by Susan Sey
“You got any kind of education?”
“Criminal justice.” He sent Eli a sideways smile. “How’s that for irony? In the event I didn’t make it to the NFL, I was planning to be a cop. Was one, too, for a while. Till my temper got the better of me.” The smile died. “I’ve got a temper when I’ve been drinking.”
“I gathered.”
“My plan is to get to Willa’s place, borrow a laptop and some internet, and figure something out. I’m not young anymore but I’m sturdy enough for construction, road work, something.”
“You want a ride out there? To Willa’s?”
“Nah. I’ll walk.”
Eli lifted a brow at that. “It’s a good ten miles.”
“I know that.” Brett lifted a brow of his own. “How do you?”
“Pete’s sake, Brett. I haven’t ravished your daughter.”
Willa pushed through the swinging door, slid a cheeseburger onto the counter in front of him. It was almost buried under a mountain of fries, still glistening with hot oil and sparkling with salt. “I might, though, if that burger tastes anything like it smells.” He snatched it up and shoved it into his face. Closed his eyes and chewed blissfully. “Oh, yeah.” He pointed at Willa. “You’re getting yourself ravished just as soon as I finish this. You might want to brace yourself.”
“I’ll take an IOU,” she said drily. Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out of her jeans. “Zinc Pest Control.” She listened intently, then grabbed an order pad from under the bar. Uncapped a pen with her teeth and started scribbling. “Uh huh. Yeah, I know where it is. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
She pulled back, tapped the screen of her phone a couple times, then put it back to her ear and waited with that economical watchfulness of hers. Brett frowned at the phone. “I hated cell phones before I went in,” he mused.
“Can’t avoid them now,” Eli said. “Especially if you’re job hunting.”
“Hell.”
“Peter, it’s Willa,” she said into her phone. “I just got a call on a cabin south of town. I have to deal with it. Get down here and take over your empire.” She hung up. “He won’t call me back.”
“No?” Eli was down to fries now, his stomach placated to the point that he could chew and enjoy instead of just swallow by the handful. He eyed the disconnected tap lines. He’d kill for a Coke. “Why not?”
“Because he’s Peter. And he recognizes my number.” Her lip curled and Eli understood that, should he ever have the misfortune to meet her brother, he’d probably end up punching the guy in the face on principle alone. He considered the prospect. Wasn’t overly disturbed by the idea of assaulting a stranger. Not if the guy made Willa’s lip curl like that. “Bastard.”
Eli couldn’t agree more. “Is there anybody else you can call?”
“I don’t call anybody about this place. It’s Peter’s responsibility. That’s why he makes the big bucks.”
“Peter makes big bucks these days, huh?” Brett’s eyes roamed the bar, skating over the shiny wood, the polished brass, the gleaming mirrors, all of it bathed in sunlight so thick you could almost touch it. “Definitely looks more expensive than in my day. That big front window was a good call.”
“He’s a bastard who knows how to make money,” Willa conceded. “But I’ve got a cabin owner with a van full of scared kids and something alive in the attic she didn’t invite in. Keeping Peter’s empire staffed isn’t my job. Dealing with whatever’s in that lady’s attic is.”
The door opened and a handful of tourists breezed in. They paused uncertainly at the sight of all the empty tables but Brett waved a hand. “Anywhere’s good, folks. Menus on the tables.”
Chatter resumed and they took a sunny four-top near the window.
“No.” Willa narrowed her eyes and pointed at her father. “You’ve been out of prison what, twelve hours? I’m not leaving you in charge of the scene of the goddamn crime.”
“This is where it happened?” Eli asked, startled.
Brett’s smile was faint, regretful. “Of course this is where it happened. When you’re serious about your drinking — and I was — you have to put in your hours on the stool. And when you have a bar of your very own, well. I doubt I was anywhere else those days.” He turned to Willa. “I apologize. This place is yours now, yours and Peter’s. I have no intention of trying to take it back, or even of asking for a job here. It was force of habit, that’s all.” He spread big, helpless hands. “You can take the man out of the bar, but I guess you can’t take the bar out of the man.”
