by Hugh Dutton
Pete Cully tugged again at the carefully measured cable, as strong as he dared this time, and brought it up to the terminal. Still short.
“Dad blame it!” He held the cable up and gave it the evil eye. “What’s wrong with you? It can’t be me, four inches ain’t even a sensible mistake.”
Maybe he had cut it wrong in his hurry to get done and get out. The last place he wanted to be right now was the Burgess home, especially when Nick was there. But he could no longer put off replacing the relay box for the sprinkler system. The old relay had grown moody, prone to turn the system on at any time, regardless of what hour it was set for. It had gotten to the point that standing anywhere in the yard meant risking an unexpected enema.
He exited the garage and followed the cable route along the roofline of the outer wall. Aha, right there, hung on that little knothole. Must’ve snagged when he first pulled in the slack. He stretched up on tiptoe and flicked it loose, relieved that he needn’t start over.
As he circled back to the garage door, he spotted Lexy crossing the lawn, her jaw set so tight it made his teeth hurt. He turned in midstride and hurried to his truck to move it from behind her Jaguar.
She waved him back and then paused with her hand on the car door, gesturing at the leftover cable dangling from his left shoulder. “While you’re working with that, could you wire up my bonehead brother and zap some sense into him?” she snarled, snapping each word off with a brittle pop. “Maybe shock therapy is the answer.”
Pete smiled, despite her obvious fury. “Can’t say I haven’t had the urge from time to time, but I reckon boss man would call that overstepping my boundaries.” He could think of some other body parts on Nick where a few thousand volts would do more good.
A tiny return smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, easing the knots along her jaw. “I swear, Uncle Pete, you are the only man around here with any patience. Can’t you do anything with them?”
Assuming she meant Nick and Leo, well, no. He doubted those two listened to anyone, but if they did, it damn sure wasn’t Pete Cully, which was why the current situation looked like an inevitable firestorm to him. And though the uncle status the teenaged Lexy had awarded her new handyman years ago still felt special to him regardless of the demons in her head, right now he didn’t care for any reminder of how tangled up in this family he really was. “Don’t fret, princess, I haven’t seen the face-off yet where you couldn’t smile everybody into surrendering.”
She snatched the door open and slung it wide, darn near tearing a hinge off, and leaned against the top of the windshield with one foot in the floorboard. “You’re always good for my ego, Uncle Pete, but I don’t know this time. I’ve got one guy who doesn’t believe me and these two don’t believe I’ve tried.”
Yep, that sounded like the Burgess men, all right. “Who’s the other fella?” he asked, curiosity quickening. He couldn’t imagine Leo riding Lexy for anything other than business or family matters, and Nick wouldn’t be in on any business talks. He’d heard enough of her jawing with Nick to understand that they were pushing someone to back up a story of theirs. Was this argument over some new strategy for saving Nick’s bacon?
She shook her head and fanned a hand like she was shooing away gnats. “Nobody you know, probably. A new guy.”
Well now, if she meant new in the Point, it had to be that Brady fellow he’d met earlier. Pete hoped Brady hadn’t got himself caught in a Burgess crunch—he liked that boy. He kept his guess to himself though, because if he’d learned one thing about dealing with Burgesses, it was best that they didn’t know what all he knew, even Lexy.
She climbed in and banged the door shut. “I’m out of here, Pete. Let me know if you change your mind on wiring him up. I want to be the one to plug it in.” She backed the Jaguar around his truck and spun a furrow across the lawn.
“Damn, girl, we don’t need to bother with fixing sprinklers if you’re going to do a burnout on the grass,” he called after her.
She stuck her head and arm out of the window and gave him the finger, a sassy grin on her face. He shook his head, unable to resist an answering smile. He often wondered what she might’ve become if she had a father who didn’t strangle her like Leo did. Crazy girl would probably be President, the way she could charm a guy.
He returned to the garage, gathered up his tools, and carted them out to his truck. He piled them on top of the utility bed cabinet and began opening the side compartment doors.
