by Jessi Gage
Unease made me jumpy as I got ready for bed. I kept hearing sounds outside. Logically, I knew they were just the noises of the wooded area I’d grown up in, but I’d adapted to a new set of sounds living in Philadelphia. The city sounds of constant traffic and sirens. The apartment sounds of feet pounding up and down the stairs and voices murmuring on the other side of the walls at all hours. The creaking of towering pines in the breeze and the groans of the trailer’s plastic siding were a lost symphony, louder to me since I hadn’t heard it in six years.
Hands on hips, I frowned at the couch. I couldn’t imagine lying down to go to sleep without checking the shop first. Dad would have checked if he’d had any doubts. I would just poke my head in the door and make sure it didn’t look ransacked.
Dad kept a loaded .357 Magnum under the table beside his favorite recliner in the den. I found it and checked the chamber and safety. I wasn’t about to perform a cell phone search and rescue at this hour, and I knew better than to investigate a potential security breach with no back-up. A girl couldn’t be too careful, or so Dad had taught me.
The revolver was heavier than my 9mm Luger, which I usually kept at home but had stowed in a lockbox under the passenger seat of the beast for protection on the trip. The kick from the .357 Magnum would be a bitch if I had to use it. But it would “do the job,” as Dad would say, if a job needed to be done.
Snatching the keys from the peg by the phone, I disarmed the alarm and headed for the shop. When I opened the door and flipped on the lights, my heart lunged into my throat.
There were no obvious signs of break in. Nothing was out of place. And yet wrongness permeated everything.
Dad wasn’t here.
He wasn’t hunched over the workbench with a pair of magnifying goggles perched on his head, greeting me with a gruff “Hey kiddo” spoken around a cigarette. He wasn’t standing, feet braced apart, at the window, firing a repaired rifle into the two-hundred-foot berm he’d built out back. He wasn’t shooting the breeze with one of his motorcycle-riding buddies.
Dad wasn’t here. He’d never be here again.
The sudden pain in my heart overtook me. It stole my breath.
The first tear for my father fell. More followed. They didn’t stop until long after I’d stumbled back to the house and collapsed on the couch.
Dad was gone.
Gone.
And I’d been a terrible daughter.
* * * *
One nice thing about a New England winter is you didn’t have to bring groceries inside right away. Convenient, since I’d left five bags of frozen food, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies in the beast overnight. I hadn’t wanted Cole to see me lugging in armloads of groceries and getting out of his cruiser to lend a hand. I’d imposed on him enough with the flat.
Also, I hadn’t been sure what state I’d find the trailer in and hadn’t wanted Cole to see inside. Friday morning, as I stood in Dad’s kitchen trying not to let the enormity of the clutter dishearten me, I was glad for my foresight.
While Dad had often entertained customers and friends up in the shop, he’d never invited anyone into the trailer. I assumed he would have been embarrassed to have his friends see how he lived, especially in contrast to his tidy workplace. When I’d lived here, I’d been embarrassed by the mess, and it hadn’t been half as bad as it was now, mainly because I’d done my best to keep it as organized as possible. The clutter was part of the reason I’d never invited friends over. The other part of the reason was the unpredictability of Dad’s moods…and whether or not he’d be sober.
Shaking away the less pleasant memories of my childhood in this trailer, I pulled my freshly-washed and dried hair into a ponytail, slipped my feet into my cozy Uggs, and hauled in my bags from Shaw’s. After a breakfast of microwaved eggs and sausage and freshly ground Dunkin Donuts coffee, I grabbed a metal hanger from the closet in my room. Time to rescue a cell phone.
There were two doors to go through to get in and out of the trailer—the door to the trailer itself and the storm door on the screened-in porch, which served as a repository for even more of Dad’s clutter. I had just grabbed the handle of the main door to head out to the porch when I heard the distinctive sounds of someone stomping up the five wooden steps to the storm door. A second later, that someone knocked hard enough to make the glass pane rattle in the aluminum frame.
