Bobby Merritt Meets his Match & The Collected Short Stories (Goose Run #5)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER

ONE

GRANGER

Now

Iblamed my favorite niece, Miranda. She called herself that, not me.

She was my favorite niece, as it happened.

She was also my only niece, so there wasn’t a lot of competition for the title.

I also had four nephews—my sister Annabel’s son, who was Miranda’s older brother, and the three sons of my older brother Charles.

I loved all the boys, of course, but I wouldn’t have been lurking on a college campus at seven in the morning for one of them. This was a Miranda special.

There was an inherent creepiness in a man my age sitting in his car outside a sorority house, even though it was a very nice car and I liked to think I was a fairly nice man.

Nice enough that when I saw one of the Zeta Tau girls arriving home in a skimpy tank top and a skirt short enough that I could almost see what she’d had for breakfast, my only thought was that I hoped she had remembered to apply sunscreen.

I sent Miranda a text.

Are you ready? I would prefer not to have to explain to campus security that I’m not a creepy weirdo for parking here.

I didn’t get a reply. Instead, the front door to the Zeta Tau house opened, and Miranda and her girlfriend Emily spilled out onto the porch, dragging far more luggage with them than a weekend trip to the middle of nowhere warranted. Fortunately, my very nice car had very ample trunk space.

I got out of the car to help the girls load their luggage, and then Miranda got into the front seat and Emily got into the back.

“Great car, Mr. Kelley!” Emily said, clipping her seat belt on.

“Call me Granger,” I said.

Miranda said, “Can I call you Granger?”

I snorted. “Call me whatever you want, monster. Within reason.”

She laughed at the nickname, which made me feel incredibly old.

Miranda had been my little monster from the time she’d attached herself to me as a baby, and now here we were, twenty years later, trying to figure out how everything worked now that she was an adult too.

Could I still call her a little monster?

Was she going to stop calling me Uncle Granger?

And yeah, even thinking about it made me feel my age.

As did being back on Fraternity Row at Lassiter.

Outwardly, the place had hardly changed at all—the same row of large elegant houses that stretched out down the street, their charm somewhat diminished by the same scattering of beer cans on the lawns of more than a few of them—but I didn’t recognize the kid I’d been when I’d been living under Alpha Tau’s roof.

Who the hell was that idiot? Too clever for his own good in a lot of ways, and so incredibly, incredibly stupid at the same time.

I glanced at Alpha Tau as we drove off, and the familiarity of it hit like a gut punch. I could almost taste the beer and pizza and hear the sounds of Linkin Park in the air. Could taste the stolen kisses too.

Most of the guys I’d lived with and partied with back then had gone on to lead entirely predictable lives, including me—Lassiter, law school, career, marriage.

Kids for some of them, divorce for others.

Both, multiple times, for the remainder.

And some of them might as well have dropped off the face of the planet.

Miranda kicked her shoes off, which was the way she started all car journeys. “I told Emily we’d stop for breakfast, so can we?”

“Omigod,” Emily said from the back seat, sounding mortified. “We don’t have to!”

“We can stop for breakfast,” I said. I’d known what I was signing up for when I’d volunteered to be Miranda’s ride this weekend.

Well, been voluntold by Miranda. But of course I’d agreed, because it pissed off my sister.

Annabel, who didn’t approve of Miranda’s “choices,” had taken her car away as punishment when she started dating Emily.

Miranda and I were both enjoying showing her that it barely impacted her plans at all.

I was also going to very much enjoy presenting Miranda with a new car on her twenty-first birthday. Something expensive.

I flashed Miranda a smile as we left campus.

We stopped for breakfast at a place Miranda directed me to.

It was a little cafe not too far off campus, just down the street from a donut shop called Hole Foods.

It had been a while since I’d visited this part of Hopewell.

I remembered it as mostly greasy pizza joints and a grimy deli that sold questionable sandwiches.

Apparently, college students these days had higher standards.

There was one pizza joint left, but it had a vegan cafe on one side of it and an Ethiopian restaurant on the other side.

Fortunately, the cafe Miranda suggested wasn’t the vegan one because I was in the mood for eggs Benedict.

Miranda and Emily both ordered pancakes and smoothies.

I found my gaze drifting out the window as I ate, trying to catalog all the ways the street had changed and all the ways it hadn’t.

