Leave Tomorrow Behind (Stella Crown Series)

by Clemens, Judy

  “Hey,” Nick said, “isn’t that your buddy Gregg, who threatened you this afternoon?”

  My “buddy,” the ever-charming Mr. You’re-Going-To-Be-Sorry, hovered under one of the trailer awnings. Hardly anyone else was around in the makeshift campground, so he was easy to spot. And he wasn’t alone. Someone else stood just out of sight, hidden behind a light post, and Gregg was not happy with whoever it was. He was throwing his arms around, and pointing, and doing the whole hunched over thing he’d done when he’d threatened me that afternoon.

  I stepped into the shadow of another trailer, and pulled Nick into hiding, too, up against a camper. I peered around the corner. “Who is that with him? That’s not his wife. At least, I don’t think it is. It’s hard to tell with that pole in the way.”

  “Not really any of our business, is it?”

  “That’s got to be the Greggs’ trailer. If you want to call it that.” It was more like a full-fledged RV, you know, the kind for old folks who travel to Florida every winter.

  “Not really any of our—”

  “—business. I know. You said that before.”

  “But sneaking around behind trailers does have its advantages.” He pressed closer to my back, and ran his hands up my sides.

  “Nick…”

  “What? You weren’t complaining earlier.” He kissed my neck.

  I laughed. “Yeah, when we weren’t surrounded by trailers that might or might not contain teenagers. And their parents.”

  “Oh. Right.” He gave me one more kiss, then leaned over my shoulder to look toward Mr. Gregg. “Hey, it’s a woman. She moved, so I can see her.”

  “And it’s our business now?”

  “If I can’t make out with you, I might as well do something interesting.”

  Nick was right. About the person, I mean. The woman was standing directly in our sight lines now, and she definitely wasn’t Mrs. Gregg. This woman was taller, curvier, and just a little…classier. Now, Mrs. Gregg, as you remember, was clean as a dairy cow on show day. Neat and tidy and all done up to appear like a gentlewoman farmer. But this lady, I don’t know, she was simply gorgeous.

  “Wow,” Nick said.

  “Yeah, I know. What is it about her?”

  “She’s perfect.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t mean for me. You know you’re the only one who’s perfect for me.”

  “Not according to Miranda.”

  “Were we talking about Miranda? I don’t think so. Anyway, this woman’s just…look at her. Everything’s how it should be, and it doesn’t seem fake.”

  Yeah. Made me want to go over and kick some dirt on her. Or mess up her hair. Just like I’d felt earlier that day about Mrs. Gregg. Except if I did that, I’d have to talk with Mr. Gregg, and we all know he would have a cow about that.

  “Who do you think she is?” For not wanting to poke his nose in other people’s business, Nick was sounding awfully…nosy.

  “Have no idea. I’ve never seen her before.” But something about her looked familiar. I couldn’t tell what it was. Her hair was reddish, but I couldn’t tell if that was from the light, or because of its actual color. Her skin was ivory, and that smile. It was a surprise when it came out, since its brightness was almost blinding, but also because it was aimed at Mr. Gregg. Not somebody I would imagine received a lot of those smiles.

  Nick cleared his throat. “Um, what they’re doing right now reminds me of us about a minute ago.”

  Yeah. Not exactly how a married man and another woman should be standing. Except it wasn’t really her. It was him. She was backing up, her hands out. Pushing him away. She wasn’t smiling anymore. I could see even from this distance that she was pissed off now, backing away. But he wasn’t giving up. He grabbed her upper arms and pulled her closer, bending his face toward hers.

  Nick moved, like he was going to run around me and go after Gregg, but I held him back. “Wait. She’s going to—”

  She kneed Gregg in the crotch, and he bent over double, letting out a grunt we heard all the way at our spot. The woman said something else I was sure he deserved, then spun around and marched off.

  Awesome.

  Nick looked down at me. “You knew she was going to do that?”

  “I could see it in her face. And the way she was preparing her knee.” I took his arm, loving that he had been ready to go defend her. I would have done the same if she’d needed it, of course, but I could tell she was up for the task.

  Gregg stood up gingerly, his fists on his hips.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “Agreed. Seeing that made me feel…”

  “Like you were going to heave?”

  “I was going to put it a bit more delicately, but yes.”

  I was not a delicate lass.

  Just as we were pulling back, Gregg looked our direction. I stumbled, stepping on Nick’s foot. He gasped and hopped backward, crashing into a trash can and knocking it over. He leaned down to pick it up.

  “Hey!” It was Gregg. He’d seen us. Or heard us, more like.

  I grabbed Nick’s hand, and we ran. We ducked around the last row of trailers and sprinted to the far side of the concrete bathrooms, dodging wayward parents and jumping over a cooler and several teens who sat on the ground playing a card game. I pressed my back against the building and peeked around the corner, but I couldn’t see Gregg anywhere. It seemed we were safe.