“Hey, Cully, if you’re done there, how about taking a few minutes to wash down the Porsche?”
He turned to see Nick sauntering down from the house, decked out in one of those retro Hawaiian shirts that look like bowling uniforms, flip-flops, and sunglasses dangling on a cord around his neck. Creep. Boy knew damn well Leo would bust his chops if he heard that crap. “No sir, and I ain’t got the time to stop and change your diaper for you, either.”
“That’s a piss poor attitude to take with your employer, isn’t it?” Nick smirked. He crossed his arms, sticking his nose in the air.
Pete turned and grabbed a rag from the front shelf to wipe down his snips, keeping his back to Nick. “Didn’t reckon you to be my employer. If you’ve got a legitimate request, let’s hear it. Otherwise, that’s all the comedy I can use.” Fool had the nerves of a trapeze artist or about the same amount of brains as the trapeze, yanking Pete’s chain at a time like this.
Nick snorted and continued down the lawn, mumbling something about “what the hell we pay you for anyway.”
Pete ignored him, finished cleaning the snips, and hung them on their hook. For the sake of the Burgess family and his own conscience, Pete hoped Brady could back up Lexy’s story. He had not slept well at all since the rape of that poor Zeletsky girl, wondering if Nick did it and pondering his own guilt for Nick being free to do so. If Brady came through, it would be a weight off his back. He didn’t put any stock in Lexy. She’d lie her ass off for her brother, but Brady was a different matter. Just a gut reaction from shooting the breeze with him, that boy did not seem like a guaranteed lay-down for sale.
Unlike yourself, he thought with a pang. His daddy always told him, “Boy, if you think it’s something you might regret, just don’t do it.” So simple. And Pete had lived by that advice, up until the day Leo’s money seduced him.
Almost ten years ago now, he reflected, as he wiped down the rest of his tools and methodically replaced them in their slots. It was one of those pure coincidences—call it luck, fate, karma, or whatever—that change your life forever. Though he and Leo lived less than ten miles apart, they had never met until that day, three hundred miles away at a cheap motel off I-10 outside Pensacola. Pete had made the trip to visit his ailing Aunt Betty, and took a room there to avoid staying in her cluttered, ultra-finicky home where a man couldn’t feel comfortable even sitting down. Leo, with Nick tagging along, had traveled to Pensacola for a business meeting. Checked into a much fancier downtown joint, of course. But he had come slumming that evening to take care of his son’s latest screw-up.
Seems Nick had met a girl at some beach party that afternoon and asked her out for the evening. Apparently the girl wanted to play grown-up and, knowing that her parents would be away from the room, invited him to pick her up at the motel. Nick showed up early, found the door unlocked, and came on in. Then, sick jerk that he was, he got his rocks off spying on her as she showered. Until that wasn’t good enough. When she stepped out of the shower, he muscled her onto the bed and raped her.
Pete had known none of this then. Nor had he known she was only fifteen. He had gone charging into the middle of the fiasco once he identified the muffled moans coming through the thin motel wall as sounds of distress. The manager showed up moments later, armed and officious, promising to call the police and asking Pete to return to his room. He’d done so, figuring the guy was handling things properly, but only after he made sure the sobbing girl had his business card to contact him as a witness.
The call
never came. The police never talked to him either, though Leo had dropped in on him that night to hear his account. Pete had been glad to oblige, given Leo’s concerned-parent demeanor and the fact that Pete already knew who he was and his community standing.
Funny, when Leo called a couple weeks afterward and offered the job, Pete didn’t make the connection. Or maybe hadn’t wanted to, because he surely knew that seventy-five hundred a month for a maintenance guy was crazy money, no matter how ritzy the neighborhood. But by then he had put the Pensacola incident behind him, except for knowing he might be summoned to testify someday, and assumed Leo’s offer to be the result of a bad circumstance bringing together two men with matching business needs. A struggling handyman simply did not second-guess a regular job like this one, especially at that salary. Over the years, though, seeing how Leo operated, he knew. And it ate at his core like acid.
