to Boise, Finn ended it with her. She then visited Kevan at his office in Boise, under the guise of being broken-hearted. Kevan’s never been able to resist a wounded bird. He told Finn he wanted to start seeing her. Finn tried to warn him against her but Kevan wouldn’t listen, and Finn never said a word against her when Kevan announced they were getting married like two months later. He stood up with the rest of us at their wedding.”

  “Such a quick wedding?”

  He put his hands in the air. “Kevan adored her from the beginning. And trust me, she could be very charming. Our father was one of the only men alive who wasn’t enamored of her.”

  “Was she beautiful?” I was jealous of this manipulative dead girl. But was it because of Finn or Kevan?

  “One of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  I stared at him for a moment, a sudden memory coming. “I remember he told me that weekend we were together there was a woman who had made him sour on women. Yes, that was his exact phrase.” I remembered his face exactly as he said it. The first day of the festival, between bands, we had stood in the lines to use the portable restrooms, chatting. We’d each had a beer and our tongues were loose. I’d confessed to my engagement. He told me that he hadn’t dated for a few years, after he’d seen the true character of a woman he’d initially trusted.

  “It was Kevan’s wife,” I said now, to Ardan. This wasn’t a question. I knew. Meredith had been the woman who soured him.

  “That sounds right.” He paused, looking at me again. “Why didn’t you come back for him?”

  For the third time in two days, I answered honestly. “I didn’t know how to call off my wedding for a man I’d known for three days. It seemed impossible.” I looked at my hands; they were still damp from my run. “And I regret it. I’ve regretted it every day since.” I lifted my eyes to the branches above us. “But why would he leave town with a woman he despised?”

  “When it comes to romantic love, the lines between love and hate are often blurred.”

  “So maybe he loved her all those years but kept it hidden?”

  “That’s the only thing I can figure.”

  I was still for a moment, letting this idea come into my body in that way it does when something shocking has been shared with you. Was it possible that Finn had loved her all those years and she had changed her mind—decided Finn was the one she wanted? And who was this Meredith that she had such power over two of the Lanigan brothers? Finally, I stood, pulling my damp shorts from my thighs. “I should finish my run. Will I see you tonight at the birthday dinner?”

  He smiled, in that gentle way that softened his intelligent eyes. “Oh, yes. I’ll be there.”

  “I’ll be there as well. Kevan asked me to join you.” I added this last part to assuage the feeling that I was an intruder or interloper. Truly, what was I doing here exactly? But I was in this far now. I had to continue forward.

  “I hope this wasn’t too much to share with you,” he said. “It helped me to talk about it with someone who knew Finn. None of us ever talk about any of it. Sometimes it feels as if Finn never existed.”

  To me, that was the saddest thing in a list of sad utterings from this middle brother. If Finn was forgotten who was left to mourn him?

  I was about to depart when I thought to ask one last question. “Ardan, did Finn have a house on the property?”

  He stood, pointing to the north. “Yes, beyond mine. He built in the first of the wooded land and loved it there. He hated working at the company. I don’t know if anyone’s told you that yet. He used to describe it like he was suffocating or dying. He used to come here almost every weekend. But my mother had his house boarded up when he died. It’ll never be used again. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason, really. It’s a compulsion, I guess, to know about his life.” I fiddled with my ear buds. “I’m so full of regret.”

  “Aren’t we all?” His remorseful eyes mirrored my own.

  “I’ll see you at dinner,” I said. And then I set back down the path from whence I’d come, the music not loud enough to drown the thumping of my aching heart.

  CHAPTER 15

  AFTER A SHOWER, I donned my new jeans, green socks, and work boots (they were hideous—Bliss wouldn’t have worn them even with the threat of death) and wandered out to the horse barn, hoping to find Kevan. He stood in Buttercup’s stall, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, brushing her coat. Unlike me, he looked quite good in his boots. Looking up when he heard my footsteps, he smiled. “Nice jeans.” His astute eyes took me in, head to foot. “You look great.”

