Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (2 page)

Vega had disappeared again. Nolan felt like that asshole was just lurking in the background somewhere, waiting for another opportunity to fuck things up for the Horde.

With a blink, he pushed that restless feeling off to the side. He gave his mom his reassuring smile. “It’s all good, Mom.”

His mom frowned but didn’t say more. He bent down and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be back by one or so. You going to Valhalla this afternoon?”

“Yeah. Jackie’s closing, but I need to be there through the after-supper rush. I’ll pick up a couple of pizzas at Tuck’s on my way home.”

“Sounds good. Love you.”

“Love you, Nolan. Be careful.”

“I always am. And you always worry too much.”

~oOo~

On Sunday afternoon, Loki swiped angrily at his face and threw the book. “That’s stupid! That’s so stupid! Billy is stupid!” His voice broke, and he sobbed for a second, then punched his leg and got some control. “What a stupid book,” he said through his tears and stopped-up nose. “I hate that book. I hate Billy, and I hate those stupid dogs for going after a mountain lion. Why did the guy write a book about dogs dying? Why did I have to read it? It’s so stupid!”

“I felt the same way, guy. But Billy loved his pups, and they loved him.”

Feeling emotional himself, Nolan hooked his arm around his brother’s shoulders, but Loki shook him off. “It’s stupid,” he muttered again.

“You want to take some time before we talk about what it’s about and figure out your project?”

“It’s about a stupid boy who let his stupid dog get eaten by a stupid lion,” Loki grumbled, picking at a hole in his sock.

For Nolan, the worst part this time was Little Ann, the other pup, lying on her brother’s grave and dying of starvation—or, really, of a broken heart. “Yeah, let’s take some time. You want to play Mario for a while?”

“No.” Loki lay down on his bed and put his back to Nolan.

“Okay, guy. I’ll be around. Let me know when you’re ready.”

“I
hate
school,” Loki snarled as Nolan left his room.

Nolan closed the door and went to the kitchen for a beer. He took it to the living room and plopped down on the sofa, not bothering to turn on the television. Their mom had gone off to run errands and wasn’t back yet. Thor shuffled in and collapsed on the floor at Nolan’s feet.

The house felt thick with quiet. Nolan took a long pull on his beer, then leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

Fifth grade was about the same time that school had started getting unmanageable for Nolan, too. He was smart, and Loki was as well. Too smart for school. None of the actual subjects had been hard for Nolan, and Loki had been doing well until this year. It was being required to do stupid shit for no discernible reason that had gotten Nolan hung up, and being ignored when he’d had legitimate questions and disciplined when he wanted to think about things in different ways. From that point on, school had been, at best, a waste of time, and at worst, traumatic.

Reading a book like
Where the Red Fern Grows
and doing nothing with it but assigning some stupid shoebox diorama for a project? How fucked up was that? Why not talk about how the prize money from the hunting competition made everything worth it to everybody but Billy and what that meant about how fucked up their lives were? Better yet, why not talk about how a book could break your heart, how some made-up story could remind you of things about your own life and make you think about those things differently? Why not just talk about why it was so fucking sad? Why assign a book that made you
feel
so much and not give kids a way to understand all those feelings? It was so fucked up.

But no. Glue some construction paper into a shoebox and move on to the next thing.

Loki was right: school was fucking stupid.

But why should it be different from anything else? Nothing about anything made any kind of sense.

Life
was fucking stupid.

CHAPTER TWO

Iris combed through a display tray of vintage jewelry. At her side, her older sister, Rose, tried on a red cloche hat trimmed with a flower of black velvet and sequins. She tipped her head and preened before the round mirror standing on the display case.

“I don’t think I’m gonna find anything for Shannon here. I mean, she comes in here all the time. Anything she wanted, she’d already have.” Iris pushed the tray back and stepped away from the case, aimlessly wandering to a nearby rack of old fur coats.

Still enjoying her reflection, Rose said, “We found Daddy’s present here. And Shannon loves stuff like this. Christmas is in a few days. It’s not like you have a lot of options, putting it off to the last minute.”

“Sorry I was too busy taking finals and graduating—and being poor—to go on a shopping spree. And
I
don’t have a big discount at some fancy store.”

Rose was three years older than Iris and had gotten her degree in four years—Iris had changed her major three times and taken five years to graduate—so she was out in the world, making her life. She was a buyer for a department store on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago. She had a condo, a boyfriend, and an expense account.

Iris didn’t have any of those things, and she didn’t want the condo or the expense account—or anything about Rose’s life. But her big sister still managed to make her feel like a loser for not having it.