So Pete was the only witness to Burgess’s nasty secret besides the motel manager, who must’ve either believed Nick’s version or took a payoff from Leo. Pete was also the only person outside of the two families who knew that Leo had bought the girl’s silence, an arrangement he learned of later from Nick’s loose, bragging mouth. Enough money will buy just about anything, something Leo knew well and exercised often. Bought Pete, too. By the time he figured out the real story, including the payoff, he had grown too fat and happy living the good life on Leo’s dime to change anything.
He’d told himself he’d done all he could at the time, that it was the girl’s decision. He’d reassured himself that no one would believe him after so much time had passed, or even worse, that he could be on the hook as an accomplice for taking Leo’s job. But all that garbage was just one big sorry attempt to ignore an ugly fact: he’d made a lot of money off a little girl’s virginity.
Daddy was right. Pete had come to regret not calling the cops that day. It sickened him to think the girl’s folks had sold her like that, and he couldn’t escape the certainty that it never would’ve happened if she’d talked to the police right then. So Nick got off free and clear, since without a complaint sworn out, there wasn’t a crime. And if Nick had done it again because Pete’s silence had kept him out of jail, he just didn’t know if he could live with himself.
He shook off the past, closed his toolbox, and walked over to the garage to test the new relay. Wait, he told himself. Wait until we hear what Brady says. If it’s no, then lay all this out for Gerry. Because Pete had done something to even the playing field this time, something boss man might not like if he knew. On Leo’s behalf, with Leo’s money, Pete had hired an honest detective.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Brady Spain felt hopelessly juvenile for feeling such a need to talk to his mom, but he finally gave in to it. With thoughts of her lurking around in his mind ever since the pool party, he concluded that his subconscious was sending a message. The more he thought on it, the more his conversation with Lexy felt like a confrontation, a crossroads decision, and talking with Mom always worked as sort of a moral truth serum. Though she rarely offered him direct advice, he usually walked away with a clearer picture of things. After eight rings, she picked up, totally out of breath.
“Mom, are you all right?” Her panting and the eight-hundred-mile distance between them shot a bolt of worry through him.
“Perfectly fine, dear, just a little gardening.”
“At eight-thirty?” He carried the phone into the bedroom and opened a window, sucking in the sweet fragrance of the honeysuckle. He couldn’t get enough since discovering it, though so far he’d avoided analyzing whether the craving represented unresolved questions about Peggy.
“It’s too hot outside until the evening, you know that. And it stays light until after eight.” She drew a deep breath, sounding better.
“You’ve got to take it easy, Mom. You’re going to fall over in a flower bed one day.” She was sixty-eight now, forty pounds overweight and hypertensive, but she tackled every day with an irrepressible energy that defied it all.
She giggled and he smiled despite his concern. He could picture her—pink-faced from exertion, blowing gray hair up out of her eyes, undoubtedly a smudge right on the end of her nose.
“There are worse ways to go,” she said, and laughed again. “What’s up, pumpkin?”
“What do you mean, what’s up? Can’t I call to check on my mother?” He flicked on the ceiling fan and kicked back on the bed, feeling a twinge of guilt for not having made a habit of doing just that.
“If that’s all this is, who are you and what did you do with my Brady?” She paused and dropped the banter from her tone. “Seriously, pumpkin, I like being your sounding board. That’s what mothers are for.”
So much for the casual approach. He could swear she possessed telepathic powers. She’d always been there for Brady, even during the hell of adolescence when he’d acted like a jerk. They’d been poor, scary poor at times, though never homeless and usually not hungry. Hadn’t mattered in early childhood, he hardly noticed. By his teen years their situation became a source of embarrassment and frustration for him, sometimes outright anger. So he’d showed his ass over it. Regularly.
Eventually adulthood brought an understanding and appreciation of her decisions that had been so maddening at the time. She knew she couldn’t prevent people from knowing or even laughing because he was poor. What she could prevent was anyone ever being able to say his needs weren’t met, that he wasn’t cared for and loved and actively parented. No telling how important that had been to her, especially as a divorcée. Now his heart struggled to bear the indebtedness he felt whenever he thought back over her sacrifices, what all she went without by putting him first. And here she was, still there for him.