Willa sighed. “I can’t go anywhere until I get the lines flushed anyway, and that damn cider line is practically welded on there.”
“All the sugar,” Eli said. “It’s like cement.”
“Tell me,” Willa said. “By the time I get it off, flushed and reattached, my shift will be over anyway.” She snatched a clean white apron off a peg by the kitchen door, dropped it over her head and began filling water glasses for the customers. “Here’s hoping they don’t want a beer.” She frowned at the array of disconnected hoses. “Or a soda.” She hefted the tray with an easy strength that interested Eli almost as much as her stillness. Eli wasn’t a tall guy himself but Willa’s head barely hit his jaw. If she was five-two he’d be amazed and yet she hefted that tray like it weighed nothing. When had she decided she needed to be so strong? Was it a matter of principle, or had she learned the hard way that small people couldn’t afford to be weak?
He wondered how many people he’d be inclined to punch before he unraveled the mysteries of Willa Zinc.
He spotted a wrench on the floor next to the tap lines. He didn’t know a lot of things, but he knew tap lines. He slapped his greasy hands clean on his cargo pants and picked up the wrench. Brett leaned over for a look while Willa took orders at the front window.
“You do know what you’re doing back there.”
“Family restaurant.” He fitted the wrench to the coupling and put some muscle behind it. The coupling all but laughed at him. “I hate hard cider.”
“Is that a thing people are drinking these days? Hard cider?” Brett sat back. “I’m out of touch.”
“It’s a thing girls drink,” Eli informed him, shifting for better leverage. Something soaked into the knee of his cargos. Nice. “And kids who want their alcohol to taste like candy.”
“Ah.”
The coupling finally gave and Eli grunted with satisfaction. Willa already had the flushing solution ready to go so he hooked it up and started pumping it through. She lifted the pass-through and arched a brow at the tap lines.
“You got the cider line off?”
“We’re half flushed already.”
“Good, because we need two pints of the Angel’s Blond and a Diet Coke. Think you can get those tap lines reattached before I get their burgers out?”
“If you pay me in Coke, I’ll do anything you want.”
“You’re on.” And she sailed into the kitchen to do her magic thing with the grill.
“Willa’s still getting squirrels out of people’s attics?” Brett asked casually but Eli heard something hungry underneath it. Something that echoed his own frustrated desire to know a woman who’d made herself so unknowable.
“She’s Zinc Pest Control,” Eli said simply and started running fresh water through the lines.
“Not surprised, I guess. She spent more time in the woods than in the house when she was a kid. Barefoot and wild, all hair and knees and elbows. Like a little raven, and twice as noisy.”
“Really?” Eli took up the wrench and began reattaching lines. Coke first, of course. A deal was a deal but he had his priorities. “Can’t picture it.”
“No, I imagine not. She’s…quiet now.”
“That she is.”
“Something happened to her.”
Eli stopped tightening couplings and met Brett’s eyes. “What kind of something?”
“I don’t know.” He lifted big shoulders and wrapped both hands around
his empty coffee cup. “I never knew. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself and drinking my way to the bottom of it to pay much attention to my kids, and I’ll regret that until the day I die. Because she was a bright flame of a girl, Eli. Shouldn’t have blazed so bright with hair that black, but she did. Bright enough that when she went dark even I noticed. But then Shay disappeared and—”
“Shay?”
“My wife,” Brett said. “Ex-wife? Late wife?” He laughed bitterly. “I don’t know what to call her, since I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. If she’s divorced me, I never got served papers. All I know is she disappeared when Willa was, I don’t know, fourteen? Fifteen? Shortly after Willa went dark, anyway.”
“Where did she go?”
“What, you haven’t heard? You really haven’t been in town long, have you, son?”
“Guess not.” Eli reached under the bar for a couple of pint glasses, tested the keg labeled Angel’s Blond Ale. He discarded a glass and a half of foam before it started playing nice.
