Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
H angman…
Ten days. I hadn’t seen or heard from Lorelai at all… It held a vague kind of hurt that was mostly made up of disappointment, but I couldn’t do anything about it except leave her be to do what she needed to do.
Still, it gnawed at me and I wondered if she really had felt the same or not.
I worked the backhoe in Hill Crest Abbey East cemetery, digging down the industry standard of four feet – not six – to accept the gleaming casket with the dead old man in it the next day.
We were working behind the scenes trying to find this Calrose Pierce motherfucker and were coming up empty. Whoever he was, he wasn’t from Savannah. You’d think it was a name that’d turn something up – but every turn we made we were hitting a dead end and it was pissing me off.
In the meantime, at least two more girls turned up in the local hospital with corpse weed in their system. Neither one of them faring half so well as Lorelai Gantz. One was in a vegetative state. The other was in Reaper’s tender loving care… but she was dead for real unlike Lore.
“Ho!” My man assisting me today held up his hand, and I moved the arm of the backhoe out of the way, setting it down with its last bucketful of dirt by the pile amassed on the tarp beside the hole.
“How’s it look?” I called.
“Good!” he called back.
I took out my phone to check the time and my heart skipped a whole-ass beat.
One missed call. 843 area code… Charleston.
With numb fingers, I pressed the voicemail button and put the phone to my ear, turning the volume all the way up and powering down the machinery.
“Hi, Hangman, it’s Lorelai…” she gave a harsh sigh and carried on with, “I’m sorry to bother you… but… I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’ve tried everything and I…” She stopped and I pictured her swallowing hard. “I feel like a stranger in my own house. Like, none of this feels right or real, and I feel like I’m surrounded by just so much chaos and noise and I’ve tried. I’ve really tried… but,” her voice cracked. “Please come get me? Or at the very least, come see me?” She rattled off her address almost too quick for me to catch it, caught her breath on a sob, and thankfully repeated it, before ending the message without so much as a goodbye.
I swallowed hard, and lowered the phone, saving the message and reading the transcript of it on my visual voicemail over and over again while I sat with the sun beating down.
I swiped a hand over my face, the sweat dripping and sighed, trying to figure out if, or when, I’d given her the impression that she couldn’t or shouldn’t call me and I shook my head. I couldn’t come up with anything. It doesn’t mean that I hadn’t. It also didn’t mean that I had… she could have easily built something up in her traumatized head that wasn’t real and after everything she’d gone through, fuck… I’d be questioning a whole lot of reality too.
I had questioned my reality, quite a few times, when the flashbacks had gotten real and I could see, hear, smell, and even taste things that weren’t even there.
I called Grim, and he picked up on the second ring.
“I’m taking tomorrow off,” I said. “Find a replacement.”
“Copy that,” he replied without a single bit of preamble or wheedling. Just those simple two words and he hung up the phone, likely to call around to get a guy in to do what needed doing.
I got down off the equipment and called out to the guy that was supposed to be helping me.
“I gotta go, family emergency,” I said and he gave a nod and said, “I’ll finish up,” like I was asking instead of telling.
I went for my truck and drove home, pulling down the way and into the outbuilding near the caretaker’s house where we kept the groundskeeping vehicles.
I went up, taking the steps two at a time and stripped, before I even made it all the way through the living room, ditching my dirty clothes in the washer as I went by and getting right into the shower.
I let the lukewarm water cool my overheated skin as I thought, not for the first time, that I was a special kind of dumbass not getting her information to be able to check up on her. I’d put the onus on her and had somehow given her the impression I’d sent her out into the world to fix herself, and that I hadn’t wanted to hear from her until she did and I was put out with myself for that.
I was glad she’d called, sad that it’d taken her this long, and elated that I could finally see her.
I cleaned up, got dressed, and answered my phone as I tied off the laces on my riding boots – “What’s up?”
“She called you,” Synister said on the other end of the line.
“She did,” I said.
“You getting ready to leave out?”
“About to head to the club to get on my bike,” I affirmed.
“Ride safe,” he ordered.
“Hua,” I answered and ended the call. Word got around fast between the club brothers. I was used to it.
I rode out, hitting Highway 17 and connecting with I-95 for the two hour and some change ride.
