Binds that tie, p.28
Binds That Tie, page 28
She remembered saying to Clive, after meeting his family for the first time in their small, painted brick row in Dingle, Ireland, “Is it possible to literally be suffocated by love?”
His mother, Pearl, was round and earthy and wore long, shapeless dresses. His father, Finn, was red faced with a shock of white hair and lewd jokes. She watched Finn pat Pearl’s behind through her layers of skirt and apron. She waved him off with an eye roll, but also a coy smile and a surreptitious wink. Lucy thought, I want that. She never felt suffocated again.
They’d all be there in—she checked her watch again—one hour and forty-two minutes. Lucy sank into the couch, plopping her swollen, tired, achy feet on the coffee table. With Quinn, she’d never felt like that. But she was five years older and twenty pounds heavier. She traced the voluptuous curve of her calf. Like her sister’s. She watched Clive through the doorway, whistling as he emptied the nearly full dishwasher. She rarely thought about the past except in shadowy terms like before and after.
Clive appeared, holding two ice packs. She motioned to her feet and giggled as he knelt and wrapped her ankles with them. It felt amazing. He stood and dropped a lingering kiss on her lips. He tasted like peppermint. He trotted out the front door and returned with a stack of mail, which he dropped on the coffee table at her feet. She squawked a protest as he took the steps two at a time.
“I don’t do the mail!” he called. “I can be talked into dishes and laundry, and I’ll temporarily rub your feet and get your ice and massage butter or what the hell ever into your belly. You’re right, I should really do more around here…” His laughter faded as he entered the bathroom. The pipes groaned as water rushed under the floor and up the wall.
She grinned as she picked up the stack of envelopes. Junk mail, bill, bill, flyer, party invitation. She sorted out the items to open and flipped them over, running her short, raggedy nail under each flap. She made a short stack by her side that she’d take up to her desk before the party.
She needed to call Kim, her best friend and neighbor down the street, and tell her to stop by later for cake and singing and drinking. Clive’s brother Kaelan never traveled anywhere without his guitar, even if it meant dragging it through customs… What the hell?
She stared at the photograph. Her arms and legs went numb and cold. Her heart thudded so hard she thought it would fly out of her chest. She lurched forward, pushing her face between her knees. What the fuck?
When her vision cleared, she studied the picture again. It was an extreme close-up of her before face, a shiny strand of long blond hair blown across her face. Absently, she touched her brown bob. In the background was a man. A man whose face she knew as well as her own, whose face she saw almost every day in their daughter. Farther behind that, although indiscernible in the picture, was a white horse-driven hansom cab, the feel of cold drifting snowflakes, and the smell of burnt chestnuts. Shrimp and butter. Twelve-hundred-thread-count sheets, soft as silk under her back.
She was going to be sick. She lurched up, ran to the toilet, and holding her belly, retched into the bowl. Her hair stuck to her cheek, and her ribs ached. She leaned back against the bathroom wall, sweat beading on her forehead. Only one person would have that picture. He’d found her.
How? The tweaker? Smith Something? A man with two last names. She rocked back on her heels. Or maybe Leon helped. Leon has a gift. He can find out anything about anyone. I don’t know how, and I don’t ask. How he’d tracked her down was of no consequence.
“Luuucy!” Clive’s heavy footsteps bounded down the stairs.
Lucy’s legs went numb with panic. Oh God, Clive. She shoved the photograph under her thigh just in time. The bathroom door cracked open.
“Y’alright, love?” The half of his face that she could see was creased with concern, his mouth bowed in a frown.
She nodded, her tongue crowding her throat.
He ducked his head and softly shut the door. He hovered on the other side for a moment. “Give a shout if you need anything.”
Lucy was hot. Her skin felt stretched and feverish. She pulled off her shirt, and she leaned forward until her belly rested on the cold tile. She breathed and thought about her options. Options. Think. Think. Her heartbeat drowned out rational thought. All she could focus on was Chris.
Chris. Leaning against the door jamb in the kitchen, watching her cook with a small lopsided smile on his lips. Chris. The incandescent moonlight dancing across his sleeping face. Chris. The crease in his forehead as he spit venom at her, his fist pounding the filthy visitor’s room table. Chris. Who had tracked her down instead of moving on with his life. Instead of dating, remarrying, having children, she envisioned him poring over the Internet late at night, the glow of the screen illuminating his face as he clicked, clicked, clicked. Her name echoing in his mind, a driving relentless force. God, would they ever move on?
At that moment, she knew she’d never be free. The thought struck her right below the breastbone, and her mouth tasted tangy, acrid. Maggie stuck to her like a spiderweb, clingy and invisible. No matter how she flailed, she couldn’t lose those whisper-thin remnants of her before self—what she’d done, who she’d hurt, what she’d run from. She’d always be bound to her past. Waiting. At the bank, in the grocery store, in the pick-up line at the elementary school. She’d check her rearview mirrors, question every waiter, eye every cop.
Beyond the bathroom door, Clive whistled a bouncing, lilting rhythm. His life, untouched. If she could help it, it would remain that way. He can never know about Maggie.