It was a mental game I hadn’t dared play back on Fraternity Row.

“Uncle Granger went to Lassiter too,” Miranda said in response to something from Emily I’d missed. “Like a hundred years ago.”

I cocked an eyebrow. It was the sort of sharp look that caused the opposing counsel to take a metaphorical step back and, if they were inexperienced enough, a literal one too, but Miranda had always been immune. She just gave me a sunny smile from around the end of her straw.

“Twenty years ago, thank you,” I corrected her, although technically it was more than that—a lot more. I figured I could still round down to twenty, though. Barely. It seemed slightly less horrific than rounding up to thirty.

Jesus. When had I gotten old?

At the same time as everyone else, I guessed.

I finished eating before the girls did and checked the mapping app on my phone to make sure I still remembered how to get to Goose Run.

Goose Run, I was sure, wouldn’t have changed in the last few decades like this street had.

There had been nothing there then, and I doubted there was much there now.

The fact they were having a Pride parade seemed incongruous, perhaps even a little pathetic, and I hoped the girls wouldn’t be too disappointed in the place.

I’d never made a secret of the fact I had a cabin in Goose Run, but I hadn’t exactly been open about it either. It had just never come up until Miranda had been visiting my apartment in Richmond and snooped through some of the opened mail on the kitchen counter.

“Goose Run?” she’d asked when she’d seen the property tax statement. “Where the hell is Goose Run, and why do you own a house there?”

“It’s literally nowhere,” I’d said. “And it’s a cabin.”

And then, at some point in the following weeks, she must have googled Goose Run and found out about the Pride parade. She’d called me up straightaway to ask if she and Emily could borrow the cabin for the weekend.

I’d told her the place hadn’t been touched in years, but instead of taking it as a warning, she’d seemed to take it as an invitation to adventure instead and informed me I’d be driving them.

Kids, right?

The cabin had been my uncle’s place, and he’d left it to me instead of Annabel or Charles because I’d loved to go there for trips as a kid.

It hadn’t been a fancy cabin, not back then, and since I hadn’t even dropped in to check on the place since the keys had been delivered to me after Uncle John’s death, the cabin was probably full of dust, damp, and rats, or an exciting combination of all three.

I was fully expecting to arrive, let Miranda and Emily take one horrified look at the place, then drive them straight back to campus.

Despite my claim that Goose Run was literally nowhere, it was only about an hour from Hopewell, tucked away between I-85 and US 58 and not signposted particularly well from either one.

The day was sunny and the drive was pleasant—the punch in the gut I felt when we turned off the highway at Goose Run Gas wasn’t.

“Listen,” I said as we passed our third rusted-out car body on the side of the road, “if it’s not what you’re expecting, we’ll head back to Hopewell or, hell, I’ll get you a nice hotel in Richmond for the weekend.”

“What are you talking about?” Miranda asked. “It’ll be great!”

“Okay,” I said, humoring her. “Just, the cabin’s not fancy, like I said, and the town itself is…”

“Is what?” she asked.

“Well, from what I remember, it’s kind of a dump.”

Miranda gave me a worried look and twisted her rainbow bracelet around and around on her wrist. But then she glanced at Emily, jutted her chin out, and said, “It’s been a hundred years. I bet it’s grown since then. I mean, it has a Pride event, so there must be something there.”

“Sure,” I said, although I doubted it. Goose Run had been a nothing town then, and barring some kind of miracle, it probably still was.

The first surprise was the cabin.

I had half expected to find the front steps missing and the roof collapsed, but everything appeared to be in good condition when we pulled up.

Sure, there were leaves and dirt in drifts on the porch and leaves swirling in the breeze, and there was grass and weeds poking up between the gravel of the driveway, but overall the impression was one of hibernation rather than neglect.

Miranda leaned forward in her seat and her expression brightened. “It seems okay,” she said hopefully.

“Let’s wait until we see inside,” I said. I hoped she was right, but twenty-five years and three divorces had long knocked all the youthful optimism out of me. I’d seen the other shoe drop too many times to assume it wasn’t coming.

But when I turned the key in the lock and swung the door open, there were no rats, no damp, and only a moderate amount of dust—and cobwebs, as I discovered when I took a step forward and walked face-first into one.