I glanced at the clock. It was 9:15. My appointment with Max wasn’t until 9:30. He must be running early. The cell phone would have to wait. I stuck the hanger in the coat closet and opened the main door to find a tall man in a down parka and an orange knit cap on the doorstep. A pair of Oakleys hid his eyes.
Cole.
“What are you doing here?” I blurted as I unlocked the storm door and swung it open.
Gone was the forest green statie uniform he’d had on last night. He was in civilian clothes, which included fawn-colored work boots, cargo pants, and a gray waffle-weave Henley peeking from the V of his partially-zipped parka. His cheeks were smooth with a fresh shave and rosy from the cold.
Behind him a big white pick-up truck was parked beside the beast. If his face was cold after driving over, it must mean he lived close enough for the heater not to have warmed up yet. That shouldn’t have excited me, but it did.
I’d done the math after our encounter last night. He was forty. The number sounded…advanced, especially compared to my age, twenty-four. But towering over me like a grizzly bear, filling out every inch of that parka with the bulk of a man who worked out regularly, he looked nothing short of scorching hot. I resisted the urge to tug his shades off to see if he had lines around his eyes. Last night it had been too dark to tell, though I had noticed the brackets around his mouth were slightly deeper than I remembered. Those lines only added to his hotness.
“I’m here to check the shop,” he answered. I was mesmerized by those barely overlapping lower teeth, by the way it was the lowers, not the uppers that showed when he spoke. “Like I told you last night.”
Oh, that’s right. The shop. Duh, Mandy. Try focusing on something other than Cole’s mouth. Anything other than Cole’s mouth.
“It’s fine,” I told him. I felt myself moisten my lips as I tried not to stare at the mouth I’d fantasized about kissing too many times, including, foolishly, this morning as I’d woken on Dad’s couch. “I checked it after we got off the phone.”
He tugged the Oakleys down his nose and tucked them in his collar by a floppy temple piece that needed tightening. One of the lenses had a scuff mark on it. The glasses had taken a beating, but if Cole was anything like Dad, he probably wouldn’t consider replacing them until they were in pieces.
His eyes were crisply blue. The lines beside them were so faint as to be practically non-existent. Some men aged well. Cole aged like a freaking masterpiece. I watched his pupils shrink as they adjusted to the morning light. “I told you not to go up there.”
I shook off the spell his nearness wove around me, and bristled at the implication I was under any obligation to him. “It was fine. No one had been up there.”
“It might not have been fine. What if you’d run into someone? The whole county knows your dad’s dead by now, and he has more than fifty guns up there. That was a stupid risk.”
Indignation made me stand up straighter. “Dad’s obituary won’t run until Sunday’s paper. A few people know he’s gone, yeah, but not the whole county, not for a couple of days. So back off. Dad didn’t raise a stupid little girl who doesn’t know how to take care of herself.”
Wow. I hadn’t mouthed off like that to anyone in years. Not since high school. And even then, I’d usually reserved any heated words to counter the hurtful barbs my dad would throw my way on a daily basis. Between being confronted by Cole and standing in this trailer again, I’d fallen back into an old pattern I’d thought I’d left behind when I’d left Newburgh.
I seriously missed Philly.
I braced myself, waiting for Cole to get angry
and snap at me like Dad would have, but he only assessed me with that steady gaze of his. “I never said you were a little girl. And I didn’t call you stupid. I said you took a stupid risk.”
I felt my ruffled feathers smooth at his calm tone, but I still didn’t like the implication I’d done anything stupid. My dad had used that word far too often in reference to something I’d done. “And I told you I was careful.”
We stared at each other for a few beats. Strangers trying to make sense of each other. Finally, he said, “Give me the keys.”
“What?”
“The keys. To the shop. I’m going to go up and make sure everything’s accounted for.”
“The shop’s fine,” I insisted, my hand clamping on the door jamb. Cole had me off balance. I couldn’t decide whether I was annoyed with his pushiness or touched by his protectiveness. Not that his protectiveness was directed at me. It was Dad and the things that had been most important to Dad—his guns—that Cole was concerned about. “Everything’s there.”
