Chapter Six
York
“Oh, absolutely-fucking-not,” I said as I clicked through the pictures on my laptop at the kitchen table later that night.
Eddie was at the stove, mixing taco spices into the ground beef. Mackie was perched on the door of his cage, flapping his wings to draw attention to himself so someone would slip him a treat. Velle was standing a few feet away, looking up from his phone at my exclamation.
“What’s up?” he asked, tucking his phone away.
Not sure what the hell to do with myself once I got home from the zoo, I’d gone on my laptop to research, well, five-year-olds. What they were like developmentally, what things they might be into, how to parent one.
But after a while, both Runa and Denali’s words came back to me. About the motel.
I mean, there were some perfectly reasonable motels in Florida. Ones that might not have been the nicest places to stay, but were clean and safe enough.
But the green pool stuck in my head.
Sure, pools could be weird. I knew that from having to help maintain the one at the club. Sometimes, too many people or spilled drinks in the water, or a lot of rain, could fuck with the chemical balance of the pool and make it go cloudy or green. So it could have been a fluke.
I just couldn’t stop myself from looking into motels in the area with pools. It took a while, but I finally came across one that had a sign with an alligator, like Denali had said.
Then I clicked on the pictures.
And saw the reviews.
They weren’t staying at one of the decent motels. Oh, no. They seemed to be staying at the cheapest one. The cheapest one that didn’t have the keyword ‘bedbugs’ in the reviews, at least.
My mind traveled right back to the car. Runa’s beat-up shoes. How she’d packed lunch. The tension in her face in the gift shop.
Money wasn’t just tight.
There might not be enough to function normally.
I’d meant to get answers from Runa at the zoo. About where they’d been. About what had been going on. I’d just gotten so distracted by having a daughter and getting to spend time with and get to know her that I’d let all that other shit go.
Clearly, it needed to move up on my priority list, though.
“This is where they’re staying,” I told Velle, turning the screen so he could see.
While his face did tighten like I expected, he sighed and said in a reasonable voice, “It’s probably all Runa can afford.”
“And that’s a problem.”
And partially my fault. I didn’t know a lot about kids, but I knew they weren’t cheap. They were constantly growing out of their clothes. And all that growing probably meant a lot of food. That wasn’t factoring in things like medical care, toys, experiences.
If I’d been paying child support this whole time, things would have been easier. Or if I’d been accessible to them, so they could move down here and let me take care of them.
“I’m moving them out of there. As soon as possible.”
“You might not want to step on Runa’s toes here. Especially if she has a lot of pride.”
I was sure she had pride. But she would swallow it for Denali. Everything about her said she would do anything for that girl. And I didn’t think she would even pause to think about it if I offered her somewhere nicer to stay.
I turned the laptop back toward me, closing out the hotel search, and looking instead for apartments.
It was short notice, but I wanted some place ready by our next meet-up.
In my experience, money talked. If the usual turnaround was two-to-five days to move in, I figured paying the full year up-front would make things move as fast as I wanted them to.
Because I didn’t just need to get the keys.
I needed to get some furniture for it. Pots, pans, plates, and bowls in the kitchen. A fridge and pantry full of food.
I had a lot to get in motion and was pretty damn clueless about where to even get shit like same-day furniture around this area. The last time I had my own place, ordering a damn couch took six fucking weeks.
“Either of you know where I can get furniture around here?” I asked. “Shit I don’t have to wait weeks for.”
“What you looking for?” Eddie asked.
“Couch, beds, mattresses, dining table, nightstands, lamps…”
“You can get just about all that the same day without an issue. The only thing you might run into trouble with is the couch, but I can ask one of the girls. They would know better than us.”
“While you’re at it, maybe ask what a five-year-old girl might want in her bedroom.”
“You might be overstepping a line here,” Velle warned.
“I don’t care. I’m not demanding they stay there indefinitely. But while they’re in the area, I want them to have somewhere nice to be.”
“You’re gonna rent an apartment for possibly just a week or two of them staying in it?”
“Well, I’m hoping Runa might decide to stay close. I get the feeling that she’s not only here to let me meet my daughter.”
“You think she’s in some kind of trouble? Is that just suspicion talking, or did she say something to give you reason to think that?”
“It’s a few things she said or how she reacted. But also something Denali asked.”
“What’d she ask?”
