Chapter 18
Dear July,
I miss you so much I can’t stand it. Please write when you get this. Let me know how you’re doing. Tell me a story from home.
Joe
We didn’t run last night. July didn’t want to, and for once I didn’t either. I stayed in, alone but somehow not lonely, in the space Angus and Rose have made into a home for me. Parked my ass on my new purple couch Rose had described as “just trust me, this is The One.” I watched the TV Angus centered on the floating shelves he built along one brick wall. Fixed dinner in my efficient little kitchen and ate it sitting at my new dining table beside the bright congratulations-on-your-new-space! plant the restaurant—not July herself—had delivered. Started on the paperback thriller Dirk from softball loaned me.
Tonight’s quite a bit warmer, and as we set out running, I have to keep my eyes firmly forward, off July’s strong, curvy legs and arms. Also the bare nape of her neck, where those baby-fine blond hairs grow that used to tickle my lips and nose. Basically, I keep my eyes off all her exposed skin.
This is ridiculous. My brain and gut and body are all mixed up with wanting her, reminding myself she’s a stranger, and arguing back that she’s really not anymore.
July glances my way. “You’re quiet tonight. You okay?”
“Yeah. Thinking about my nice new apartment.” Not a total lie.
She gives me July smile number twelve: the I’m-so-tickled-that-you-too-appreciate-these-people-I-love smile. “They did a good job for you, huh? They’re an amazing team.”
“They really did. Why doesn’t Rose work with Angus full-time? Seems more fun than an office job.”
July shakes her head, her ponytail sliding over the smooth skin of her shoulders. “That office job is her passion. She loves figuring out ways to help people.”
Like someone else I know. “Speaking of. How were Maisie and Sam today?” They hadn’t taken us up on our offers for a place to stay last night. Just looked at each other, squared their shoulders, and said, “We’ll be okay.”
July doesn’t immediately answer. When I glance over, she’s frowning. “There’s something…” She shakes her head again. “I keep feeling like something’s going on there.” She meets my gaze, her gray eyes darker than usual. “Ginny—the deputy?—came to talk to Maisie again. To check the number Maisie had given for her mom. Ginny said she hasn’t heard from Maisie’s mom and doesn’t get any answer, just a voicemail-is-full message when she calls. She asked Maisie for her mom’s work number, and Maisie said she didn’t know. Said she always uses the cell. So Ginny asked for the employer’s name, and Maisie said she couldn’t remember. Said it’s a temp place out of Asheville, and they send her mom out on different jobs.”
Now I’m frowning. What kind of temp work sends people out of town regularly to a job that involves lots of meetings? “Weird. What do you think is going on?”
“I have no idea.”
Our strides match perfectly. The sound of our footsteps landing together, time after time, is…a comfort. A lulling, misleading comfort I should not get used to.
“Joe, what if the kids are lying?” July’s voice pulls me back.
“Lying about what?”
She shakes her head again. “I don’t know. About her mom, I guess. Maybe she’s got a substance abuse problem of some kind? I mean, she goes off and leaves Maisie by herself for days.”
“Possible.” She sure wouldn’t be the first. “What’s up with Sam’s family? Why are they okay with him staying with Maisie so much?”
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard them mention his family at all. I can tell from his accent he’s from around here. There’s a family or two with his name living out past the lake.” She frowns for another quarter mile. “What the hell is going on with them?”
She doesn’t need to be taking on any more responsibility. Any more worries. Half the town is enough.
This calls for silliness. “I’m thinking they’re cannibals. They seem nice and innocent until midnight during the full moon. Then they come out of the corn like zombies. Really hairy zombies. Waving knives and chainsaws. Chanting, ‘Redrum. Redrum.’”
She laughs. “How many movie plots did you mangle for that theory?”
“I don’t know.” I’m just happy to see her smile. “I’ll look out for them, okay?”
“Thank god you were there yesterday, Joe.” She’s frowning again. “You know, I’ve seen that Curt kid before. He’s bigger than you are.”
“I had the element of surprise. And once you pin somebody, it’s hard for them to get out of it unless they’ve had training.” I preferred the horror movie discussion.
“Did you have to learn that because of your dad?” She’s looking straight ahead.
“Some.” Shit, I hate this. “July, I don’t want to have a poor-abused-Joey conversation, okay? I’m grown now. I’m fine. My dad’s been dead for six years. I’m done with that part of my life.” And after yesterday when I managed to keep my rage in check, I’m no longer so afraid part of him still lives in me.
Now she looks over at me. Searches my face. Nods finally when I raise my eyebrows, and we run another half mile in silence.
