She spent another fifteen minutes consoling the woman, then topped off her wine, patted her hand one last time, assured her the oh-so-righteous Lean Dogs MC was on the case, and took her leave with a stolen dollop of artichoke dip on a Tostito.
She waved to the staff on her way out of the mansion as she licked dip off her thumb and hit Ghost on her cell’s speed dial.
He answered as she walked to her car in the brick-paved driveway. “What kinda trouble are you out stirring up?”
“Aw, nice to hear your voice too, baby.” She slid behind the wheel and took note of all the security cameras aimed at her as she shut the door. “And for your information, I was saving your ass with the Knoxville DAR, that’s what.”
As she turned around alongside the fountain and its cherub statue, she filled him in on her conversation with Carina Stephens.
“By this time tomorrow, that bitch’s clique will think you’re Doc Holliday.”
He snorted.
“The rumor mill’s gonna churn,” she said, “I’m just feeding it what needs grinding.”
He must have been by himself, because a smile colored his voice as he said, “I married a smart kid, didn’t I?”
“You bet your ass.”
From the Stephens’ ultra-elite neighborhood of gates and brick pillars, she drove through the heart of the city and across to the other side, to their modest, sleepy little subdivision of one-story houses and flat, gentle yards. She hung up with Ghost after the little routine of what-do-you-need-at-the-store-tomorrow and what’s-for-dinner, parked alongside Ava’s truck, and entered through the kitchen door.
She saw the beer first. The three empty bottles, the three left in the cardboard case, all sitting on the kitchen table with Ava’s stacked schoolbooks.
“Have a little drink with lunch?” she called as she shelved her shoes.
There was no answer.
Ava lay on the sofa, asleep, propped on a pillow with her damp hair curling down her back. Without makeup, wearing one of Ghost’s t-shirts and sweatpants, she’d obviously showered not long before. The TV was on some MTV reality drivel.
As she progressed down the hall, Maggie heard the dryer tumbling something heavy. Across the hall, Ava’s bedroom door stood open, and Maggie shot a cursory glance – something askew. Something off.
The bed was missing its white comforter, stripped down to the pale yellow sheets and tattery old patchwork quilt.
Maggie poked her head into the laundry closet’s half-open doors. Caught a whiff of bleach.
Her stomach tightened as mother’s intuition began firing impossible theories through her mind.
No, she told herself. Don’t jump to crazy conclusions.
But her own life at Ava’s age had been too crazy to ever predict. She didn’t like the direction her thoughts went, but she liked the idea of giving voice to them even less.
Ava woke to the smell of baked chicken and mushroom wild rice pilaf. She drifted up from sleep and realized she was still on the couch, that she had a crick in her neck from sleeping funny, that her eyes were puffy and bruised from crying, and that her body ached and flamed in ways she’d never anticipated. Muscles unknown before today caught and yelped as she eased to a sitting position. And the throbbing between her legs had nothing to do with desire now.
“Shit,” she whispered between her teeth. “Oh, shit.”
“Ava, are you up?” Maggie called from the kitchen, and she wondered if maybe she’d misjudged her own whispering.
“Yeah,” she called back. “Coming.”
It was full dark now, the sky diamond-studded with stars through the windows. Someone – Dad, most like – had changed the channel to a documentary about the history of handguns, and then left the room. The kitchen was ablaze with light, and Ghost was already at his seat, Maggie bringing the last of the serving dishes to the table. Aidan, surprisingly, was in attendance, his nighttime riding goggles pushed up into his wild hair, the sleeves of his flannel shirt bunched up over his elbows.
“You’re here?” she asked as she took her place across from him.
“How ‘bout ‘ glad you’re here, Aidan,’ ‘so great to see you, bro,’ ‘ I miss you when I don’t get to see your beautiful face at the dinner table, best brother ever.’ ”
“How ‘bout you try being the best brother ever,” she returned, too tired to put any bite into her voice.
