by Sophie Gunn
It was like being with Emily all over again. He couldn’t bring another woman into his mangled life. Let’s make love, and then I’ll go outside and sit in my truck and fight the waves of regret. You just make yourself at home…
He had tried to hide the pain when he had been with Emily, but it had turned him into a liar, which he despised almost as much as the guilt. He had been a person acting as if he cared what he ate and what movie he saw and what color the new bedspread would be when inside, he couldn’t muster the effort to care about any of that because all he thought about was the accident and what he’d done and how he could never turn it back.
So he had hurt Emily. Badly. The second innocent victim of the crash, of him. They had plans to get married, kids, the works.
Until his life had narrowed to wanting only two things: to make it right with Candy and to get through the never-ending minutes of his days.
So he’d stopped pretending. Stopped trying to hide anything. And she’d, rightfully, left him.
Had he actually kissed Lizzie? Brought her into his narrow, starved world?
Of course he had, he could still feel her lips against his.
But Lizzie didn’t deserve halfway to normal. She deserved a normal man—one who could kiss her without pulling back, without feeling crippling pain. One who could love her without hating himself. One who didn’t roam the streets at night, or wade the freezing water of the gorges all day. She didn’t deserve a man who couldn’t show his face in Galton. A man who had to leave as quickly as possible as soon as he got that money because Candy didn’t deserve worrying about running into him.
Dune leaned against him and moaned softly, as if protesting Tay’s thoughts, as if saying, So what’s so bad about forgetting the past and moving on? I do it all the time. Forgot yesterday, even forgot this morning. Is it time to eat again…?
He kneaded the back of the dog’s neck. “I know, boy. I know. Let’s get out of here before I go back in there and—”
Dune rotated one ear his way.
Yeah, and kiss her again, he thought. Kiss her until neither one of us can see straight and the world falls away and nothing matters. Not the past, not the future, just her lips on mine…
Great, now he could even taste and smell her when she wasn’t anywhere near.
He waited for the guilt to crush him.
It came; it crushed.
And he wanted to imagine Lizzie all over again.
But this wasn’t a healthy cycle.
He had to fix things before he got involved with anyone, especially someone who lived in the town that Candy lived in, so he pushed her out of his mind.
Find the money and go! Leave these innocent women alone.
He drove off into the night, swearing he’d never bother Lizzie again.
CHAPTER
16
Later that night, Lizzie heard someone banging on her front door.
Despite the embarrassment that still lingered over what had happened in the bar—what had happened in the bar?—Lizzie hoped that it was Tay. Maybe his super-fixit powers had been alerted that the oven light had just exploded. She had flicked it on two seconds ago to check the frozen pizza she was passing off as dinner tonight. The hollow pop and subsequent darkness seemed about as much fanfare as her dinner deserved, but she was dead-tired from the first full weeks of serving students back from their summer break. The Galton U. undergrads were ravenous, like migrating birds that hadn’t eaten since they’d left Galton last spring. Whenever the students came back to town, Galton became a different place and it took some adjusting. When Lizzie was younger, she’d preferred the summer emptiness. Now, she preferred the school-year tips, even if she was worn to a frazzle by five o’clock.
The banging on the door grew louder. Paige wasn’t going to move from the couch in front of the blaring TV unless she knew it was the pizza man.
At the door, Lizzie whispered an ardent prayer: Please don’t let it be Judy Roth complaining about the raking again. The sugar maples out front had begun to drop their leaves in earnest. Judy, Lizzie’s across-the-street neighbor, couldn’t stand that Lizzie didn’t hover all day on the front lawn waiting for them with a net to fall one by one. They had the same “talk” every year about how Lizzie’s leaves blew onto the neighbors’ lawns, which according to Judy wasn’t fair. The neighbors all had lawn services that blasted loud, exhaust-spewing leaf blowers that frightened all the birds off Lizzie’s feeders. As far as Lizzie was concerned, she and her neighbors were even.
She looked out reluctantly.
