Page 5 of Den of Iniquity

“Hello, Jeremy,” I said cheerfully. “How’s it going?”

“What do you mean how’s it going? I want to talk to Kyle. He just now texted me and said he was there. Why didn’t he take my call? I don’t need to talk to you. Put my son on the line.”

“I believe it’s safe to say that Kyle’s uncomfortable with having a new woman in the house,” I said pointedly. “Under the circumstances, I can’t say that I blame him. By the way, in case you’re interested, I’m not eager to talk to you, either, so we’re even on that score.”

“I take it he told you about Caroline?”

“And about the approaching arrival of your new bundle of joy.”

Jeremy paused for a moment before he replied. “If that’s what this is all about, it’s none of your business.”

“Actually, it is my business, because Kyle showed up on my doorstep to talk to me about it,” I responded. “From my point of view, he has good reason to be upset, so he’s staying here for the weekend at least, and maybe longer. That has yet to be decided.”

“Wait a minute,” Jeremy began. “Where the hell do you get off?”

“I have to go now, Jeremy,” I interrupted. “Talk to you later.” With that, I ended the call.

“You hung up on him?” Kyle asked wonderingly.

“I did,” I answered, putting the phone down on the side table. “Before I say anything more to anyone, I want to know more about what’s really going on down there, and since you’re the one who’s here, I’d prefer to hear your version of the story before I hear either one of theirs. So tell me.”

It wasn’t pretty. Without Mel’s or my knowledge, Jeremy had been carrying on with other women for years, while Kelly had been covering for him as far as our knowing about it was concerned. The fling before this one had involved a fellow teacher from school. One of Kyle’s friends had seen the lovebirds together and had spilled the beans. I couldn’t imagine anything much more humiliating than having your friends let you know that your fatheris screwing around on your mother. That affair had ended when the woman involved had left Ashland at the end of the previous school year to go somewhere else. As far as Kyle knew, no one had reported the situation to the school district and no official action had been taken against either of the two teachers.

Given that, it was easy to see why Kyle might be distrustful of the adults in his life. His father was a liar and a cheat and his mother had covered for him until Caroline’s pregnancy made further covering impossible. In a world where all the grown-ups seemed to have lost their bearings, Kyle appeared to be the only one attempting to behave sensibly.

“Well,” he said once finished with his sad tale. “What do you think?”

“What I think is that your parents have put you in a pretty tough situation,” I replied. “For now you should probably unload your car and bring your stuff inside before it gets dark. You’ll be staying in the guest room. While you’re doing that, I’ll try to figure out what we’re having for dinner.”

With Kyle busying himself with dragging his gear into the house, I called Dirty Dan’s and managed to up our Valentine’s dinner reservation from a two-top to a three. The fact that we’re regular customers went a long way toward making that possible. Then I called Mel.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“It’s about dinner,” I told her. “Dinner for two just became dinner for three, and I think our lives have become a lot more complicated.”

“Why?” she wanted to know. “What’s going on?”

So I told her. “Wow,” she said when I finished. “That’s a lot to take in. What did you tell him?”

“That we’d have to talk it over.”

“I guess we will,” she agreed. “But I wonder what’s really going on. What he’s told you so far doesn’t sound like the whole story. It takes a hell of a lot to make a high school kid decide to change schools in the middle of the second semester of his senior year. When Dad got transferred my senior year, my parents left town, but I finished the year by staying with a friend.”

Hours later during our not-so-romantic but very expensive Valentine’s dinner for three, Kyle recovered his appetite, making short work of his own eight-ounce prime rib and a good chunk of mine as well. In the meantime, Mel managed to elicit some useful information concerning the family dynamics down in Ashland. Jeremy’s previous gal pal left town at the beginning of the summer. By December he had moved on to Caroline Richards, whom he had met through an online dating site—Alone in Jackson. That’s where Ashland is located—in Jackson County.

At the time Caroline appeared on the scene, she was newly divorced and working as a waitress in a coffee shop in Medford. She had since moved to Ashland where she had settled into a similar job, one she had quit shortly after moving in with Jeremy.

“I get the feeling she thinks Dad is rich,” Kyle admitted. “I’ll bet that’s what he told her. The thing is, the money from Texas belongs to Mom, not Dad.”

That “money from Texas,” as Kyle called it, is actually money from my father’s long-lost family in Beaumont. They had been in the oil business for generations. Once my cousin tracked me down here in Washington, her mother—my late father’s sister—made sure my kids received their fair share of the family fortune. Kelly had told me early on that she had used part of that initial influx of cash to pay off the mortgage on their home, but what Kyle saidmade it seem as though she had managed to keep some of it in her own name.

Good for her, I thought to myself during dinner when Kyle passed along that information.Kelly may have been covering up for her jackass husband’s serial infidelities, but she’s been smart enough to keep her money separate from his.

“Dad claims he’s not the only one who’s been fooling around,” Kyle continued. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. I mean, since he lies about everything else, he’s probably lying about that, too.”

Wait, Jeremy’s not the only one who’s been unfaithful?

That was what was going through my head. Although I didn’t say it aloud, I’m pretty sure Mel got the message because she changed the subject. “Let’s talk about school for a moment.”

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