“How ‘bout you both eat and don’t act like little shits,” Ghost suggested as he accepted the green peas from Maggie and spooned up a portion.
Aidan made the stupidest face at her and she was forced to laugh.
“Mom, you should have gotten me up,” she said to Maggie as the rice was passed around. “I could have helped you with dinner.”
Maggie scooted her chair forward and gave her an elegant nose-wrinkling. “That’s okay, baby. You were tired.”
What was that? Flicker of question in the way Maggie blinked? Suspicion? Curiosity? Tired from what, Ava? Tired from what?
“Besides, you woulda burned the shit out of this.” Aidan forked two chicken thighs onto his plate.
“I can cook.”
“In your Fisher Price plastic kitchen.”
“Aidan,” Maggie said as Ghost began to reprimand both of them again. “Where’s Tango tonight? He knows he’s always welcome at the table.”
“Oh, he went to see his aunt…”
And on the story continued, the saga of Tango’s poor ailing aunt who’d been the only maternal figure in the guy’s life prior to joining the club. Now he had Mags and Ghost and the whole rest of the crew to love him, but his aunt had been his only salvation at one point, and he paid to keep her in the best nursing home he could afford, with a little financial help from his club brothers here and there.
Ava was sympathetic to the situation – she loved Tango like a brother (more than her actual brother, most of the time) – but her mind wandered. She’d half-expected a phone call from Mercy. Even a text. A simple: r u ok? But no, there’d been nothing. He’d fled the house before with shame and regret dogging his heels. He’d made it perfectly clear that she was too young, and he didn’t go for that sort of thing, and it would be a bad idea for them to cross those lines.
Well, okay, but now the lines were good and crossed. Was he going to pretend nothing had happened? Could he do that? Yeah, he could. He wasn’t like her. He wasn’t full to the brim with tears and longing and mashed feelings.
“You’re quiet,” Ghost said, and she jerked, realizing she must have zoned out for several minutes, because now Aidan was talking about an annoying customer who’d come into the shop that day.
Her face heated. “Just tired,” she muttered, dropping her head over her plate.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Maggie watching her, her expression thoughtful.
“Your mom’s smart,” Mercy had said.
Yes. Yes, she was.
Seventeen
Five Years Ago
The thing to do, Ava decided, was to be an adult about it. She had nine more days of OSS, and she had plenty of schoolwork to keep her busy, and plenty of work to do at the nursery, and she would just put on her big girl panties and tackle the situation with the aplomb and disinterest of someone who’d been around the block a few times. It was Saturday; not like she had a lot of opportunity to be home alone, anyway. She could handle this. She totally could.
That plan lasted about an hour.
Because the moment she pulled onto the Dartmoor grounds, her heart squeezed and her eyes burned and she dissolved into this hormonal bundle of girl.
But she greeted Mina with a cheery hello, unrolled the long garden hose and began misting the indoor flats, intent on exhausting herself with work.
It wasn’t Leah who popped by at lunch this time, but Carter, to her massive shock.
“Hi,” she greeted, dumbfounded, as he stood in front of the baby koi tubs and studied her with his hands shoved in his pockets. “You’re here.”
“I ran into your bro
ther over at the clubhouse, and he said you were working over here.”
“Yeah. Wait – you were at the clubhouse?”
“I tried yesterday, but that big guy ran me off. Today, Aidan said I should come look in the nursery.”
“He…did?”
Carter nodded.
“Okay…don’t take this the wrong way…”
He grinned.
“But why would you come to see me? After…” She twirled her hand. “Your friend’s in the hospital.”
His smile pulled to the side until it was more of a grimace. “Can we go outside?” Gesture to the relative privacy of the mulch piles through the open door. “Maybe talk?”
She was too surprised to tell him no. She glanced up and caught Mina’s gaze, earning a nod of permission. So off came the gloves and out she went into the sunlight with a boy she was fast learning she didn’t understand at all.
