Page 63 of Steadfast
With my heart in my mouth, I climbed the steps and flipped on the lights. My room was trashed. Again. It had been searched in a hurry. My drawers were empty, the contents strewn everywhere.
Rage pulsed from my chest and through my limbs. I mean—what the fuck? Did the cops do this? Or those fuckers who came into the garage to ask me about some stash of Gavin’s?
My fingertips twitched, and then I had a drug craving so powerful that I had to just stand there clenching my fists, my eyes screwed shut.
Fuck. When I was released from prison, people told me to “stay out of trouble.” But what the fuck do you do if trouble comes looking for you?
I didn’t straighten up my room. I closed the door and locked it again. Whoever searched the place seemed to be able to come and go at will. I walked down the stairs and got into the Avenger. Then I drove straight out of town toward the Shipley Farm.
Do not pass Go, do not score a hit.
Chapter Nineteen
Sophie
Internal DJ tuned to: “Breakdown More” by Eric Hutchinson
After that horribleconversation with Jude, it was hard to put my game face on and walk into my house again. The police report that Officer Nelligan had lent me was zipped into my book bag. And even though neither of my parents had searched my things since high school, I was careful to carry the bag upstairs and deposit it on the floor of my room before starting a homemade noodle soup for dinner.
Chopping onions at the kitchen counter made me think of Jude. Hell, everything made me think of him. He’d sounded so angry on the phone. And so discouraged.
The covert nature of our affair didn’t bother me very much, because the people in my life weren’t honest with either me or themselves. My father buried his grief in anger and misplaced blame. My mother crumbled under the weight of hers and refused to talk about it even with someone trained to help.
My honesty was a gift that I chose to bestow on the people who deserved it. And lately, Jude was the one who best fit that description.
But I’d seen that hurt look on his face when he’d spotted me in the bakery. Until today, I don’t think I understood how hard it was to be Jude. Sometimes I chafed against the label of That Girl Who Dated the Druggie. But the judgment on him was so much worse. He walked around every day under the weight of having killed a man.
At the bakery, he was stung when I couldn’t acknowledge him. But if I hadn’t been sitting with a cop, I would have.
Probably. If my father suspected that Jude and I were in contact, he’d freak. I needed a little more time to figure how to get out of my father’s orbit without abandoning Mom.
My diced onion chunks weren’t nearly as precise and uniform as Jude’s, damn it. I wanted to stand next to him in a kitchen somewhere and watch him work, without having to disguise my interest. Hell, I wanted to stand together inourkitchen. Wherever that mythical place might be.
Jude didn’t think it would ever happen. I wanted us to be more optimistic than that. I wanted him totry.
Feeling blue, I sautéed the onions with carrots and celery. Then I added chicken stock, broccoli, noodles and water. I left it simmering for a bit, then I added leftover chicken, because my father bitched whenever I didn’t put meat in a meal.
Feeling like Cinderella, I brought my father his portion in the den. It’s not that I enjoyed waiting on him. It’s just that I didn’t want to have a sit-down family meal.
He looked up in surprise when I carried in the tray.
“I have a headache and an exam to study for,” I explained. “I’ll be in my room.”
“Your mother?” he asked, taking the tray.
“I set her up in the kitchen. She’s reading a magazine.”She never speaks to us, anyway.
Having satisfied everyone to the best of my abilities, I went upstairs with my own bowl of soup. I cleaned all the schoolwork off my desk and closed the door. After pulling out the police file, I ate my supper while examining the file’s exterior. The tab listed a date from three-and-a-half years ago and simply,Haines, Gavin.
Pushing my empty bowl aside, I took a deep breath and then flipped open the cover. I was afraid there would be photographs. But I didn’t see any yet. The top page was a neatly executed summary.Report: Fatal Accident Investigation.
I’d never been told exactly how it all went down. But now the order of events was spread out in front of me, as tidy as the outlines my high school teachers used to demand for research papers. At 7:53 a motorist had made a 9-1-1 call from the two-lane highway heading north out of town. At 7:55 two of my father’s deputies were dispatched, along with an emergency vehicle (The Lifeline Highliner) from the fire department.
The first responders arrived all around the same time. They found one Gavin Haines in a prone position in the ditch. He’d been thrown from the vehicle and was not breathing.
One Jude Nickel was trapped inside the vehicle. He was non-responsive.
At 8:10, seventeen minutes after the first 9-1-1 call, a second ambulance was dispatched.