Maybe she was a loser. She had a shiny-new college degree but not the tiniest clue what she wanted to do with it. She had no idea where she would live or how she would make money or any of it. Yeah, that was the probably the definition of loser.

Rose hung the hat back in its place and gave her the kind of subtly nasty look that only sisters could give each other. “You better not be cheaping out on your half of Daddy’s present. It was
your
idea.”

“I’m not, jerk.” Iris dug into her pocket and pulled out her cash. When she gave Rose her half of the cost of their dad’s present, she had twenty-eight dollars left. That represented all of her dollars in the world, and she still didn’t have a present for Shannon.

As Rose neatened the bills and slid them into her wallet, the door to the back of Fosse’s Finds opened, and Dora Fosse came out with a large, flat package in her arms. She’d been back wrapping it in glittery silver paper and a blue bow. “Okay, ladies. How’s this?”

“That’s pretty, Dora, thank you!” Rose smiled and clapped her hands. “I don’t know how we’d’ve gotten it into the house unwrapped without our dad seeing it.”

The shopkeeper smiled. “I didn’t have a box of a good size, but I wrapped it up good in tissue and put a cardboard border around it so the wrapping would be pretty.”

“It looks great, Dora,” Iris affirmed.

She was excited about the present. It had taken a lot of convincing to get Rose to go in with her so she could afford it, and it had taken Dora a lot of searching to find it, but Iris knew their dad would love it.

Their parents had divorced a long time ago, and Rose and Iris had sort of picked different parents. They’d both always lived together basically full-time with their mom, in Arkansas, and it had been a couple of years before they’d even gotten to see much of their dad. It wasn’t like they’d really chosen sides, exactly. Rose loved their dad, and Iris loved their mom. But Iris just
got
their dad better than she did their mom, and for Rose it was the opposite.

A really horrible thing had happened right before the divorce. Their oldest sister, Daisy, had been killed in that horrible thing, and it had made the divorce happen. Their mom blamed their father for it, then and now. Rose did, too, though she had forgiven him. But that was probably why she’d always held him off, just a step or two.

For years, Iris had told everybody that she didn’t remember the really horrible thing. And everybody had always believed her. It had been a lot easier to let them believe it.

She remembered it. But she didn’t blame her dad. The people she blamed were dead.

The really horrible thing was
really
horrible, but Iris had never liked how angry their mom always was at their dad. She had never liked the things their mom said to her and Rose about him, or how she tried to make them feel bad for wanting to see him. Iris held her mom off, just a step or two, because she saw a different man from the one their mother wanted them to see.

So yeah, they’d sort of picked different parents in the divorce.

They both liked their stepmother, Shannon, a whole lot better than they liked their stepfather, though. On that it had been easy to agree.

Rose pulled out a credit card and handed it over to Dora, and Iris walked to the front of the shop. There was just nothing in here that seemed right for a gift for Shannon.

She looked out the window. Main Street in Signal Bend was fully decked out for Christmas, with pine rope wrapping all the rails and posts and street lamps, and big red and gold bows, and lights everywhere. Keller Acres Bed & Breakfast, which Shannon managed and partly owned, had a decorated horse-drawn carriage with a driver in an old-fashioned uniform offering rides up and down the Main Street Marketplace—several blocks of antique shops, cute boutiques, and cafes. All they needed was some snow, and the view outside would belong on a Christmas card.

This last push before Christmas Day, the Marketplace was hopping. Iris smiled. She’d been young when she’d really lived in Signal Bend, but she remembered the days when the town was barely keeping its feet. When her dad talked about those days, he’d say it was ‘pure, ornery stubbornness’ that had kept the town from collapsing into a dead heap, but Iris knew it had been more than that. The Night Horde MC had kept the town going. And now it thrived.

Her father’s club. He was a hero. They all were.

There was a new shop just across the street from Fosse’s Finds: Jubilee Antiques & Curiosities. Iris had never seen it before, and she was, well, curious. When she saw Rose’s reflection approaching in the window, Iris turned and waved at Dora. “Thank you so much for all your help, Dora! Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas, ladies! I’ll see you Friday!”

Christmas Eve in Signal Bend. A big gift donation drive and then the party at the Horde clubhouse. Iris grinned. She loved this town.

She opened the door into a blast of frigid air—no snow yet this season, but plenty of cold—and jumped off the boardwalk to cross the street.

“Iris! Wait! We need to put this in the car!”

“Go ahead—I’ll just be in here,” she called without pausing. Rose could handle the package.

A little bell tinkled overhead as she opened the door to the new shop. Every shop on Main Street had the exact same bell—Iris’s thought stopped as she looked up and saw a shiny red bell dangling from a gargoyle’s extended tongue. Okay, not every shop had the exact same bell after all.