“I haven’t been to see Mason,” Carter said as they strolled toward the railroad tie walls framing the mulch pits. He studied his shoes as he walked. They were a neon blue and white pair of crisp new Nikes. “His dad called me, the morning after it happened, and wanted me to go to the school and pitch them a story about you forcing Mason to take that shit. He wanted to put the whole thing on you.” He glanced at her sideways, his mouth tucked up in the corners with obvious sympathy. “He said, ‘We’ll blame it on the Dog girl – he didn’t say girl. I’m sorry.”
She shrugged.
“But he figured the school and the cops would be willing to believe it had been your fault, if I’d just join Beau and the girls and say you did it.”
Ava formed her words carefully. “That would be the logical thing to do. Going against Mason Stephens – either of them – never got me anywhere. And I am the biker slut. Everyone would believe you.”
Carter winced. “I didn’t go along with him. And when he started to chew my ass about it, I…kind of hung up on him.”
Personally, Ava thought Carter should have taken a plastic cafeteria fork to his friend’s eye in the fifth grade, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in situations like this. “Impressive.” She spun and sat down on one of the staggered ends of a railroad tie, somewhere in the middle of the wall around the pine bark chips. Plucked one up from the pile and needled its edge with her index fingernail, half-watching Carter as he scuffed his toe through stray chips and gave a facial shrug.
“Yeah, not really.”
The weight of what he wanted to say pressed down at his shoulders, gave their normally wide, straight frame a rounded-edged look.
Ava sat and waited, stripping off the top layer of the bark chip.
“So…” He took a deep breath. “I got a B on our Wuthering Heights quiz yesterday.”
The quiz she would have been taking yesterday at one-thirty if not for Ainsley’s broken nose and Mercy’s hands all over her naked skin. “That’s great.” She tried to shoot some enthusiasm through her voice. “You should be proud of that.”
He grinned: straight white teeth, nice shape to his mouth, blend of humility and mischievous spark. Carter was your classic cutie, in all respects, and if he knew it, and if he used it, he did so with more grace than she would have thought possible – back before she’d gotten to know him better. “That brings my quiz average up to a seventy-seven.”
Ava returned a frail version of his smile. “That’s a C. That’s passing.”
“I bet I can raise it more, though, by the end of the semester. Don’t you think?”
“Probably, if you keep studying as hard as you have been.”
Carter allowed his smile to soften, lips closing, and pulled it inward, a warm inner sunbeam to radiate through from the inside out behind his eyes. “I wouldn’t be passing if it wasn’t for you.”
Ava waved off the praise, a prickle of discomfort itching across her skin. “All you had to do was apply yourself, and there’s at least four other people who could have helped you with that. You just happened to get stuck with me.”
His smile waned a little more, took on a wry twist. “You know what Mason said when I told him that I was going to fail English? He said, ‘Good. Poetry’s for pussies, dude. My father says only women should have to study pointless bullshit like
that.’ ”
“That’s your Mason, for ya.” She flicked the chip away and watched it skip across the top of the pile, dislodging others that shivered down in little rivulets of bark. “Always with the philosophical upper hand.”
“He’s a fucking prick,” Carter said, the words bursting out of him like a sneeze. He even looked surprised afterward. “Shit…yeah. Yeah, let’s go with that: a fucking prick.”
Ava offered a thin, false smile. “Glad it only took you most of your life to figure that out.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Why not?” she shot back.
A shadow passed across his face, something deeper and darker than the blonde quarterback persona hinted at. “Because when you come up from a family like mine, you think the best thing you could do for yourself is make friends with a family like Mason’s. What good happens to a guy like me without friends like that?”
Ava wanted to probe – but she wanted to maintain her righteousness more. It felt good. It felt damn good to be the one looking down her nose for once, the biker whore with the upper hand. “You get OSS for defending yourself, and you make friends like me.”
The silence dropped on them, suddenly. Boom, out of nowhere. The heaviness of what they’d said to each other registered a moment too late, and then they couldn’t pull it back, or try to shrug it off like nothing.
