One Foot in the Grave: Carly Moore #3

by Denise Grover Swank

  Wyatt parked on a wide gravel driveway and I pulled in next to him, ignoring him as I got out and walked around the side of his house to see the view.

  Storm clouds were dark purple in the horizon, but rays of sun shot through openings, the rays creating spotlights on the pasture below.

  “I knew you’d like it,” he said beside me, his tone neutral.

  I turned to look up at him. “And yet you never once brought me here.”

  A sheepish look filled his eyes. “The inside was still a work in progress.”

  I nearly told him he was full of bullshit. The fact was he hadn’t trusted me, and while I partially understood why he wouldn’t tell me his secrets, his reluctance to bring me to his home was another matter altogether.

  “Whatever,” I said, my weariness bleeding through. “Let’s get started. I have to be at work by three.”

  He led me to the front door, pushing it open after he unlocked it and letting me enter first. I had no idea what to expect, but the house was more put-together than Wyatt had implied, suggesting he was indeed a liar.

  The inside walls were composed of logs, and a smooth rock fireplace extended to the top of the two-story ceiling. Windows at the back of the space overlooked the view. A worn sofa and two chairs had been set up in a conversation area around the fireplace, and a kitchen with maple cabinets filled the opposite wall. A loft extended over the kitchen, with a set of open stairs leading up to it.

  I headed to the kitchen island and sat on a stool, pulling my notebook out of my messenger bag and setting it on the counter. “Let’s get started.”

  Wyatt walked around the counter and pulled the pot from the coffee maker. “Let me get a pot of coffee started.”

  I didn’t respond and fought hard to keep my gaze on my notebook and away from the incredible view out of those back windows. Seeing it was like a stab to my heart, one more piece of evidence of how little I’d meant to him.

  He was silent as he quickly got to work brewing a new pot, but then he opened a cabinet and pulled out a box of pancake mix.

  “What are you doing?” I asked in exasperation.

  He glanced at me without missing a beat. “Making you breakfast.”

  “I never asked you to do that. I’d rather get to work.”

  “Contrary to what you might think, I’m capable of multitasking,” Wyatt said as he got out a glass mixing bowl. “Ask me questions while I cook.”

  “You’re only making breakfast because Hank told you to feed me.”

  He shot me a glance as he opened his fridge and pulled out a carton of eggs. “I’m hungry too.”

  “What’s a blood price?”

  “Nothin’ you need to worry about.”

  “Look,” I said in a cold tone. “If I ask you a question, you can do me the courtesy of giving me a straight answer. No more bullshit. Is that clear?”

  He turned back to face me. “I’ll answer what I can.”

  I slid off the stool. “Good luck to you.”

  “Carly,” he called after me. “At least stick around long enough to find out what I won’t answer. You might fill in some blanks along the way.” When I stopped with my hand on the doorknob, he added, “If you leave now, who knows what information you’ll miss out on.”

  At that moment, I hated him. I hated that he was playing me with his dangled carrot, and we both knew I wasn’t going to walk away, no matter what my pride was telling me to do.

  I turned back to face him. “What’s a blood price?”

  “It means if anything happens to you while I’ve sworn to protect you, Hank has the right to seek his own revenge.”

  “As in kill you?” I asked in shock.

  “If that’s what he chooses.”

  “It could be something else?”

  “Anything of his choosing. Anything.”

  “Why would you agree to that?” I demanded.

  “Because I wouldn’t let anything happen to you anyway. It was an easy oath to take.”

  I struggled to catch my breath, daunted that Hank would ask for such a promise and that Wyatt would agree to it so willingly.

  He cracked an egg and dumped it into the bowl. “I’m sure you want to know more about my history with Heather. I suppose that seems like a good place to start.”

  “Hm,” I said noncommittally, then sat back down and pulled out my notebook again. I hadn’t used a notebook before, but looking back, I realized that had been foolish. And since I didn’t have Marco with me as a backup memory bank, the notebook seemed the best way to keep track of everything.

