Chapter 21
Evan insisted on going with Bill to talk to Leanne. Hurricane Jake and Roadkill stayed behind at the farm to wait for Kayla. It had gone against every cell in his being to drop her off and let her out of his sight. He’d sworn to protect her. But she was lost in her own mind and he couldn’t seem to reach her. He figured she needed one of two things—a bottle of bourbon or the support of other people trying to help her stay sober. Maybe she needed a woman’s support after everything she’d just recounted at the police station. A quick text that she was fine gave him some relief.
They arrived at a run-down motel and located the room number Leanne had given Kayla. When Evan knocked, the door opened quickly. Leanne’s expectant face dropped when she saw the two men at her door. She looked rough. She was thin and wearing a dirty tank top and jeans that didn’t fit properly.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, fishing for a cigarette out of a pack in her back pocket. Her voice was gravelly from years of hard living.
“We need information,” Evan said. She gave them a disgusted look and retreated into the hotel room, but left the door open behind her. Evan assumed it was as much of an invitation as they were going to get.
She eyed Evan. “So, you’re Kayla’s new guy, huh?”
Evan watched her steadily. “Yeah.”
She shifted her gaze to Canyon Bill. “And you?—”
“What kind of muscle does Trent have, Leanne?” Canyon Bill interrupted her.
“Why should I tell you?” she retorted.
“Because for one damn thing, your daughter’s safety depends on it. For once, put her first,” Evan interjected, and saw a stab of regret in Leanne’s face.
“I always put her first!” Leanne retorted.
Evan’s anger boiled over. “Letting Trent make her a stripper when she was fourteen? That was putting her first?”
“Well la-de-fuckin’-da, Mr. Know-it-all has somethin’ to say. Nice to meet you too, asshole. Comin’ in my place and judging me about how I raised my daughter. You try tellin’ her not to do something she’s got her head set on! She wanted to do it!”
Evan took a step toward her. Bill’s hand on his arm snapped him out of it. He stood poised, feeling like he was about to explode. Leanne stared at him, then Bill, daring either of them to come for her. When they didn’t, she deflated slightly.
“I did the best I could by myself,” she said quietly, retreating across the room to sit on the bed. “We didn’t have a lot of options.”
“You could have stayed on the farm. You could have left Kayla on the farm with her grandmother, instead of bringing her down to this shit hole,” Bill said.
“So Mother Teresa could go on rubbin’ it in my face how much better she was than me? So she could turn my daughter against me? Kayla is my baby. She’s all I got in the world.”
It was crystal clear to Evan that this was going nowhere. Leanne obviously couldn’t see the forest for the trees where her daughter was concerned.
“There sure as hell wasn’t no daddy trying to help us, now was there?” she spat, staring pointedly at Canyon Bill.
Evan felt like his head was on a giant swivel controlled by someone else as he turned to stare at Bill, incredulous. Was she insinuating what he thought she was insinuating? But he said nothing. Now wasn’t the time.
“Bill, let’s go,” Evan said shortly.
“He’s got some guys,” Leanne said softly. Evan turned back to her, and for once, she looked almost appropriately shamed. “And he’s really pissed. It’ll probably blow over quick, but for right now, it’s bad. I heard them say they had to shut her up so she couldn’t testify if it goes to court.”
An emotion crossed her face—something foreign and wild that seemed to flee because it felt it didn’t belong there. She approached Evan, reeking of booze, her weathered skin looking like old saddle leather.
“Don’t let him hurt Kayla,” she said, her voice suddenly smaller, imploring. Years of hard living and bad choices melted away for a moment, and Evan saw a woman who actually did love her daughter.
“I won’t,” he said, staring at her a little longer than he should have. He wouldn’t let anyone hurt Kayla, despite that being a mother’s one divine job, which Leanne had utterly failed at. Then he turned to go.
Evan rode on through the night along a long dark stretch of Route 31 back to the house, stewing over the meaning behind Leanne’s words. He had to talk to Bill before they got back to Kayla’s place. Finally, the lights of a distant gas station appeared in the road ahead. When they got to it, Evan pulled in, jerking his head for Bill to follow.
He and Bill parked their motorcycles at the edge of the parking lot, where the tiny dot of civilization met the Florida wilderness. To one side was never-ending cattle pasture stretching off to the horizon. Bill leaned back on his bike and lit a smoke.
