Chapter 16
Sixteen
“Your phone’s ringing,” I said, unable to keep the sullen tone from my voice. Phillip looked at me for a moment, about to say something, then put it on silent.
He speared a piece of smoked cauliflower on his fork. He held it out to me, and I took it reluctantly. How did he instinctively know those were my favorite? Little things like that normally made me fall in love with him more, but I was so upset from the phone call I’d overheard earlier that it was hard to smile. “We’re having dinner; I can call them back.”
I leaned forward and let him feed me another bite of cauliflower. It was damn delicious, I had to begrudgingly admit. To my surprise, there had been bags of takeout on the kitchen table from a soul food and barbecue restaurant that boasted “alternative faire with a southern flair ” right on the bags, waiting for me when I’d walked in from Lydia’s. Phillip had ordered us dinner.
I dug into my vegan taco mac and brooded. As touched as I was, I was still mad at him.
“Something wrong?” Phillip asked finally, peering at me. Before I could shake my head no, his phone rang again.
I pushed it toward him. “They won’t stop calling until you answer.”
Phillip looked at me apologetically and hit the green button, holding the phone up to his ear. Even after all this time, he still held it slightly away from his head, as though he were one of those folks afraid of dangerous radiation or nanobots infiltrating his brain through his ears or something. “Phillip Deville here.”
His face brightened at the voice on the other end of the line. “Oh, yes! Lee told me you were going to call. Sure, I can talk.” I shook my head and shoveled in another bite of mac n cheese, then moved on to my tomato pie. Lee was really picking up steam as the Bloomer Demons agent. I wasn’t surprised, and deep down, I was pleased that he was helping Phillip, but I hated how this train seemed to be barreling down the track so fast without me. I hadn’t even brought that up to Lydia, though she probably would have told me to stop bitching and just be glad he had a job. For all her faults, one thing Lydia definitely was, was proud of her son.
“Well, I’m currently in Boston and I have another show tomorrow. But we could arrange for a shoot sometime…next week, maybe?” Phillip said. “I don’t have a calendar in front of me; what would next Wednesday be? Would that be enough time to hit the Goth rock issue? You said you go to print in early May?” He nodded. “Do you do clothes and makeup, or do we need to bring our own provisions? You know what, scratch that—just give Lee a call and he’ll sort all that out for us. He’s got a better idea of everything we have going on, anyway. He’s the one to handle it.”
I put my container of food down on the table and scooted my chair back quietly, Phillip seeming not to notice as I left the room. I left most of my food uneaten and trudged back up the stairs to his bedroom. I sat on the bed for a few moments, hoping he’d immediately come up after me so we could hash this out— I hadn’t told him about Colt Leather, after all—but he was still downstairs on the phone.
I pulled myself to the shower and turned on the water. As it was warming up, I decided if he wasn’t upstairs by the time I was finished with my shower, I was leaving and driving back home to Brunswick. I wouldn’t take off like a thief in the night this time, but I certainly wasn’t going to stick around while he made all these huge life plans without even talking to me first. Sure, I could go to him, but…shouldn’t he be coming to me? After all the lectures he’d given me about letting him in and keeping him in the loop. All those lectures about honesty.
Phillip Deville and the Bloomer Demons were in full fame mode again, well on their way to their big comeback, and I just knew he was going to leave me behind. And he didn’t even have the decency to talk to me about it.
I stripped down and stepped into the shower, letting the too-hot spray run down my back, scalding me a little, feeling my muscles loosen their tension. I’d read once that women with anxiety tended to be more thrill-seeking when it came to pain—they liked scalding hot showers, tattoos, spicy foods—anything to give them a slight amount of pain and release endorphins to mimic that panic-mode they were so used to living in. I sighed. It was a generalizing, sexist stereotype, but it was probably true. I liked my showers hotter than the sun.
Still salty as hell at Phillip. I reached a little too aggressively for the shampoo bottle, knocking the shampoo, conditioner, and face wash off the ledge and onto the shower floor. “Goddamit!” I reached down to grab at the shampoo, trying not to slip and fall and break my neck in the process.
