The Lonesome Young (4 page)

I looked around the green and white ruffled decor and realized I’d outgrown the room, anyway. Melinda was more the ruffles type. She sank onto the bed and fought back tears. I hurriedly shut and locked her door and then grabbed a box of tissues, sat down next to her, and pulled her too-thin body into a hug. Although it had only been a couple of months, she felt unfamiliar, as if a sharp-edged stranger had taken her place, and the stench of alcohol was pretty obvious now that I was close enough to smell her. In spite of the camouflage of the open tin of breath mints I saw on her bedside table.

I was worried. Melinda had never gone along with the “Whitfields don’t show emotion” crap, but she’d never been one for hysterics, either. Acid roiled around in my stomach.

“Honey, you have to stop. Melinda, honey, please,” I said coaxingly.

I patted her back and then handed her more tissues, since I didn’t really know how else to help. Discarded tissues littered the floor like abandoned good intentions, and I swallowed the accusations trying to escape my throat. Saying “but you promised” wasn’t a good idea and—even worse—it sounded like something my mother would say.

Even though Melinda
had
promised.

She’d promised me that it would be different here.
She’d
be different. She’d said that I wouldn’t have to worry about her in “Hicksville.” She would be
better
, away from the lure of Louisville’s bright and shiny parties and drinks and drugs, and the bright and shiny people whose glittery surfaces reflected back all the lying promises that Melinda whispered to herself in the dark.

Saner. Safer.

Sober.

But, clearly, she was none of those things.

“Tell me,” I said softly, but a small, horrible part of me really wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled. “You can’t tell me something like ‘I killed Caleb’ without explaining.”

She finally lifted her head from the pillow and looked at me. Her eyes were blank and so lifeless that it scared me.

“We’re . . . dating. Sort of. You know,” she said, her voice raspy from sobbing.

I nodded. I did know. There was no way Richard and Priscilla Whitfield would have let their daughter date a ranch hand, so what Melinda probably meant was that they’d been screwing around in the barn.

“He—I—we wanted to get high,” she said, stumbling over her words. “He said he knew a place where they had quality weed, and he’d run out and be right back. Maybe he’s okay, though. Maybe the sheriff was wrong, and he wasn’t anywhere near that fire.”

“Maybe,” I said, wondering if she could hear the lie in my voice.

Over the summer, before he’d let me borrow the truck to do errands, Pete had warned me about the dangers of getting anywhere near certain parts of Whitfield County, which were known to be the central stomping grounds of a busy meth ring. I didn’t have to be a chemistry whiz to know the basics about the drug that was destroying the state. The places where they created meth—“cooked” it—were explosions waiting to happen, because the ingredients were like toxic sludge.

For some reason, there were plenty of people who couldn’t wait to put this deadly crap in their bodies. I’d never understood it, but then again, I’d never been forced to live with addiction issues like Melinda had. The immediate problem wasn’t the national drug crisis though, but that if my sister’s boyfriend had died in a meth explosion because he went to get pot for her, I wasn’t sure she’d survive living with that knowledge.

“Let’s wait until we get the facts, okay?”

I tucked her into bed, turned off her bedside lamp, and sat with her, holding her trembling hand, until she fell into an exhausted sleep. She’d lost more weight while I was gone, and a surge of anger swept through me, most of it aimed at my “you can never be too thin or too rich” mother. Maybe if she’d spent more time trying to be a mom and less time pretending none of us existed, she might have noticed that her eldest daughter was turning into a wraith. Of course, my dad was a self-absorbed jerk who ignored Melinda’s problems just as much as Mom did, so there was enough blame to go around.

I’d abandoned her, too—I left for school without a second thought for how she’d survive.

Guilt and remorse joined anger and worry in the giant spinning hamster wheel of my brain, but I didn’t even have the energy to defend myself from myself.

A little while later, a splash of light on the window from headlights turning onto our driveway snapped me out of the half-doze I’d been falling into in spite of the situation. I hadn’t slept well for the past few days, since Dad’s phone call and the chaos of withdrawing and packing, and it was all finally catching up to me in the dark, quiet room.

