Scarred By Sin (Touch of Evil #15)

Chapter 1

Brooklyn Walsh

The heat had been building all afternoon, heavy and unmoving, the kind that pressed against the skin.

Brook turned the corner onto her street with sweat collecting at the base of her neck, her tank top clinging to her back.

She had spent the last three hours at Sally's house reading magazines and drinking lemonade.

She should have accepted Mrs. Pearson's offer to drive her home.

The walk was only four blocks, but the July sun made it seem much longer.

She spotted her mother from halfway down the sidewalk. She was standing on the front lawn, though her shoulders were hunched forward. As Brook's steps brought her closer, she realized that her mother had one hand pressed against her mouth.

Something was wrong.

“Mom?”

As Brook edged nearer, the damage to the front lawn finally came into focus.

The rosebushes that had lined the front walkway for as long as Brook could remember were gone.

Not trimmed or wilted or suffering from the heat.

They had been ripped from the ground, some of their root systems exposed and crusted with dry soil.

Clumps of dark earth were scattered across the grass in wide arcs, as though someone had torn them out and flung them aside.

The ceramic border her father had installed the previous Spring, the one he had spent an entire Saturday leveling and pressing into the ground, had been kicked apart.

Jagged pieces of painted clay lay in the flower bed and on the walkway, some reduced to nothing more than gritty powder ground into the concrete.

She turned around at the sound of Brook’s voice. Her cheeks were red, and while there were tears brimming in her eyes, they were more from anger than anything else.

“It was those Bushel boys,” her mother murmured, shaking her head in disgust. “I just know it. They've been tearing up everyone's yards on their bikes. I'm going to have your father call their parents tonight.”

Brook peered at the rosebushes again. They hadn't been run over with bicycle tires.

Literally, every single bush had been uprooted.

And the ceramic border hadn't been cracked by a bicycle tire rolling over it.

It had been stomped. The shoe tread marks were visible in the soft soil where someone had stood and driven their heel down again and again.

Brook glanced across the street to Maxwell Simmons' house. He'd fallen in with some troublemakers at the end of the school year. It hadn’t helped that her father had scolded him for parking his mom’s car directly across from the driveway, which made it difficult for her dad to pull out.

Had Max ruined their landscaping in retribution?

“Mom, the Bushels are in Florida,” Brook said, pulling her gaze from Max's front porch. “Tyler was bragging about going to Disney World the other day.”

Her mother yanked a pair of gardening gloves from the pocket of her apron. She then pulled them on with sharp tugs. She shook her head again, more firmly this time, frustration etched across her features.

“Well, they must have just left.” She gestured at the ruined flower bed while giving an audible huff. “Who else would do something like this? They've always been troublemakers.”

Brook had planned to go inside, ask her father for some money so she and Sally could rent a couple of movies at Blockbuster.

They wanted to rewatch the first two Harry Potter movies since the third had come out in theaters last month, but she couldn't very well leave her mom to clean up the front yard herself.

“I can't believe this,” her mother muttered as she bent down to gently pick up some crushed rose petals. “My poor babies.”

The woman spent most days pruning and weeding. She diligently watered the rose bushes every single week. Not too much, not too little. She had even nursed those rosebushes through two harsh winters and a late frost that had nearly killed them back in April.

The screen door suddenly opened before slapping shut with a sharp crack.

Brook turned toward the house, expecting to find her father. Instead, her brother stood on the front porch, hands tucked casually into the pockets of his jeans. Her first thought was that Jacob must be suffocating in that denim, because it had to be in the nineties.

The humidity didn't seem to bother him, though.

His posture was loose, almost lazy, like he had just woken up from a nap and wandered outside to check the weather. His brown hair was slightly damp at the temples, and his T-shirt was untucked. He didn't even glance at the destroyed flowerbeds. He didn't pay any attention to their mother, either.

His gaze found Brook instead.

The way he was staring at her was direct. Steady. A few seconds passed before a smirk slowly crossed his face. The kind of expression that existed only long enough to be registered before it vanished behind the mask of indifference he wore so effortlessly.

There and gone, like a match struck and extinguished with a single puff of air.

Brook's stomach tightened, and she instinctively wrapped her arms around herself. She held his stare without blinking, without moving, her sandals planted on the edge of the walkway where a piece of broken ceramic lay near her toe.