“Let me get that for you,” a voice said behind me, and I jumped and almost slipped again. Strong arms caught me, wrapping around my waist and pulling me close. Phillip.
I started to ease myself back into him, to melt into his wet skin, then stopped. I was mad at him. I wasn’t going to let him disarm me by being hot and sexy in the shower.
“I know you’re mad at me,” he said.
“Shouldn’t take poking around in my head to figure that out,” I said crossly.
He grabbed at my shoulders and turned me around to face him, reaching up to push my wet hair out of my eyes, caressing the droplets of water from my face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have a bunch of stupid excuses to make or any dumb reasons to give you. I should have been checking with you about every single plan I’ve made, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”
I stared at him. “That’s it?”
He nodded. “I know it’s not good enough. It’s just that…well, I didn’t expect Lee to go off and running quite so fast. He booked all these shows and promotional things so quickly that me, Jason, and Ollie were totally caught off guard. Hell, Benny’s his boyfriend, and I don’t think even he knew half the wheeling and dealing Lee managed to do until after the fact. But it’s hard to turn it down. The money is really good and…” He looked down for a moment, embarrassed. “None of us are spring chickens. It might be our last chance as a band.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” I said. He handed me the shampoo bottle, and I began to lather up my hair, still looking at him.
“It is, though,” Phillip said. “You know what Lee said to me? He said, ‘These days, thanks to social media, everyone’s attention span is so short that all our fifteen minutes of fame are more like fifteen seconds.’ He told me we should get while the getting’s good because as soon as they get bored of my resurrection, everything will dry up.”
I sighed, rinsing the lather out of my hair. Sometimes Lee annoyed me with how pragmatic and logical he was.
“Still,” I said. “It would have been nice if you’d run all these plans by me before you’d just said yes. Because it does affect me, you know. If you’re going to be gone touring all the time…and me just sitting back home…”
“No,” Phillip said, taking my hands in his wet ones, holding them to his chest. “I have a plan for that. That is, if you’re agreeable.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re going to come with me on tour. You said the other day that you wanted to write. Why not start with a tour diary or blog or some type of column about being on the road with a touring band? It’ll be a working trip for both of us, but the best part is, we’ll be together.” He pulled me close to him, pressing his wet mouth to my neck. “You’ll be the groupie I take to my bed every single night.” He placed another kiss near my collarbone. “What do you say? Will you come?”
“Yes, I will,” I said, relaxing and letting him encircle me in his arms. I bit at his chest, enjoying the low moan that came from him, taking his hand and moving it downward. “Right now. You owe me, Deville. As for the tour, I’ll let you know my answer later.”
His eyes widened as realization dawned. “You dirty girl.” He began to chuckle and grabbed at me roughly, pressing down on my mouth with his own. “I am 100 percent at your service.”
Somewhere around the fifth or sixth ring, my phone woke me up from the deep sleep I’d finally been enjoying. I groaned, rolling over and feeling around under the pillow, producing the phone and almost dropping it before holding it up to my ear. I glanced at the time—4:50 in the morning. Someone had better be dead. Actually, scratch that; I hoped nobody was this time. I’d seen enough death.
“Hello?” I said into the phone, my voice little more than a croak. It had only been about an hour and a half since I’d managed to drift off into sleep. I was beginning to understand why they said that sleep deprivation is a form of torture.
“Stormy, it’s Daddy.”
I sat up in bed, leaning over to jostle Phillip awake. “What is it? What’s happened? Is everyone okay? Shably or?—"
“Calm down, calm down,” he said on the other end of the line, his voice slurred. I sighed, though it wasn’t in relief. My father was drunk. Drunk and calling me at five in the morning. So much for being on the straight and narrow. “Everyone’s fine here. Well, relatively.” The word “relatively” came out ‘ruhltivey.’