  “You know, I was with Marco when I was looking for Lula,” I said. “I wasn’t investigating on my own.”

  “I’ll be driving you around,” he said in a gruff tone as he whisked the batter, and I couldn’t help thinking what a contrast his domestication was to his burly frame and tone.

  Nope. Not going there.

  I had other issues to think about, especially since I had no intention of letting Wyatt play chauffeur, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

  “When did you first start dating Heather?”

  He turned on the water faucet, collecting a small bit of water on his fingertips before flicking it into the pan he’d set on the burner. The beads of water sizzled and danced, and Wyatt turned down the heat. “We’d known each other since grade school. Her family moved to the area when she was in third grade, but I didn’t pay much attention to her then. It wasn’t until middle school that she caught my eye.”

  I couldn’t help noticing the soft smile on his face.

  “So you two became a thing in middle school?”

  He released a chuckle as he poured batter into the skillet. “No. Believe it or not, I didn’t get up the nerve to ask her out until our sophomore year. I asked her to the homecoming dance.”

  “And she said yes, of course,” I said, writing down sophomore homecoming dance.

  He laughed again. “Actually, she said no. She’d already agreed to go with Herbie Metcalf, but she told me she would have chosen me if she could have. So she went to the dance with Herbie and I went with some friends, but she ditched him before it ended and asked me to take her home.”

  I blinked hard. “She ditched him?”

  “We were kids, Carly. Stupid kids.”

  “And how did Herbie take it?”

  Wyatt gave me a long look. “At the time, he seemed to take it okay.”

  “You were popular, right?” I asked. “You were on the football team. You were good-looking.”

  “You’re forgettin’ the part about my father havin’ money.”

  “Oh, I haven’t forgotten that part at all, but that’s a given.”

  He scowled. “What are you getting’ at?”

  “That you were big man on campus. Where did Herbie place in the high school pecking order?”

  “That’s not fair, Carly.”

  “What’s fair or unfair is irrelevant. I’m looking for facts.”

  “What the hell does a high school dance have to do with the fact that Heather was buried out there in that field for nine years?” His voice rose then broke, and I realized he wasn’t angry with me. He was grieving Heather’s murder.

  “The fact is someone killed your former girlfriend and her death, it seems, is about to be pinned on you, Wyatt, which means this could be like looking for a needle in haystack. So I’m digging through the haystack.”

  He turned back to the skillet, flipping four pancakes. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” He paused, considering, then said, “Herbie was in the middle, I guess. He wasn’t unpopular, but he wasn’t in the upper echelon.”

  “How many kids were in a graduating class?” I asked.

  “About a hundred to one-twenty,” he said. “It’s a county school. Kids from Ewing and the surrounding towns like Drum.”

  I nodded, writing that down. “And where was Herbie from?”

  “Ewing. Most of the kids were. There are more kids in the surrounding area, but there
’s a Christian high school in Ewing, and some of the more rural kids homeschooled, or at least that’s what their parents told the school district. No one really pushed them on it.”

  He grabbed two plates from the cabinet and placed two pancakes on each before pouring more batter into the skillet. He set a plate in front of me, along with everything I would need to enjoy it—a fork and knife, butter, a bottle of maple syrup, and a cup of coffee. “I don’t have any nondairy creamer, but I do have half-and-half.”

  “That’s fine,” I said with a slight frown, feeling uncomfortable with the air of domesticity rolling off him.

  He pulled the carton out of the fridge. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “Nope. I’m good.” I poured some half-and-half into the mug and stirred it with my fork before taking a sip. “Did you have any enemies in high school?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, harsher than I’d intended. “I didn’t.”

  He turned to face me. “Even with your father being who he is?”

  High school seemed like light-years away, and talking about my past as Caroline felt off and wrong. “I went to a private school where everyone’s parents had money. I was shy and quiet.”

