Wild Ride: A Changing Gears Novel (18 page)

But then she noticed that Gill had ducked her head so her honey blond hair spilled over her face, but not before Alex saw the blush. “Oh, my God. It’s true!”

“Nothing’s happened. Yet.”

“But you want it to?”

Gillian raised her head and pulled back her shoulders. “Yes,” she said. “I want it to.”

“I remember in high school you were—”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. Okay.”

“My marriage is over. I’m moving out of this house. It’s time for a fresh start.”

And, why waste time? Naturally, she didn’t say that. What she said, rather surprisingly, was “Do you want some help moving?”

Gillian poured more tea. “Sure. That would be great.”

“I could bring Duncan to help.” She added milk and sugar to her tea so she didn’t have to look at her cousin. “You met him in the library.”

“I know who he is.”

“Right. Well, we’re kind of seeing each other.”

“I’m not blind, Alex. I know. Is it serious?”

“Oh,” Alex said, wondering if she’d also become fodder at Katie’s. Guessing she probably had. “Of course it’s not serious. He’ll be leaving in a couple of months.”

And that was absolutely fine with her.

Tom waited until her moving day to approach Gillian. He’d thought long and hard about this crush he’d never seemed to shake. Her divorce was well on its way and she was moving out of the house she’d shared with her ex. He could start on that romancing he’d promised her. She looked like a woman who could use some romance.

He’d checked her story. She’d been going faithfully to AA meetings in a town about half an hour’s drive away, keeping her sobriety a secret the way some people keep their drug habits quiet.

He decided to show up, nice and casual, in a place where a strong back and a willing pair of hands would be of use. He’d start easy, and take it from there.

He not only felt an urge to pound the son of a bitch who’d blackened her eye into the dirt, he also felt a powerful urge to protect Gillian. When he’d held her in his arms, he’d felt a fragility he hadn’t thought she possessed.

To a guy who’d spent his life taking in strays and trundling birds with broken wings to the local vet, he acknowledged his own urge to heal even as he recognized there was something else mixed in with it. A possibility that sparkled.

Wearing serviceable jeans, a work shirt, and his steel-toed boots, he showed up at Gillian’s house. The first thing he saw was a nice, trim ass bent over, the top half of the woman inside a rented U-Haul. But his blood pressure didn’t spike, so he knew it wasn’t Gillian’s backside. Sure enough, the woman emerged and he recognized her cousin.

“Morning, Alex,” he said.

“Hi.” She eyed him, pretty surprised to see him there.

“I came to lend a hand.”

“Gillian’s in the kitchen, I think.”

“Woman, would you get your ass back in here so the damn bookcase doesn’t fall on my head?”

So, Duncan Forbes was also helping on moving day. He had to hand it to the professor—he’d gone from the man least likely to make Alex happy to see him, to top of her list in a couple of weeks. Alex climbed into the rented moving van at her lover’s command. He only hoped he could move in on Gillian that fast.

He knocked on the open front door and called out as he strode down the hall to the kitchen, “Gillian? It’s me. Tom. I came to help you move.”

He heard dishes bashing together in the kitchen and he figured she hadn’t heard him, so he yelled some more.

“I’ve got a strong back and a pair of—hey!” he yelled, as a frying pan came flying down the hall like a demonically possessed Frisbee and narrowly missed the side of his head. “What the hell was that for?”

Gillian stomped out of the kitchen looking mad enough to take him apart with her slender, graceful hands. He glanced behind him, wondering if some monster had wandered in, but nope. There was nobody else around. The flying pan seemed meant for him.

“Unless you’ve come to arrest me, get out of my house!” she shrieked.

“Are you deranged? I came to help move boxes.”

“Is that why you canvassed the neighborhood asking if anyone had seen me the night of that man’s murder? If they’d maybe heard shots coming from my house?” Her voice was rising with each word and by the time she got to shots, he was worried about his long-term hearing. He was also getting a bit hot under the collar himself.

“It’s my job, Gillian. I was doing my job.”

“Hah!” He’d heard of women looking magnificent when they were angry. Gillian wasn’t one of them. Her face was red and blotchy, and her pretty blue eyes were screwed up tight as though the less of him she had to see the better. He was happy to notice that the bruising had faded to almost nothing.

“You didn’t ask about one other single person in my neighborhood. Only me. Because I’m supposed to be the drugged-out loser. If there’s trouble, come looking for Gillian.”

She was starting to cry, but not sad, little weepy tears; these were more like poison sparks flying out of her eyes. Each one seemed to prick him with tiny stabs of remorse.

“I had to make certain.”

“You said you believed me. For once, I thought someone I cared about really believed in me.” Now she was crying real tears. Slow, rolling heart breakers. “But you didn’t.” She shook her head violently when he made a move toward her. “You didn’t come here to make sure I was all right and fix me tea. You came in here to snoop around, didn’t you? Looking for blood or bullet holes or something. I know you, Tom Perkins, and you don’t have any guts.”