  I let out my breath, giving a little laugh. “Well. That was interesting.”

  Nick took several deep breaths. “Why do I feel like an idiot?”

  “Don’t worry. You’re still cute.”

  He made a face, then grabbed my hand, and we headed toward the calf barn, which is where we’d been going in the first place, before that little excursion into the dark side. “So.” Nick sounded a bit awkward, because coming across a scene like that was weird, and if he was feeling anything like I was, he was just a little creeped out. He looked up at the cloudless sky. “Nice evening.”

  “Too hot.”

  “Whiner.”

  “Am not.”

  “Are too.”

  I turned to argue just as we went through the calf barn entrance, and ran right into Mrs. Gregg. She bounced off of me into a burly teenager, who barely stopped on his rush past, screaming, “Don’t let her go there! Don’t let her—oh, shit.” His shoulders slumped, and he stopped running to plod forward toward the mess his cow had just made.

  “Hey!” Mrs. Gregg said, just as her husband had a couple minutes earlier, only her version sounded afraid, rather than angry.

  I held up my hands. “Didn’t see you. Sorry.”

  Her lips trembled, and she glanced around, as if she was worried someone was watching. “Have you seen…my husband?”

  Oh, boy. I glanced at Nick, but he was no help, avoiding my eyes. “You lose him?”

  “He’s somewhere around here.”

  “Maybe the dairy barn?”

  “I was just there. I didn’t see him.”

  Of course she hadn’t, because he hadn’t been there. He was busy assaulting some unknown woman.

  From Mrs. Gregg’s appearance, it seemed she’d been searching for him everywhere, including the manure pile. Her clothes, which had been pristine earlier that day, bore signs of actual work, which, if it were true, made me feel a little bit better about her. Not great, mind you, but it was something. And it made me feel even more dirty about what I’d just witnessed her husband doing. Her knees were smudged, she had a small rip in her shirt sleeve, and there was a piece of something—a wood chip?—lodged in her hair. If I didn’t know better, I would say Mrs. Gregg had been for a roll in the hay. Without her husband. What was going on with them?

  “Mom?” The two older Gregg girls, the ones with the dairy cows, wrinkled their noses in unison. From their French braided, light brown hair, to their clean pastel shorts and skintight, lacy tank tops, they were practically twins.

  “Where have you be
en?” the older one said. “Where’s Dad?”

  “I’m sure he’s close by, Madison. Did you try calling him?”

  The girl rolled her eyes. “I texted him. He didn’t answer. But then, does he ever?”

  From the sarcasm, I would guess the answer to that would be “no.”

  “He’s very busy,” Mrs. Gregg said. “He’s probably helping your sister.”

  “Of course he is. Because Melody is so way more important than we are.”

  “Like, right,” the other one said.

  “Now girls.” Mrs. Gregg glanced at Nick and me, obviously embarrassed. “Let’s go see where he is.”

  “You go look,” the older one said. “I’m going to the concert. Come on, Annie.”

  The two girls spun like countrified synchronized swimmers, and stalked away.

  Mrs. Gregg looked like she was going to say something, like maybe, “I’m sorry you had to witness that, and that I have two spoiled brat kids,” but instead, she pulled her head in like a startled turtle and scuttled away.

  “Any guesses?” I said. “Has he been after that other woman for a while, or did he just want to take this moment to screw another 4-H mom in his trailer?”

  “Stella!”

  “What? You think he wouldn’t do it?”

  “I don’t know anything about him!”

  “Except he’s a cheater in one way, with the cows. So why not another? You saw him over there, practically smothering the woman.”

  Nick frowned. “Sometimes you disturb me.”

  “And why did she look like that?”

  “Who? Like what?”

  “Mrs. Gregg. Dirty.”

  “Maybe she was cleaning out the girls’ stalls. Seems like something those parents would do instead of making their kids do it.”

  “True.” I hesitated. “Should I have told her where he was?”

  He shrugged. “No-win situation right there.”

  “Absolutely. So let’s forget them, okay?” I pulled him toward Zach’s stall, but our boy wasn’t there. “Where’s Zach?” I asked Barnabas.

  He didn’t answer.

  Austin, Zach’s next-door neighbor, was cleaning out his stall, putting the dirty wood chips into a large wheelbarrow. He leaned on his pitchfork. “I think he already left for the concert.”

  “Aren’t you going?”

  “Yeah, soon. I wanted to make sure Halladay here had a clean place for the night.”

  “Good man.” I looked around, wondering where Zach had gone. Barnabas looked just fine, so I assumed Zach had done what was needed, and then headed out.

