Little Red Ride (The Grimm Riders MC #2)

Prologue

Odile

Nineteen ninety-eight, and I had six boys at my kitchen table eating me out of house and home.

That's how it started. Not with an oath. Not with blood or a knife or any of the nonsense they tell it with now. It started with a pot of chicken and dumplings and six mouths that had never in their lives been told they could have seconds.

I want that written down somewhere. Everything else got written down wrong.

The oldest was Deacon. Twenty-two, though he lied and said twenty-four, and I let him, because a man who lies about his age upward is a man who's tired. He had a jaw like a shovel and he chewed with his mouth shut, which told me somebody, somewhere, had gotten to him young enough.

"Ma'am," he said, "this is the best thing I ever ate."

"It's chicken."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You've had chicken before."

"Not like this."

"Then somebody was cooking it wrong," I said, and I put more on his plate, and he looked at the plate like it might be a trick.

They all did that the first night. Every one of them. Looked at the food, looked at me, looked at the door. Counting exits. Foster kids count exits the way other people count change.

There were six.

Deacon, who I've said about. Marcus, small and quick and never still, who could not sit in a chair without one leg going like a sewing machine.

The Bell twins, Otis and Early, who were not twins at all but had decided at some point that they were and nobody had the heart to argue.

A silent one they called Priest, who I never once heard swear.

And the youngest, sixteen years old and half a foot shorter than the rest of them, with a bad haircut and a good face.

That one's name was Roman.

He's the president now. He's forty-one and he has a gray streak coming in over his left ear and he thinks I don't notice, and he still can't lie to me worth a damn.

But that night he was sixteen and he was sitting at the end of my table with his hood up, and I said, "Take that off in my house."

"It's cold."

"It's July."

"I run cold."

"Take it off."

He took it off. And underneath the hood he had a black eye going yellow at the edges, four days old maybe five, and he watched me see it and he set his jaw and dared me to say something.

I said, "You want cornbread?"

He said, "Yes, ma'am."

That was the whole conversation about the eye. That's how you do it, if anybody's asking. You don't ask.

They'd come out of the same placement in Youngstown. A house run by a man named Pike, which is a name I'd like you to hold on to, because it comes back around and I don't have the patience to explain twice.

Six boys aged out or ran out or got moved out of one house within eighteen months of each other, and instead of scattering the way the state expects you to scatter, they found each other again.

That's the part nobody appreciates. The state's whole design is scattering.

Six boys undoing it on purpose, with no money and no car between them but one, is the only miracle I've personally witnessed.

They ended up at my table because Deacon had done a summer of hay for the Vaughn place two ridges over and somebody told him the old woman on the forty acres would feed anybody who worked.

Which was true. I did. I fed half this county at one time or another.

My husband had been dead four years by then. Cancer, and it took him slow and rude and it left me with forty acres, a pump house, a barn with a bad roof, and a great deal of time.

You can do a lot of damage with time.

So they came for a Sunday and then they came for a Tuesday, and then Marcus fixed my gutter without being asked, and after that it wasn't a question anymore.

By September they were sleeping in the barn.

By October I'd stopped pretending they weren't.

"You could sleep in the house," I told Deacon.

"Barn's fine."

"There are four bedrooms in that house and I sleep in one of them."

"Barn's fine, ma'am."

"Is it the barn or is it me?"

He thought about it. He was slow, Deacon, but he was slow the way a good scale is slow. "It's that we'd get used to the house," he said.

I didn't have anything to say to that. I went in and I cried a little at the sink like a fool and then I came out with blankets.

Now here is the part everybody wants.

Everybody wants nineteen ninety-eight. Everybody wants the thing that happened in October, and I have kept my mouth shut about it for twenty-eight years, and I'll tell you exactly as much as I feel like telling and not one word past it, because I'm seventy-nine years old and I have earned the right to end a sentence when I want to.

There was a man.

He had money. He had a name that people around here still say quietly. He owned the ridge road and the two mills that were still open and a good half of the men in this town by way of their debts, and he had a habit, and the habit was young people.

He'd had a habit at the Pike house in Youngstown, is what I'm telling you.