“Well, ask around. Everybody’s got a theory. Most popular is that I killed her in a jealous rage, a drunken fit, or out of just plain meanness. Probably dumped the body in the big lake. Superior doesn’t give up her dead, you know. Too cold for the bloat-and-float, as the cops say. No, bodies just sink down, down, down to the rocks and they stay there forever. Which, of course, I’d know as I’d been a cop once upon a time.
“Then again, some folks are more inclined to think I threw her into the Kettle. You been here long enough to get a gander at Devil’s Kettle? The pothole, not the town?”
“It’s what brought me to town in the first place,” Eli said carefully. He set the two requested pints on the counter and started on the Diet Coke. “Who hikes through this town without taking a look at a disappearing river?”
“Yeah, all that water.” Brett toasted Eli with his empty mug. “Scientists have studied it, you know. They’ve measured the volume of water that goes down that hole. They’ve measured the volume of water that comes out of the cliff below, too. And you know what? They don’t match. Only about half the water that goes into the hole comes out the falls.”
“Where does the other half go?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Brett set his cup down carefully. “Nobody knows. It just disappears. And if you had a body you didn’t want found…”
“You might toss it in the Kettle in the dead of night.”
“You’re practically a local already.”
Willa pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen, her tray loaded with burgers and fries. Eli put the drinks in the spaces she’d left for them and smiled at her expression of mild surprise.
“Family restaurant,” he told her.
“You’re just full of surprises, Eli Walker.”
“Yeah. You, too.”
She shot Brett a glance. “Been telling stories, Dad?”
Brett shrugged. “Assumed he’d heard most of them, unless this place has changed more than I thought.”
Willa sighed. “Probably not.”
She moved away to deliver the food to the table. The door opened, letting more tourists in. Eli waved them to a table and threw on an apron. He grabbed Willa’s arm as she stashed her tray behind the bar. “I know my way around a grill, too. Family restaurant, remember? Go see about the mom and her van full of scared kids. I can handle this.”
She glanced at her watch. “Peter’s shift doesn’t start for an hour.”
“I can do an hour of this in my sleep.”
“Are you sure?”
“You have at least three of my IOUs already.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Stop doing me favors, then.”
“I haven’t been.”
“So let me do you one.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, and he wanted more than anything to nudge up the brim of her ball cap, to get a better look at those suspicious eyes. “Why?”
“Because I’d like to.”
“Again, why?”
He nudged up her ball cap — couldn’t resist — and met a pair of pale gray eyes, startlingly light against the raven’s wing of her hair. They were suspicious, sure enough, but also a little baffled. He was trying to help her for no reason other than that he liked her, was intrigued by her, and wanted to be closer. And she truly couldn’t understand that.
“Have dinner with me,” he said.
She blinked, bafflement deepening into straight-up incomprehension. “What?”
“Consider it a favor if you really have to balance the scales.”
“How is having dinner with me a favor to you?”
“You’re absolutely fascinating, Willa.”
“And you make absolutely no sense.” She scowled at him and snugged her cap back down. “And stop messing with my hat.”
“Is that a yes?”
She hesitated and he glanced at his own watch.
“Van full of scared kids with something in their attic, Willa.”
“Damn it. Fine. Dinner.”
“Tonight.”
“Tomorrow.”
Eli smiled, delighted with her. “Tomorrow then.”
CHAPTER 9
SEVERAL FILTHY HOURS later, Willa found herself pushing through the heavy wooden doors of the Devil’s Taproom one more time. Peter hadn’t returned her calls — the predictable bastard — so they were going to have to have this conversation in person, in front of a crowd. Not her first choice, but then neither was Peter. Life was what it was, and so was family.