She heard the back door open and Quinn’s racing footsteps, followed by boisterous voices talking over one another. She heard raucous laughter, backslapping hugs, and loud smacking kisses. The voices faded into the kitchen.
Lucy pulled the picture out from under her thigh and studied it, tracing her eyes, her lips, her cheeks. The horse. The shadow of a man she used to know. Used to love. She flipped it over, knowing what she’d see.
We’ll never be old married folks. Promise you’ll love me forever?
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Other Books By Kate Moretti
Thought I Knew You
While You Were Gone
The Vanishing Year
The Blackbird Season
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my beta readers, Rachel, Audrey, Emmie, Betsy, and Becky.
Thanks, Mom, for “helping” me plot (write your own damn book), and thanks to Sarah for spending hours talking about things that haven’t actually happened to people that don’t really exist. May we always gossip about imaginary things.
Thanks to Elizabeth for just about everything—support, advice, reading, feedback, frantic middle-of-the-night emails, and endless amounts of wisdom.
Thanks to Matt Banks (Banks Law Group, LLC) for reading this novel in its entirety and providing pages and pages of encouragement and feedback. (Some of which I ignored for the sake of fiction, so don’t blame inaccuracies on him. He tried.)
Thanks to Gary Asteak for providing guidance and entertainment while in the outlining stages, and helping me to understand the inner workings of criminal law.
Thanks to the folks at RAP: Michelle, Cassie, and Streetlight Graphics. For the second time now, I’m floored by the final product.
I’m eternally grateful for the widespread support from my family and friends who read my books, my sporadic blogs, tell their friends, rent billboard space, and share in my excitement. I can’t tell you all what it means to me.
Finally, thanks to Chip—my everything, always—for taking care of real life while I make things up and letting me into that scary little-known world of “how a man thinks.” You’re my best friend and partner in crime.
About The Author
Kate Moretti lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, two kids, and a dog. She’s worked in the pharmaceutical industry for ten years as a scientist, and has been an avid fiction reader her entire life.
She enjoys traveling and cooking, although with two kids, a day job, and writing, she doesn’t get to do those things as much as she’d like.
Her lifelong dream is to buy an old house with a secret passageway.
Excerpt: The Blackbird Season
The day the birds fell, I dealt the tower card. Everyone always said to never read your own cards, but who the hell was gonna read mine?
People believe, though. I don’t, but other people do. I was more interested in the idea that there was magic in the world at all. I found a book in the library and I’ve been reading my own cards every morning since. But two things happened at once, two days in a row, and you should know about them. First, I found a blackbird, just like the others. Perfect. Smooth. Soft. Like it had just stopped breathing. Except, this one had a hole where its left eye should have been. I’ve never seen that before. The next day, I did a reading and dealt the tower card, the one with that one-eyed raven on it. And then, just when I thought the world was mocking me, it rained starlings.
I try not to believe in signs. But sometimes they’re just so goddamn obvious.
CHAPTER 1
Nate, Monday, May 4, 2015: Two weeks after the birds fell
The rain came in sheets, like a wall, forming wide rivulets down the windshield. The wipers swished and couldn’t keep up. They were old, needed to be replaced, and left streaks across the glass. But this was Alecia’s car and she hadn’t told him. His job was the maintenance, sure, but he wasn’t a mind reader. He smacked the lever up a notch.
He squinted against any oncoming headlights, the few there were. Winding pavement and black towering pines combined with the lack of streetlights made this stretch of road, up into the Pocono Mountains, a hazard regardless of the season. The Lackawaxen River rushed by to his right, a mere fifty feet over a guardrail, engorged with the deluge of rain, more than typical for spring in Pennsylvania. He slowed to thirty miles an hour and leaned forward, his headlights bouncing off the white line, the yellow centerline almost invisible, faded with age.
His phone rang, the display flashing. He ignored it. Could be Tripp, but he’d gotten into it with Alecia and she likely wanted to keep it going. He’d been so distracted he’d forgotten his pillow and would be stuck sleeping with a throw pillow on Tripp’s sofa, mildewed and lumpy. He wasn’t even sure the bag perched next to him on the passenger seat had enough to get him through the week. He’d been unfocused, just shoving things in: jeans, socks, underwear, shirts. Things you need when you have no job, no wife to go home to.
The phone rang again and he took his eyes away from the road for a split second. Alecia. He almost picked up, but tightened his hands on the wheel. Pick it up, don’t pick it up? Her pecking and pulling at the threads of their marriage wasn’t new; it was as old as anything he could remember. She just had so much more to pull at now. Not just Gabe, although always, always Gabe.
His headlights caught on a figure in the distance, a hand waving in the air, panicked. He slowed the car, pulled over, until he was next to her, hair plastered to pale cheeks, black clothing rendering her almost invisible in the night, had it not been for her gleaming white hair. He felt the cord of muscle up his arms tighten in a spasm. He rolled down the passenger-side window, but just a crack. Maybe two inches. He’d be damned if he was letting her into this car.
“You’re going to get yourself killed. What the hell are you doing?”
