Chapter 17 – Stone
STONE
“Ijust made some sleepy tea,” Cora said quietly and patted my arm. “Help yourself.”
“Thank you,” I said sincerely. After years of insomnia, Cora created a special blend of tea to help her sleep, and Juice helped her turn it into a business. Grave Tea.
“Sweet sleep,” she said before continuing up the stairs.
“You too.”
Since I was on my way downstairs to smoke a blunt because I was having trouble falling asleep, I detoured to the kitchen to get a cup of tea first and found Whitney leaning against the counter blowing the steam from the mug she was holding.
“Having trouble sleeping?” I asked.
“Yes. How’d you know?”
I gestured to the mug in her hand. “I know the smell of Cora’s sleepy tea well, and I’m here for the same reason.”
“Does it work?” she asked hopefully.
“It does for me, but I always smoke a little weed with mine.”
“I’ll let you know how it is without, unless you have something you’re willing to share.”
I grinned and opened my hand to show her the blunt I was holding.
“Lead the way.”
We took our teas out to the balcony and sat in the same rocking chairs as the night before. I lit the blunt and took a few puffs before I passed it to her. “So, why are you out here in the middle of the night instead of sleeping?”
She sighed. “I don’t sleep well when I’m not at home.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that’s true for a lot of people.”
“It is,” she said and cleared her throat. “I meant I don’t sleep well when I haven’t been able to sleep in my bed at home for a while.”
“Like you can’t sleep because you’re homesick?”
“Sort of. My mother moved us from place to place until she lost custody of me for the last time when I was nine. Then I bounced from foster home to foster home until I was placed with the Jenkinses when I was sixteen. I was there for over a year before I finally slept through the night without waking.”
“You need to feel grounded.”
“I need to be able to say, I want to go home and immediately know where my home is, what it looks like, what it smells like.”
“That makes sense. How long did you stay with that family?”
“I was there for five years. Stevie had already been with them for a year when I arrived. We lived there until Mrs. Jenkins died. Then we moved into our own place, and we’ve been together ever since.
With the exception of the two years I lived with Glenn.
Though I always slept in my old bedroom at Stevie’s when Glenn was out of town.
Which was a lot. Now that I’m thinking about it, I bet I spent more nights at Stevie’s than I did at Glenn’s during the time I was technically living with him,” she clapped her hands and laughed. “Oh, that’s funny.”
Yes, it was, but I felt weird about laughing since I was the one who incinerated the poor fuck. She clearly knew he was a schmuck, but I wondered how much she knew about the shit Glenn had gotten himself into.
“Do you know why the Wood brothers killed Glenn?”
“Am I supposed to know?” she asked. “Are you supposed to know I know? Shit. I mean, I don’t know. I’m high.”
I laughed. “You know something. What is it?”
“You probably already know all this anyway. He was in a lot of debt. He lost his job and his house. He was going to lose his car, and he couldn’t pay for his booger sugar.
I assumed he had borrowed money from the brothers and couldn’t pay it back.
Then they killed him and took his car to recoup some of the money. But that’s just an assumption.”
“That’s a pretty spot-on assumption.”
“He was already going downhill when I left him, and one of my best friends is a PI who I sometimes work for. I know all kinds of shit.”
“I’m not gonna lie. You scared the fuck out of me when you called me Sawyer Stone Hart.”
“Really?” she laughed.
“Yes. You called me by my government name on sight. No one calls me Sawyer. Then you ordered me around at gunpoint like you weren’t the slightest bit scared of me.
I didn’t know what to think. I’m a fucking biker.
Most people are at least a little intimidated.
But I’m curious—how did you know my name? ”
“Hadley’s a private investigator. We spent the entire weekend identifying all the players involved so we could figure out what to do.”
“What did you come up with?”
She shook her head. “Not much. When y’all showed up at the beach house, we were planning to stay at Hadley’s apartment downtown since it’s close to where Stevie works, but that’s as far as we got.”
“Did you meet Hadley in foster care too?”
“No, we met Hadley at a funeral home. Her father’s funeral was right after our foster father’s funeral. She was in the bathroom because she didn’t want people to see her smiling, which is exactly why Stevie and I were in there. We bonded over our dislike for the father figures in our lives.”
“You lost your parents, and then you lost a foster parent? That’s rough.”
“Not exactly. My mother was a piece of shit, and my father was never around. Not even sure if it was the man she said it was. So, I didn’t lose a loving set of parents the way Stevie did.
But neither of us gave a shit about Ralph’s death.
He was an old jackass who’d been funneling foster children through his home for decades. ”
“I thought you said you lived there until your foster mother died.”
“We did. Ralph died the summer after we graduated from high school. We had already turned eighteen, but they didn’t kick us out like we thought they would.
Ralph told us we could stay as long as we enrolled in classes at the community college and made good grades.
I was surprised by the offer because I truly thought he hated us.
Anyway, Edna wasn’t in great shape, and it only got worse.
We stayed and took care of her until she died.
And please save your condolences. She was a mean old hag until the very end.
We didn’t stay out of the goodness of our hearts.
We stayed because we didn’t have to pay rent. ”
“Then what happened?” I asked, yawning.
She yawned too. “By that time, we had steady jobs and had saved enough money to move out. And here we are.”
“Sounds like Cora’s tea is working. You ready to go inside?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
We took our mugs to the kitchen before walking upstairs. “Thanks,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”
“Night.”
When I got into bed and closed my eyes, Whitney’s face was all I could see.