Next of Kin

by Sharon Sala

  “I wish you could stay,” Beth said.

  “I do, too, but remember what we talked about. If someone starts looking into your family history, it won’t take long to find out your folks are dead. As your dad’s oldest brother, I’m the obvious choice to look at, and if I’ve suddenly deviated from my routine in any way, they’ll suspect I’ve taken you into hiding, and then one thing would lead to another, and you know how that would go.”

  Her gut knotted as she thought about Sarah. “The last thing I want is for someone to think you know where I am. They killed my friend because of me. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to any of my family because of this.”

  “None of this is your fault, and we’re not stupid, girl. We’ve covered our backs just fine here. I’m scheduled to pick up a load in Richmond at noon tomorrow. If I stay on schedule, there will be nothing to find.”

  “Okay.”

  He grinned. “Damn right it’s okay. You’re with family now. I’m still dealing with the guilt of not bringing you back home when Sam and Annie were killed, but you were no longer a minor, and I didn’t feel like it was my place to tell you what to do after six years of silence from all of us. In our defense, I will say it’s the way Sam wanted it, but we should have ignored him. We shouldn’t have let him call all the shots, ’specially not once he was dead. However, you’re here now, and nothing and no one’s ever gonna hurt you again. We’ll see to that. Now sit back and relax. We’re less than thirty minutes from the turnoff.”

  Ryal had been waiting close to forty-five minutes when he saw the lights of an eighteen-wheeler come up over a hill on the highway. It wasn’t the first one he’d seen pass by since he’d gotten here, but this one appeared to be slowing down. When he saw the turn signal come on, his muscles tensed. This was good. At least they were making the transfer before the storm hit.

  As soon as the truck came to a complete stop, he got out of his pickup, then stopped by the front fender, watching as the driver climbed out of the big rig’s cab. He recognized Will’s tall, lanky frame as he walked in front of the headlights to the passenger side.

  Ryal shifted from one foot to another, suddenly anxious about what Beth looked like now. Ten years in L.A. could change a lot about a person. He frowned slightly as he waited for their approach.

  And then she stepped out from behind Will and started toward him, backlit by the headlights of the truck. All he could see was a dark, womanly silhouette of long legs, slow, lanky steps and a long swath of hair that swung in perfect opposition to her stride.

  His gut knotted. The closer she got, the faster his heart began to beat. He didn’t know whether to run or stand his ground and take the punishment he felt coming.

  Then she stopped before him, and even though the light wasn’t the best, he saw only the fear and uncertainty in her eyes. When she extended her hand, his attitude shifted from defensiveness to a great sense of wanting to protect.

  “Beth, it’s good to see you again.” He reached for her hand, then caught a glimpse of the raw, ugly cuts and crude bandages, and stopped short. “What happened to your hands?”

  Thinking he’d been disgusted by their condition, she yanked them back against her chest.

  “I fell in an alley near a Dumpster when I was running away from gunfire.”

  Shattered by the matter-of-fact tone in her voice, she undid him.

  “Lord have mercy,” Ryal said softly, then wrapped his arms around her. There were ten long years and some bad family history between them, but right now that could all go to hell. She looked as if she was about to fall apart.

  Breath caught in the back of Beth’s throat. She hadn’t expected this. What was worse, she didn’t want it to stop, but it didn’t last long as thunder suddenly rumbled overhead and Ryal turned her loose.

  “I better get you to your granny Lou’s before she comes looking for the both of us.”

  Unsettled by his tenderness, Beth struggled for a reason to turn away. Her uncle’s need for a hasty exit gave her the excuse she needed as she walked into his arms and hugged him fiercely.

  “Thank you for everything, Uncle Will.”

  Will returned the hug, along with a kiss on the cheek. “You’ve got my number. All you have to do is call and I’ll be here.”

  “I know.”

  Will handed her duffel bag to Ryal. “I don’t have to say it, do I?”

