Autumn (12 page)

Chapter Fifteen

If someone had told Cooper a month earlier he’d be lying in his truck bed on a blanket, listening to baseball with a totally adorable girl, he’d have called that person a liar.

Had that same person told him they’d be sharing an awkward silence and not looking at each other, he’d be a bit more willing to listen. Awkward might as well replace Eugene as his middle name.

He wanted to know what the deal was between his family and Lou’s. His mother and Elle Whittaker had never been best buddies, but he hadn’t thought there was more to it than that. When people told Lou to steer clear of him, he’d assumed they were looking out for her new social standing, nothing more.

It wasn’t until his mother told him in no uncertain terms that he was forbidden to spend time with Lou that he started thinking there might be more to it than he’d originally suspected.

He had to figure out what was going on, but in a way that would keep his secret protected. Lou was clever and had a level head on her shoulders, but he couldn’t exactly say, “My brother turned into a coyote, and on my eighteenth birthday, I will too. What do you have to do with that?”

There was no evidence Lou had
anything
to do with it, so to spill the beans seemed reckless. Unless she did something to prove she
needed
to know, he wasn’t going to tell her anything.

But they still had a weird Hatfields vs. McCoys thing going on with their families, and since neither side was interested in sharing details, they needed to figure it out for themselves.

During a lull in the bottom of the fourth inning, Cooper finally broke the ice. “What did your grandmother tell you when she said you shouldn’t hang out with me?”

She sat up, resting on her elbows, and looked at him. “Pretty much the same thing everyone else in town said. You’re bad news. I think she implied that Reynolds men had a bad habit of bailing and you wouldn’t be any different.”

Cooper covered his eyes so he could glance at her without being blinded. She had no idea how right she was. “I guess that’s true.”

“What, that you’ll run away?”

He shrugged. “That men in my family have a history of doing that.” It didn’t matter than most of them ran away on four legs instead of two. The truth didn’t need to be so well defined.

Of course, his dad had left for more old-fashioned reasons. Nothing turned him furry, but he sure had run off with his tail between his legs.

“What I don’t get is what your mom could possibly have against me.” Lou sounded more hurt than she was offended. “I’ve never even met her. And I’ve only been in town for like two weeks. I haven’t exactly been stirring up trouble in all that time.”

Cooper sat up and crossed his legs, turning to face her. “She got weird about your last name. So I’m guessing it has more to do with your grandmother than it does you personally.”

“What’s with this town? I’ve never known a group of grown adults to behave like they’re all in high school cliques. It’s bizarre.”

“I know. My mom is in her forties, but she spazzed out on me like she was a member of Archer’s fan club. She’s never
forbidden
me to do anything, but you should have seen how serious she was about you. I was hoping your grandmother might have said something to tip you off as to why.”

Lou shook her head solemnly, then a thought came over her, showing almost as visibly as a light bulb over her head. “You said your mom is in her forties, right?”

“Don’t tell her I told you that.”

“Has she always lived here?”

“Yeah.”

“So, there’s a good chance she went to high school with my dad. Maybe that has something to do with it. Like, maybe our parents dated. Maybe that’s why they both have issues with each other still.”

“That would have to have been one hell of a breakup.” It also didn’t offer any explanation as to why the whole town treated his family like pariahs, but it was more of a lead than they’d had five minutes earlier.

“Maybe the school library has old copies of the yearbooks. We could check it out tomorrow and see what shows up.”

“I don’t want to pin all our hopes on that. It’s pretty…” He trailed off and gave a shrug, not sure what word he was looking for.

“I know, it’s not exactly a smoking gun on the grassy knoll, but people in small towns hold grudges over the stupidest things. Maybe this really is just because your mom broke my dad’s heart or something.”

“Or vice versa.”

Lou rolled her eyes. “Sure, or vice versa. Point being, if we can figure out
why
our families want to keep us apart, we have a better chance of proving to them how silly they’re being. Right?”

