Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Clay
Louisa doesn’t interrupt my late breakfast. She doesn’t come barging in while I restock the bar or as I busy myself with the work we didn’t finish.
She didn’t take her second shower of the day last night, and while late nights make it unlikely she’ll be up with the sun, it’s late in the morning. Her not showing up by now is unusual.
Not that I’m worried. She’s perfectly safe in the camper.
I go so far as to ensconce myself in the office for a bit of book cooking. Now that Louisa knows, there’s no point in hiding what I’m doing. It’s not like she told me to stop or threatened to expose me.
But after five minutes of staring at numbers without being interrupted by a certain dark-haired harridan, I give up.
Isn’t fresh air supposed to do me good? Help me focus? I’ll take a walk down the old dirt road behind the bar and see where it leads to. Then I’ll be able to get back to work.
The camper happens to be on the way. I am not checking on her, I tell myself as I walk toward the clearing.
The clearing is quiet, and there’s no answer when I knock on the camper door. The door is locked when I try the handle, so she must be out. Was her car still parked under the trees next to mine?
It doesn’t matter. The woman is clearly fine.
Dappled sunlight filters through the canopy that encloses the old road in a green tunnel, and everywhere birds chirp and insects buzz. To my surprise, my shoulders relax as I walk along. Grasshoppers jump out of my way. A butterfly floats up from some wildflowers.
It’s pleasant. I already feel lighter.
I can no longer deny that the ennui that’s been my companion for years has faded. Building in its place is a sharp, fluttery sensation, like the crispest dry champagne. Is it excitement? Anticipation? For what? Why now?
It can’t be small-town life, and it’s certainly not my growing ease with Briar and Benji. It’s definitely not Louisa Gallo.
The fact that I’m outside, casually strolling down a dirt road to god only knows where, and I’m mostly enjoying it, is raising an army of red flags. This cannot be good for me.
I need to put her out of my mind. Tristan Hunting is still somehow alive. Is there some way I can help his troubles along without sticking my neck out? Probably not, but my attention should be on the man who failed my sister, not on whatever this feeling is.
The driveway ends at a small lake ringed by forest, devoid of boats and any other signs of civilization. There was a house here once. The concrete pad and a brick chimney are still there, along with some charred, rotted, tumbled-down walls.
I can almost smell the smoke from the fireplace, faint in the forest.
Travis tried to sell me a section of lakefront property, but I wasn’t interested. Was this what he was talking about? This house must have burned down years ago.
I approach the old husk of a building, walking a wide path around the rubble.
The sound of a door opening sends a shiver down my spine.
This place has ghosts.
I glance in the direction the sound came from, expecting to see nothing but forest, in which case I plan to walk very quickly back to the bar and never step another foot down this haunted road.
Instead, I spy a small building near the shore, partially hidden by the forest, smoke rising from the chimney.
It’s a sauna. A woman is walking away from it, toward the lake, a towel draped over her shoulder, and nothing else to conceal her very naked body.
Louisa.
Her heart-shaped ass jiggles slightly as she carefully picks her way through a carpet of pine needles, obliterating any sense of peace I’m still clinging to from my late morning ramble.
I try to will away that problematic champagne-fizzing, but it’s no use. It’s not even that she’s naked. It’s the glimpse into an unexpected slice of her life. A hint that there’s more to her than cherries and lipstick.
No, that can’t be right. It’s definitely about seeing her naked. Which I also don’t care about.
I hold perfectly still, watching as she jumps gracefully onto an old wooden dock. If I move now, she’ll see me and assume I’m spying on her. Which I absolutely am, but it wasn’t my intention.
A partially collapsed wall blocks my view as she reaches the end of the dock, so I edge just far enough out to open the view. She drops the towel, then launches off the dock in a perfect swan dive that gives me a very brief glimpse of more than her backside.
Too brief. I’m left only with the impression that she’s beautiful.
She swims lazily out to a floating platform before turning back, and I ease myself behind the tumbled wall in case she looks my way.
When I peek out again, she’s going back to the platform.
Swimming slow laps with a form that suggests she could go a hell of a lot faster if exercise were what she wanted. Instead, she’s enjoying herself.
I should leave while she’s in the water. Every time she turns to swim to that floating dock, I tell myself to go.
I stay.
And then it’s too late. She’s done, climbing up a ladder at the end of the dock and reaching for her towel.
