Chapter 3 #2
Willow heard her, but the words skated across the surface of her mind without leaving marks.
She opened the fridge, took out a beer, and wished it was whiskey, then held it out to her cousin, but Drew shook her head.
So she slammed the fridge door, twisted off the cap, tossed it toward the wastebasket, and missed.
The cap hit the cabinet door, ricocheted across the floor, and spun on its end before falling with its pointy edges up.
“I can’t believe they kept this from me. And they’re acting like I’m the one who did something wrong.” She could whine to her cousins. They were as close as any siblings, Willow thought. Then again, how would she even know what having a sibling felt like?
Drew shrugged one shoulder and averted her eyes.
“What? You think I did something wrong?” Willow asked, stunned.
“No!” Drew opened the fridge and took out a beer, apparently having changed her mind. She tossed her cap and it went into the wastebasket without touching the sides. Then she went over, picked up Willow’s cap, and dropped it into the basket before taking a generous sip.
“You do think I did something wrong, don’t you?” Willow was a deputy sheriff. She could tell when a suspect was stalling for time.
“I just think you could’ve been…gentler.”
“I was pissed!”
“I don’t blame you.” Drew looked around. “So Jeremiah’s not here?”
“He’s helping out at the saloon today. No school today, so Frankie’s at the house with Beans, which is his favorite place to be.”
“Him and that dog…” Drew shook her head, smiling. “Frankie’s staying at your place more and more, isn’t he?”
Willow nodded. “Yeah. We, uh, brought up the notion of taking formal custody with his grandparents. That way they could go back to being grandparents.”
“How did they respond?”
“Well…they didn’t throw us out. And they didn’t say no. They’re talking to a lawyer and considering it.”
“Aw, Willow, that’s wonderful!”
“Yeah, it is.” Willow smiled fully for the first time in quite a while.
She’d been walking on air about her little family taking shape; her and Jeremiah and Frankie and his horse of a dog who’d brought them all together.
Everything had been perfect until this bombshell had dropped right into the middle of the clan.
Footsteps made them look up. Elena Rodriguez, the newest member of the cousin-hood, and a doctor to boot, came down the stairs.
She was one of four non-blood Brands. Ethan was adopted.
Elena and Jeremiah were his half-siblings.
Same Italian father, but different moms. Elena’s mom was of Mexican descent, and the combination was stunning.
She looked like Sophia Loren cranked up a notch, Willow and the other she-Brands had decided.
Elena wore jeans, boots, a pretty turquoise peasant blouse, had eyes like a woodland doe’s and dark wavy hair. No white coat, but she was carrying a little black doctor’s bag that could’ve come off the set of an old western.
“Hey,” Elena said. “You okay, Willow?”
Willow was touched, but sick of being asked. Jeremiah had been asking it every time he looked at her since they’d found the cradle. And Drew, of course. Drew adored her.
She shrugged and said, “How can I be okay when I don’t know what happened to my brother?”
“How can your mom be okay when she doesn’t know what happened to her baby?” Elena asked the question gently, placing a hand on Willow’s shoulder as she did.
Will figured it was the voice she reserved for dying patients and their bereaved families, or for delivering scary diagnoses at the clinic in Quinn.
Her words didn’t skim the surface of Willow’s brain like Drew’s had.
They stabbed straight through the ice into the depths.
“Poor Mom. All this time, never knowing,” she whispered.
“No wonder she never spoke about it,” Drew said. “I mean, it’s still the wrong call, but I can kind of understand it. Imagine her guilt—that she couldn’t hold onto him. You know?”
“Even the strongest mind can break under pressure like that,” Elena said. “Her history and files are at the clinic. It was before my time, but she consented to me looking at them. It was a serious breakdown, Willow.”
“Are there unserious breakdowns?” Willow muttered, but knew it was a dick thing to say.
“Your dad’s right to be worried.”
Willow tipped her head backward and blew a sigh to the heavens as her eyes burned. “He won’t let me in to apologize,” she said.
“I will,” Wes said.
He’d come into the kitchen to join their coffee klatch. Willow glanced at the brown bottle in her hand. Beer klatch.
“Just not today, Willow. Elena says she should sleep the rest of the night. You can talk to her in the mornin’.”
His voice had changed, Willow thought, shooting a quick glance at Drew to see if she’d noticed it, too. Drew furrowed her brow to acknowledge she had.