“I need help.” Her eyes were wild, wide and doll-like against her face, and her hands, red chipped fingernails, cupped her cheeks, pushing her hair back. Fingers wound up into that bright white hair at her temples and she shook her head back and forth and back and forth, like a dog shaking off water. That hair, a regular topic of conversation with the students, impossibly exotic but just so weird. Teenagers these days aimed to stand out, and that bright whiteness still gave them all pause.
“I can’t help you. You know that.” There it was. He was finally, finally angry. Everyone had been asking him, are you angry? In an accusatory way, a way that really meant why aren’t you angry? As though this alone was proof of his guilt. He wanted to capture the moment, record his voice right now, because seeing her, finally, he realized he was really, really angry. “Get out of here, Lucia. Go home. Where you belong.”
She leaned against the car so her mouth was even with the window opening, her body pushed against the window so he couldn’t see her eyes. Only that mouth, that lying little mouth. She wore a white T-shirt, soaked through, and he could see the outline of her nipples, pressed against the glass. Where was her jacket? It had to be fifty-five degrees. Not his problem. He looked away.
“I don’t belong anywhere.” And when she leaned her forehead against the door trim, he could finally see her eyes. They were bloodshot and her pupils dilated like black Frisbees against a cerulean sky. Fear could dilate your eyes, he knew that for sure. Or was she on something? Pilfered from that brother of hers?
He didn’t care.
He picked up his phone. Pressed the numbers 911.
“I can’t help you, Lucia. I’m calling the police and I won’t leave until they get here, but you cannot get in my car. I can’t do anything for you.” His voice was gentler than he’d intended. He’d always had a soft spot for her and those like her: the damaged, pretty girls. The smart girls with no guidance. The lost girls. There had been others; Robin Hendricks came to mind, but none who’d gotten him to this place before.
He hit send. Ring. Ring. “Pike County Police Department.”
“Hi. This is Nate Winters. I need help on Route Six.”
“Sure, Mr. Winters, what appears to be the problem?”
“I’m here with a Lucia Hamm. I was driving and I found her walking along the road. She might be on something but I can’t drive her anywhere. Just send someone, please.”
She stared at him, her mouth twisting. She backed up slowly, away from the white line, her eyes narrowed at him, the side of her face illuminated by the headlights.
“Lucia!” He called through the slight window opening. “Don’t you dare go anywhere. Stay right there.”
She stepped around the front of the car, his hazard lights blinking red against her face. Her mouth curved up in a wicked smile and his insides coiled. She leaned forward, palms flat against the hood of his car, eyebrows arched seductively.
“Mr. Winters?” The voice on the other end was deep and slow. “Is everything all right?”
She blew him a kiss.
He rolled his window down all the way and leaned out. “Lucia!” He called again, his voice dying in the wind.
She turned and walked away, along the white line, the headlights of the car flanking her retreating figure. She wore a short, black skirt and knee-high boots, and her hips swayed.
“Shit.” He ran his hand through his hair.
“Mr. Winters? Are you still there?”
She turned, then, maybe ten feet from the front of his car, braced her feet on either side of the white line and gave him two middle fingers. Then she cut right and ran into the woods. “Mr. Winters.” The man on the phone was stern now, angry about having his time wasted. “Are you still there? Do you still need someone to come out?”
“I don’t know.” He felt sick. No matter what happened now, everything had just gotten worse. All the pieces he’d been clinging to had flown apart, scattering what was left of his life in a million directions. He was in trouble, he’d been in trouble, but now he was more than in trouble, he was as dead as a person could be while still being alive. In one heartbeat, he envisioned Alecia and Gabe huddled together on the couch, himself in prison, a 20/20 special. His dinner rose in his chest and he took a deep breath to quell the panic.
He had no way of knowing that this moment would become the linchpin, the moment that all the moments after would hinge upon. The papers would call him a murderer; the police would come to him; his ex-friends, his gym buddies, the guys who knew him for God’s sake; and say, Nate was the last one to see her alive, right? The last one is always the guilty one.
He couldn’t know all this. But he could still feel it, like something physical chasing him and gaining ground, his heart beating wildly, a skittering pulse up the back of his neck. It was more than a feeling. It was a portent, something tangible, almost corporeal.
“She’s gone,” he said quickly, and hung up, dropping the phone on the seat. He should have just driven away. Everything in his body told him to just drive away.
He opened the car door and stepped into the rain
CHAPTER 2
Alecia, Tuesday, April 21, 2015
A month before Nate was fired, nearly a thousand starlings fell from the sky. Not fluttering to the earth like snowflakes, but plummeting, like quarter-pound raindrops. They fell hard and fast in the middle of the third inning of opening day at Mt. Oanoke High field. The first one Alecia saw bounced off Marnie Evans’s shoulder and hit the gravel with nothing more than a soft rustle. She screamed, her fingers threaded through her hair, get it out! Get it out! Get it out! Like it was a trapped bat. Alecia didn’t mind watching Marnie Evans freak out; in fact she kind of enjoyed it, so she just covered her mouth with her palm. Marnie Evans treated minor hiccups—missing basket bingo cards and off-color varsity jacket orders—like national disasters all while chewing Xanax like Pez.