  “I’m sure he’s okay,” Nick said. “Let’s go get seats for the concert.”

  “You sure you want to?”

  “I thought that was the whole point of coming again.”

  “Well, it really was just to be social.”

  He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “Who are you?”

  I punched his shoulder, and he grinned. “That’s more like it. So, what do you say?”

  I said goodbye to Austin, took Nick’s hand, and started toward the grandstand. “We can always leave if you can’t stand it anymore.”

  “Or if you decide you’ve had too much socializing.”

  I kissed the smirk right off his face.

  Chapter Ten

  Zach was standing toward the front of the crowd with his friends, but Nick and I wanted a seat in the stands, not having any desire to be on our feet for an hour and a half. Besides, I also didn’t feel like dealing with the unavoidable drama—I could see that cute girl Taylor standing right next to Zach, and him looking like a lovesick calf. Claire was close by, too, doing her own looking at Zach and the other girl. Nope. Didn’t want to be anywhere near that.

  I heard someone calling my name, and I searched the faces in the stands until I saw Jethro, Zach’s dad, standing up and waving. We were fortunate the stands didn’t collapse with his bulk swaying around like that.

  Nick and I clambered up toward the Grangers, offering a lot of “Excuse me’s” and “Sorry, I didn’t see your lemon-shake-up there’s,” and squeezed in between Belle and Vernice, whose husbands made us feel like a particularly smooshed up sandwich. Jermaine was as large as Jethro, but had landed solidly at the other end of the color spectrum, his skin resembling eighty-percent dark chocolate. Yum. He’d come to the Granger family as a Fresh Air kid from Philly way back when, and had been adopted into the white-faced Granger clan for good. He was a great addition to the group, and everyone in the area just thought of him as “one of Ma’s boys.”

  “Country music?” I asked Vernice, whose gorgeous skin was more of a gentler sixty-percent cocoa.

  She smiled. “I think Jermaine’s a bigger fan than his brothers. I never could quite understand his fascination with it, but then, there are worse vices. It’s especially funny, since the girl is as white as they come, including that bleached hair of hers, but he assures me it’s the music he loves.”

  I thought back to a few months earlier, when Jermaine had been working security at a different concert, one that had all gone to hell. Jordan, yet another Granger brother, had lost his girlfriend in the aftermath, and he hadn’t been quite himself since. Not that I could blame him.

  “No Jordan tonight?” I asked Belle.

  “Nope. Just couldn’t bring himself to come. I don’t know that he’ll ever enjoy concerts again, poor guy. We left him at home with Ma, cleaning up from today.”

  “Lots of corn?”

  She flexed her fingers. “Thought I was never going to be able to move again, my hands were so stiff. And even after a shower I still feel sticky.”

  I searched through the teens down at the lower level, but couldn’t find any I knew, other than Zach and his crew. “Where’s Mallory?”

  Belle pointed. “She and Brady are down there.”

  “With Zach?”

  “Are you kidding? She’ll stay as far away from those boys as she can. One of the reasons she likes Brady so much is he doesn’t think burping and farting are funny anymore.”

  “Zach still does?”

  Nick laughed. “It never ends. Believe me.”

  The lights on the stage brightened, and background music started. The kids—and Jermaine—whooped and hollered, and before long the whole place was rocking. I had to give it to the girl, Rikki Raines—she had quite a set of pipes. It was a wonder we hadn’t seen her on “American Idol,” or one of those shows. But then, maybe she didn’t need that. She danced around the stage in her white cowboy boots, denim skirt, and fringed vest, like she’d been doing it for years. The lights reflected off of her trademark bright blond hair, making me squint.

  “Local girl, right?” Nick said.

  “From our county. Got noticed somehow, and has been making the rounds in the area.”

  “She’s amazing.”

  He was right. Even I—die-hard classic rock fan—enjoyed the show. Jermaine hooted and screamed while Vernice clapped politely, and the kids down front went nuts.

  “How old is she?” Nick asked in-between songs. “Can’t quite tell from here.”

  “Almost twenty, I believe,” Belle answered.

  “Ask Jermaine,” Vernice said. “He probably knows her exact birthdate.”

  “First CD came out last year.” Belle frowned. “What was it called?”

  “Rainestorm,” Vernice said. She looked at me. “Not ‘rain storm,’ like you’d think, but her last name and ‘storm’ combined. A play on words. The song she’s singing right now.”

  “Yeah, I got it.” I wasn’t that dumb. Did I look that dumb?

  “Haven’t I seen her somewhere?” Nick said.

  Vernice laughed. “Only if you’ve gone to the grocery store and scanned the gossip magazines in the checkout line. Or watched the news. Or listened to the news. Or the radio. She’s everywhere these days. What’s the latest thing? It’s not about her music…”