  “No, sir. We’ll take real good care of her.”

  “That’s all I ask,” Will said, as he brushed a lock of hair from Beth’s face. “Trust him, Bethie. Trust all of them. Despite the past, they’re family. They know the mountain. They’ll keep you safe.”

  Ryal touched her arm.

  She jumped.

  “Sorry,” he said, and pointed to the sky. “We need to leave now.”

  Beth quickly climbed into his pickup. He set the duffel bag on the floor beside her feet, then closed the door, shutting her away from the inclement weather.

  The first drops of rain began to fall as Will pulled back onto the highway. Beth watched the taillights of the semi disappearing around the bend, then caught Ryal watching her and shivered.

  “It’s gonna be okay. I promise,” he said.

  Beth wanted to scream at him—to tell him that, for her, nothing would ever be okay again, certainly not between them—but it was painfully obvious he’d long ago gotten over her, so she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing he could still hurt her.

  She had yet to see his face clearly. Even now it was barely highlighted by the dashboard light. But his voice was like warm whiskey on a cold night, and she kept remembering what his lips felt like on her skin when they made love.

  Ryal started his pickup and turned around. In moments they hit the gravel. The road they were on looked like a dark scar on the mountain, but the farther up they drove, the heavier the woods became and the safer she began to feel. It was as if the mountain itself was sheltering her. She shivered.

  “Are you cold?” he asked, and reached toward the dash to turn on the heater.

  “No, just exhausted and scared half out of my life.”

  “I’m really sorry, Beth. This is a hell of a thing to be going through.”

  “I need to hide. Can you hide me, Ryal?”

  “Yes, and I will. In fact, we’re all in this together. Every Walker on Rebel Ridge knows what happened to you, and every one of them is ready to help at a moment’s notice.”

  She shuddered, then leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.

  “I didn’t know anyone back here even remembered I existed.”

  Ryal’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel as the wind began to blow a little harder. There was anger in her voice, which didn’t make any sense. She might not have had a choice about leaving, but she was the one who’d chosen not to come back.

  “We’ll be at Lou’s in a few minutes. I hope we beat the storm. It would add insult to injury if I brought you back cold and wet, now, wouldn’t it?”

  Beth frowned. So he was ignoring her comment. Fine. Two could play that game.

  Six

  The farther up the mountain Ryal drove, the more anxious Beth became. Her memories of Granny Lou were wrapped up in childish things. The molasses cookies Granny Lou kept in an old brown bean pot. The cool taste of spring water from her well. The scent of clean sheets dried on a line outside as Beth snuggled into bed and closed her eyes.

  Lightning flashed on the ridge up ahead. She flinched at the crack of thunder that followed.

  “We’re okay. Remember, storms are always loud up here,” Ryal said, wanting to reassure her.

  Beth glanced at his profile as he drove—his hands steady on the steering wheel, his gaze firm and straight ahead. She was curious about the man he’d become. Despite the broken bond of their relationship, he’d answered her grandmother’s call without hesitation. The word dependable came to mind. And then he sensed her look and momentarily took his eyes off the road to meet her gaze. Startle
d to have been caught staring, she quickly looked away, hoping he hadn’t seen more than curiosity in her expression.

  When he began slowing down, she leaned forward, anxious for that first glimpse of her granny Lou’s home.

  “We’re here,” he said, as he turned up a narrow one-lane road and into a clearing where a small, two-story log cabin with a big front porch sat nestled among a stand of tall pines.

  The porch light was on, and the curtained windows were backlit from within, giving the home a welcome feeling. Then she saw a woman move away from the door and come down the steps. The growing wind had plastered the skirt of her dress to her legs and was pulling wisps of gray hair from the braid wrapped around her head like a crown, but Beth would have known that tall, spare figure anywhere.

  “Granny Lou.”