“I’m sorry. I guess I do keep bringing it up, don’t I? I won’t do that anymore.” Her voice is soft but firm. She means it. I can trust that.
I focus on the road ahead of us. “Yeah, let’s talk about you for once. Tell me why you always change the subject when I ask you what it was like for you when I left.”
Silence, for at least a block and a half.
I try again. “Okay, then, tell me why you’re still single.”
Another silent block.
Then she sighs. “The two things are related, I guess.”
I wait while she works out in her head how to say whatever she wants to say.
“Okay, I’m going to tell you, and it may be more truth than you wanted, but you asked, so suck it up.”
I smile at her bluster. I know this girl and her fake-tough love. I ache for her, for the fear I hear behind her words. “Hit me.”
“After you left I fell apart, okay? Completely. For a whole year. Dropped into a depression—I didn’t even know I was capable of depression. But it was bad. I was suicidal some of the time. Didn’t take care of myself. Stopped ea—everything. Got real sick. Almost had to be hospitalized.” Her voice is stunningly matter-of-fact. She might as well be talking about a book she read.
I can’t speak. The night sounds around us swell to fill my brain: bugs and faraway traffic and creatures in the dark. And our footfalls, carrying us together through the center of it.
This is so not what I expected. I can’t even picture my golden July like that. Makes my stomach turn to try.
I have a million questions and no idea which ones might be okay to ask. I want to stop right in the middle of the road and hold her. Anchor her. Save her from the past. Our past. My parents. The idea of my goddamn family making my laughing, grounded, bighearted girl want to die…shreds me.
She shoots me a glance. “There are exactly six reasons I’m still here. Jen, Brendan, my mom, my dad, Angus Drummond, and Angus’s grandma.”
My words come out as a croak. “How…? What…?”
One side of her mouth quirks up, but it’s not exactly a smile. “I get that you don’t understand. Some people come out stronger when they’re tested. I think you’re one of them.” She shrugs, but it’s not carefree. It’s more like she’s shifting an uncomfortable load. “But some of us break.” Her last word cracks.
Ten strides before she speaks again. “I had the perfect life up to that point, you know? No disappointments, no losses, no real challenges. Thought I was strong. Capable. Thought the rest of my life would just…fall in line too. When I met you, I assumed you’d be part of the rest of my charmed life. Of course you would, right? I believed in soul mates.”
So did I.
I don’t want to hear the rest of this. It’s like we’re peeling back the top few layers of our skin, exposing everything underneath to the sting of the night air. But I have to listen. Have to know.
Twelve strides. “When you disappeared, suddenly I could see all those assumptions like a spotlight was shining on them. And then I could see them crumbling to dust, one by one. All the things I’d taken for granted about the world and love and how life works. About my own judgment. I mean, clearly that couldn’t be trusted. Because I had been so sure about you, Joe. About us. And then it turned out I was wrong—or I thought so for twenty years, anyway—and I felt like I had zero control over anything in my world. Even my own brain.” Her voice drops lower as if she’s talking to herself. “It would have been easier if I’d ever had any doubts.”
I should reach out. Take her hand. Pull us to a stop. Hold her. Show her she wasn’t wrong.
But she keeps running, and her words keep flowing, stinging like acid although her tone is calm. “At first I thought you must be sick. I went over and saw your truck there, but nobody answered the door. No signs of life. Finally a neighbor saw me hanging around, told me he’d spoken to y’all that night and your dad had said something about Germany.” She looks at me now, her eyes wide and dark. “I didn’t know what had happened, Joe. I had a bad feeling. Didn’t even know if you were still alive.”
Oh, shit. It never occurred to me that she’d have been worried about me. But of course she would have been.
“I was so sure you wouldn’t just leave me without saying anything. I waited and waited for you. I was so sure. I got my folks to talk to the police, to get them to do a wellness check. They found mail piling up in your mailbox. Checked with the landlord and found out y’all had moved.” She raises her hands, swipes at the corners of her eyes. “And that’s when I quit being sure of anything.”
I have to stop, have to hold her, but she speeds up.
I push to catch up. “But your family…”
“My family was wonderful. For a whole year, I didn’t want to do anything but lie on my bed or try to literally outrun my thoughts. Jen and Brendan would make popcorn, snuggle up close, and just sit with me. Like they knew I needed their body heat to stay alive.”
Thank god she’d had the family she has. Thank god. “And Angus?” Did she and Angus have a thing? Is that why he seemed so protective that first day I was back?