Annie was at the front door with Meghan on one hip, an enormous brown bag on the other, and—
Lizzie checked again just to be sure, then threw open the door. “Annie? Is that you? I hardly recognize you. Are you—” She almost didn’t dare say the word. “Smiling?”
“Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” Annie waltzed in the door. She practically tossed a cooing Meghan to Lizzie and went straight for the kitchen. “I brought Chinese. Trade you the baby for your fortune cookie.”
“I get a fortune cookie,” Paige said, zooming into the kitchen from her spot in front of the TV, freed from her trance by the smell of chicken and broccoli. Paige was still in her school clothes—tight jeans and layered multicolored camisoles. “Hi, Aunt Annie. Did I ever tell you you’re the world’s best aunt? And you’re the world’s best baby, aren’t you aren’t you aren’t you?” Paige cooed at Meghan, who rewarded her with an enormous one-toothed grin. A brief scuffle for possession of Meghan ensued. Lizzie won with her patented elbow-and-spin.
“Penalty!” Paige complained.
“All’s fair in love and babies,” Lizzie said, bouncing Meghan.
“I could bring a million bucks in here, and you guys would only care about the baby,” Annie groused. But Lizzie could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Her sister gazed in wonder at Meghan as if she were a brand-new baby, nothing at all to do with that other baby who’d depressed the hell out of her sister for the last six months.
Paige pulled the half-frozen pizza out of the oven and dumped it into the trash. “What happened to the light?”
“Dead.”
Paige shrugged. “Another soldier down. Soon we’re going to be living by candlelight.”
“I can replace a lightbulb,” Lizzie insisted.
“Yeah,” Paige said. “But you won’t. Because you’ll have to get some special bulb, which means a special trip to a special store, and you’ll be too tired and you’ll never do it.”
“You could replace it,” Lizzie suggested.
“Fat chance,” Paige said.
“So, to what do we owe this honor?” Lizzie asked, turning her attention to Annie.
“It’s not so weird, me coming by,” Annie protested.
“No. Not weird at all, er, what’s your name again?” Lizzie asked. Meghan grinned and giggled in her arms. Lizzie tickled her stomach to elicit a squeal. “What did you do to your mommy to make her happy again? Hmmm? Diaper-train yourself? Or maybe you got into Galton U. Very, very, very early admission you smart, smart baby…”
Paige pulled the high chair they kept for Meghan out of the corner while Annie got to work unloading the food from the grease-stained brown bag. The kitchen smelled divine.
“Oh, let’s just say I came into a little extra cash,” Annie said.
They plopped around the table and dug into the food straight from the cartons, passing them from hand to hand. Poor Meghan had to settle for mashed banana and grains of plain rice. She didn’t seem to mind.
Lizzie said, “So, spill. Where’d you get the money for our feast?”
“I found it,” Annie said. “On the ground. Just lying there.”
“Oh, thank heavens. I thought it was something much worse. Prostitution is so sad amongst the middle-aged–mommy set,” Lizzie said. She snagged an eggroll from the bag. “Cover your ears, Paige, dear.”
“I thought she was dealing drugs,” Paige said. “Using Meghan as a cover, like in that G
oodfellas movie where they stuff the drugs in the diaper bag. What do you have in your diaper bag, Aunt Annie? I think I hear police helicopters.”
Annie choked on her rice.
Lizzie whacked her on the back. “You okay?”
After a sip of water, Annie coughed out, “Fine. I think there was a stone in my rice.”
“You really found money, Aunt Annie? How much? Like, forty bucks? A hundred?” Paige asked. “Can I borrow some? I so need a new snowboard for Geneva and Mom says no.”
Lizzie and Annie met eyes over the cartons. They hadn’t talked in so long, Lizzie hadn’t told her about Paige’s constantly escalating plans.
Lizzie shrugged apologetically.
“Suppose you found some money just lying around, Paige. What would you do about it?” Annie pointed her eggroll at Paige.
Lizzie was grateful to her sister for steering the subject away from Geneva and Paige’s father. She wanted this to be a happy meal. It had been so long since she’d seen Annie smile.