  “And from what I gathered, you had Jake looking out for you,” he said with a bit of an edge of his own.

  My back stiffened. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that you don’t have any right to judge me. Was I an asshole in high school? Yeah, I was. I had a chip on my shoulder because in the eyes of the school, I was the kid to knock off a pedestal, even if I never wanted to climb onto it in the first place. But I was a Drummond, and my father had expectations, even in school. Even with sports. And people hated that I was a Drummond, so plenty of people stepped up to challenge me. If I didn’t defend myself well enough, my father would be quick to rake me over the coals at home for not acting like a leader. So yeah, I was admittedly an asshole with absolutely no real friends. Until Heather.”

  I set my mug on the counter, my edge softening. “I’m sorry. I’m sure it was difficult.”

  He shrugged and flipped the pancakes in the skillet. “It was like Heather could see right through all my layers of bullshit.” He snuck a glance toward me and just as quickly looked away. “Just like you.”

  Had Heather been more tolerant of all his secrets? Or maybe he hadn’t had them back then. Did it matter?

  One thing was certain, I didn’t like being compared to her. At. All.

  “So you and Heather started dating?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice gruff. “During our junior year, her father got a job in Virginia, but Heather refused to go with them. So her aunt offered to let her stay with her until she graduated from high school.”

  “Did she go to college?”

  “For a while, but she flunked out her second semester. Too much partyin’.”

  “But you didn’t go to college?”

  “My father believed it was a waste of time and money. He thinks life teaches you all you need to know. My mother had to convince him to pay for Max’s college.”

  The heir and the spare to the Drummond kingdom. Since Wyatt was the heir, Max had very much been treated like the disposable son. Until he wasn’t.

  “Did you and Heather break up when she went to college?”

  “Yeah. She said she didn’t want to be tied down, and my father wasn’t all that crazy about her. Heather was much too headstrong to suit him.”

  “But you got back together?” I asked.

  “Not right away. She went to live with her parents for a couple of years after she left college. Then she came back.” He made a face. “And so did I.”

  “You mean you went back to her?”

  He nodded. “I was young and stupid. And she had some sort of spell on me.”

  Something about the way he said that, or maybe the words he’d chosen, made me feel a little prick of jealousy, mostly because I obviously hadn’t meant that much to him. I told myself he’d known her for years and me only a month, but still…

  “What sort of spell?” I asked, proud of myself for not letting my irritation bleed through.

  He put the pancakes on another plate and moved the skillet off the burner, staying on the other side of the island as he started doctoring his pancakes. “Nothing magical,” he said with a laugh. “More like she was a master manipulator and she knew how to play me like a fiddle. It didn’t hurt that she was wrapped in a pretty package.”

  “Got any photos of her?”

  “Nope,” he said, keeping his gaze on his food.

  “Come on,” I said. “I don’t believe that. You were taken with her, spent years with her. Surely you have something. A snapshot of you with friends? Homecoming photos?”

  He still refused to look at me. “Nope.”

  I’d found newspaper articles about her last November when I’d looked up Wyatt’s arrest, but none of them had included any photos. “What about yearbooks?”

  “I didn’t bring any of that stuff with me when I moved out. They’re all at my parents’ house.”

  I didn’t think marching up to the Drummonds’ front door and asking to see Wyatt’s old yearbooks was a good idea. “So she left after y’all graduated high school, then came back a couple of years later?”

  He took a moment. “She came back to see her aunt for a few weeks over the summer when we were twenty. We hooked up, but then she left for what I thought was good. When she came back the next time, I was runnin’ the bar. We got together, but she said she wanted to see other people, so I started datin’ Ruth. What Ruth and I had was nothin’ serious, and truth be told, datin’ someone who works for you is the worst idea ever. In any case, the next thing I know, Heather was wanting me back. I told her I was done bein’ her yo-yo, but she told me she’d done a lot of growin’ up and seeing me with Ruth had made her realize what was important.” He made a face. “She claimed it was me. And fool that I was, I believed her.”