“At the end of junior year, Angus caught me in the hallway at school. Most people had given up trying to talk to me by then. But Angus pushed a piece of paper into my hand. Said, ‘Call my grandma. She needs help this summer.’” July glances over at me, a faint smile on her face. “His grandma was a saint. His grandpa too, I guess, but she was the driving force. She spent all her free time helping people, trying to make sure people had what they needed. Your house burn down? Mrs. Drummond would line you up a place to stay and help you replace what you’d lost. Lose your job? Your family hungry? She was the person who’d get you fixed up and fed. She was the Mother Teresa of Galway.”
“And now you are.” There’s a smile blooming somewhere in my chest, even if it hasn’t made it to my face yet.
She shoots me a startled look and a frown. “What? No. But she put me to work helping her that summer, and it straightened me out. Gave me some perspective on what real need and loss are.” She nods to herself. “Gave me a purpose. Saved my life.”
We’re at the halfway point of our run, and she swings into a wide turn. Shakes her hands and arms like she’s shaking off something cold. “Anyway, that’s one reason why I’m single. Not strong enough to go through that again.”
We head back toward the square.
“And not to make an excuse, because there is no excuse for what I tried to do to you, Joe, but that’s why I was so freaked out when you first came back, and I felt my head and my feelings getting all jumbled and overwhelming again, and I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid of a relapse.”
I watch our feet keep perfect pace with each other, so close and so far away.
She sighs. Says quietly, “So you were right that we’re pretty much strangers now. Because the girl you knew shattered into a million pieces when things got tough. I’m just the pieces that were left, glued back together kinda sloppy. Everything doesn’t quite match up right anymore.”
***
July
I’m in the kitchen cranking out a big order and trying to ignore the fact that Joe’s brought Rose and Angus in for a thank-you dinner. And that when I went out to say hi and deliver their drinks, he looked wonderful, a slim, button-down shirt tucked into his faded jeans, his hair messy as usual, his scent clean and woodsy and delicious as always.
I’ve never felt this urge to run my hands all over anybody else. Just Joe.
We didn’t run the past two nights—I had back-to-back board meetings for the shelter and the free clinic Tuesday and we had softball last night—so I haven’t had much chance to gauge his reaction to my confession the other night. He was really quiet afterward. Realllly quiet.
I was hoping we might eventually have a friendship. I hope I haven’t wrecked that by oversharing.
But dammit, he asked. And asked. And asked. So now he knows.
He used to be a safe person to share with.
It’s probably better for him to know I cared too much than to think I hadn’t cared enough.
Better for him, anyway.
Sonya pops her head in from the dining room as I put the finishing touches on the big order. “July, somebody’s here for you.”
It’s Ginny Lewis and another deputy. I dry my hands on my apron as I greet them. “Hey, y’all. What can I do for you?”
Ginny’s grim expression tells me they’re not here to eat. “July, I need to talk to the kids. They here?”
Shit. This doesn’t sound good. “They’re in the kitchen, but we can go upstairs to my apartment where it’s more private.” I glance over to where Joe and Rose and Angus have finished their meal.
Joe’s watching, his brows raised. I gesture him over. He hands his credit card to Sonya, says a few words to Angus and Rose, and joins us.
“Let me get the kids. Joe, would you like to sit in too, so they both have an adult with them?” I touch his forearm below his rolled-up sleeve and feel the tension there.
He doesn’t show it. Doesn’t hesitate. His voice is easy. “Sure.”
I round up Maisie and Sam, and turn over supper service to the evening team. Donna says she’ll stay late to make up for me stealing part of the crew. Her eyes are worried. She knows the story and has enough life experience to take it really seriously. I know she’s wondering, like I am, what fresh hell that Curt asshole and his little asshole sidekick have cooked up.
We troop upstairs in silence. Maisie’s got big waif eyes again. The kids sit together on the sofa. Joe pulls over a chair from the dining area and settles beside Sam. I squeeze in next to Maisie on the couch, leaving the deputies the armchairs.
“All right.” Ginny flips open a notepad, all business. “This case has taken an unexpected turn, and I need y’all to tell me what’s going on.” She eyes the kids, who huddle together looking scared and much younger than usual. “Maisie, I think you know I haven’t been able to reach your mom, and she hasn’t tried to reach me. The cell number you gave me still says voicemail full.”
She flips to the next page of notes. “This afternoon I got phone records for that number, and I learned something interesting: no outgoing calls or texts have been made from that number for months. Not a single one. And the only incoming calls have been very short and were all from the number you gave me for you. So. That’s one mystery.”
She turns her attention to Sam. “Meanwhile, Sam, I’ve contacted your parents, and they tell me they have not seen or heard from you since New Year’s, and that they know nothing about your activities but would not be surprised to hear if you are in trouble. They asked me not to contact them again.”