“You had a good look around?”
“Well, no. I just turned on the light and made sure the place wasn’t trashed. It was fine, neat as a pin, like Dad always kept it.” My throat got tight as I pictured Dad up there where he belonged, where he’d never be ever again. When we happened to be in the trailer together, he’d grumble and yell more often than not, but up in the shop, he’d be almost nice. It was the one place we could have a conversation without raising our voices at each other. My eyes burned. Crap.
I didn’t want Cole to see me vulnerable. I didn’t want him to see me as the reckless wild child this town assumed I’d been. I wanted him to see me as the strong, mature woman I’d become since leaving.
I don’t know why it mattered what he thought of me. I hardly knew Cole. Maybe it mattered because I’d always admired him. Maybe it mattered because he’d implied I’d been stupid last night, and that had stung more than it should have. Maybe it mattered because he was one of the cops who had seen me at my absolute worst, at a time I wished I hadn’t been seen by anyone.
Flashes of memory brought back my abject humiliation. Suddenly I was back at the Newburgh Police Department six weeks from graduation. I smelled of hard-liquor and sex and was sporting a skirt barely long enough to hide the fact I’d lost my underwear, and a top that barely covered the bruises I felt blooming on my breasts.
Yes, I’d gone out that night to party, but what Cole didn’t know—what no one knew—was that the sex I’d had hadn’t been my choice. I’d been dragged from the party by three men too old to have been hanging out with teenagers, one of which, admittedly, I had been making out with. That’s where my voluntary participation had ended.
The men had driven me down a deserted road and raped me in the covered bed of a pick-up truck. I still remembered the sting of gravel their tires kicked up as they drove away after. Their fading whoops of victory still rang in my ears like the most insidious tinnitus.
It had been too dark to read the license plate number. I’d been too drunk to remember it anyway. I’d been too drunk to even remember the whole ordeal. I think I’d blacked out during some of it. What I hadn’t been too drunk for was to ping the breathalyzer test Chief Tooley had made me take when he’d found me wandering down the side of the road, disoriented and aching with wounds I was determined no one would ever see. Especially not my dad, who had told me when I’d left the house that night I was asking for trouble dressed the way I was.
I would never forget the mortification that had pulsed over my entire body like waves of fire when Cole looked up from his paperwork in time to see Tooley push me down in a plastic chair and handcuff me to his desk. “Knew you from the time you were a little girl, Mandy Holcomb,” Tooley had said. “Never thought I’d see you like this. Dressed like a whore. Smelling like a whore. Drunk like a cheap whore. You don’t change your ways, young lady, you’re going to end up a whore for real. You want that? You want to turn tricks in Boston for a shit living? You sit in that chair and think about your life and the direction it’s going. I’ll call your father in the morning, and he can decide if we need to bring charges or not.”
For the next few hours, I sat beside Tooley’s desk in that unforgiving chair, my eyes closed against the intense pounding in my head, hoping I wouldn’t throw up on myself while Cole was in the room, wishing I’d never gone out that night.
“You okay, Mandy?” I heard Cole’s voice and for a second thought it was part of the memory. He’d said the same thing back then, coming to crouch in front of me while Tooley had been out of the room. His gentle tone had been a startling contrast to the hard set of his mouth, like the granite our state was known for.
But it wasn’t a memory. He was here. On Dad’s doorstep.
Like back then, I nodded. Like back then, I had trouble meeting his gaze.
He shifted one hand to the aluminum door frame. He held on just above where my hand still gripped it. “Hey. It’s okay. You’ll be okay, you hear me?”
He couldn’t know I’d gone back in my mind to the last time he’d spoken to me before the flat tire. He thought I was upset over Dad. I was upset over Dad. But that night at Newburgh PD jumbled together with Dad’s death in a knot of grief too powerful for me to contain. Being home sucked. It sucked so bad.