“If I was going to be nice to her mom too.”
“Hm,” Velle said. “I mean, kids say weird shit. It could be nothing. But it could also mean she’s seen someone not be nice to her mother.”
“Exactly. I’m hoping to get more information on that. But I don’t want Denali overhearing it.”
“Yeah, that’s smart. So, how are you handling all this?” he asked as he walked over to the coffee machine and made us both a cup.
He wasn’t going to give up until I confessed something. “I’m probably still a little in shock about it. But I’m in. I want to know her. Runa seems happy to have that happen.”
“Does she know you’re her father?”
”Not yet. Unless Runa told her now. She asked if she could if Denali asked.”
“She’s approaching this well. Runa,” he clarified.
“It wasn’t like she was trying to keep Denali from me. She just didn’t know who the fuck I was. Or where I was. I was only in that town for the weekend.”
It had been a pretty high-profile murder of a mob boss. And the rival boss who took him out wanted me to hide the body as far away as possible, so he could never be implicated, even if the body surfaced.
That little town just happened to be nestled in thousands of acres of dense wooded land. And had the benefit of a really corrupt local police force in case a body did get uncovered one day. So palms could be greased and files lost and nothing would ever come back on my client.
I’d just finished the back-breaking work of digging a ridiculously deep grave, shoving the body in, covering it, then rolling boulders and tree limbs around the space before replanting an oak sapling over it, hoping it would grow deep and wrap its roots around the bones of the body.
I’d stopped in at a rest stop off the highway for a quick shower, then headed in to town to find some food.
I’d found it. At the many food trucks at the fair.
Then, well, I’d found her.
Standing at a shooting game, boasting to the carnie that she was going to win that capybara stuffed animal if it cost her all the change in her pocket.
Despite having decent form that suggested she had shot a gun or two in her life, as I watched it became clear that the stuffed animal would cost her all her money.
Those games might have been set up for people to fail, but I was a good shot. And I wanted to impress the gorgeous woman in her national park shirt with her husky voice.
So that was what I did.
She’d been impressed enough to bring me back to her hotel room. A night to remember took place. But then a call came in. And it was time to get moving again.
I should have left my damn number.
But it wasn’t exactly the first one-night stand of my life. We were adults. We knew what we were doing. We trusted the condom’s effectiveness.
It was clear she struggled, but equally apparent that Runa had done everything in her power to be a good mother.
Which must have come with a lot of sacrifice, because from what little conversation she and I shared before we fell into bed, I knew she was a bit of a nomad, a wanderer, full of wanderlust and a love of the outdoors.
And while I was sure there were some parents out there who still did the whole camping and hiking lifestyle with a kid, Runa had chosen to give up that part of herself to raise her daughter in a more traditional way.
I couldn’t help but wonder if all the moving around they did was simply a manifestation of Runa’s innate restlessness, or if it was something darker than that.
“Oh, hey,” I said as Huck’s wife, Harmon, came in the back door. Her blue hair was in a messy top-knot and she had an empty mug in her hand.
“Hey! Our coffee maker broke and I need to go to a child’s birthday party in forty minutes,” she explained. “Congratulations, by the way.”
“Thanks. Actually, while you’re here. What’s the best way to store a stuffed animal collection? They have these net things…”
“No. You don’t want the nets. The nets just make more work for you because they’re going to call every two minutes to get them something down because they can’t reach them.
You know those things they have at stores where they keep the bouncy balls?
They make those sort of things for home use now.
Get one of those instead. They can pull all the stuffies out from between the elastic bands that run vertically.
And cleaning up can be a bit of a game to see if they can get the toys in through the open top. ”
“Like this?” I asked, turning it to face her.
“Yep. Those are the ones. You won’t regret that. And it has a matching system with bins—which is great if your little girl collects those little animal figurines.”
My little girl.
I added the bin system to my cart as well.
Harmon squeezed next to me as she sipped her coffee, helping me pick out more room decor as well as some age-appropriate craft kits, books she’d liked for her kids, and a little astronaut that projects lights on the ceiling and walls that looked like the Aurora Borealis.
I had a cart with a list of items as long as my arm that would come next-day shipping.
With that, I grabbed my phone with my screenshots of the apartments I wanted to look at, and a tape measurer, then I headed out to go find a nice apartment for my girl to live in with the mom who had been doing the heavy lifting for all these years.