  He glanced up at me as though expecting me to reprimand him.

  “Who am I to judge?” I said. “I’m the master of playing the fool with men.”

  He made another face. “I’m fully aware you count me on that list.”

  I did, but admitting it would serve no purpose.

  “When we got back together, she started needlin’ me about the bar. She didn’t like that I didn’t flat-out own it, and suggested I try bein’ more assertive with my father. Demand what was mine.” He released a bitter laugh. “What was mine.” He pushed out a sigh. “I had a small house a few blocks from the tavern, and Heather moved some things in even though she never officially lived with me. We were together for about six months before I found out why she’d ended up back in Drum. She’d had an abortion while she was living with her parents, and they found out and disowned her. She couldn’t afford to live alone, so she moved back to Drum, and in with her aunt.”

  “And back to you.”

  He shrugged, but he didn’t come off as nonchalant as he was trying to act. “Yeah, but she was right. We had done some growing up, and we stuck that time. I think maybe I took her back because I’d dated everyone I was interested in and no one else seemed to fit. For all her issues, I knew what I was getting with her, you know?”

  “Yeah.” Sadly, I did. I’d done the same thing with Jake.

  “We started gettin’ serious, but she wanted more…or more specifically she wanted me to have more. She wanted me to own the tavern, not just run it for my father.” He shook his head with a wry grin. “She had a way of bolsterin’ a man to do things he might not ordinarily do. So I went to my parents and told them I wanted them to hand over the bar. My father knew right away it had come from Heather and told me she was a gold digger. I admit, I suspected there might be some truth to it, yet I’d already started the battle, I figured I might as well finish it. I told him if he didn’t give it to me, I’d disown the entire family. I should have known better, bec
ause he told me fine. I was no longer part of the family. I stopped running the bar, cold turkey, on Heather’s suggestion. Show him how much he needed me. Only he never came crawling to ask me back.”

  He pushed out a sigh, and his voice was tight as he said, “Deep down, I think I knew he wouldn’t. Maybe part of me was relieved.” He shrugged again and swallowed, refusing to look at me again. “Maybe I was tired of trying to make the old man happy. But Heather was startin’ to sweat. She saw me as the Drummond heir apparent and she didn’t want to wait for the old man to die for me to get what was comin’ to me. She started pickin’ fights, tellin’ me I hadn’t approached him the right way, that I needed to go back and plead for forgiveness. I was close to crawlin’ back to him just to get Heather to shut up, and then I caught wind that my father had sold my baseball to Earl Cartwright. The one signed by Joe DiMaggio that my grandfather had given me.

  “I’d been drinkin’ far more than I should have, feelin’ plenty of regret, and I went to talk to my father. He said he was selling off my things since I considered myself too good for the family, only he wasn’t givin’ me the money. I went home and just got drunker. The next thing I knew, I was drivin’ to the garage and breakin’ in. I got my baseball back, and I drove Heather and me to Balder Mountain State Park, where we drank even more. The next thing I knew, I was arrested for a DUI and breakin’ and enterin’.”

  “You must have been pretty hurt by his behavior,” I said quietly. “Every child wants their father to love them.”

  He lifted his gaze to mine, his eyes glassy. “You of all people know we don’t always get what we want.”

  I didn’t respond.

  He shuffled his weight and sniffed, then looked at me with emotionless eyes. “My father had me followed and arrested to teach me a lesson. To bring me to heel. Only I wouldn’t fall into line. Heather was furious, and then scared, sayin’ my family was pushin’ her hard to lie to the sheriff about the drinking and driving and the break-in, with the hope of gettin’ me off. My father posted bail, but that’s the last favor I accepted from him. When I got out, I wouldn’t speak to them and refused their attorney. I told them I was done. Heather didn’t stick with me, which came as no surprise. She told me that my father had given her five thousand dollars to leave town and never come back. So she did. Or so I thought. Turns out she was murdered instead.”