The yeasty musk of spilled beer rose up from the floorboards as the door thunked shut behind her. It twined together with the hot-grease-and-salt scent of a grill in action, and suddenly she was eight again. Eight years old, her skinny thighs stuck to a cracked vinyl barstool, her eyes wide open, her mouth shut tight but cold and sweet from the pop her dad had shot into a fancy glass with that gun he had on a hose under the bar. Ten-year-old Peter was beside her, the ice melting in his own pop because he was too busy trying to impress the cops who had been her father’s friends (until they hadn’t been) to drink.
The door opened behind her, snapping her back to the present while nearly sweeping her into the crowd of tourists enjoying a craft brew with a lake view. (It was, she had to admit, a nifty tag line. Say what you would about her brother; the guy knew how to sell stuff.) A fresh batch of drinkers breezed in, and Willa stepped aside to let them pass. And took a moment in the shadows to root herself in the present.
She was twenty-eight, she reminded herself, not eight. And the Devil’s Taproom — for all that it smelled the same — wasn’t the dim, shabby clubhouse for serious drinkers her father had cultivated. Peter had been back in town about three minutes — had been in charge of the family bar for about two — when he’d driven them both yet further into debt with that big-ass plate glass window that was currently lavishing lake-shattered sunshine on the early dinner crowd and painting the floor a thick, August gold. He’d pitched the cheap chairs and sticky tables, too, in favor of a mix of high-tops and cozy booths, and a gleaming oak bar that ran the entire length of the back wall. A small stage and sleek sound system stood where the jukebox had once reigned. About the only thing he’d left alone were the floors — wide pine planks dark with age and warped with countless spilled beers. Because a bar, Peter said, ought to smell like a bar.
Her brother of the firm opinions and fearless mortgage applications was right there behind the bar where she’d expected to find him. He was slinging drinks, chatting up tourists and wiping up spills with the easy charm of a bartender born. Unless you looked closer, of course. Then you’d see that he despised everybody in this place.
It was so obvious to Willa. She wondered why nobody else ever seemed to see it. Peter was as slick and glossy now as the bar he was working behind but there was no changing your bones. He was just as desperate for approval as he had ever been, only now he was self-aware enough to know it. And to bitterly resent the very same peopl
e whose approval he craved. It was right there in the tight edges of that easy smile, in the dark eyes that scanned constantly for the next angle, the next sale. People weren’t fellow humans to Peter; they were potential profits.
He lifted a friendly hand when he spotted her and jerked his chin in what might’ve looked like welcome, but wasn’t. She knew her brother still, knew what that chin jerk meant. Normally she’d just flip him the bird and leave him to sleep in the bed he’d shit. But this wasn’t normal, was it? Normal had left the building the instant she’d heard the word parole. No, it was war now. It always was, getting Peter to do anything that didn’t line his pocket. It wouldn’t hurt to have his IOU in her pocket before the discussion they were about to have.
So she slid through the crowd like a fish through water, propped her elbows on the bar at the waitress station and waited for Peter to ask her for that favor. It took about thirty seconds.
“Walt’s running late,” Peter told her as he pulled a handful of pints. “Could use a pair of hands to get us over the dinner rush.”
She hefted the pass-through and snagged an apron off a peg. “Grill or stick?”
He hesitated, his dark eyes shooting longingly toward the kitchen door for the briefest of instants. Then India Grace arrived at the bar, a tray riding the full sleeve of tattoos on her arm, her magenta hair in a Rosie the Riveter do-rag. She slapped a handful of grill tickets on the bar and rattled off half a dozen drink orders. At the same moment, a trio of sorority sisters propped their cleavage on the bar and batted their Kardashian eyelashes at Peter.
“Christ.” He snatched up the tickets and shoved them at Willa. “I’ll stay on the stick.” He wiped the irritation off his face between one instant and the next, replaced it with a naughty sparkle. He turned to the boobs and said, “Welcome to the Devil’s Taproom, ladies. How can I help you get into trouble this evening?”
Willa headed for the grill while the girls giggled. She wondered, not for the first time, how the hell he did that so quickly and so well. Shed his skin, his emotion, like a snake. Like there was something underneath it, something different just waiting for him to be next.