He told her of Lexy urging him to back up her story, presenting it as a choice between telling a small fib and letting down a friend. He skipped any mention of rape or stalkers or held checks, stuff that set off maternal alarm bells.
“I don’t know, baby,” she said when he finished. “I can’t answer your question directly, but I can try to help.”
“Okay.” He wondered if she was going to serve up another one of her riddles, and hoped not. He realized his phone was slippery with sweat and switched hands.
“First, you have to decide if you’re an honest man, honey. Honesty is a trait, what one is, not what one does on a case-by-case basis. There’s no such thing as an honest answer or an honest opinion. It would be a truthful answer or a truthful opinion. One is honest or one is not. And an honest person telling an untruth can be a very self-destructive thing. Does that help at all?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Being all blasé about it, but really just hiding the fact that somewhere inside he had known it already and hoped she would tell him otherwise. Fit nicely into one of her riddles, too—the one about the easy way out is usually not a way out at all. “Thanks, Mom.”
“And Brady, it sounds like you’re interested in your friend, this Lexy.” She paused again, and he heard her purse her lips.
Oops. He’d tried to gloss over that part, too embarrassed to admit that keeping his chances with Lexy alive was the crux of the dilemma. Though he could talk to Mom about most anything, heck if he could get himself to say: Yes, Mom, I think about her all the time, I’m obsessed with imagining what it would feel like to hold her naked in my hands, to find out what her skin tastes like. He did consider telling her how Lexy epitomized the sophistication and elegance small-town life didn’t have, everything he’d left to find. But that would bring out a cautionary tale about how growth and success and satisfaction are found from within, not from another person. Or something along those lines. He felt his ears turning red, but she continued before he thought of a safe answer.
“There is nothing dishonorable about searching your memory and finding something hidden in there that helps your friend. But if she’s interested in a man who will lie for her, then she is not a woman you should be interested in. Follow me?”
After a moment of untangling
he did, though it chafed, as it felt like one more strike against Lexy. On a wild impulse, he almost told her about the honeysuckle, managing to swallow the urge when he realized he didn’t want her answer.
Right on cue, she said, “Incidentally, I saw Peggy at the mall in Raleigh last week.” How did she do that? Woman was scary. “She asked how you were doing. Have you spoken with her recently?” He heard the sly smile in her voice.
“Not since I left. I keep thinking I’m going to email or text her to say hey, but I never get around to it.” Because I don’t know if I’m comfortable being friends with someone I treated so unfairly.
Mom, you’re a sweetheart and a trip, he reflected after they had said their “byes” and “love yous” and disconnected. Here I am almost thirty, and you’re still more worried about me going for the wrong woman than anything else. And now the million-dollar question: Am I an honest man?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Roaming around Heron Point on foot during the late-night and early-morning hours provided Gerry Terence with the best feel for the place, both the geography and the people. It didn’t take him long to start picking out the boozers, the dopers, the quarreling couples, the cheating spouses. Not necessarily one of the job requirements, but Gerry always liked getting tuned in to his surroundings. Plus he enjoyed the exercise in the cooler night air. The crisp scent of the pines and citrus trees, mixed with the slight tang of the ocean breeze, gave the dark hours a fresh clean feel that washed away the tired, grumpy old ex-cop he’d seen too often in his mirror of late. Besides, he sure wasn’t going to get anywhere by sitting in his car waiting for the bad guy to wave him down and confess.
The minimal ambient lighting in the neighborhood—just a sporadic streetlamp here and there—was something he planned to recommend Leo change. The skyline of black shadowy trees, outlined against a brilliance of stars not visible in brighter lighting, made for a setting of surpassing beauty and peacefulness but it also offered the ideal environment for peepers and burglars and all manner of night-stalking lowlifes. And that’s what he was here to put a lid on, regardless of the aesthetic sacrifices.
