Trouble Comes Knocking (Entangled Embrace) (7 page)

It wasn’t the green one, and even though I had no reason for it, my heartbeat still sped up. The car slowed, then stopped right in front of me. As if the cement had somehow attached itself to my shoes, I stood stock still as the window rolled down. “Are you Lucy Carver?” he asked, sunglasses hiding his eyes.

My lips dried instantly, and my limbs turned to jelly.

“Are you Lucy Carver?” he asked again, this time more insistent.

The door to the coffee shop jangled open. “Hey, who are you?” Eli asked from behind me.

With a squeal of tires, the man shot into traffic and around the corner, narrowly missing a truck as it passed through the intersection. Eli ran a distance behind him, but there was no way he’d be able to catch the license plate. Running back to me, he grabbed my arms, slightly shaking me, trying to break my stupor. “Who was that?”

I was shivering and couldn’t stop. Apparently, Eli felt it, too.

“C’mon.” Taking me by the elbow, he led me to his car and had me in and buckled before I had a chance to protest or even speak a word. Getting behind the wheel, he turned, giving me a fierce look that sealed me to my seat. “Think, Lucy. Have you seen that man before?”

“Yes.” At that point, I couldn’t hold it in anymore as panic took over. My breathing came quick and shallow.

Eli took my hand and held it on his chest. He took slow, deliberate breaths. “Easy, now,” he said in a voice that sounded calmer than his eyes looked. “Slow and steady. In and out. I’m right here. You’re safe.”

After a few minutes, my panic subsided and my breathing returned to normal. I pulled my hand away, tucking it into my lap.

“I’m taking you home,” he said, putting the car into gear. It was an unmarked black sedan. Police issue but definitely not a cruiser.

“I have work.”

“You’ll be sick.”

“I was sick last week.”

“Then you’ll be sick again. Stop arguing.” With that, he merged and we headed to my house.

When I was fourteen, two men showed up at our farm in a shiny silver truck late one morning. Though I should have been picking green beans from our garden, I’d actually been playing with the kittens under our front porch and saw as they arrived, each wearing blue jeans and polo shirts. My father stepped out of the house to meet them.

“What are you doing here?” he asked in a voice not his own. My father was a soft-spoken man who never raised his voice or spoke rudely to anyone. To hear him sound both deep and threatening made me shrink deeper into the shadows. I felt an instinctual sense of fear over the arrival of these men.

From where I sat I could see my father clearly. He’d been working on our tractor all day, his clothes and skin both covered in a shiny film of sweat and grease. His bright blond hair glistened in the sunlight, making him look youthful, maybe playful; yet the deadly serious set of his eyes said he meant nothing but business. He held a wrench in his hand, probably the tool he’d been using on the tractor, though in front of these men it looked more like a weapon.

“We only came to talk, Mr. Carver.”

“I told you to stay away from here, stay away from my family. We come to you. That’s what we agreed to.”

One of the men, the older of the two with more white hair than brown, held up his hands. “No need to get upset. You know why we’re here.”

My father took a step toward them and held the wrench at his side, hand clenching and forearm rippling.

My heart raced, and I clutched one of the kittens tight against my chest. I wanted to close my eyes like I would during a scary part in a movie, but I found I couldn’t look away.

The younger man took a step back, but instead of leaving, he sat on the porch swing. “You can’t keep the truth hidden forever,” he said. His lighter brown hair reminded me of a horse we’d kept several years earlier. The dimple in his chin might have even made him seem friendly if I weren’t so frightened. The older man followed suit and sat alongside his associate. “Mr. Carver, David. Look, we’re not here to cause trouble. You know the situation. You know the bind we are in and what kind of trouble we’d all be in if the truth ever surfaced.”

“It won’t ever get out,” my father said. “That’s why we’re here.” He sighed and set down the wrench. Pulling a rag from his pocket, he swiped it over his face, then wiped the grease from his hands. His shoulders slumped and every bit of the warrior I’d seen only moments earlier melted into Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders. “How are Kat and Julie?”