The wind therapy was just what I needed. Clearing the cobwebs and letting my racing thoughts cool with the rush of the pavement beneath my tires and booted feet. Sweat trickled down my back beneath my jacket and cut, the warm wind blowing in the front of my open leather and wrapping around me, didn’t do much to cool me.
I cranked my music and powered north, following the blue line on my GPS from the club’s door to hers, and I’d probably been to a thousand houses just like it.
I pulled into the circular drive, stopping on the other side of the round white fountain that sprayed a fine, cool mist into the air, the scent of chlorine hanging thick outside the broad steps that led to an arched double door.
I heeled down the kickstand and leaned the bike onto it, sniffing, taking off my helmet and mopping the sweat from my brow with a navy-blue bandanna I liberated from my jeans back pocket.
The birds chirped, the insects sang, and the late afternoon sunlight hung golden and thick around the lush courtyard.
I marched up the steps and rang the bell, waiting patiently for the door to open. When it did, I looked down to the short Hispanic maid standing in the doorway. She peered up at me and frowned quizzically.
“I’m here to see Lorelai Gantz at her invitation,” I said and that seemed to surprise her.
“One moment please,” she said and she shut the front door in my face. I smirked.
With the trust fund I had but didn’t touch compounding a shit ton of interest over the last almost twenty years, I could have bought this place six times over – but I knew I didn’t look it. Add to those millions what I made with the club? Shit, I never had to work a day in my life if I didn’t want to – but I just wasn’t cut from the rich bitch jet set cloth even though I’d been born to it.
Fuck, I pretty much lived for disappointing my dad right up until he and my mom had both died. No siblings, no grandchildren, just me… their washed-up disappointment of a veteran living life at the edge of the cemetery they were both buried in.
All the money in the world couldn’t save them from a bout of carbon monoxide poisoning on a ski trip when the house’s exhaust vents had gotten blocked by the snow.
When it was your time, it was your time.
Now, even though I still owned the house I grew up in, I rented the damn thing out as an event space and wedding venue.
That in and of itself was still a pretty lucrative thing.
I wasn’t hurting for cash. Not in the slightest. Still, most of the motherfuckers I’d come up around could take their silver spoon and shove it up their ass.
I wasn’t interested.
I stood for what felt like several minutes sweating in the heat and oppressive humidity on the fancy front porch of the mansion, waiting on the help to come back and turn me away. Just when I was fixing to ring the bell again, the maid returned and said, “This way,” holding the door open for me and stepping aside.
I nodded, tried to be gracious, not because I was, but because I knew it would be what Lorelai would want me to do, and I followed Consuela into the grand house.
She led me through tasteful, yet still opulent sitting rooms and through a kitchen that Torment would be tormented by if he saw it and didn’t get to play in it, out a set of French doors into a back yard that put the gardens in Bonaventure to shame.
I followed her down a set of steps off the rounded flagstone patio onto a garden path and to a pair of greenhouses out here, large, and damn near industrial in size, but with the flare of the old-style conservatories you could once buy in a Sears already weeping precum at the tip, begging to be inside her – but I wouldn’t go there. Not unless she wanted to. Not unless she made the first move. I wasn’t about to compound any of her trauma and there was that nagging doubt in the back of my brain that even if she were the one to initiate… would it be the right thing?
I thought about it, long and hard as we carefully swept through the close and crowded historical streets that were never intended for cars, but rather horse and buggy. I was taking the long way to the freeway. Getting her used to making turns and seeing if there was anything I would need to stop and let her know to do or not to do – but so far, she was a natural. A little stiff behind me, but she leaned with the turns and didn’t move around too much or throw me off in any way.
That was good, that was really good.
By the time we hit the freeway, and I turned for the ramp, she had just begun to relax; but when she saw the red, white, and mostly blue sign for the interstate, she stiffened right up, hugged onto me close, and as I caned it, twisting down on the throttle, the wind whipping past us and drowning out the world I could have sworn under the roar of it, and just over the guttural thrum of the bike’s motor I heard her yelp. This sharp, little, adorable cry as she held onto me even tighter than she’d first got on and we swept up the lane and headed for home.
As far as first rides went, this was going to be a long one for her.