  Lou Venable had been a widow for nearly thirty years. She’d come to this house built on the side of Rebel Ridge as a newlywed with her husband, Doyle, and raised four children—two boys and two girls. Years later she’d buried Doyle and then, four years ago, buried her son Sam and his wife, Annie. Their deaths had nearly killed her. Just the thought that now someone was stalking her granddaughter made her physically ill, and she wasn’t going to feel easy until she saw her again.

  Another rumble of thunder sounded outside. She glanced at the clock as she paced the floor. The storm was getting closer and Ryal still wasn’t here. Her imagination was in overdrive, fearing everything from Will wrecking his truck to a breakdown on the side of the highway, which, in theory, could give the people who wanted Beth dead time to catch up. She paused to look out the front windows as she had a dozen times before, when all of a sudden lights swept across the trees at the end of the drive.

  Someone was turning in. It had to be Ryal!

  She flipped the switch on the porch light and stepped outside, then immediately regretted the lack of a sweater as a chill wind engulfed her. She glanced up at the rolling clouds highlighted by intermittent lightning strikes and shivered. The storm was upon them.

  As the truck stopped at the edge of the yard, she came down off the porch, then stopped. When Ryal got out then ran around to the passenger side and opened the door, she frowned. He seemed to be helping Beth out of the truck. Was she hurt in some way? Then she focused on a tall woman with dark hair who turned and looked toward the house, and her vision blurred. It was like looking at a female version of Sam. “Bethie girl, is that you?”

  For Beth, everything after that seemed to happen in slow motion. Getting out of Ryal’s pickup as the storm bore down upon them…the feel of Granny Lou’s arms around her…the sweetness of her grandmother’s kiss before she hurried them both inside.

  “Just in time!” Ryal said, following them in as the sound of raindrops began hitting the roof.

  He set Beth’s bag against the wall, then turned to face her. That was when his thoughts scattered. He’d seen her face by moonlight, then by the dashboard light of his pickup, but seeing her in this light added a whole new layer of intrigue.

  There was no mistaking she was a Venable. She had long legs and dark hair, with eyes the color of milk chocolate, and he saw Annie in the curve of her cheek and the stubborn cut of her chin. The young Beth Venable he’d fallen in love with had grown into a beautiful woman.

  It was a time of understanding for Lou, as well. When she saw Beth’s hands in the full light, she understood why Ryal had helped her down from his pickup truck. The palms looked as if they’d been shredded. Parts of them were beginning to heal, but she could only imagine how painful it was for Beth to clench her fingers.

  “Bethie…darlin’, what happened to your hands?”

  Safe now after the terror of the past few days, relief welled up inside her as she started to shake, then spilled out in the hot, blinding tears rolling down her face.

  “After the shooting began at the third safe house, I jumped out my bedroom window and began running. I stayed in the alleys where it was dark, running from block to block to get as far away from that place as I could before they realized I was gone. I was running through an alley when I tripped on something and fell on the debris beside a Dumpster.”

  “Honey, honey, I’m so sorry this is happening to you, but you’re no longer alone. You’re with family now, and we won’t let you down.” Lou smoothed the windblown wisps of Beth’s hair away from her face. “You need to get some food in your belly and then into bed. The bathroom is the last door on the right down the hall. I’m going to warm up some stew and corn bread. Ryal, I’m expecting you to stay the night. No need driving home in this weather when you’d only have to come back in the morning anyway.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ryal said, grateful he wouldn’t be driving farther up the mountain in the storm.

  Beth swayed on her feet as Lou left the room.

  Ryal caught her. Again their gazes met, but this time Beth didn’t look away.

  Ryal wanted to pull her closer. Instead he let go and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Do you need help?”

  Beth shook her head, quelling the urge to just close her eyes and lean on someone else for a change. “I can manage. I’m just a little tired.”

  “I’ll go help Lou.”

  Beth turned around and headed for the bathroom.

  Ryal watched her walk away, but his heart was heavy as he headed for the kitchen.