There’s nothing gentlemanly in my reasons for hiding behind the wall again. I’d watch her if I knew I could do it without her seeing me. As it is, once she’s back in the sauna, I’ll get the hell out of here. Go back to the bar. Play with numbers. I’ve had enough fresh air.
I give her plenty of time to get back inside the sauna, but I don’t hear the door close. Cautiously, I peer out from the wall.
Louisa is standing at the sauna door, towel wrapped around her body, staring directly at me. She wiggles her fingers in a sarcastic little wave. Then she steps inside, the door closing behind her.
Louisa doesn’t walk in until the bar is already open.
It’s a grand entrance, complete with pushing her dark sunglasses up into her perfectly styled up-do.
As there are only two regulars already sitting at the bar, I can assume this is for my benefit.
The hint of a smile on her red lips doesn’t disappear when I—sarcastically—applaud.
“Voyeur,” she says softly when she walks behind me.
I suppose she expects me to deny it or explain it away as an accident, so instead I ask, “What’s with the burned-down house?”
The secretive smile flickers and dies. “That was Aunt Rita’s house. My childhood home.”
“What happened?”
Something hardens in her dark eyes. “My cousin.”
“Travis burned it down?”
She glances at the regulars, who are deep in conversation about baseball, before answering. “Not that anyone could prove it was him, but yes.” At that, she ends the conversation by disappearing into the back.
“What’s her deal?” I ask Ford when I bring him another low-carb beer.
“Who, Lou?” he asks, although there’s no one else around that I could be talking about.
I nod.
He takes a long drink of beer, then rubs at the silver whiskers on his face. “The thing you gotta know about the Gallos is that they came here from Chicago during the Prohibition era.”
“I don’t need her pedigree.” If she has one. She probably spawned out of some algae-filled pond when someone tossed an old Elvis record and a drug store brand tube of red lipstick into the murky water.
“They were gangsters,” Mikey says with a bit of a laugh.
I lean over the bar, my interest piqued. “Were they?”
Mikey nods. “Come up here like all the others, to escape the law. They were given sanctuary in St. Paul, so long as they didn’t commit crimes there.
” He goes off on a brief tangent about the corrupt politicians and police chiefs who were paid off, as well as Minneapolis being fair game for crime.
“And then like everyone in the Twin Cities, they came up here to vacation, or to hide out when it got too hot elsewhere.”
“The Gallos weren’t a big name and Benito Gallo was from a lesser branch of that tree,” Ford says, taking over the story he started.
“But he built a cabin on Little Harpy Lake, to the west of the bar here, with his wife, Marcella. Prohibition ended, and Benito landed in jail on murder charges, but his wife still held all the money from bootlegging. So Marcella opened the bar. Benito never saw it. Shanked in prison.”
Mikey nods. “Old Marcella Gallo was tough as old leather, my pa always said. All the Gallo women have been.”
“Have to be. They’re cursed.”
Gangsters and curses. Louisa Gallo is starting to make sense. “What’s the curse?”
“Men,” Louisa says.
Ford and Mikey take opportune drinks as I turn to face her. “Men?”
She takes a few measured steps until she’s standing in front of me, her arms crossed over her chest, that same hard expression on her face.
“Benito died in prison,” she explains patiently, “leaving Marcella on her own. Their daughter Loretta married a local who drank himself to death, leaving her with two kids to raise. Her daughter—my aunt Rita—took over the bar as the oldest child. The man she married was a cheating lout who fought her over the ownership of the bar. And here I am, my savings cleaned out by my ex-boyfriend and my cousin trying to sell this place out from under my feet.”
I’m surprised she doesn’t add me to that list, but it’s implied. Considering I have her aunt’s will naming her as the sole beneficiary hidden away with no plans to tell her it exists, I belong on that list. “Hell of a curse. How do you lift something like that? Circle of salt? Light some candles?”
She shrugs, reaching for those fucking cherries. “The horrors persist, yet so do I.”
“Does Red 40 have preservative qualities then?”
She spoons two cherries into a glass and puts the jar back. “No, my bitchiness is self-sustaining and eternal.”
“Good to know.”
She fills the glass with Coke, then walks out from behind the bar, taking a seat in a corner booth and pulling a paperback out of god knows where.
“Taking the night off?” I call out as I wipe down the bar.
“The bar isn’t exactly busy,” she says, opening the book.