She tried to nod and agree. But her head ached, and she couldn’t pay attention to Gabe, even though he held her quivering chin in one hand and stared straight into her eyes as he spoke. His words didn’t make any sense, anyway. They were mixed up, backwards, not the truth at all.
Summer tried to focus on Joe’s face. “I can’t remember what happened that night.”
Before he could answer, Margaret delivered their sandwiches, greasy Reubens with greasier fries on the side. Joe took a few bites. Finally he harrumphed, and his mouth twitched as if he was trying to figure out the right words. “That might not be a bad thing. Not remembering, that is. I think you’re very lucky that time, or pain, or a combination of both, has blocked out the accident.”
She shook her head. That might have worked for the last ten years. But things had changed. “I want to remember,” she said. “I need to know.”
Why the urge now gripped her so tightly, she had no idea. Maybe it was the memories spiraling through her more and more since she’d set foot on the East Coast. Maybe it was seeing the cemetery gate rising out of the trees behind the house. Or maybe it was a combination of all of the above, along with being thrust into her past without realizing she was missing so many of the pieces that made it up.
“Tell me,” she said. “You must remember something that came out afterwards. Something the cops or the newspapers said.”
“I don’t know much, really. You and Gabe had taken Donny to the drive-in.”
“I do remember that. We went for ice cream, and then he wanted to see the new Bruce Willis movie with us. Donny thought Gabe was the coolest guy on the planet.” So did I.
“Yep. So then it was eleven-thirty or so, and you were all headed home, far as anyone can tell.”
She nodded. We were going to drop Donny off and then go back to Gabe’s lake house...
“No one saw the collision. Mamie and Herb Talbot were on their way home from visiting their grandkids in Silver Valley. They got to you a few minutes after it happened and called it in.”
“I don’t remember them being there.”
“You and Gabe were out of the car by the time they found you, banged up but walking around.” His brows drew together. “At first the cops couldn’t figure out why you both got out so fast, but you were looking for Donny, of course. He was thrown from the car.”
Summer closed her eyes and tried to summon the memory. I thought Donny was in the backseat. “He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt?”
Joe shook his head. “Medics found him a few yards away. Said he probably died on impact.”
But that couldn’t be true. Summer frowned. “I heard him talking, calling for me, after we were hit.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible.”
She didn’t speak, though she’d just remembered something else. She and Gabe hadn’t gotten out of the car to look for Donny. She would put her hand on a Bible and swear to that. They both thought he was still strapped into the backseat. She’d told her little brother a hundred times to wear his seat belt, even in the back. Then why, bleeding and dizzy, would she and Gabe have unstrapped their seat belts and crawled out of a twisted piece of metal?
“Summer, get out of the car. Now.” Gabe pulled at her arm.
“I can’t.” Things hurt, like her head and her left arm. And her ankle.
“Yes, you can.” The seat belt snapped free from her shoulder. “Come on.” He dragged her across the seat and out the open door.
Did he think the car was going to explode? She didn’t recall any smell of gas or smoke. Summer grabbed at it, a murky reason that swam at the very edge of her memory. There was something wrong that night. She and Gabe had taken Donny out before. As long as they were home before midnight, her father didn’t care. Gabe was the best driver she knew. He never sped or took turns too fast, not with her or Donny in the car. That was part of the reason she hadn’t fought too hard when her father made her wait to get her junior license.
But something had happened earlier in the night, something unexpected, that changed their plans. What was it?
Joe picked up his sandwich. “You had a sprained ankle and some bad cuts from hitting the windshield. They thought you might have a concussion too, so they kept you at the hospital overnight for observation. He cleared his throat. “Gabe, though—”
“Where is he buried?”
“Sorry?”
“Donny. Do you know where his grave is? My father never told me.”
“Ah, yes. Of course.” And he told her, right down to the last detail about the spread of wildflowers that grew under the biggest pine tree in the cemetery.