Cool! But she probably wasn’t going to find anything for Shannon in here, either. Their stepmother wasn’t exactly the gargoyle type.

“Welcome to Jubilee!” A male voice pulled Iris’s attention back to normal eye level. A guy who was probably middle-age-ish, dressed like he’d bought his whole outfit off an Eddie Bauer mannequin, stood in the center of the shop.

“I’m Geoff with a ‘G.’ Are you on the hunt for anything in particular today?”

“Hi, Geoff-with-a-G. I’m Iris.” Having already decided that the place was probably too weird for Shannon, she was going to say that she’d just look around for a few minutes. But she didn’t get the words out. She was too interested in what she was seeing. The shop was nothing like anything else in Signal Bend.

For one thing, it wasn’t packed to the rafters with stock. This room—she could tell that there was at least one more room—had a lot of space on the stripped-wood floors. The pieces displayed were high end, even Iris could tell that, and everything was set out for maximum highlight.

On closer inspection, it was pretty normal, really: estate sale furniture and décor. Lots of heavy, ornate wood, and brass and silver, and depression glass and milk glass. A case full of stoneware crocks. A shelf full of glass bluebirds. All the old antique-shop standards. But this stuff had been reconditioned to be beautiful and a little funky, and it was displayed unusually.

“Doing some Christmas shopping, Iris?”

“Yeah. For my stepmom. I don’t have a lot of money, though.”

“Well, then”—Geoff-with-a-G stepped to her side with a friendly grin—“this might not be the right room. There are others, though. What does your stepmom like?” Though there were three other customers Iris could see, Geoff seemed ready to give her his full attention.

She let him lead her toward the door to the other room she’d noticed. “Maybe nothing here. She’s girly and…elegant, I guess.”

“Hmmm. Girly and elegant. We might be able to find something.”

They were in the side room, and Iris gaped. This room was obviously where the ‘Curiosities’ in the store name were kept. It was darker than the main room, and here, stock was packed in tightly, and nothing was like what the other shops sold. In this room, there was a stuffed—as in had once been alive, and had since been subject to taxidermy—owl with its feathers dyed cobalt blue and with big pink crystals for eyes. A black case against one wall held nothing but identically-sized jars full of strange powders and liquids. Across the top of that case sat a long row of large bird skulls.

She’d walked into Edgar Allan Poe’s basement.

Iris wasn’t into goth stuff, like at all, but the room fascinated her nonetheless. She found it curious that people would think to make stuff like this. What kind of person looked at an owl carcass and thought,
This would look great on the mantel. The only thing it’s missing is pink jewel eyes. And maybe some blue dye.

She liked thinking about what made people tick and why they liked the things they did. One of her favorite courses in college, called Anthropology of Modern North American Cultures, had asked a question like that, albeit on a larger scale. They’d had a whole unit on Hoarder Culture. Iris wouldn’t have ever thought of hoarding as a culture before that class, but she sure did now.

She meandered through the crowded room, smiling at the oddities. Not everything was as dark as the bird skulls or the strange dead animals, but everything was at least a little bit weird.

“Does your stepmother like jewelry?” Geoff asked. He held out an ornate pair of earrings with dangling red stones like drops of blood. Very much not Shannon’s taste.

“She does, but I don’t think this is going to work for—” She stopped as her eyes landed on a beacon of bright blue in the middle of this strange, dark room. On a small, round table with a marble top sat an old-fashioned bell jar. Inside it was an arrangement of about a dozen bright blue butterflies. It was so beautiful, Iris’s breath literally stopped for a moment.

“Are they real?”

“Yes. Not alive, of course, but real. Do you like it? Will your stepmother?”

Honestly, Iris didn’t know. But the blue in the butterflies’ wings was the same color as Shannon’s eyes, and the whole thing was just so
beautiful
. Sad, yes, but beautiful.

She stroked the glass of the jar. “How much is it?”

Geoff sighed. “I’m sorry to say that this piece is six hundred dollars.”

Iris jerked her hand from the glass so quickly an onlooker might have thought it had caught fire. “Oh.”

“But,” he added, “If you like that, let me show you these.”

He walked over to a display piece that was shelves on top—filled with weird old books and strange glass baubles—and narrow drawers on the bottom. When he pulled out a drawer, Iris saw a collection of individually-framed butterflies and moths.

With the cost of the bell jar clanging in her head, she eyed a small frame with a similar blue butterfly. When she pointed to it, Geoff lifted it from the drawer and handed it to her. Up close, she could see subtle variations in the blues of the wings, and the way the black edging seemed like lace. Again, she brushed a finger over the glass. “How much for this one?”