The names clicked for me. My mom told me I used to talk to my imaginary friends, Kat and Julie. Said I had a nightmare one night and never brought them up again. At the mention of their names I let go of the kitten to hug my arms around myself.

The older man looked down at his hands. “Growing,” he said, then paused. “Though nothing in comparison. She was so…” He sounded wistful before he stopped himself. “Haven’t you thought about what we’re missing out on? I mean, what could have been achieved with all three of them together?”

The younger man cut him off. “We have a place to protect her. So different from where she was before. It’s a school, not a lab. No tests, no experiments. Strict learning and growth opportunities. Things don’t have to be the way they were at Voeller, Mr. Carver.”

Were they talking about my mother? She was a teacher. Why did she need protecting? Who were Kat and Julie other than imaginary friends I’d had as a child? Could they be more?

My dad shook his head. “Not in a million years. You saw that place. What they did. If you hadn’t agreed with me, you wouldn’t have helped. Keep that in mind.”

“But someone might find out,” the older man said.

“Are you going to tell, Chuck? You, Roger? So far we’ve managed just fine. We’re keeping off the radar; no one knows anything about where we’re from, and that’s the way it needs to stay.” His shoulders straightened and the fierce look returned to his eyes. “Now, if I need to move my family again, hide them from you even, I will. But I don’t want to do that. You know it benefits us both to have some contact. I don’t want to sever all ties, but I will if I have to.”

The younger man, Roger, held up his hand. “The decision is yours. It always has been.”

My father nodded. “Then the answer is no. We won’t be coming in. For now, she’s safe. If that ever changes, we’ll do what we have to, but right now things are fine the way they are.”

Chuck flexed his arms and clenched one fist inside the other. “You’re a damn fool, Carver.”

“Be that as it may.”

Above my head, I heard the sound of the glass door sliding open. My mother stepped out onto the porch. “Mr. Ridley, Mr. Phillips, what are you doing here? David, where is Lucy?”

“Doing chores,” my father said, not taking his eyes off the men.

My mother’s head twisted around as she searched for me. Suddenly, the men looked around, too. “Someday things might change, Carver, and we might not be able to leave things status quo,” the older one, Chuck, said. “I’d rather the decision be yours.”

“We’re done, Phillips.”

The men nodded and left.

“What are we going to do, David?” my mother asked once they were gone, wringing a dish towel in her hands. I could hear the worry in her voice. I had no idea why these men were looking for her, but it terrified me.

“We’re going to keep protecting her.”

Her? Me? They were looking for me? Why?

Breathing too fast and confused about everything I’d heard, fear drove me from my hiding place.

“Lucy!” I heard my father call as I scrambled from beneath the porch and ran away. “Come back here!”

I couldn’t. I ran fast, legs pumping, muscles burning as I raced deep into the woods. I’d been all over; knew the place better than my folks, better than anyone, I imagined. Still, I didn’t want to get lost, and it would be dark soon. I ran until I made it to a rock overlooking the valley below. There, I collapsed into a heap of teenage emotion and spent energy, lungs burning and my heart feeling as if it might burst from my chest. “Me. Why are they looking for me?” I cried.

Huddling, I gathered my knees against my chest and propped my chin on them, rocking until the fear ebbed.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew my parents would protect me. Like my father said, they’d protected me just fine until then. Whatever was going on, they’d keep protecting me.

Who were those two men?

Truthfully, I didn’t want to know.

That night at dinner, my mother asked if I wanted to talk about it.

“No.”

She stilled for a moment. She and my father exchanged glances and after a nearly imperceptible shake of his head, she turned back to her meal. “Okay.”

We ate our fried eggplant and mashed potatoes in silence and never talked about the visitors again.

Eli made it all the way to my aunt’s house before the shock wore off and the blood returned to my face. “Eli. I know who was in the car.”

Chapter Six

Officer Len stopped tapping his pen when I finished talking. “Well?”

“Actually, could I get something to drink?” I asked, licking some moisture back into my lips. “I’m feeling pretty parched.”

Len motioned to someone behind the interrogation glass. “Water okay?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?