The sun glinted off the bright painted aluminum wheelbarrows, found bits of jet in the concrete birdbaths out in front, laughed and danced through the heaving birch leaves, their shapes crackled and brown and ready to fall.
Finally, Ava said, “So why’d you come by?”
Carter lifted his head and met her stare with a bold one of his own. If he was capable of duplicity, it didn’t show. “Because you’re my friend, and I care about you. And I know you aren’t the kind of person who deserves OSS, and I was worried about you.” His golden brows lifted. “Am I allowed to care?” Bit of a challenge, bit of a grin.
My friend.
Uncomplicated, just support and caring and helping one another – what would it feel like to have someone on her side besides Leah? She didn’t know. That had never happened before.
“Yeah.” She felt herself smiling back, genuine this time. “You are.”
The address Fisher had given them led to a tiny but nicely appointed cottage in Moshina Heights. Set down a dirt drive, shaded by tall oaks, the cottage was sided with cedar shingles and trimmed in red and white, with a small covered porch and a portico with room to park one small car beneath. They paced around it, finding no signs of rot, termites, broken glass. The lawn was mown and the branches close to the house trimmed down. There was an ADT alarm system sticker in one front window, and a satellite dish up on the roof.
It was empty, though. Through the half-covered windows, they spied stretches of pine floor, vacant built-ins, silent gleaming appliances. There was a room around the side that looked like a library: lots of shelves, stone fireplace, window seat.
There was a FOR RENT sign out front.
“Well,” Collier said, with one last peek into the back door window, “at least Fisher didn’t lie about this.”
Walsh stood under the portico, collar of his chambray shirt popped up against the breeze, hands in his cut pockets. His shrewd, light eyes scanned the property. “It’d be easy enough to rent the place for a couple months, do business outta it. We’re off the beaten path out here – no one to say they saw anyone coming or going. No witnesses. Small police presence.” He nodded like he approved of the thought process behind it all. “Smart.”
“And not in the city proper,” Mercy agreed, “so not on our radar.”
“Exactly,” Walsh said. “And my guess is they didn’t do any of the cooki
ng here. This was just a point of contact. This place is too clean.”
Rottie came striding back to them from the edge of the forest, phone in hand. He’d gone to search the tree line, for whatever good that would do him. “Ratchet called,” he said as he rejoined them. “Jesse thinks he has something to show us on the pills.”
“Good.” Collier fished his riding gloves from his back pocket. “We’ll swing by the clubhouse on our way, pick up Ratchet, fill James and Ghost in.”
Walsh entered the number of the real estate agent on the sign into his phone, saying he’d call the guy later and see what he could learn about the last renter, but they weren’t optimistic.
Mercy hated leaving empty-handed. He’d suggested they break in – i.e. kick their way in – which Collier had vetoed, as was his right as an officer. But it was unsatisfying not to have answers. In Mercy’s line of work he experienced more…instant gratification. He wanted to get things done, figure things out, put bullets in people.
But Collier and Walsh and Rottie were of the more patient variety. They could wait.
So into the teeth of autumn they rode back into the city. He relished the bite of the wind, the unfiltered blue of the sky, the growl of their four bikes as they hugged the corners and opened the throttle on the long stretches of empty road.
His mind wandered. To Ava, to the wounded shine in her big brown eyes yesterday afternoon when he’d left her.
He wasn’t sure he knew how to untangle that knot. Had Ava come to him, crying, and curled beneath his arm and told him she’d cashed in her V-card with some jerk who’d hurt her so badly she’d cried when he was inside her, heads would have rolled. He would have been on the warpath. But when he was that jerk – when it had been his cock in her and his shoulder with her little teeth marks in it – what did he do with that? How could he claim to love her and then take her at seventeen, when she was still just a baby? And what did he do with how dangerously wonderful it had all felt?
He didn’t know. He didn’t want to see her again. And he wanted a chance to do it over again, to break her in slow, again and again, until she was biting him in the throes of pleasure, rather than pain.
Fearless Page 22