THE ROAD CURVED AWAY from town and became more overgrown the farther in she drove. Evergreens arched toward her car and blocked the sun. They scraped their branches along her windows. A dust cloud rose up behind her.
By the time Summer parked in front of All Saints’ black gates, clouds had gathered and turned the afternoon gloomy. Thunder rumbled as she opened the door and tested the ground. Good thing she’d worn sensible running shoes today rather than designer heels. She walked across the road and stopped under the curved wrought iron letters. Her chest tightened.
“Miss Thompson, can you tell us who was driving the car?” Chief Walters put one hand on her shoulder. She stared at a piece of metal at her feet. It looked like it might have been a mirror, or part of a door panel ripped away in the impact. Her head hurt.
“Summer?”
She looked up. Above them a solitary stoplight blinked, red one way, yellow the other. Of course she knew who’d been driving. What kind of a question was that? She looked past the police chief at the bleary-eyed man who stumbled on the side of the road. The front of his truck was badly dented, and the windshield had shattered. Blood dripped from a cut on his head and his mouth.
“Mr. Hartwell,” she whispered. In a breath, she indicted the elementary school custodian.
The policeman nodded and closed his notebook.
Summer stepped inside the gates. Follow the path on the right, Joe had told her. It goes all the way to the back. Two big pines are standing in the northeast corner. Donny’s buried right underneath.
It took her less than a minute to find it.
She drew in a breath and dropped to her knees. A simple stone with simple printing rose a few inches off the ground. She pulled at the weeds that choked the letters of his name. Donald Francis Thompson. Beloved Son. Bright Angel. Forever Missed.
Here at the back of the cemetery, she heard nothing except a whisper of wind through the trees. She glanced at the stones around her and saw familiar names: Hadley, Simpson, Graves, Bernstein. A few hundred yards away, wilting flowers surrounded a new swell of ground. She leaned over and laid her cheek on Donny’s plain white marker. As she knelt there, the sun came out again. Eyes closed, she felt its warmth on one side of her face, a granite chill on the other.
“I miss you.”
His stone didn’t say beloved brother, and yet he’d been just that. The tagalong, the tease, the grass-stained kid who caught snakes and hid them in her closet. The baseball player. The country music lover. The round-eyed face that listened to her problems, the sweet kid who brought her breakfast in bed every year on her birthday.
One week past thirteen, he’d left her. Summer let her fingers trace the letters and dig into the edges that had worn smooth with time and wind. At twenty-eight she’d lived more than two whole lives to Donny’s one. Nothing seemed more unfair.
After a long while, she sat back on her heels. At least her father had picked a good spot, quiet and private, surrounded by trees. It overlooked a sloping hill that led down to a stream. Not a bad place, if you had to choose. Of course, Ronald Thompson shouldn’t have had to. His son shouldn’t have been in the ground at all; he should have been finishing college, starting a job, bringing home a girl, sketching out a life.
Summer stood and glanced over her shoulder. Above the trees rose the top of the mansion. Her mansion. She recognized the o
utline and the way three stories speared the clouds. She couldn’t hear anything, and yet she knew Mac and Damian were working less than a mile from where she stood.
Something inside her chest thawed. I can see it from here. She pushed her hair behind her ears and realized for the first time that maybe her father hadn’t bought the house so he could stand on the second floor landing and see the ground that held his dead son. Maybe he’d bought it so that someone standing in this open grassy area could look up and catch the glimpse of a familiar silhouette in one of the windows. Or so that someone sleeping here could sense that family lived and breathed and loved just a short distance away. Maybe that kind of connection went both ways.
So many questions. So many pieces that didn’t fit the puzzle inside her head. Summer blinked with realization. She hadn’t changed her flight just so she could find a way for the Knights to stay in their farmhouse. She’d changed her flight because she couldn’t leave Whispering Pines until she knew exactly what had happened the night her brother died.