“I’m really sorry, Dad. I didn’t know.” Willow felt like shit for hurting her mother. In her defense, she thought, her mother had never seemed hurtable.
Her dad nodded. “I shouldn’t have kept it from you,” he said. “If I’d just told you privately, it could’ve stayed between us and maybe she wouldn’t have—”
“No, it couldn’t.” She cut him off in a harsher tone than she’d intended. “Dad, you can’t think it was ever okay to keep this secret from any of us. This isn’t just about you and Mom. The whole family deserves to know the truth.”
“Well, thanks to you, now they do.”
“That’s not fair, Uncle Wes.” Little Drew stepped right up to Will’s tall, lean father and tipped her chin up. “We younger Brands are more like siblings than cousins. We all deserved to know that one of us was missing.”
“Dead.” Wes Brand dropped the word like a cinder block. Thud.
“Not without a body, he’s not,” Drew snapped back.
Wes pointed a forefinger right at her. “No. You hear me, niece? You do not mess around in this, Drew Brand. You are not a detective. You’re a kid.”
“I have a license that says otherwise, Uncle Wes, and twenty-three is not a kid. I took that accelerated course last summer and passed my exam with flying colors. Tied for first in the class.”
“That’s all well and good, but if you go digging into this, you’ll tear your Aunt Taylor’s heart right out of her chest,” Wes said. His black hair bore strands of white and was pulled back in its customary band. “You need to leave this alone, both of you.”
Drew stepped back, holding up her hands as if in surrender. But there was a spark in her eyes that hadn’t died. Willow saw it clearly, but she didn’t think her father did.
“The things is, Dad,” she said, “I don’t think you get to tell me what to do about this.
I don’t think I’m the one in the wrong here.
I need more information. I want to know everything about my brother.
Mom doesn’t have to know about it if you think she can’t handle it.
I think she can, but if you don’t, I can keep secrets, too.
Apparently, it runs strong in our line.”
Her father lowered his head, shaking it, clearly angry and trying to bank it. He said, “I’m going upstairs. Come back in the morning. Late morning. You can talk to her then.”
“Fine.” Willow chugged the beer and slapped the bottle onto the counter, then started for the back door, because her father was between her and the front.
“Fine,” he said. And then as she opened the door, he added, “I love you,” the words clipped.
“Me, too.” Then she was out. Drew followed, but Elena stayed behind, speaking softly to Wes about the meds she was leaving in case Taylor needed them. The door closed behind them.
Drew slung an arm around Willow’s shoulders, which was awkward as she was several inches shorter than Willow.
“We’re not fixin’ to leave this alone, are we, Will?” she asked.
“Not in this lifetime,” Willow replied.
Wolf
Wolf stood beside an open grave. They’d lined the inside of the hole with green felt, so the dirt wouldn’t show. His young, beautiful, vibrant, secretive mother was in the box suspended above the hole. He felt as hollow as the grave.
Cilla had made all the funeral arrangements herself, and she’d kept it modest but dignified, choosing a black casket with white lining and dark bronze hardware.
She’d bought a plot in the middle of a small cemetery and had made arrangements for her life insurance policy to pay for all of it, with the remainder going to Wolf.
Unbelievable.
She’d even planted a tree on the spot ahead of time.
She’d always been fiercely independent, his mother.
She’d dated. A lot. But as soon as any of them started to get serious, they were history.
Serious, she’d told him once, usually meant possessive and controlling.
So the minute one of them told her what to do, criticized a decision or how she spent her time, or treated her son badly, they were gone.
She’d loved him.
He was kind of amazed by his mom when he thought about it.
It was a beautiful day in the fifties and warm, more typical of the area than the snow of the other night, though they got a little snow every winter. His mom had loved the snow. She always treated it like a special occasion when it snowed. It was nice that it had been snowing the night she’d died.
The other waitresses she’d worked with at the diner were there. Two brought their spouses, and three were alone. A few of the regular customers had come, and two of Cilla’s nurses showed up, too.
Camellia and her mother were there. He hadn’t seen either of them since that night. It bothered him a little that Camellia was a P.I. who knew more about him than he knew about himself. He didn’t like outsiders in his business.
She was wearing her hair up again. Always up, in a twisted, untidy nest of golden shades. It seemed like a lot of hair, and he’d wondered at least six times since he’d met her how long it was and whether she ever took it down.