“What is it, then?” I asked, trying to keep the anger from my voice and failing.
“You ran outta here the other night before I could tell you,” he slurred, his voice pained. He sounded so far away. “And I can’t stand it, Stormy. I can’t stand no more secrets, you see? All the secrets is how we got into this mess. All the secrets is how come things have been bad for you.”
“No shit,” I said angrily. Phillip had switched on the bedside light and was looking at me curiously. “So what is it you need to tell me? Because it’s five in the morning, and we’re trying to sleep over here.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Daddy said. “I don’t sleep much these days. Insomniac an’ all. Sometimes I forget not everybody’s up, pacing the halls.”
So I came by that trait honestly, it seemed. “What is it?” I asked again.
“Tess,” Daddy said, and my heart skipped a beat. “I know why he died. Why he was in the house.”
“You do?” I asked. “I just assumed it was because of drugs; same shit, different day.”
“It was because of drugs, sweet pea,” Daddy said slowly. “But Tess wasn’t the one with the problem.”
“I don’t get it.”
He took a large, audible breath, and when he spoke, his words came out in a flood. “When I left your mama and moved down to Florida, I got clean. I stopped doing all that shit, stopped working with that asshole Elvin, got clean. On the straight and narrow. Stayed that way for years too,” Daddy said, his Southern drawl thick with drink. “I stayed clean for a long-ass time. I wish you woulda come around more then, Stormy. You woulda been proud of me.”
“Yeah, well.” I sighed, the hand that held the phone up to my ear trembling a little.
“It was a good ten years at least that I stayed out of trouble. Made a good life down here. Put a little by, bought a house, turned the corner. So I thought. Till Elvin came calling again. He kept offering me more and more money. I kept sayin’ no. He’d offer more, I’d still say no. Then he caught me on a bad day. Dee had overspent on some furniture, and I’d gambled a little too much that weekend, and we was a few hundred short on the mortgage. And Elvin just happened to call, and the job seemed pretty easy, so I took it.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Month or two ago,” Daddy said. I heard the sound of a beer tab popping open. “And once I got back in, I couldn’t get out. One day, I’m just mowing my lawn and be-bopping around my house, sober as a judge, and the next thing I know, I’m selling drugs out of the goddamn boot of my car and then Elvin starts asking questions. Questions I don’t want to answer.” He paused. “Questions about my daughter. About you.”
“Like what?”
“Like when’s the last time I seen you. How often do you come around. Who do you hang with. What kind of stuff are you into these days, where you work, where you hang out, stuff like that,” Daddy answered. “I didn’t like to answer him, so I dodged the questions, but he was getting real aggressive about it. Starting to scare me. I tried to call you, to warn you, but I couldn’t never catch you at home. I tried Tess too, and he told me he hadn’t talked to you in months. And then I found out he was working for Elvin and Guthrie too, and I regretted calling him.”
“He went back to Elvin and snitched?” I guessed.
“No, but he would have, I reckon. If Guthrie hadn’t up and died and then Elvin right after him,” Daddy said. “Tess was so wrapped up in all that, more than I was, even. He was working with that joker Shank, who was downright evil.” He paused. “Shank’s the one that burned down my house.”
“How do you know?” I asked, though I’d guessed as much.
“Because Tess told me.” I drew in my breath with a gasp, and Phillip stared at me from his side of the bed. I hadn’t expected that. “He left me a voicemail. I didn’t get it because I was on that fishing trip, and when I checked it later…well, it was there. I didn’t tell the police.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it would have implicated him more, and I didn’t want to do that. Not after what he sacrificed for me.”
“What did he sacrifice?”
“Stormy, he tried calling me and left that voicemail and couldn’t get through, so I reckon that’s why he showed up here. He wanted to make sure me and Dee and the gal got out before the fire started. With Guthrie and Elvin gone, Shank had designs on trying to ‘take over’ what little of their business was left. He strong-armed Tess into joining him—Tess always was kinda weak, huh—and the first order of business was to shut up anybody that knew about the shit they were doing…and since I was on the payroll and connected to you, that made me enemy number one.”
