Chapter 24 #2
A shuffle from inside and the door creaked open. Warren stood there, thinner than I remembered. He was a few inches shorter than me, and he’d always been round. Wide. Now his skin hung loose, and beneath his weathered tan he was gray. If I passed him on the street I might not have recognized him.
He looked past Evers, his eyes coming to rest on me. A smile cracked across his face, and he pulled the door open more.
"Summer, what are you doing here? I thought you were living in Atlanta."
"I am, Warren. I've been looking for my dad. I need to find him. He's not returning my calls."
"You came all the way out here?"
"I didn't know where else to go," I said. "Can we come in and talk?"
Warren shot a nervous glance over his shoulder and shook his head. "I wasn't expecting visitors, if you know what I mean."
"I don't think we do," Evers said, craning his neck to look over Warren's shoulder into the dim interior of the house. "Let us in. We won't take much of your time."
"We can talk out here—"
I shook my head. "Warren, just five minutes? Please."
He shot another look over his shoulder. When he stepped back to let us in, I fully expected to see someone else in the room. Maybe my father.
The house appeared to be empty, but I quickly realized why Warren hadn't wanted company. The place was a bizarre combination of messy and organized. I hadn't known Warren was a hoarder.
In the corner of the room, stacks of newspapers rose to tower above my head. Beside them, a wooden crate overflowed with old-fashioned alarm clocks, at least twenty or thirty of them. Another crate held toasters; toaster ovens, slot toasters—some of them older than me.
Rocking chairs were crammed along one wall, the seats filled with stacks of boxes. Electrical cords spilled from one. Old clothes from another.
Layers of filth had accumulated beneath Warren's haphazard collection of belongings. I doubted his house had seen a bottle of cleaning spray or a rag in decades.
On the coffee table, I spotted a glass pipe, a lighter, and a small plastic baggie filled with a white powder interspersed with small whitish crystal shards. Shit.
I don't do drugs. Growing up with my father and his ubiquitous pot smoking had been enough for me. I like a glass of wine or mixed drink now and then, and beer is okay, but drugs are not my thing.
Still, you didn't grow up with Smokey Winters for a dad and not learn more than you wanted to about the tools of the trade.
I knew pretty much every device you could use to smoke pot, from a glass pipe to a bong.
I even knew how to carve an apple into a pipe and how to make a gravity bong from a soda bottle. Thanks, Dad.
Despite my extensive education in pot smoking, I was pretty sure nothing on that table had anything to do with pot. Warren had moved on to meth. Shit. I closed my eyes and sent a prayer to the heavens that my dad hadn't made the move with him. Pot was one thing, but meth…
Meth was an entirely different problem.
Evers saw everything I did, probably more. He positioned himself in the room between me and Warren. Time to get this over with. I didn't want to hang out in Warren's place any longer than we had to.
"When's the last time you saw my dad, Warren?"
"Oh, it's been a while," Warren said vaguely, shooting another glance over his shoulder.
I couldn't figure out what he was looking at. His house wasn't more than one big room. There were a bedroom and bathroom off to the side, nowhere near where he kept looking. The kitchen was behind him, but it, too, was empty. Behind that, there was just the backyard and more trees.
"Okay," I said, not wanting to push too hard and scare him off, "Do you remember more specifically? Did you see him here or in town? Did he tell you what his plans were?"
"No. I'm sorry Summer. I want to help you. I do. But your daddy didn't say anything. He's just—"
Warren wrung his hands together, his fingers twisting, clenching until the knuckles were almost white. He shifted his weight and shot another look over his shoulder. This time I saw he was looking through the main room, through the window in the kitchen to the backyard.
Something in the yard had him on edge.
"What about my dad, Warren? You can tell me. I love him, but I know he's not perfect."
"Summer, girl, you should go back to Atlanta. Take your man with you. Your daddy, he's been messing with some people, you don't want them to know about you. You let Smokey deal with his own troubles. He wouldn't want you here."
Shit. Evers had told me it was bad. I'd believed him. Mostly. But this? Warren, like my dad, was generally too stoned to get scared. A warning from Warren was not comforting.
"You can't tell us anything about when you last saw Smokey Winters or where he might have been heading?" Evers asked in a hard voice. Either he’d learned what he needed to know, or he was out of patience.
Warren shrugged his shoulders helplessly, and with another nervous glance over his shoulder said, "I wish I could be more help. I really do."
"Thank you for your time," Evers said, backing me towards the door. If I thought there was any chance we'd get more out of Warren, I might have argued or offered a bribe. Unlike the bartender and Jade, Warren was too scared to be useful.
Fear shimmered in his normally dull, bloodshot eyes. I would have expected him to be nervous about the meth paraphernalia on the table, but he hadn't spared it a glance.
He wasn't afraid we'd catch him with drugs.
He was afraid we'd catch him with something else.
Evers jumped off the porch, turning to lift me over the ramshackle concrete block steps. Instead of heading to his SUV, he took my arm and led me at a brisk pace around the side of the house.
Warren, his voice high and desperate, called out behind us, "What are y'all doing? You can't go back there. This is private property."
We ignored him. Following Evers into the backyard, I saw what he'd spotted and I'd missed. Across the rough dirt of the backyard, hidden in the trees, was a tiny, ancient camper.
Smoke leaked from the cracked window. As we drew closer, I recognized the smell of it. Evers reached for the handle and yanked open the door.
My father stood there, his hair straggly and badly in need of a cut, wearing an ancient Grateful Dead t-shirt and a pair of jeans faded white at the seams. His Winters-blue eyes, bloodshot and hazy, lit up the moment they fell on me.
He broke into a wide grin and stumbled through the door, arms wide. Pulling me into his embrace, he rocked me back and forth, the familiar scent of patchouli and pot filling my nose.
"Baby girl, baby girl. You're a sight for sore eyes. Your old dad is glad to see you."
I didn't believe that for a minute.
And yet, for all his faults, I relaxed into my dad's arms, relieved to have found him alive and in one piece.