“Jacob, honey,” their mother called out. She had turned partially toward the porch but was still glaring at the rosebushes, as though she couldn't quite pull her attention away from them. “Dinner's at six. I'm making your favorite.”

Her voice shook slightly as emotion took over. She was trying to steady it, struggling to reach for something normal to say, and she had landed on the only thing she knew how to offer him. The assurance that, despite the destruction around her, the household would continue to function.

Jacob didn't even acknowledge her.

He didn't glance back, didn't nod, didn't make any indication that he had heard her at all. He walked down the porch steps with the same unhurried ease, his sneakers barely making a sound on the cement steps.

His hands stayed in his pockets.

His shoulders remained relaxed.

He moved past the ruined garden without a flicker of interest, as though it were someone else's yard entirely.

Brook observed him cross the lawn to the curb, where his Ford Taurus was parked.

The dark sedan had been a graduation gift from their parents two months ago.

Their father had been so proud to hand over the keys, had clapped Jacob on the back, and told him it was the start of his independence.

Jacob had smiled at that comment. The same kind he had just given Brook on the porch. He reached his car and opened the driver's side door. The expression he gave her over his shoulder all but sucked the last drop of humidity from the air.

He settled behind the wheel, and before too long, he'd pulled away from the house without hesitation. He didn't even bother to use a turn signal before disappearing around the corner at the end of the block.

While the sound of the engine faded into the stillness of the afternoon, a sprinkler hissed somewhere two houses down.

A dog barked a few times and then stopped.

When she turned around, she found her mother had lowered herself to the edge of the flowerbed, staring at the nearest rosebush as though willing it back into the ground.

Brook believed with absolute certainty that the Bushel boys hadn't destroyed the flowerbed. Neither had Max. The knowledge wasn't a suspicion or a guess. The way Jacob had stared at her and not at the mess was because he was already aware of what it looked like.

He'd made it.

But Brook wouldn't correct her mother's assumption. The truth would cause more heartache, and her mother was already in enough pain. Some truths were like that.

They didn't set you free.

They just made the cage smaller.

A trowel lay discarded in the overturned soil near the edge of the walkway. Brook bent down and picked it up. The wooden handle was warm from the sun, and dried dirt flaked off against her palm.

“I'll help try to save them, Mom,” Brook murmured as she knelt to the ground beside her.

The gratitude in her mother's expression was unguarded, and for just a brief moment, Brook wondered if there wasn't a seed of doubt in the woman’s mind.

Did she have any reservations about her son at all? “What should we do first?”

“Well, some of the bushes might still be okay if we get them back into the soil quickly enough,” her mother said as she stared at Brook's hands. “Go into the garage and grab my old gloves. These thorns are nasty.”

It didn't take long for Brook to collect a pair of worn garden gloves. She returned to the front yard, pulled them on, and lowered herself to her knees. The soil was dry and loose where the rose bushes had been torn up, but underneath the first few inches, it was still dark and cool.

Brook inhaled the rich, mineral scent of earth that had been turned over.

It mixed with the sweet, wilting fragrance of the roses.

Her mother's hands moved with care, cupping the root ball of the nearest bush and examining it for damage.

She spoke softly as she worked, mostly to herself.

She mentioned buying some fresh compost from the hardware store and how the ceramic border would need to be replaced.

Her father would be upset, but they could fix it.

Everything could be fixed.

Brook tried to salvage one of the few rosebushes that hadn't been pulled out by the roots.

She packed the soil around the base and repositioned the bush as much as possible.

She tried to shut off her thoughts about Jacob.

She constantly struggled with the intrusive, horrible theories that invaded her mind while trying to fall asleep at night.

Why would he do something so horrible?

She'd even started locking her bedroom door at night. She didn't have words for what she understood about her brother, not yet. She couldn't have articulated his cruelty or the way he seemed to study the people around him for weak points, the way other kids studied for exams.

But Jacob was eighteen and leaving soon.

Their parents talked about it at dinner sometimes, their father offering advice about trade schools and their mother hoping he would stay close. Brook listened to those conversations and experienced two emotions simultaneously.

Relief that he might go.

And terror about what he might do before he left.

She feared that by the time Jacob was finally gone for good, he would do to their family what he had done to the flowerbed.

Tear it apart at the roots. Destroy the very thing their mother had spent years nurturing and protecting, then walk away with his hands in his pockets and that same unreadable expression.

And their mother would stand in the wreckage and find someone else to blame, because the truth was a door she could not afford to open.