“Right. I mean…it’s not like anything is even going on between us.” He threw the words out like a floater on a fish lure, bobbing them in front of her to see what she’d do. She stared at him, and he saw the briefest flicker of disappointment on her face before she lay back down on the blanket and looked up at the blue sky.

“Right. Nothing at all,” she said quietly.

Cooper lay down as well, resisting the urge to say anything else. He’d already proven how stupid he was, he didn’t need to hammer the case home.

Chapter Sixteen

When Cooper dropped her off later that evening, Lou debated walking back into town to spend an hour at the library before it closed. She hadn’t made a lot of headway through the periodicals, but her limited research
had
explained to her how her father knew Nigel.

The article from August 1984 detailed the story of how her twelve-year-old father had rescued an eight-month-old baby when a coyote had tried to run off with the child during a town picnic. The baby had been left briefly unattended on a blanket in the sun when the animal had come out of the woods and grabbed the child.

Lou’s father, acting quickly, had chased after the coyote, and since the animal was burdened with the extra weight of the baby, her dad was able to retrieve the kid relatively unharmed.

That baby had been Nigel.

She hadn’t spoken to the oddball librarian about her discovery, but his name was right there in print. From what she gathered, her father had stayed close with young Nigel, forming a generation-defying friendship, and it sounded like they’d stayed in touch even after her dad had left Poisonfoot.

So she had one question answered, and a new respect for her father. Turned out even as a child he’d been an awesome guy. It made her uneasy to research her dad’s history with Cooper’s mom. One article had reminded her what a great guy he was, but what if he
had
broken someone’s heart? And done it so brutally it left a twenty-year grudge in its wake? He’d been a teenager, and teenagers did stupid stuff all the time—she was living proof of that—but she didn’t want to know any bad things about him. She wanted his memory untainted.

Yet, if it was as simple as a bad romance, she wouldn’t need to spend any more time in the public library digging for clues.

Instead of going to the library, she decided to take a night off from her new quest for answers and spend a few hours doing actual homework.

When she kicked her shoes off at the front door, the house was oddly still. The sounds of
The Bachelor
hummed from Granny Elle’s den, but it was the kind of white noise that did nothing to add any life to the space around it. Lou wandered down the main hall to the kitchen where her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, a newspaper opened to the classified section. She was chewing on the end of a red marker, scouring the page for job listings.

Financially they weren’t hurting for money with their new rent-free digs, but Lou knew their family savings was empty. More than that, though, her mother had
always
had a job. She was probably getting a little stir crazy sitting around the house with Granny Elle.

“Anything?” Lou asked.

“Paper mill. Paper mill. Walmart. Paper mill.” Her mom sighed and set the marker down. “Slim pickings for stuff with benefits.”

Lou felt a familiar snarl of guilt in her belly. If it wasn’t for her, they wouldn’t
need
the benefits. Her mother never got sick and had perfect teeth and vision. Lou, on the other hand, needed insulin. She needed test strips. She needed a vast number of very expensive medical supplies, and having health benefits made those things more affordable. She’d seen the price on her insulin last week when they’d gone to the pharmacy in town. She knew what she was costing her mom.

She didn’t want to feel bad about it—she hadn’t
asked
for diabetes after all—but she worried about what it meant for them. Certainly Granny Elle would offer to pay. She likely already had. But Lou’s mom was stubborn, and she seemed dead set on proving she was capable of taking care of their needs on her own.

“Where were you?” her mom asked.

Lou debated lying, but Mom seemed like one of the few people in town who wouldn’t care who her daughter spent time with. “I was hanging out with Cooper.”

“Who’s Cooper?” Her mom waggled her eyebrows, wearing a suggestive grin.

Lou blushed tellingly. “He’s just a boy.”

“
Just
a boy. Suuuuure, sure.” Attention returning to the paper, her mom chuckled quietly to herself. “Are you going upstairs?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you take that box up to the attic for me? Just some papers from the sale of the old house and some… It’s some papers. Your grandma said there’s plenty of space up there, even after remodeling for your room, so we might as well make use of it.”