He'd paid for access. He'd paid Pike, and Pike had opened the door, and six boys had been on the other side of that door at various times and none of them had ever said it out loud to each other until they were sitting at my table on an October night with a bottle of my late husband's rye they thought I didn't know about.

I was on the stairs. They didn't know that either.

I want to be careful here, because I've heard how it gets told now — I've heard the version where it's a war, where it's business, where it's the club's founding score. Men love to make a story into money. It's how they hold it.

It wasn't money.

It was six boys finding out, one at a time, going around that table, that it had happened to all of them.

I have never heard a sound like the sound in my kitchen that night. I hope I don't again.

And then it got very quiet, and Roman — sixteen, hood down, black eye gone to nothing by then — said, "So we go."

And Deacon said, "You're not going anywhere."

And Roman said, "I'm going."

And Priest, who I'd never heard say four words together, said, "We all go or nobody does."

I came down the stairs.

I'd like to tell you I talked them out of it. That's what a good woman does in the version where a good woman is in the room.

What I said was, "Not in my kitchen."

They all turned around.

"You want to plan it, you plan it in the barn," I said. "This is where I eat."

Marcus started laughing. Couldn't stop. Laughed till he had to put his head on the table, and then Early started, and then it went around the room like a fire, and Deacon put his hands over his face, and I stood there in my husband's bathrobe at one in the morning and I let them laugh, because I have buried enough people to know that laughing is a load-bearing wall.

Then I said, "Sit down. All of you. And tell me what you think you know."

They told me.

I'm not going to tell you.

I'll tell you three things and then I'm done with it.

The first thing is that the man is dead and has been since October of ninety-eight, and the newspaper called it an accident on the ridge road, and there was one deputy in this county who knew better and he took a fishing trip and never wrote it up.

The second thing is that there were six of them and only five of them were in the car.

The sixth was sixteen years old and had been locked in my cellar since eight o'clock that evening by a woman he trusted, screaming himself hoarse through a door with a bolt on the outside that my husband installed in nineteen seventy-one for reasons of his own.

He has never forgiven me. He'd say he has. He hasn't. There's a thing he does where he won't look at the cellar door when he comes in my kitchen — steps around it like it's wet paint — and he's done it for twenty-eight years and he thinks I don't see.

I'd do it again.

I'd do it again tomorrow, twice, with the same bolt.

The third thing is what I buried.

They came back before dawn. Five of them, and the car was gone somewhere it isn't anymore, and Deacon had a cut on his hand that I sewed at that table with a needle out of my mending basket while Otis held the lamp and threw up twice.

And after, when the sun was coming up gray over the barn, Deacon put a bundle on my kitchen table wrapped in a feed sack.

"We need you to keep this."

"What is it?"

"Better you don't."

"Deacon Ross," I said, "there is a boy in my cellar and blood on my floor and you're about to tell me what's better."

So he told me.

And then I opened it, because I don't take a man's word on the contents of a sack in my own house.

It was papers.

That's all it ever was. That's the joke of it, and I want you to appreciate the joke, because I've had twenty-eight years to and it's still funny in the way that a thing can be funny and also sit on your chest at three in the morning.

Six deeds. Six parcels along the ridge, bought clean and cheap and legal in the winter of ninety-seven by a dead man who was buying up the whole spine of this county for reasons he never got to finish.

One parcel apiece, signed over — and I'm choosing the word signed deliberately and you may make of it what you like.

And underneath the deeds, an envelope.

And in the envelope, the thing that proves who that man was and what he did and what six boys out of the Pike house did back.

Both halves in one sack. Their fortune and their noose, tied together so neither one can be picked up alone.

Deacon said, "Burn the envelope."

Marcus said, "Burn the deeds."

Priest said, "Burn all of it."

And I said, "Nobody's burning anything in my house, I just cleaned that stove."

I took it out to the pump house at seven in the morning in my nightgown and my dead husband's boots, and I put it under the floor where the frost line is, in a milk can, and I set the boards back and I stood there a while.

Then I went in and I unbolted the cellar door.

He came up the stairs and he didn't look at me. He went out the front and sat on the porch step and he didn't move for three hours.

I brought him coffee at ten. He drank it.