  The food Lou served was simple—rabbit stew with small potatoes and carrots, and a wedge of hot-buttered corn bread, but to Beth, it could have been filet mignon. She hadn’t had food like this in years, but she remembered the taste, and it was good.

  Being back in this house, she also began remembering Sunday dinners with her parents and the rest of the family, and wading in the creek below the house with her cousins, while the men played horseshoes and the women sat on the porch in the shade, and cheered and jeered for their hits and misses. After she got older and began noticing boys, it was always Ryal Walker who caught her eye.

  Their first kiss had been behind this very house. Beth remembered the warm feel of his lips on hers, and how it had started to snow as they’d quietly pulled apart. There had been a look in his eyes that she’d never forgotten. He’d wanted her in the way that a man wants a woman, but he’d never pushed. Instead, he had let Beth lead the way, giving her all the freedom she needed to feel safe with him. And when they’d finally made love that next spring, it had been magic.

  She sat quietly, thinking of the day her family had left Rebel Ridge, and how she’d cried and begged her father to take her back, insisting that she didn’t want to leave Ryal. But he’d just kept telling her that she was too young to know what she wanted, and that they were a family and family stuck together.

  Lou laughed at something Ryal was saying, and Beth watched the laugh lines deepen at the sides of her grandmother’s face. Lou Venable had laughed a lot in her life, and it showed. But there were frown lines dug just as deep into the flesh between her eyes. She was also a woman who’d known great grief, yet somehow life had taught her how to live with both without breaking.

  That was something Beth had never really mastered: how to laugh within the pain. She kept thinking about how solitary her life and her parents’ lives had become after they moved to L.A. Even when Sam and Annie were still alive, the three of them had lived an insular existence. No large Sunday dinners—no friends over from the neighborhood. It was just the three of them behind the walls of the house Sam rented. They did nothing that would indicate they were putting down roots.

  After the wreck, and after she’d finally healed and Uncle Will had helped her get set up in her own apartment, it had never occurred to her to come back here for a visit. Sometime during the past ten years, Beth had reached the conclusion that they were unwelcome here. Now, listening to her granny and Ryal talking about their families in such a fond and loving way, she realized that living in L.A. had felt like being in exile because her mama and daddy had never talked about Kentucky again.

  “Granny?”

&nb
sp; Lou was still smiling from something Ryal had said when she turned to answer her granddaughter.

  “What, honey girl?”

  “Why did Mama and Daddy really move away from Rebel Ridge? I thought for years it was because I pushed them too hard to accept Ryal, even though he was older.” Beth’s face flushed, but she wouldn’t look at him.

  Lou glanced at Ryal, her face flushing slightly as she lifted her chin. “What did they tell you?”

  “That they didn’t want me growing up here. Daddy said there weren’t any good men on this mountain except his own brothers, and since he didn’t want to work the mines and there were no other job opportunities, they moved away and made me go with them.”

  “That’s not entirely the truth,” Lou said.

  “Then what is the truth?”

  Lou glanced at Ryal again.

  Finally he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table between them. “What your granny doesn’t want to say, because it could be construed as a slur against my side of the family, is that your mama, who was a Walker, had an affair with her sister’s husband. Your granny talked Sam out of killing his own brother-in-law, but then Sam surprised everyone, including Annie, by moving all of you to the other side of the country. I guess your daddy no longer trusted your mama. They didn’t move because of us. They moved because of Annie’s affair.”

  Beth was stunned, but it explained a lot of the sadness she’d always felt between them. Then something occurred to her.

  “Was the affair before I was born?”

  “Oh, my Lordy, no,” Granny said. “You’re Sam’s child. You know that. All you have to do is look in a mirror.”

  Beth sighed, relieved that she still knew who she was, but this also meant that her parents had lied to her. They hadn’t been upset to find out that she and Ryal had been making love. Ryal hadn’t crossed a line. Her mother had. However, she wasn’t about to ask him how he felt now, especially in front of her granny.