Page 28 of New Year, New Guy
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Laura dragged out the dusty bottle from the back of a cupboard and plonked it and four glasses down on the table. She doled out generous measures and shoved one across to him. ‘Get that down you and talk.’
‘Yes ma’am. Good to see the Enforcer is back in business.’ Hunter tipped the glass in a mock toast and gulped it down before slamming the empty glass back in front of her. ‘Top it up.’
Without asking what happened to his manners she did as he asked. Laura watched enviously as Johnny pulled Polly onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her.
‘There were a core group of students who bullied anyone who showed any weakness and most of the teachers were content to turn a blind eye. The others only made the occasional token protest, never enough to put a stop to it. Someone found out that Johnny hated spiders.’
‘I still do.’
Laura remembered laughing with her sister when she shared a story about eradicating a particularly large, hairy spider that was freaking out her new boyfriend in the shower.
‘One day the gang somehow filled his bed with spiders and removed the bulb from his bedside light so he didn’t see them until they crawled all over him.’ Hunter shuddered.
‘What he’s not telling you is that afterwards I threw my lot in with the bad crowd because I was too bloody scared of being picked on again.’ Johnny sloshed another inch of brandy in his glass. ‘To make sure everyone knew whose side I was on I suggested locking Hunter in a cupboard.’ He clutched his head. ‘We were only going to frighten him for a couple of hours but webloody left him there all night when there was a storm and we lost power. That’s why he’s—’
‘—worse than a damn baby when it comes to confined spaces and the dark.’
Hunter’s attempt at self-deprecating humour broke Laura’s heart.
‘I’m certainly not standing up for what they did to you but he—’ Polly pointed to Johnny, ‘—told me you were to blame when one of the other boys disappeared. Is that true?’
Chapter Sixteen
He wavered for a few seconds but the soft, fleeting stroke of Laura’s fingers crumbled his last shreds of resistance.
‘Johnny’s talkin’ about Danny Pearce.’ When he spoke to the kids in his programme he never went into specifics about his time at Greystone. He used the threat to other people’s privacy as his justification but now he wondered if it was only ever to protect himself and the guilt he still harboured. ‘People assume all the kids in a place like that are tough troublemakers but Danny didn’t fit the mould. I’m guessin’ he never fitted anywhere and that’s why his folks dumped him there.’ Reluctantly he admitted that on one occasion he joined in when the boy was being harassed because he was weary of bearing the brunt of the staff’s anger.
‘You were a child yourself.’
‘I was seventeen.’ He didn’t deserve Laura’s compassion. ‘Old enough to know right from wrong, although I guess none of us were great at that or we wouldn’t have been at Greystone in the first place.’
‘Things got out of hand one day.’ Johnny took up the tale. ‘When we finally stopped harassing him Danny warned us we’d be sorry in the morning.’ He shrugged. ‘No one saw him again.’
‘There’s no need to hide it any longer. We both know I saw him.’ Hunter sighed. ‘I watched the poor devil creep out the back door and didn’t try to stop him because I thought he was better off out of there. I didn’t have the guts to run away myself.’ The boy’s white, pinched face when he saw Hunter hovering on the stairs still haunted him. ‘A few weeks later Danny sent a postcard to the school from Llandudno in Wales.’
‘I’m surprised they didn’t keep that under wraps.’
Hunter managed a faint smile. ‘Addressed it to me, didn’t he? Stuck it in an envelope so the staff couldn’t see who it was from. I made sure it got around.’
‘I’m sorry for being so awful to you.’ Polly wriggled out of Johnny’s grasp. ‘I need time to process all this.’
‘What about our wedding?’ asked Johnny, a hopeful look on his face.
‘I don’t know. It’s still a struggle for me to wrap my head around the fact you didn’t trust me enough to share all this before.’
Hunter grabbed his old friend’s arm. ‘Why don’t we go upstairs and leave the ladies alone? You can stop the bogey man gettin’ me in the dark and I’ll fend off any spiders. Deal?’ He hauled Johnny to his feet and gestured to the pile of spare candles. ‘We’ll need supplies.’ Before Laura could voice her opinion, and he knew she must have one because she did about everything else, he threw her a warning glance. For only the second time since they met she conceded.
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Laura leaned her head against the cold window as if staring at the dark streetlights would magic the electricity back on. Far past normal exhaustion she knew if she tried to follow Polly’s example and fall asleep it would be a dismal failure. Her sister hadn’t needed much persuasion to wait until the morning to talk and cuddled up on the floor wrapped in Laura’s duvet hugging her pillow the exact same way she’d done as a child.
Hunter and Johnny’s story ran through her head in a continual loop.
‘The goddamn rain’s finally stopped.’ Hunter’s raspy whisper startled her.
‘What the—’