Sam’s face is impassive, but Maisie shoots him an outraged look and then picks up his hand and holds it tight between both of hers.
Joe shakes his head, his mouth twisted with disgust.
Ginny turns back to Maisie. “We’ve done an online search for your mom. Her social media activity stopped around the time of her last outgoing phone call. Her bank account shows some modest transactions: the deposit of your paychecks, online bill payment for insurance and utilities. No record of other economic activity or employment in her name for months.” She closes her notebook and draws a deep breath. “Our assault investigation seems to have opened up a whole new can of worms. So we have two big questions for you two today. Where’s your mom, Maisie, and why have you two been lying to us?”
Nothing about Curt or his friend. This is bigger and even scarier. Joe looks as shocked as I feel.
No one speaks for what seems like an eternity. Maisie’s barely holding back a sob, and Sam disentangles her hands from his—gently, so gently—and puts his arm around her.
Ginny tries again. “You know, this looks really bad. You seem like good kids, but this looks like y’all might have done something to your mom, Maisie. Tell us what really happened.”
Now Maisie’s horrified. “I didn’t! We didn’t! I wouldn’t! I love my mom!” She looks at Sam. He nods at her, his eyes sad, his arm tight around her. She turns back to Ginny Lewis. “And Sam didn’t even know her. He never met her. He’s never done anything wrong. It’s his family that sucks.” She’s fierce. Angry.
Ginny nods encouragingly. The other officer quietly begins to take notes. “Where is she, Maisie?”
“I don’t know,” Maisie wails, misery and truth evident in her voice. I open my hand on the cushion between us, and Maisie seizes it. “But…I’m afra—I might have an idea.” Tears stream down her face.
Joe gets up and grabs some paper napkins from the dining table. Hands them to Maisie and sits back down just as she says, almost inaudibly, “I think she was the person in that bus crash in Asheville.”
Oh god. “That one a few months ago?” I probably shouldn’t have spoken, but I can’t help it.
Maisie nods, swiping at her face with the napkins. “Four months and four days.”
Ginny Lewis leans forward, her voice gentle. “Why do you think it was her, Maisie?”
Maisie’s face crumples, and she has to force the words out. “Because she went to Asheville that day and she never came home. I was supposed to go pick her up from the bus station when she called, but she never called. And she didn’t answer my texts. I fell asleep in the chair waiting, but she never called.”
My god, this poor, poor child.
“Why would she have been on a bus in Asheville?” Ginny’s doing all the talking, but the other deputy is scribbling notes like his pen is on fire. “She has a car.”
Maisie makes a heroic effort to calm herself, sniffling and wiping her nose. “She went in to check out the temp agencies. We had just moved here from Illinois, and she was looking for work. She wanted me to use the car to stock us up on groceries and cleaning stuff—she gave me a big list—so she had me take her to catch the Galway bus into Asheville, and then she was going to use Asheville city buses to get around town there. Then she was going to take the Galway bus back here and call me to come get her from the station. She never… I haven’t heard from her since that morning.”
I’m dredging my memory for facts about the bus crash. There was a lot of speculation about it in the restaurant. The weather was still cold. An Asheville metro bus was broadsided by a drunk driver in an SUV. Both vehicles caught fire, and both drivers and almost all the bus passengers sustained severe injuries. One passenger had been trapped on the bus and died, the body burned beyond recognition. The authorities were fairly sure that the person who died had been a woman in her early to mid-thirties, probably white, but beyond that, without a clue of where to search for dental records or a DNA match, identification was impossible. To add to the mystery, no one reported a person of that description missing.
I remember multiple news reports asking for anyone with information to come forward.
Ginny Lewis must be thinking the same thing. “If you thought that might have been your mom, Maisie, why didn’t you contact the police?”
Maisie huddles closer to Sam and looks down at the soggy napkins clenched in her fist. “Because I didn’t want to have to go to foster care. I’m almost seventeen. Grandpa left the cabin to me. I can take care of myself.”
Brave, stubborn, gutsy girl.
“How can you be sure your mom didn’t just take off?” Harsh question, but again Ginny’s echoing my own thoughts.
Maisie frowns, ferocious. “My mom would never do that! She would never leave me. If she could come back to me, she would.”
Ginny draws a deep breath and blows it out. I suspect she and Joe are as unsettled by these revelations as I am.
After a minute she turns to Sam. “Sam, where do you fit in this picture?”
“I live with Maisie. We take care of each other.”
“Are you boyfriend and girlfriend?”
Both Sam and Maisie shake their heads.