Chapter Sixteen
The following night, Summer and Gabe sat in a corner of Marc’s Grille. Around them, plush chairs and elegant place settings waited for the dinner crowd to arrive. She shifted and adjusted her blue silk sundress. She pulled a dinner roll in half and separated it into smaller and smaller pieces without eating it. Crumbs fell onto her plate as she looked past Gabe, through the restaurant’s front window. Outside stretched a quarter-mile block of spotless storefronts, manicured landscaping and wrought-iron benches. Posh boutiques and cozy bars had replaced the rambling cornfields of her childhood. This new avenue, Park Place Run, looked like it had been lifted from the east side of some upscale city and transplanted amid the hills and farmland.
She barely recognized it. Then again, sometimes she barely recognized herself these days.
“I won’t bite,” Gabe said.
Summer felt herself color. “Sorry. It’s just been a long day.” That was the truth, anyway. She’d spent the morning with Sadie going over paperwork and the afternoon on the phone with the museum. The only thing that had surprised her more than Gabe’s message for her at the motel desk was the fact that she’d called him back and agreed to dinner. Now she wondered if she’d made a mistake in doing so.
The front door opened, and Summer smiled and waved at the couple that entered. The young woman took a step toward their table and then stopped. With a tight smile, she laced her fingers through her husband’s and pulled him toward the hostess stand instead.
Summer frowned. “That was weird.”
“What?”
“That’s Alyssa Reynolds. Or Williams now, I guess. Didn’t you play ball with the guy she married? Frank?”
“Yeah.” Gabe dug into his salad.
“She just totally ignored me.”
“Don’t worry about it. You know how people can be in a small town.”
“I thought they were nice.”
“They still are nice. They just keep to themselves.”
“But she didn’t even say hello.” Surely Alyssa remembered her. They’d sung together in the school choir for three years.
“Maybe she’s not sure what to say. You haven’t been back in a long time, and you left under, you know, not the best circumstances. People might feel a little awkward.”
“I guess.” Summer pushed lettuce leaves around her plate. “This is a beautiful place,” she said after a minute.
“It is.” Gabe set down his fork and studied her. “The owner worked hard to get it going.”
Conversation lapsed into silence. She had so many questions she wanted to ask and no idea where to begin. The waitress came and cleared their salad plates. An open bottle of wine sat on the table between them. Gabe split it between their glasses and sent it away, empty.
The front door opened again, and this time Grant Knicke walked in. The former elementary school principal held hands with a little girl decked out in a ballerina’s tutu and princess crown. A slender woman followed them, carrying a toddler on her shoulders.
“Oh, there’s Mr. Knicke. And Mandy and her kids.” With a stash of lollipops in his desk drawer, Mr. Knicke had headed up the only school in town where kids actually tried to get into trouble, just so they could spend ten minutes in his spacious corner office.
He glanced at Summer, and she thought she saw recognition in his eyes. She pushed her chair back, meaning to go over and say hello. He nodded in her direction, looked briefly at Gabe and then patted his granddaughter’s shoulder and steered her to the other side of the restaurant.
What’s going on here? She tried to shrug off the paranoia. Maybe Gabe was right. Maybe people didn’t know what to say to her. When her salmon arrived, she speared it with a fork, glad for the distraction. “So how did you end up working as a paramedic?”
Gabe sliced his filet mignon. “They needed more guys in the corps, and they had a program where they paid for my training. Figured it’d be as good a job as any.”
“It never gets to you? Especially after what happened to us?”
“That’s part of the reason I chose it.”
“Oh.” Her heart crept into her throat. “Well, you’re braver than I am.” Ask him. Ask him what really happened that night.
He smiled. “Or dumber. Haven’t really figured it out yet. How did you get into...whatever it is that you do?”
“I’m a curator for a small museum in San Francisco.”
“Ah. That makes sense. You always were a history buff back in school. All those dates and details. You like it?”
“Love it. I get to arrange exhibits, do some research, set up shows and workshops for kids in the local schools...”