I stood up, only to find Melinda staring at me with wide, terrified eyes.

“Will you find out what happened? If it really is . . . was . . .” Her voice trailed off, and I squeezed her hand in what I hoped was reassurance.

How do you comfort your sister when her boyfriend might be dead, and she believes it’s her fault? Nothing in any of my advanced placement classes had prepared me for this.

“I’ll find out, and then I’ll be right back,” I told her.

With one of Mom’s sleeping pills, I promised myself. One way or the other, Melinda was going to need it.

I tucked the blanket more snugly around her thin shoulders and then went down to face the music. When I got to the door, Melinda called my name. The moonlight slanting in through the window highlighted the silvery tracks of the dried tears gleaming on her pale cheeks, and again I was struck by how wraithlike she’d become.

“Welcome home, baby sister.”

CHAPTER 4

Mickey

I
parked my bike in the pothole-infested lot—and then thought about turning right back around and leaving. The last place I wanted to be was school, where nobody would want to talk about anything but yesterday’s fire, but since escaping this rat hole of a town was high on my priority list, earning good enough grades to get into college was part of the plan. I played football, but I wasn’t a superstar, so chances of a scholarship there were slim, and I had no intention of becoming just another uneducated, drunken, no-good Rhodale, with or without criminal tendencies. Having a teacher for a mom gave me some hope, but if anybody had been fool enough to make a scrapbook of my family tree, they’d see that the Rhodale genes always seemed to drown out whatever they mixed with.

Every Rhodale male had black hair, blue eyes, and a nose for trouble, no matter which side of the law he ended up on. One of my great-uncles had been a kingpin during Prohibition, running moonshine so good that people claimed Al Capone himself had special ordered it for his own table. Chicago was far enough from Kentucky that the story was probably pure bull, but rumor turned petty crooks into godlike myths in a place where there wasn’t much hope for climbing out of poverty in any legal way.

On the other side of the law, another ancestor had been a Pinkerton man, riding trains to protect the railroad’s payroll. His badge and gun were in a glass case at the Whitfield County Historical Museum, labeled with a neatly printed card that explained how Frank Rhodale of the National Pinkerton Detective Agency had been instrumental in the pursuit and capture of Jesse James and his gang. Again, probably overinflated bull, at least about the James Gang, but the badge was real enough. Like most legends, there was just enough truth in it to pay for a wagonload of maybe.

When Ethan got drunk enough, he liked to tell people that he would have been riding
with
Jesse James, not against him, and my brother Jeb was just gullible enough to go along with whatever Ethan said. Jeb was two years younger than Ethan and half as smart; he’d inherited both my dad’s leanings toward drunkenness and Anna Mae’s greed, which made for a really bad combination in a wannabe criminal. I’d heard whispers that it had been something Jeb had done (or failed to do) that had sent Ethan to jail, but the two of them had seemed amicable enough at the barbecue yesterday.

Then again, I’d seen Ethan smile and shake Junior Koslowski’s hand just before he broke Junior’s nose, so I didn’t really believe Jeb was off the hook for whatever it was he’d done. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t want to know, not that anybody at this petri dish of a high school would believe it. Most of them probably figured I was involved. When Ethan went to jail, one of the senior girls had asked me in a breathless voice if I’d been the “wheel man.”

She was a moron, but the gossip and speculation were at least partly my fault.

My brothers’ reputations had always washed over me like an overflowing septic tank, and at first I’d been young and ignorant enough to like it. Nobody messed with a Rhodale boy, for fear of Ethan, and I’d swaggered through elementary school and junior high like a preening rooster until I’d discovered the dark side of borrowed infamy.

Maybe nobody messed with a Rhodale boy, but nobody let their daughters date a Rhodale boy, either. Nobody wanted their kids to be friends with a Rhodale. Parents who’d been afraid that Ethan would get riled up over some slight—whether actual or only in his over-active, quick-to-take-offense imagination—didn’t even want their boys to play ball with me. Not that I could blame them after he’d gone after my Little League coach with a bat for yelling at me.

I’d tackled Ethan before he’d done any real damage except to put a dent in the batting cage, but I’d been banned from the league for life after that. Not a big deal, maybe, unless you were a ten-year-old kid who lived in a town where baseball was one of the only things to do all summer.