Ginny tries again. “What’s the deal with your family, Sam? Why don’t you live with them, and why would they think you might be in trouble?”
Maisie rolls her eyes and makes a rude noise.
Sam just looks resigned. Maybe a little nauseous. He raises his blue eyes to meet Ginny’s gaze. “Because they think I’m demon spawn,” he says finally. “They threatened to throw me out because I stopped going to church with them. Then somebody told them I’m gay, and they did throw me out. I’ve never gotten in any trouble. They just think I’m a sinner, and they don’t want me around my little brothers and sisters.” He mutters almost to himself, “As if I’d ever hurt them.”
I glance at Joe. His expression shifts from bleak to angry to blank.
“How long ago was this?” Ginny’s gentle again.
“Winter break.”
Jesus Christ. These so-called parents threw their child out in the dead of winter? I want to kill. And cry. And burn things down. I shift so my arm is around Maisie and my hand on Sam’s shoulder. On Sam’s other side, Joe leans into him too.
Ginny’s brows raise. “So you two have been living together all that time?”
Sam shakes his head. “No. I didn’t meet Maisie until a little later.”
“Where did you live, then, before you moved in with her?”
Sam looks down at his knee, picking at an imaginary spot on his jeans. “Mostly under one of the cabins near Maisie’s.”
“ Under the cabin? You were homeless?”
He nods.
I check Joe’s expression and find zero surprise there.
“How did the two of you end up living together?”
“Maisie—” Sam breaks off and looks at her. She gazes back, her eyes sad and full of love. “Maisie started going to my school. She was the only person who’d sit with me at lunch. After a while she figured out I was homeless.”
Maisie speaks up then, to give him a break, I think. “I was really lonely. And sad and scared. I was trying not to do anything that would make anybody notice me, so I didn’t talk to anybody. Sam noticed me but he never gave me any trouble. One day…we had a long talk and found out we knew each other’s secrets. He knew I was all alone in the cabin.”
Sam takes up the story. “She was afraid I’d freeze to death or starve. She asked me if I wanted to stay in the cabin with her.”
Maisie tosses him a tiny smile. “I had to really talk him into it.”
“I was filthy… I stank. And Maisie asked me to live with her anyway, and that first night while I was in the bathtub trying to scrub clean, she wrote a little note and put it in the room that’s mine now. She wrote, Welcome home, Sam . So that’s my home now, and Maisie’s my family.” Sam says it fiercely, looking around at us one by one, daring us to try to separate him from his chosen sister. “We go to school. We go to work. We pay our bills. We don’t bother anybody. We take care of each other. We’re doing fine.”
“Except for Curt,” Ginny says dryly.
The two kids fall silent then. The rest of us are quiet too, contemplating the situation. Finally Ginny rises. “I need to make a couple of calls. If y’all don’t mind, please wait here.”
She heads downstairs. The other officer stays with us in the living room, finishing up his notes and then sitting quietly.
I shift to face the kids. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but y’all will not go through this alone, okay?”
“We’ll help.” Joe’s determined face makes me feel better, so I know it must help the kids some too.
Sam nods, looking stoic, and Maisie gives us a tiny watery smile. Then we sit in silence until Ginny Lewis rejoins us.
She drops into the armchair with a weary sigh. “Okay, here’s the deal.” She looks from Maisie to Sam. “I can’t let y’all stay in the cabin by yourselves. We have to find you some kind of temporary custody. You’ll be assigned a caseworker. Maybe two, one for each of you. You probably will have to enter the foster care system, at least temporarily. And a detective from Asheville will be coming to collect a DNA sample from you, Maisie, to see whether it was your mom on that bus. The dates on the phone activity and the bus crash do match up.”
“Temporary custody.” I’ve not heard that phrase except maybe in relation to jail. “What does that mean?”
“Somebody who cares about them and can keep them until they enter the system. It’s usually a family member or family friend.”
Everyone looks at Maisie and Sam, who shake their heads. “I don’t have any more family,” Maisie says. “My mom ran away when she was fifteen because her family…abused her bad, and she never wanted them to know about me. I don’t even know their names. And Grandpa was the last person on my dad’s side.”
Sam grimaces. “All my family’s friends go to their same church. They call gay people an abomination. They wouldn’t want me. And even if they said they did, I wouldn’t feel safe going with them.”
The kids exchange glances and then say at the same time, “We want to stay together.”
I can’t stand the idea of them being separated after all they’ve already lost. “Ginny, I know them, and I care about them. If they’d feel safe being with me, can I provide the temporary custody?”
Maisie and Sam look at Ginny. I think that’s hope in their eyes.
Ginny stands. “That might work. Let me check.”