  I flushed. To hide my embarrassment I made a sarcastic remark about my outfit. “These boots are the worst. And my feet are hot in these green socks.”

  “You’ll be happy for those socks at the end of the day.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “No blisters.” Chuckling, he set the brush on a bale of hay and unlocked the stall door. “Come on in. She won’t bite.”

  Keeping my gaze on her at all times, I stepped inside. Her large brown eyes flickered but she remained still as I moved around her to the back of the stall. Kevan reached into a bucket and pulled out a small apple, giving it to Buttercup. Her giant teeth chomped it with greedy delight. Those teeth. Stained brown. And so large. I stared at them. “Her teeth,” I said, under my breath.

  He laughed. “Don’t worry. She won’t bite you. You ready to ride her?”

  I looked over at him. “Oh no. Not today.”

  “Come on now, don’t be such a chicken.”

  “I’m not a chicken.” Buttercup had finished her apple and now nuzzled against Kevan’s chest while he stroked her nose. “And you can’t bully me into riding her.”

  He smiled, his face turning into a half-dozen crescent moons. “What’re you afraid of?”

  I shrugged. “She’s just so big. What if she bucks me off?”

  “This ol’ girl doesn’t have a buck left in her.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you say you dreamt of a horse when you were a little girl?”

  I nodded, without meeting his gaze. “I dreamt of a lot of things that never came to pass. So what?”

  “So when they come along, you should seize them.”

  An image of my father came to me, stooped over the table of a swap meet, examining items he never bought. He’d never seized one thing in his life. Then he died, suddenly. And that was it. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

  Kevan raised his eyebrows. “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Without a word, he reached for a saddle.

  While Kevan got Buttercup ready, I walked out to the pasture. It smelled of drying grasses and the wild roses that grew along the fence. The breeze rustled grasses and wildflowers. I leaned against the fence, the swishing sound of swaying grasses my companion. I sp
otted buttercups and stargazers in the pasture, yellow and purple splashes of color amongst the green.

  Again, I thought of my father.

  My father remarried the year after he left and it didn’t take us long to understand my father’s new wife, Liddie, hated us, especially my sister. Bliss, even as a little girl, was bossy and opinionated and so wickedly smart it was eerie. Liddie’s children were roughly the same age as us, except there were three of them and they were all thick limbed and dull minded, like their mother. My sister’s intelligence and my artistic talent made Liddie competitive and protective of her own children. It wasn’t long before she instituted the twice a month visits on Sundays, and never at their house. Why my father agreed, I cannot say, except that he never had any fight to him, never chose anything, simply allowed things to happen to him. I can’t imagine he was happy with my mother, given their differences, but she’d ultimately decided on the divorce, insisting that he move out of the house. He was a quiet man, bashful and unassuming and without any sense of his own needs, and, I suspected, any connection to his feelings. If there was anything happening inside him, he certainly didn’t show it.

  On a Sunday afternoon the summer I was eleven, my dad and I went to the swap meet at the fairgrounds. Bliss, sometime earlier, had declared she would no longer join us at the swap meet. “Old people’s stuff disgusts me,” she said. “I won’t go one more time.” My father, no match for her will, agreed. So she stayed in the car, reading, with the back windows rolled down. It was a different time then; people left their children in cars alone without fear of them coming to harm. Now a parent would be tarred and feathered for such an offense.

  That day, newly interested in my appearance, I’d spent hours trying to get my hair to curl with the iron but to no avail. I’d also put on makeup, which now melted under the hot August sky. We perused the tables while I prayed I wouldn’t see anyone I knew from school. My father rarely bought anything and today was no exception. He examined the items on various tables, picking them up and turning them over in his dry hands but then setting them back on the table, never fully committing to any of them. We came upon a table of old cameras, vintage photo frames, and assorted photography equipment, like lenses and dark room supplies. He stopped at the table, hovering a foot or so away from the edge. I watched him from the same distance. His eyes darted from the top left hand corner of the table to the bottom right corner, like he was reading words on a page. “I wanted to be a photographer,” he said, quietly. “Did I ever tell you that?”