Evan exploded. “Did you fuck Kayla’s mother? Are you her father? Because listen, motherfucker—I’m ready to run everybody out of town who’s no good for her. She’s been through enough in her life!”
Bill didn’t retaliate. He didn’t raise his voice back. He kept his gaze out on the horizon of the cattle pasture ahead, carefully neutral. Evan had the intuition that he was a man not accustomed to being dressed down without fighting back, and it was an effort for him to stay calm.
“I ain’t got nearly as good of an answer to that as you both deserve,” Bill said quietly.
“I’ve had a lot of years to think on everything that happened. When Leanne got pregnant, she told us the daddy was some boy at a party. She never saw him again. For a while after Kayla was born, we all lived in that little farmhouse together. Leanne would run off for days at a time partyin’ and druggin’ with her scumbag friends. She didn’t want to raise no baby. So Kay and I took care of Kayla like she was our own.”
Bill took a long drag on the cigarette and exhaled thoughtfully. “But Leanne got jealous of Kay. Thought she was stealin’ her baby from her. To her, Kayla was some fancy doll she didn’t want to share. They fought like cats and dogs, and Kay finally put her in that trailer across the farm because she was fuckin’ up all our lives along with her own.
“Kay was a good woman. Too good a woman, just about. She was always tryin’ to take care of Kayla without mixing it up with Leanne, and Leanne was just hell-bent on making us all as miserable as she was. I guess I just didn’t know no other way to deal with it than to drink. Ever since I knew Kay, I tried not to drink, because if I ever picked it up, I was gonna end up in a blackout. By the time Kayla was twelve or so, things were so bad between Leanne and Kay that blackouts were sounding pretty good.”
Bill paused, took another long drag on his smoke, and turned his wounded gaze directly at Evan. “Now, Leanne is a lot of things, but stupid ain’t one of ’em. She come at me one day demandin’ money, and I told her no. That’s when she started makin’ noises like if I didn’t give her money, she’d go an’ tell Kay that I been at her when she was a teenager and maybe I was Kayla’s daddy. I was as shocked as you are right now.”
He looked down, stomping out the butt into the roadside grit with a pained expression of helplessness. “I don’t remember doing nothin’ to her, and I can’t imagine that I would—no matter how blackout drunk I ever was. But I can’t prove I didn’t, neither.”
Evan shook his head, exasperated.
This just kept getting worse and worse.
“Ain’t much I done back then I ain’t ashamed of, Evan. The only other thing I can say is hardly a word come out of Leanne’s mouth back then was the truth. But it didn’t much matter. Even the thought of it would have killed my sweet Kay. The thought of it damn near killed me. I raised Leanne since she was four years old. I’d be a monster if I fucked her when she was nineteen.” Tears welled up in the old biker’s eyes.
“Spent ten years in the bottle, missin’ the woman I love. Tryin’ to drink away even the thought of the possibility I’d fucked her daughter. But Leanne was meaner’n a snake. If I stayed, eventually she woulda blown her lid and told Kay just to hurt her. I figured it’d hurt everyone less if I just left.
“I didn’t think Leanne would leave the farm, Evan. I thought if I left, Leanne and Kayla would stay in the trailer. Kay took good care of them. If I left, Leanne wouldn’t have no reason to spew that story and ruin everybody. And if it was true, I didn’t deserve to be around my family anyway. I thought it was better…” He trailed off, and his gaze shifted off to the empty horizon in a pained look of regret.
As much as Evan wanted to hate him right then, he couldn’t. It was an impossible situation.
After a long pause, Bill turned back to Evan and said, “You ain’t got to run me off. All you got to do is ask me to go and I will. When I come back and seen Kay was gone, and Kayla had got clear of Leanne and was trying so hard to run this place on her own, but the farm was fallin’ down around her. I saw a chance. It was finally a chance I could do right by somebody. I could help her fix the place up so she could have a good life. If she is my daughter, then she deserves it all the more.”
“Jesus Christ, man,” Evan said quietly.
“Right now, she needs all the help she can get. And I aim to stay, ’less’n you tell me otherwise,” Bill said.
Evan scrubbed his face, blowing out a breath, shaking his head. As disgusting as the thought was, Evan thought bitterly, if it did happen like Leanne said, at least no laws would have been broken. Kayla did need all the help she could get, that was the truth. She was in a delicate state. Recounting the trauma she’d been through was obviously taking a toll. The last thing in the world she needed right now was for Bill to either abandon her or confess that he might be her father.