rubbing his ears the way he liked. “I think we’ve each won the first skirmish.” It was mighty interesting that, considering she thought I was dead, Alice and her creaky boyfriend sure seemed to know all about my “aimless, godless life.”
I straightened up and looked around me. The porch, the house, even the grounds looked nothing like how I remembered. But the ghosts of my childhood were still there, waiting to jump out at me. God, I hoped it didn’t take long for Alice to give me what was my due. I didn’t think I could last very long in this haunted house of ours.
CHAPTER 2
I hung up my clothes, put the folded things into the pretty oak dresser, lined up my shoes in the bottom of the closet and stacked the boxes of records and books in the corner behind the bed.
“Now what?” I said to the world at large. I’d accomplished the first part of my plan. That had turned out to be the easy part. Now I needed a plan for Part Two.
My stomach gurgled and I rubbed one hand over it. “You stay here,” I told Tripod, who’d already stretched out on the faintly dusty pine floor. “Guard my stuff while I…”
Go somewhere. Do something. I wasn’t sure what.
All I knew was that I wasn’t sitting up here in the room my mother had called the Venus Trap. I’d once seen three women and two men doing stuff to each other here that no eleven-year-old should ever be exposed to. The room was painted pale blue now, with eyelet curtains framing the two windows and an old-fashioned chenille bedspread covering the pretty iron bed. But I could see the black and hot-pink walls beneath this pretty facade as clearly as if the paint was bleeding through.
“Ugh.” I shuddered and closed the door behind me. Directly across the hall Daniel’s solid door seemed to beckon me. I knocked, a short lilting rhythm. After a minute he cracked the door.
“Hey. Listen, I’m going out. You know, to drive around and check out the changes in town.” I made that decision barely a split second before the words spilled out of my mouth. “You need anything? A ride anywhere?”
He shook his head, not meeting my eyes. But he didn’t close the door in my face either.
“Look, Daniel. I didn’t come here to make trouble between you and your mother. She and I…well, let’s just say we weren’t raised in a real close family. I’m sure she has her reasons for not telling you about me.” Lousy reasons but reasons all the same.
“But she lied to me.” He lifted his eyes—Mom’s eyes—to me.
“Look, kid. Everybody lies. All the time.”
“That’s not true.” When I only shrugged, he said, “Well, they’re not supposed to.”
“But they do. The trick is to figure out their motive. Are they trying to hurt you with the lie or just trying to help themselves out of a bad situation?” Then for some stupid, maudlin reason I added, “Or maybe they’re lying because they think it will somehow help you.”
“Well, it didn’t help me.” He gave me this long, steady look. “Why’d you decide to come home now?”
I didn’t want to say. It was one thing to demand what I was owed from Alice. It was another thing to discuss it with her kid. “I figured twenty-four years away would have been too long. So,” I went on. “Do you need anything while I’m out?”
He hesitated only for a second. “Maybe I will take a ride with you. To my friend’s house.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
Tripod started to howl. How he knew I was leaving the premises was beyond me. Daniel gave me a questioning look. Normally I’d take the dog, too. But I didn’t trust Carl Witter not to take my stuff and throw it outside. I knew Tripod wouldn’t let him get past the door.
We didn’t see anyone in the living room. “I’m going to Josh’s,” Daniel called toward the kitchen.
No answer.
“She’s not going to be happy when she finds out I drove you,” I pointed out as we climbed into Jenny.
“I’m fourteen, not four,” he muttered. “Almost fifteen. I can take care of myself.”
“Okay then.” I started up Jenny’s cranky engine. “Which way?”
Driving down the old roads of my childhood was like negotiating a foreign country. Like a Twilight Zone episode where everything was so strange and yet somehow familiar. The town square and St. Brunhilde’s church, and the Landry mansion were familiar. The P.J.’s Coffeehouse in the old Union Bank building, the Wendy’s on the corner of Barcelona Avenue and the Walgreens opposite it were all new. The park that meandered along the river was the same. Bigger trees and bigger parking lot but otherwise the same. That’s where that stupid Toups kid and his friends had chased me once, wanting to know if it was true that hippie kids didn’t wear underwear. I’d jumped into the river to escape them and nearly drowned.
Mother had laughed when I’d finally got home, shivering in my wet clothes. I’d shown them, she’d chortled.
Her boyfriend at the time, Snakie somebody or other, had stared at my fourteen-year-old breasts beneath my clinging knit top and promised to get even for me. And he had. The old sugar-in-the-gas-tank trick. I heard Bonehead Toups had to go back to his bicycle. Sweet justice, literally.
But of course, it had a downside. Snakie had wanted a sweet little reward for being so heroic. A reward from me, not my mom.
Unfortunately for him, after the river incident I’d checked out a library book on self-defense for women. That knee-to-the-groin business really works. He moved out the next week.
“Turn left up there, by the gas station,” Daniel said, bringing me back to the present. We went down an old blacktop to just past where it turned to gravel. “There.” He pointed to a pair of shotgun houses with a rusty trailer parked farther behind them.
“Do you need me to pick you up later?” I might as well ingratiate myself with him before his mother turned him completely against me.
“No. Josh’ll give me a ride home.”
“This Josh is old enough to drive?”
He grinned. “He has a four-wheeler. We’ll take the back route through the woods.”
I grinned back. “Sounds like fun.”
“Yeah. But don’t tell my mom that part.” His grin faded. “She says it’s too dangerous.”
“It is too dangerous. But that’s what makes it so fun.”
“Yeah.” He slammed the door, then gave me a head bobble that I guessed passed for “thanks.” “See ya.”
Then it was just me and Jenny Jeep and my old hometown.
On the surface, Oracle, Louisiana, is just like every other small town I’ve ever been in: an Andy of Mayberry downtown, a big, brick elementary school, a couple of churches. It had more trees than most. And more humidity. I’d been in a lot of little towns, especially when I toured with Dirk and his Dirt Bag Band. I’d done everything on those tours: arranged the shows, driven the bus, collected the money. Collected the band too when they were too stoned to find their way back to the bus.
I hadn’t collected very much money for myself, though. I was Dirk’s girlfriend. What did I need with money?
His words, not mine.
That’s when I’d started my T-shirt and jewelry sideline. Small-town wannabe rockers and wannabe groupies had snapped them up. Too bad I hadn’t saved more of that money. But Dirk had thought what was mine was his, and he would have blown my profits on booze and drugs and music equipment. So instead I blew them on becoming the best-dressed rock band manager you ever saw.
Anyway, you see one