“So what you’re saying, so I’m clear, is that Tess came to warn you? And that’s why he died?”
Daddy’s voice was full of tears. “I think so, sweet pea. I really do. I believe Tess was here to warn me, and either Shank happened on him or followed him or something, and he started that fire when Tess was still inside the house. I think he was like a sitting duck, and Shank disposed of him like he wasn’t nothing. And then he went up to Boston to try and do the same to you.” He gave a ragged sigh. “I dunno what happened to make y’alls marriage go bust, but Tess loved you, Stormy. He wasn’t too good at showing it, but he did.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Daddy, does the name Colt Leather mean anything to you?”
To my shock, he replied, “That greasy-haired singer? Yeah, I met him once or twice.”
“When?”
“He was part of that group. Elvin and Shank and Tess and all of ‘em. Caught up in the same shit as the rest of us.” He hiccupped. “Stay away from that fella; he’s bad news. He ain’t like Phillip, Stormy.”
“Preachin’ to the choir, Daddy.”
“He’s trouble,” he said as though he hadn’t heard me.
I was silent. So it was likely that Colt Leather had been there the night Tess died. Shank had been telling the truth.
Daddy went on. “I was so glad when your mama called me and told me y’all were okay after that concert. I been following Bloomer Demons on the computer a little—Dee showed me how —and when I heard about that bomb, I knew it was Shank. I just knew. I was so worried.” He dissolved into sobs.
It was eerie, hearing my father cry. But I found I could shed no tears of my own. I was all dry, at least for now. What he said tracked, though. I could believe that Tess would do that for my father. He had been a coward, and a little bit simple on occasion, but Tess had not truly been an evil person. He was just another kid who’d grown up on the wrong side of the tracks with hurts to nurse, easily led by those who intended to exploit his pain and ignorance for their own purposes. And it had caused not only our divorce but his death.
I sighed, not sure what to say. Phillip was a silent but comforting presence beside me. “Daddy,” I said quietly, swallowing hard. “Why didn’t you ever tell me I had a brother? Why didn’t you ever tell me about Nikolai?”
“I did,” he said, his voice still logged with tears, so slurred I almost couldn’t understand him. “Didn’t I? Surely I did at some point or ‘nother.”
“No,” I said evenly, gripping the phone. “Never once, in my entire life, did you tell me that you had a son. That I had a brother. Why?”
“Aw, shoot, sweet pea,” Daddy said, his voice almost a whine. “I guess I meant to. I just…didn’t get around to it. It was weird times back then. Your mama didn’t like me to mention it, you understand. Anyhow, it don’t matter now, does it? You’re both grown. Call him up if you want. I ain’t gonna stop you.”
“No,” I said, surprisingly calm. “I don’t suppose you will.” I started to hang up the phone, then thought better of it. “There’s something you can do for me now, if you care to. It won’t make up for everything, but it would…it would mean something to me.”
“What is it?” he asked, his voice a little wary.
“Send me that voicemail from Tess,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’d like to hear it.”
“Hey, Chad…long time no talk. I hope you doin’ okay. Listen, uh, I don’t quite know how to say this, and you’re gonna think I’m crazy but…I thought about callin’ Stormy, but she and I ain’t exactly on speaking terms and I can’t say I blame her. But look. Listen, Chad…whatever dealings you had with Guthrie and Elvin, you might want to clean it up. Just in case. Shank’s talking about getting the business back up and running. And he ain’t looking to put you on the payroll, if you catch my drift. So just, uh…just watch your back. I always liked you and Laureen. I know Stormy has her differences with y’all, but you’re still her folks, and I care about what happens to you. If Shank turns up in Florida, you run as far as you can. I’m keeping my eye on him, but he’s wily as all get out. Right when you think the bad guys are gone, another one takes their place out here in the real world. Just be careful, Chad, okay? Anyway, talk to you later, bye.”