“Nope.”

“So we can continue?”

“Yes.”

“Good, so who was the man in the car?”

“His name is Roger Ridley, though I don’t have any idea who he is,” I told Eli.

He kept the car idling. Facing me, he waited for more.

“When I was a kid, he showed up at my family’s farm. He was looking for me then, too,” I finished, faltering toward the end.

I couldn’t read the stony set of his jaw. “Go on,” he prompted, still not betraying any emotion or thought.

“Honestly, that’s all I know.” I looked out the window to my aunt’s house. She’d decorated for Halloween sometime that morning. A ghoulish scene of cobwebs, spiders, zombies, graves, and a couple ghosts and witches. It always struck me as sad that she never had children; she would have been a wonderful mother.

I turned back to Eli when I heard him take a deep breath. With his eyes pinched closed, I could nearly hear wheels turning in his head. He blew out his breath and opened his eyes. In a very deliberate and slow voice he asked, “Why,
do you think
, was he looking for you as a child? And how,
do you think
, might he have found you now?”

Even after telling him everything I knew, a large part of me was still that frightened little girl under the porch. I wanted to run; only this time I had no woods to disappear into. Instead I silently willed it all to go away.

“As for how he found me, I don’t know. Ouija board? Perhaps he knew about my aunt. He knew my name; maybe he tracked me down that way. I’ve had a lot of jobs; I couldn’t be all that hard to find. Who knows? If I knew more about what happened back then, maybe I could tell you, but since I don’t…”

I saw no reason to finish the thought.

My phone rang, and Eli nodded for me to answer. “Hello?”

“Hey, beautiful.”

My stomach tightened and the bitter coffee from earlier rose up the back of my throat. I still hadn’t figured out how to deal with the cold shoulder John had given me the day before. “Hey, John.”

“Listen, I hope you’re ready for work because I’m about two blocks away. Thought I’d surprise you and take you out for breakfast. I have to talk to you anyway.”

I didn’t even have time to try to dissuade him before I heard a car pull up behind us. When I glanced back I saw the green car, sun glinting off the windshield. “Ohmygod! Ohmygod!”

“What?” Eli turned to see why I was freaking.

“That car almost hit me yesterday. He’s following me. He knows where I live.” I ducked my head as Eli jumped from the car, gun drawn.

“Police! Put your hands in the air!” I heard him shout from my duck-and-cover position.

“I’m here to see Lucy!”

That made no sense. It sounded like John. The car jolted as a body slammed against the trunk. I looked up to see John’s face squished against the metal, arms twisted painfully behind his back, Eli with his gun holstered now, reaching for cuffs.

Unbuckling my seat belt as fast as possible, I jumped from the car. “Wait! Wait. John, it was you?”

He twisted his head to face me, though Eli did not let go of his arms. “What was me? I just called and told you I was coming.”

Eli tightened his grip, his jaw set. Eyes hard, he looked to me to see if he could let John up.

“He’s fine, Eli. Let him up. Oh, for God’s sake. That’s the car from yesterday—the one that tried to hit me. I swear. It wasn’t you?”

“No. This is my mom’s car. I took mine to the shop last night because my alternator went out. I’m borrowing hers today. And before you go thinking my mom was the one who tried to plow you down, she only drives from the house to the grocery store and back. So unless you were at the grocery store, it wasn’t her.”

“And you acted like a jerk yesterday, too.”

His cheeks and neck reddened. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s, well, I did see you yesterday with this guy.” He indicated with his thumb toward Eli. “I saw you and thought maybe you were playing games, and then I thought, naw, this chick is cool, she’d be honest. So I went on to work. I wanted to talk to you there, but people were always around, and then when they weren’t, I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear the truth.”

Why are boys so dumb? “Seriously, John?”

“Lucy, why didn’t you tell me you had a boyfriend?” Again, he indicated toward Eli.