“Keep it,” Paige said without missing a beat. “Buy a snowboard. Dumbass drops money, they don’t deserve it.”
“Your uncle Tommy wouldn’t agree,” Annie said, peering into the carton of lo mein as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. Something was still off with Annie, but Lizzie couldn’t put her finger on exactly what. She was manic, too hyped-up. Something was on her mind.
“He wants you to turn it in?” Lizzie asked. “How much did you say you found?”
“I haven’t told him about it. But don’t change the subject. What do you think I should do?”
“Tommy would insist you give it up to the authorities. His policeman’s code of honor is in his DNA,” Lizzie said. It felt like Christmas to see Annie smiling after months of depression. She wanted to know what had changed her. Could it really be something as simple as some cash she found on the ground? It seemed unlikely.
“But would he be right?” Annie asked.
Lizzie thought about saying that Tommy was too trusting. Anyone could see you pick up the money, then say it was theirs, and then what? Would you believe them and give it back? And Paige had a point, too. You had to be responsible for your things. She searched for the right words. “Of course, Tommy’d be right. You shouldn’t keep what isn’t yours. You have a responsibility to at least try to return it. Good people drop money by mistake, too. Maybe it belonged to a mother who now can’t buy dinner for her twelve sick, starving children.” Lizzie put down the last bite of the eggroll she was about to stuff into her mouth. “I don’t think I’m hungry anymore.”
Annie pushed the duck sauce at Lizzie. “Eat. No one is starving. Trust me.”
“Okay, so say a mom dropped it. She would still be an idiot for doing that,” Paige said. “Her kids would be better off learning early on not to depend on a mother who was careless like that. They’d learn to fight for themselves and be independent. So we get to keep it. Pass the rice.”
Lizzie tried to keep her mouth shut, tried to let it pass. But her mouth opened and she said, “Is that wisdom from your life? You learned to fight for yourself because your mother let you down?”
Paige let her head fall back and she moaned like a small animal dying a painful, bloody death. “God, Aunt Annie. She’s been so touchy ever since she told me about my dad coming to get me.”
Lizzie said, “He’s coming to meet you. Not get you.”
“You don’t know that,” Paige insisted to Lizzie, then turned to Annie. “See? She’s totally defensive. She thinks I’m going to split on her and go live with my dad. And so what if I do? Is that so bad? This town sucks. He’s in Europe! Near the Alps! I can make my dreams come true!”
Lizzie and Paige’s discussion about Ethan spiraled into an argument about wishes and trusting strangers and what language did they speak in Geneva, anyway…
Annie’s attention returned to the two hundred thousand dollars stuffed in Meghan’s diaper bag. She had imagined telling Tommy about the money, but Lizzie was right. His policeman’s code of honor was in his DNA. He’d want her to turn it in to the authorities, no doubt about it.
Because he was the authority.
She had spent the last weeks counting the money, smelling it. She’d even given a pack to Meghan, who tried to eat it. “No, honey. You can’t eat hundred-dollar bills until after you show me you can handle ones and twenties. Don’t want to upset the tummy!” She had piled it in a stack that reached to her waist until it had toppled over, to Meghan’s delight. She’d even given in to her urge to roll in it. Just for a second or two, before she’d blushed and jumped up and straightened the small packets back into neat little piles.
She’d tried to keep the money at home, but it was starting to eat at her. Tommy was the kind of guy who noticed everything. It was what made him excellent at police work, but made Annie jumpy when she did anything not 100 percent aboveboard. Last April, she’d tried to throw him a surprise birthday party, but he’d discovered the party plates and streamers in the garage. He said he had noticed that the spiderwebs were broken in the top left-hand cabinet, and it had struck him as odd.
Who notices things like that?
So Annie had stashed the cash in the far back of the hall closet, careful to check for webs. But after a few days, she knew the money had to go. She felt as if she had a man in the closet and he was wearing leather undies. On his head. And was dancing the rumba.