In a twisted kind of way, a lot of what he’d done had been because he’d been so protective of me. Of all of us, especially Caroline, even before . . . well. Before the incident. Not the drugs, but some of the violent stuff for sure stemmed from wanting to protect us. But nobody in town saw it that way, and everybody was always quick to think the worst of me, by association.

“Trouble always breeds true,” they’d said.

“The Rhodale streak will show up in him sooner or later,” they’d said.

My mother had told me to ignore them, but instead I’d proved them all right when I turned sixteen, saw two boys roughing up my half sister, and lost my mind.

“Mickey!” My buddy Derek angled his bicycle into the rack, but didn’t lock it. It was a real POS and nobody would bother to steal it. Derek was one of the few kids whose parents weren’t afraid of Ethan or of me—probably because they were preachers and believed God loves everybody. Or maybe because they didn’t actually know who Ethan was or what I had done; they weren’t exactly the type of folks to gossip. I’d never brought it up with them, so I wasn’t sure which was true. I swung my leg over to dismount the Harley and headed toward him.

“I heard about the fire. Holy crap, was it really Caleb? I thought he was working for old lady Whitfield. What was he doing hanging out at a meth lab? Was he a drug dealer?” Derek’s questions tumbled out so fast that he was making my brain hurt. He looked around and then lowered his voice.

“Was Ethan involved? Doesn’t look good, with him just getting out of the big house.”

I raised an eyebrow. “The big house? Have you been watching too much Netflix again?”

He punched me in the shoulder, and I pretended it hurt. When your best friend was short and skinny, sometimes it was good to make him feel like he was bigger than he really was. Especially when he’d been the only one from high school to visit me in juvie.

“Everybody’s going to be talking about it,” he continued, his smile fading. “If it was Caleb, the student council will need to arrange some kind of memorial service here at the school. He only graduated a few months ago.”

Derek was on the student council. Also the yearbook staff, the school paper, and the wrestling team. He was a demon in his weight class.

“It was Caleb,” I confirmed gruffly. Pa hadn’t made it home till the middle of the night, but I’d still been awake long enough to get the details. When he’d headed for the bourbon, I’d headed for bed, not in the mood for another drunken round of “where did I go wrong.”

The few hours of sleep I had managed to get had been restless. Over and over, I’d dreamed that Victoria had driven that old truck directly into the fire, instead of away from it. Every time I woke up, heart racing, my room seemed to echo to the sound of her screams.

The two cups of coffee I’d poured down my throat probably would be just enough to get me through to lunchtime.

“Whoa.
Whoa
. Who is that?” Derek’s whistle cut through my glum mood, and I looked up to see a battered pickup truck with a WHITFIELD HORSES logo on the door pull into a parking space in the middle row, only a few spaces down from my bike. I shrugged and acted like I wasn’t looking.

“Melinda Whitfield, probably. She’s been going to school here since the beginning of the year. I’d have expected you to have noticed that, Mr. School Paper.”

Derek rolled his eyes. “Melinda doesn’t drive. She always catches a ride with somebody. Honestly, as spacey as she acts, she probably doesn’t know how to drive. No, my friend, this is somebody else, and she’s
hot
.”

He wasn’t kidding. Victoria was gorgeous, yeah, but there was something else there that had caught at my imagination. A sense of sadness in her eyes. I hadn’t been able to get the way she’d stood up to me out of my mind, either. She’d intrigued me, and I hadn’t felt that sensation in a really long time.

Derek and I, and half the students in the damn high school, stopped and stared at her as she climbed out of the truck. Her silky blond hair swept down past her shoulders in a loose wave, and when she glanced my way I could see that her eyes were a startling green, which I hadn’t been able to tell the night before in the fire-bright dark.

Her legs were a mile and a half long, and her curves under her hot little green dress were making me itch to walk over and throw my jacket over her, so none of the other guys currently checking her out could see the hint of cleavage on display. She looked elegant and untouchable, and I had the same feeling of hopelessness that I’d had driving by her on the road even before I’d known who she was.