I bit my lip as a tear leaked from each eye, warming my face as I stood in the muscle-clenching cold of a New Hampshire winter morning.
Cole cursed on an exhale. After a beat, he said, “Is that Dunkin’s I smell?”
I nodded.
“You got enough to share?”
“Yeah.”
Cole was the last person on Earth I should have wanted to invite inside, but his solid presence at my back as I led the way to the kitchen was a balm for my soul.
Chapter 3
I poured a mug of coffee and handed it to Cole. I couldn’t believe he was in my father’s disaster of a home. What must he think of Dad after seeing this mess? What must he think of me for running off to chase my own dreams while he lived in this squalor?
What the heck had I been thinking inviting him in?
He’d thrown his parka on the couch, but even without the extra bulk it gave him, he made the trailer feel like a Hobbit hole. The guy must have been six-foot-four without shoes. In his work boots, his head practically scraped the ceiling, or at least it seemed that way from my five-foot-four vantage point.
He rested a hip on the kitchen counter and sipped the coffee. His eyes rolled back in his head. Cops appreciated good coffee. Dunkin’s was very good coffee, and I made it nice and strong.
After he came back down from coffee-bliss, he leveled his gaze on me. “Your dad was proud of you. You know that?”
I swallowed a gulp of sweetened coffee that was too hot. The burn in my throat was more comfortable than the awkwardness Cole’s statement made me feel.
Dad and I hadn’t had one of those relationships where we told each other we loved each other or were proud of each other. We hadn’t been huggers. The last kiss I could remember getting from him was when I was little and Mom was still alive. As I grew up, we sort of just existed side by side, living in the same house but keeping different schedules. I hadn’t minded, since he’d usually find something to yell at me for when our orbits happened to intersect.
“He talked about you all the time,” Cole went on. “He was over the moon about you going to grad school—a double master’s. He wouldn’t shut up about that. First person in the family to go to college, and you were getting enough degrees to make up for the lack. You finished with school yet?”
So. Dad had read my cards. That warmed away some of the awkwardness. I nodded in answer to Cole’s question.
“When?”
“June.” I’d found the job at PHMC and jumped right in as soon as I graduated. Four months of working full time with benefits and I was starting to see the light at the end of the student-loan tunnel.
“Congratulations.” He
toasted me with his mug.
“Thanks.” It occurred to me that for Cole to know all the things I shared in my cards, he and Dad must have become friends again. “I thought you and Dad had a parting of ways.”
Cole’s eyes drifted to the side as he sipped. He took his time before saying, “We patched things up.”
“When?” I mimicked his earlier question.
He stared into his coffee. “When he got sick.”
I blinked. That had only been a couple months ago. Cole had been estranged from my dad almost as long as I had. “What did you two fight about?”
His gaze bored through me for an uncomfortable second. “That’s between him and me.”
Maybe by asking, I’d overstepped the bounds of whatever this was, this coffee-and-catch-up session, but that had hurt. I buried my face in my mug.
“How long you back for?” Cole asked.
“However long it takes to wrap up Dad’s estate.” And not a second longer.
“He leave you much?”
I raised my eyebrows. Seemed a kind of personal question, like asking a guy what he had a falling-out over with one of his best buds. I could have told him it wasn’t any of his business, but in all honestly, I didn’t mind answering. I hardly knew Cole, and yet he kind of felt like family.
I shook my head. “You know Dad. He liked expensive toys.” The beast was parked in the driveway instead of the three-car garage because the bays were already occupied by Dad’s super-duty truck, his snow plow and his beloved Harley, none of which were paid off. He had a top of the line entertainment system up in the shop and another in the den. He might have lived in a cluttered trailer, but he’d paid good money for that clutter, usually money he didn’t have.
“He leave you anything?”
“Probably not,” I admitted. “The gunsmithing business was in the black, and there’s a lot of nice equipment in the shop, but I’m going to have to arrange the sale of this property to cover the medical bills and some other debts. When all the numbers are crunched, who knows.”