“Him?” I asked. My whole body stiffened over the mere
thought
of Eli as my boyfriend. “He’s not my boyfriend. He’s nothing, I mean,” I stammered looking toward Eli. “He’s…”

“I’m just a friend,” he finished, though I couldn’t deny the scowl on his face. “If everything is fine here, I need to get going. Lucy, we will talk about our other friend later. I can’t stop you from going into work today, but since you’re sick, I think you should stay home.”

This time it was me scowling. “I feel fine.”

“Lucy, if you’re sick—” John stopped talking when my scowl landed on him.

Eli opened his mouth as if to say something else but then closed it. “I’ll see you later,” he said before getting into his car and driving off.

I wrapped my hands around my arms and braced myself against a sudden gust of wind. “What kind of car is that anyway?”

“It’s a Cougar. Not exactly the hippest car, but at least my mom’s letting me borrow it for the day.”

I smiled. Not at the fact that he borrowed his mom’s car, but because he’d been jealous to see me with Eli. I’d never had a guy jealous for me before. “It’s fine. Do you mind taking me to my car?”

John grinned and the redness subsided as he motioned toward the car.

My morning was a mountain of past-due paperwork with no more discrepancies and a department meeting where Seth told us all there had been too many errors and unprofessionalism would not be tolerated. Our meeting was held in a generic conference room with absolutely no embellishments of any sort. Seemed Seth’s ability to do as little as possible carried further than just his desk.

Seth marched back and forth in front of us. A little vein popped on his forehead each time he said an exclamation-point word, so it quickly became difficult to take him seriously. Natalie leaned over and whispered, “We have these meetings once a month. It’s always the same lecture about unprofessionalism. I think that’s why Diana left. She said she couldn’t work for someone who managed like he does and yet gave us lectures like this.”

Seth stopped pacing. “Natalie, is there something you would like to add?”

Everyone turned toward her. “No, sir. Filling in our newbie on how important professionalism is to you.”

“Good.” He nodded and continued his pacing and lecturing.

With him once again fully engrossed in his own voice, I leaned toward her and pointed to Seth. “Look, he’s about to trip.”

She watched as he stumbled and grabbed for a chair to steady himself. Natalie giggled, then gave me a questioning look.

I grinned, then filled her in like a magician giving away his act. “His shoelaces have been untied all morning. He’s been pacing back and forth, and the more agitated he’s gotten, the shorter his stride. He was bound to step on it.”

Seth turned around to see who interrupted this time. Our chairs knocked together as we tried to appear as quiet and normal as possible. He glared pointedly at each of us before continuing with his vein-popping lecture.

I coughed to hide a giggle under my breath and sketched mindlessly on a piece of paper for the rest of the meeting. He ran out of steam right around lunchtime; by then the paper was filled with doodles. I stuffed it in my pocket and headed up to the sixth floor, hoping to find out what I could about Bonnie.

No one knew Bonnie Kent all that well. One person described her as having dark hair and being a bit on the chunky side, another said she wore glasses and lost a lot of weight from a recent diet or illness. It seemed I wasted my entire lunch break looking for a ghost until I finally ran into the temp taking her place.

“Bonnie? I heard she’s taking a few weeks off to stay with some family out of town,” she told me.

“Yeah? Who did you hear that from?”

“Oh, you know. People talk, gossip really. It’s like everyone’s excited when they have anything to say.” She took a bite from a celery stick. “I have her address if you need to reach her. One of the girls was bringing her a makeup order, so she left it for me to send her stuff.”

“That would be fantastic,” I told her. “Thank you. It truly is important.” I copied down the address. “Will you be staying with the company once she’s back?”

“Naw, I’m just a temp. I transfer a lot.”

“Well, thanks all the same.”

In the elevator on the way back down to second-floor data entry, I tried to call Eli, but my phone cut out. Glancing at my cell, I saw that I still had ten minutes before lunch was over. I pressed the lobby button and detoured toward John instead.

“Hey, beautiful,” he said for the second time in a day.

“Hey yourself,” I replied, my cheeks heating under his perusal. It was nice to feel hopeful about having a relationship with him again. He was my type, unlike Eli. I mentally shook my head at the thought that anyone would mistake him for my boyfriend. Eli was a pretty boy. One of those trophy boys you take to parties or to your parents’ house—if you have parents who care about such things.