Lou hadn’t seen the attic yet in all her explorations of the house to date. In spite of the fact it was literally on the other side of the drywall from her, there was no direct access from her room to the storage half of the top floor.

The box she was meant to take sat next to an interior door on the back wall of the kitchen. It was a tattered cardboard banker’s box, torn and ratty on the side like it might fall apart at any moment. Lou hoisted the box up, balancing it on her hip and opening the door. The stairwell was dark, with a minimal patch of yellow light from the top of the stairs guiding her way.

The kitchen door swung closed behind her, making the space around her even darker, and Lou staggered on a step halfway up. She held tight to the box, bashing her knee against the wooden riser, unable to brace her fall.

“You okay?” Her mother’s voice was muffled from the kitchen. Lou must have made a louder noise than she’d expected.

“I’m fine,” she called back, though her knee called her a liar, throbbing in dull pain. “Just tripped.”

She made her way up the remaining stairs, her injured knee thumping its own tiny heartbeat, and when she got to the top, she immediately dropped the box so she could rub the wound. There was no scrape, but it would definitely be bruised in the morning.

The lid of the box had come off when it had fallen, and a quick glance inside showed her the mortgage documents her mom had promised, but a few folders also bore the logo of the hospital where her father had died. Lou had no interest in seeing how much money it had cost her family to see him slip away, so she repositioned the lid on the box and kicked it into a corner.

Without her burden, Lou was able to get a good look of the attic. It was a fair bit smaller than her side of the upper floor, making her silently thankful to her grandmother for being so gracious to her. Unlike the light, airy feeling of her bedroom, the beams and ceiling were all aged dark wood, and most of the windows were covered with brown paper, giving the room its dim yellow glow.

Several old steamer trunks were lined under the wall with neat stacks of cardboard boxes piled on top of them. An old sewing mannequin was covered in dust in one corner with an ancient velvet coat draped over it. There were moth holes chewed through the material, making it look older than it probably was.

Curiosity overcame her when she saw a trunk with its lock popped and no boxes on top of it. There didn’t seem to be any harm in doing a quick investigation of the trunk’s contents, and she wouldn’t disturb anything.

Lou knelt in front of the trunk and opened the top. The hinges squealed, rusted from disuse. For a moment she held her breath, waiting for someone to come in and tell her she shouldn’t be snooping, but the room remained quiet. She could hear the muffled voices of people talking on Granny Elle’s TV, but otherwise there was no sound in the house.

On the top insert of the trunk was a small khaki uniform with a sash covered in multicolored patches. Each badge was decorated to represent some skill—canoeing, hiking, archery—and they were neatly sewn onto the sash with perfectly even spaces between them. Obviously the work of a proud parent and not the child himself. It reminded Lou of her own Girl Scouts sash, though she’d sewn those badges on herself in order to earn the sewing award.

She fingered the prizes on her father’s sash reverently, then put the miniature uniform to the side, careful not to ruin the folding job. She didn’t want the shirt or sash to end up wrinkled.

Underneath was a collection of toys, and Lou’s heart leapt. It was like finding a secret time capsule dedicated solely to her father. A beaten, brown leather baseball glove was next in the pile. An elastic was wrapped around the outside, keeping an aging Rawlings baseball trapped inside.

She took the elastic off, and the ball rolled out. Inside the pocket of the glove, the leather was worn so smooth it shined. Lou imagined her father using oil to condition the leather and the ball to mold the glove to the proper size. It smelled sweet and slightly like lemon. She placed the ball next to her hip, sure no one would notice it going missing, and added the glove to the pile of other goods.

The trunk contained old Hardy Boys paperbacks, dog-eared sci-fi novels—Lou took a few of these, the ones that looked the most well-loved—and at the bottom of the trunk was a stack of papers.

A few were old class papers, some scribbled notes, and the very last sheet was from a sketchpad. When Lou looked at it, everything else she’d been holding in her lap tumbled to the floor.