“Sounds cool.”
“It is.”
More silence. She pushed away her fish, half eaten, and leaned back in her chair. “So are you dating anyone?” Her gaze dropped to his left hand. No ring. “Girlfriend? Fiancée?”
He chuckled. “Nah. Playing the field, that’s all. No one came close to you.”
She winked. “Of course they didn’t.” But a familiar ache rolled around her heart and fell away. “No one, really? Not even a kinda-sorta once-in-a-while kind of gal?”
He shrugged. “I hooked up with Tara Hadley for a while, if you can believe it.”
“I can, actually. She’s gorgeous.”
He made a face. “It was years ago. She ended up leaving me for some older guy. She got bored with him, so we started going out again. We’d go out for a few months, break up, get back together a few months later...until about two or three years ago. She went on a trip to Jamaica with her sisters and came back married.”
“Seriously?”
“Lasted about a year. Long enough for the guy to get his green card and dump her. Since then, we don’t really talk.”
Summer wondered about that. Relationships that wandered through the years rarely ended with neat corners and final goodbyes. She knew that better than anyone.
They finished dinner and ordered coffee, full-strength for both of them.
“When did you start drinking the hard stuff?” she asked. He’d always hated coffee back in high school, even when all his friends started drinking it mornings after a big game or a bigger party.
“After the accident.”
And just like that, the ice broke. The past swerved into the present, and everything came rushing back.
Summer sat without moving while Gabe stared into his coffee. Steam rose into the air. She reached for his hand, and he let her take it. “I wished we’d talked. Said something, or seen each other. After it happened, I mean. Before I left.”
He stroked his thumb along the ridge of her palm. “Me too.”
“Did you—this sounds stupid—” She exhaled. “Were you hurt that night?”
“Physically?”
Or emotionally, or psychologically, or all the other ways something like that can hurt a person. “Yeah. Physically.”
He pulled his hand away and dumped two packets of suga
r into his coffee. “Just banged up. Bruised back. Broken nose. Nothing too bad. You had it worse.”
She sipped her coffee too soon and burned her tongue. “I don’t remember a lot of what happened. I only know what my father told me, and then my aunt when I went to live with her, which wasn’t much.”
He nodded. “I sort of figured.”
Something beeped before she could ask anything else, like why they’d gotten out of the car or where Donny had been when the EMTs found him.
Gabe’s hand moved to his lap and he glanced down. “Shoot. I’ve gotta go. I’m on call tonight. Sorry.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Seconds later, the beeper went off again. He pushed back his chair and flagged down the waitress. Outside, a siren wailed down the block.
She reached for her purse. “Let me leave the tip.”
“Already got it.” Gabe signed the credit card slip and tore off his copy.
“I feel like I owe you.”
They headed for the exit, and he flashed her the smile she remembered from school. “Oh, you do. In ways you can’t begin to imagine.” He held the door for her and they stepped into a humid evening.
Summer rummaged around in her purse for her car keys. She felt unsettled, as if they’d only just creaked open the past without daring to look inside. She needed more. She wanted more. “Can we maybe have coffee sometime?”
“I’d like that.” They stood there for a moment without speaking, and then he leaned over and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “How long are you staying?”
“I changed my flight to next week.”
“Thought you were leaving sooner than that. Any special reason?”
“I’m trying to work out a contingency with the sale so the renters can stay on.” She didn’t add that one of the renters had kissed her the other night and turned her topsy-turvy with desire. Or that said renter was trying to keep his mother safe from a crazy stalker ex-husband. She didn’t suppose either was something you confessed to a former boyfriend.
An ambulance sped up Main Street with its lights flashing. Chills ran down her spine, and she marveled again at the fact that Gabe did this, rescued bleeding people the same way they’d been rescued all those years ago. She could never do it. It would be like staying trapped inside that night forever. She shivered.
Second Chance Summer Page 9