I counted my lucky stars I had an aunt who didn’t.

John was me through and through. Artsy, strange, nerdy. A little awkward and not afraid to show it, yet oddly at peace with who he was as a human.

Totally me.

Except that increasingly I didn’t have any idea who I was, and daily I found my peace slipping farther and farther away.

“You have a good lunch?” I asked.

“Would have been better with you,” he said, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. Even with my short-short hair, he found the little bit I had out of place and smoothed it back. It felt so intimate, so lovely.

“Maybe dinner?” Things had been bad over the past couple of days, and I wanted to make them right. If only he had told me sooner that he saw me with Eli. It would have saved so much frustration on both of our ends. I still didn’t know who drove the green car, but I’d rather believe it was a random accident than some deranged killer out to get me.

“Dinner sounds good. What are you in the mood for?”

“My aunt’s making a pot roast.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Oh, I thought you meant you wanted to go out somewhere.”

“So you don’t want to?”

“Hey, no, I mean, yes. It’s just…”

“What?”

“Your aunt is a little intimidating.”

I remembered last time. Then, for a moment, I thought John was a wuss for being scared of her. How could anyone be scared of Dee? Embarrassed, sure, but scared? “She’s protective,” I defended.

“Very,” he agreed. “But intimidating isn’t a bad thing. I think it’s kinda cool. She’s a tough broad. I can imagine her taking on anyone. You remind me a lot of her.”

“I do?”

“Yeah.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead. This time it didn’t feel weird or awkward. It felt nice. Intimate. A shared secret between the two of us. Like the hair tucked behind my ear.

It warmed me.

He reached up to tuck my hair back again, but this time I knew it was an excuse to touch me. I let him. Feeling giddy inside, I told him what time to come by the house and went back upstairs.

I gave myself a couple of hours from when I left work until John would come by for dinner. I also called Aunt Dolores with a heads-up during my afternoon break. She was extremely excited he’d be coming by again.

“I’m home,” I called, racing in the door. I had so much to do to get ready. Normally I wouldn’t try so hard to impress a guy, but after this morning I wanted to doll up for John.

“Hey kid,” Aunt Dolores shouted back. “I’ve cleaned up a bit, sent Ana to the store to pick up stuff for dessert, and we decorated the house today.”

I skidded to a stop in the foyer. Ana. Shoot. I forgot. Not that she’d try to steal John or anything; he wasn’t her type. Unfortunately, Ana was every guy’s type. Bobby wasn’t the first boyfriend of mine to end up falling for Ana. She never went for any of the others, but I had a long history of losing men to my best friend.

She had that unidentifiable ethnic look, the one that made her possibly East Asian/Hispanic/Middle Eastern or some other exotic amalgamation. Her dark hair stayed straight, thick, and always shiny. The light green of her eyes contrasted with her dark skin—and it wasn’t even her looks that made the difference, that’s what sucked.

Personality-wise she was sweet and loyal. Not all the time, of course, she wasn’t perfect by a long shot, but she also wasn’t some pretty bitch who thought herself above everyone else.

And despite a long trail of men constantly throwing themselves at her, she had a very level head and never acted as vain as she had every right to.

Shit
, I thought, racing up the stairs. Well, no helping it. John would meet Ana tonight, and either it would go well or it wouldn’t. No, it would go well.

I needed it to go well. I knew John liked me, and I knew I liked him, so actually the question was how into Ana would he be?

I shook the thought from my head as I stripped down to nothing and jumped into the shower. “I will not be a petty, insecure female. I will be proud of who I am. I will not compare myself to others.” I said my mantra over and over again in the shower as I shaved and did my best to undirt the day.

“I will not be the woman who constantly worries about what men think,” I said, brushing out my hair before applying the spiking gel. I pulled on a skirt, then discarded it for something more comfortable, something more me. I went with funky jeans and a vintage T-shirt I’d found at a flea market. Finishing with a hint of mascara and gloss, I looked in the mirror and grinned.