Tommy was way too uptight and honest for a ménage-a-two-hundred-thousand-dollars.
She spent days agonizing over what to do with it. She considered taking the money to the bank. But she and Tommy knew every teller at the credit union. She could go to the new Citizen’s Bank downtown, but she wasn’t sure what kind of alerts went off if you suddenly opened a new account with that much cash, and she wasn’t about to find out.
So she had finally decided to hide it at Lizzie’s until she knew what to do with it. Once the decision was made, her elation at finding the money returned. It was perfect. This house had been her childhood home, a warren of unused rooms that she knew every crevice of like the back of her hand.
Lizzie and Paige were still at it, arguing over what language they spoke in Geneva and whether Paige could add German to her schedule this late in the year or if her French was enough.
Annie jumped up from the table. “Meghan needs a diaper. I’ll be right back.” She grabbed a protesting Meghan and the diaper bag and raced up the stairs.
She rushed into the spare bedroom and put Meghan on her back in the middle of the rag rug, handed her a rattle, and opened the closet.
The ancient laundry chute was still in the back, just the way she remembered it. Tommy had propped a flimsy sheet of plywood over it when he had moved her parents’ laundry out of the basement years ago. But her parents had gotten sick so quickly afterward, Tommy had never gotten the chance to properly close it up. Then her parents had died, Lizzie inherited the house, and her stubborn sister forbade Tommy to work on anything anymore. No charity for Lizzie Bea Carpenter, no matter how badly she needed it.
She was letting her house—their house!—go to hell.
Which for this one moment was good. Annie pushed aside three paper grocery bags filled with Paige’s old jeans and T-shirts, shoved aside the plywood board, and jammed the bag into the chute. It stuck firm, just as she knew it would. Good enough for now. She’d come back when no one was home and figure out a better spot. She quickly rearranged the bags, grabbed Meghan, and rushed back to their guilty feast, feeling somehow vindicated.
As if she finally had something that was all her own.
CHAPTER
17
Paige put the bag of chips she’d been munching aside, got down on her knees, and pushed the plywood panel off the laundry chute.
She felt slightly sick at the sight of the diaper bag stuffed inside. She hadn’t wanted to be right, but she didn’t realize it until just then.
She had known something was wrong last week when Aunt Annie had p
ractically dropped her lo mein and grabbed Meghan to rush her upstairs as if she was on fire. Later that night, Paige had done some investigating, and there hadn’t been a dirty diaper in the bathroom trash. Why would Aunt Annie run upstairs like a wild woman to change Meghan and then not change her? She wouldn’t exactly take a gross diaper home with her; they had a special trash can upstairs in the bathroom just for Meghan.
The lie bothered Paige the next few days at school. That and the weird look Aunt Annie got on her face when they were talking about Goodfellas and the drugs in the diaper bag, the police helicopters circling.
And then, in science today, when Mr. Denning was droning on and on about forming hypotheses, Paige tried to form her own hypothesis. That was when she realized that Aunt Annie had come back downstairs without the diaper bag. Paige had run the scene over and over in her head.
She didn’t know what was going on, but she could hypothesize—something. But what? She needed more facts.
Paige couldn’t wait to get home. She had run all the way, grabbed some chips from the kitchen, and headed right upstairs to look around.
She had searched the entire upstairs before she remembered the old laundry chute in the spare bedroom that used to be her grandparents’ room. She had used that chute to hide stuff when she was a kid. There was a little catch just inside that you could hook things on if you wanted and sometimes, when her stuffed animals had been bad, she’d hang them there in “time-out” till they learned their lessons. When she was ten, after she had started suspecting her mother of reading her journal, she had tied a string around the small book and hung it in there. She had marked the plywood with a tiny X that she made sure was always in the lower-left corner to see if anyone had disturbed it.
Someone had propped the board upside down.
Aunt Annie. Her breath had caught in her throat.
Hypothesis: Aunt Annie was sneaking upstairs to read her fifth-grade diary. Was the diary even still there? Paige hadn’t thought about it in years.
