Chapter Thirty-Five Piper #2
Even after all these years, her stomach gave a little lurch when she thought of Dwight Claussen, a man so tall and thick that she’d wondered if he was the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Heavy work boots caked with mud.
The sharp scent of nicotine with a pungent frill of alcohol around the edges.
Huge hands with a crescent of dirt beneath the nails.
An involuntary shudder crawled up her spine as she continued.
“When she turned sixty, Mrs. Claussen finally worked up the courage to leave him. And that’s when she moved into the little house next door and started babysitting me.
But one time when I was staying over at her house, I woke up in the middle of the night and heard shouting and breaking glass.
I tiptoed downstairs and out to the driveway, and I saw her husband beating her with a spade. ”
Kiersten gazed back at her with wide eyes. “Oh. Piper.”
Piper exhaled. “Yeah. It was awful.”
“What happened?”
The pictures from that night never seemed to fade. She struggled to remember her mother’s face, but Dwight Claussen’s crimson cheeks and gashing scowl remained vivid and clear, as though it happened yesterday.
“Mrs. Claussen was screaming, blood dripping down her face. I snuck out the back door to our house and called 911. Then I climbed on a chair and grabbed the loaded .22 my dad kept on a gun rack in the garage and ran next door.”
Kiersten drew in a breath. “How old were you?”
Piper met her gaze across the table. “I was nine.”
Kiersten gasped. “Nine?”
Piper swallowed the thickness clogging in her throat.
“I clicked off the safety, and I pointed that loaded rifle at Mr. Claussen and told him to put the shovel down. And I kept the rifle pointed at him until my dad arrived in his patrol car five minutes later. It was the longest five minutes of my life.”
“Did they arrest him?”
“Yeah,” she said grimly. “They threw him in jail, but he didn’t stay there long.
And sometimes when he got drunk, he’d come over to our place and pound on our door.
We had to get a restraining order. Mrs. Claussen ended up moving in with us and became sort of a housekeeper for my dad and a live-in nanny for me because she wasn’t safe living alone.
It was the right thing to do, inviting her to live with us. ”
She paused. Of course it was the right thing to do. Mrs. Claussen would be dead if they hadn’t. But now that Piper was older, now that she’d been forced to work with a therapist, she could acknowledge the price of providing that sanctuary.
“But it also sort of . . . brought the threat inside our house, so to speak. I spent years terrified he’d break in and, you know, shoot us all.
He finally wandered out of the bar one night on Christmas Eve and froze to death my senior year of high school.
Dwight Claussen’s funeral was the first time I’d felt safe in years. ”
“That’s awful.”
“I should have had therapy,” she said with a wry smile. “But you know how it was when we were young. No one had therapy back then.”
“And that’s why you went into law enforcement?” Kiersten asked.
“Yeah. I wanted to protect good people, like Mrs. Claussen, from bad people, like Mr. Claussen. And now I want to protect my girls. I want to protect the people I care about. And even though I just met you, I feel like I’ve known you forever, and I care about you and your boys.
I want to protect you. And Rosamund, too, and her daughter.
I just don’t trust easily. And I don’t trust that Influencer. ”
“Which is understandable,” Kiersten said gently, “given what you’ve just told me.”
Piper shook her head. “It’s an explanation, but it’s not an excuse. The incident with the crazy man in the panel van showed me that I need to change. If I want to get my job back, I need to demonstrate that I can assess threats appropriately. And this is a good place for me to start.”
Piper squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “So I’m going to trust the Trad Wife over there”—she jerked her shoulder in the direction of Aspen’s house—“and see where it takes us.”
“It is kind of scary, isn’t it? This thing we’re doing.”
“It’s absolutely terrifying,” Piper admitted. “But most things worth doing are terrifying, in my experience.”
“True.” Kiersten clutched a pack of loose-leaf paper to her chest. “Getting married is terrifying. Having children is terrifying. Moving to a city where you don’t know anyone is terrifying. Anytime you do something without knowing the outcome, it’s scary.”
“Exactly.” Piper nodded. “So I’m going to jump in wholeheartedly with this experiment thing and trust that I’m not destroying my children’s future by doing something different from what everyone else is doing.
No matter what my mother-in-law says. I’m going to trust that this Harvest Festival is going to be fun, and not just a pain in the ass.
And I’m going to trust that I still have some investigative skills in my toolbox and help you find the woman who wrote those diaries. ”
“I appreciate that,” Kiersten said with a smile. “Because while I know how to investigate things like a persistent pain in your knee, or a cough that won’t go away, I have no idea how to find someone from 1965.”
“I’m on it,” Piper said. “When you finish reading, hand the diaries over to me, and I’ll see what I can learn.”
“By the way, Aspen is not a name,” Kiersten said, scooping up a handful of markers. “It’s a deciduous tree.”
Piper grinned. “I don’t know you well, but I do trust you. And if you trust Aspen, then I will too.”
Kiersten smiled. “Trust by proxy?”
“Trust with training wheels.” Piper stacked a pile of spiral notebooks in the center of the table. “You know, this is kind of nice.”
“Turning my dining room into a one-room school?”
“Having a friend who lives right next door,” Piper clarified. “I have friends, of course, old friends who live in the area, but I never get to see them. Between traffic and work and the kids’ activities, we never manage to get together.”
“You’re the only friend I’ve made since we moved out here.” She opened a package of gold star stickers and stuck one to Piper’s sleeve. “You are my official First Friend.”
Piper smiled. “I’ve always wanted a gold star.”
“And now you have one.”
Piper’s chest tingled as she touched the star on her sleeve.
She’d always felt intimidated by the other moms at the dance studios where she spent so much time, maybe because she’d been a tomboy who rarely wore makeup and had never been a dancer herself.
She wasn’t naturally equipped for the sequins and eyeliner and complicated buns of the dance world.
So she’d always held the other moms at arm’s length, even though they were perfectly nice.
But with Kiersten, she felt comfortable. With Kiersten, she felt like she was enough, exactly as she was.
“I don’t think parents are meant to raise their kids alone . . .” Piper said slowly, attempting to explain how she felt. “It’s like Rosamund said once, about the Vikings sleeping around the ancient firepit together, or wherever the hell she was talking about.”
“Welcome to my feasting hall.” Kiersten gestured at the dining room. “My Viking name is Kiersten Dirty Sock.”
“I’m Piper Anxiety Leotard.”
Kiersten burst out laughing. “I’m glad you’re in my clan.”
Piper smiled and sank back in her chair, grateful to finally have a clan.