“Please, Gillian, it’s not like that.”

“Go away.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Get out!”

So he did. And his heart felt heavier than an entire moving van of furniture.

Gillian ignored the pounding on the front door as she’d been ignoring it for the last ten minutes. She’d peeked out the upstairs window of her grandparents’ house and recognized Tom standing there.

The bouquet of flowers in his hand made her soften for an instant but not more than that. Flowers were easy to come by. Trust wasn’t.

The banging continued.

She flicked on the TV.

“Gillian? I know you’re in there,” he yelled.

“Man’s a genius,” she mumbled, turning the set up louder.

She didn’t pay attention to the station. It was some kind of game show with a lot of clapping and electronic music.

It didn’t matter. Nothing could drown out the noise. The pounding on the door echoed in her ears, seemed to pick up the beat of her heart.

Finally the banging stopped and she breathed a long sigh of relief, only to jump half out of Grandpa’s old recliner when a fist rapped sharply at the window.

Tom’s face appeared, and he held up the flowers. “I’m sorry,” he yelled. It must be raining, for his hair clung damply to his skull and water dripped off his ear.

She clambered out of the recliner, walked to the window. Saw him smile at her and pulled the blinds down so hard they sounded like a hailstorm. With a flick of her wrist she closed the louvers.

The sharp rattle of his knuckle on the glass set her teeth on edge. She ought to call the cops. Except that he was the cops.

“Damn small town,” she muttered. Maybe it was time to move on, to somewhere big and anonymous where a person’s past mistakes didn’t stick to them like some kind of visible skin condition. Was she the only person in the history of Swiftcurrent who’d been wild in his or her youth? She couldn’t be, but perhaps she was the only one who tried to stay in town and live down a reputation.

The trouble was, the townspeople wouldn’t give her a break. If she stumbled on a cracked bit of sidewalk, she saw the eye-rolls. Drugged up again, they’d be thinking. If she fumbled with her wallet in the supermarket or dropped her purse, she felt the weight of the town’s disapproval heavy on her shoulders. And if her perfect cousin was anywhere near, she was worse. The harder she tried to appear in control and sane, never mind perfect, the more clumsy and inept she became.

She had a feeling she was lumped in the same category as old Earl Hardminster, who sat outside the liquor barn wearing a torn hunting cap, smelly old clothes, and a guitar with a broken string. Didn’t matter about the broken string. He never played the thing, only left the case open for money. As soon as he had enough, he went into the liquor store and stocked up.

He slept wherever he could find some shelter and on really cold nights, Tom sometimes found an excuse to arrest him so he could spend the night in jail where it was at least warm and dry.

Yep, she and Earl. They were quite a pair. The town drunk and the town addict.

Maybe it was time to move on.

Except she didn’t want to go.

She slumped back into the recliner and stuck her hands over her ears. She didn’t want to go anywhere. This old house comforted her like the smell of home-baked oatmeal cookies, or the wrap of a faded quilt.

She had ideas, some energy seeping back now she was no longer living with Eric, and the stubborn feeling that if she could prove herself here, where attitudes were already against her, she could somehow get back that long lost sense of possibility, that she could be anything, do anything she wanted.

No. She wasn’t running away. She’d done that once before and look how that had turned out.

Eventually, the banging, window-rapping, and the yelling ended. Good, she thought, as she crawled up to bed right after the news. Tom had received her message. She didn’t want his flowers, she didn’t want his apology, and most of all, she didn’t want him.

She readied herself for bed, slipped into her favorite gown. It was floor-length Indian cotton cut in a traditional style. She thought of it as hippie chick meets Victorian maiden, which summed up how she felt coming back to sleep in her old bedroom. The sheets were cool as she slipped between them, the comforter her old one with the faded roses that sort of but not quite matched the old wallpaper with a different kind of rose stamped all over it.

Her grandparents had never changed her room when she left, and now she was glad. If she could go back to where she’d first taken a wrong turn, maybe she could straighten everything out.

She settled down in the clean sheets that smelled of lavender and made her miss her grandmother, who’d been the only real mother she’d ever known. Minutes ticked by and sleep wouldn’t come. She’d hurt her grandparents when she left, hurt them worse when she returned, but at least she’d been able to show them she’d cleaned up. They had always believed in her.

This bed was all lumps. She turned and fidgeted, yawned. and tried to figure out what kind of work she wanted. What did she know how to do? She didn’t even have her high school diploma, so who’d hire her? She could cook, clean, garden.

The great irony of her life was that she’d run away to the big city, only to discover eventually that she was a home-body who liked small towns. She was basically an old-fashioned woman who wanted to take care of a home and a family.

She punched her pillow and tried to make it less lumpy, while the sounds of the old house settling for the night jarred instead of soothed her.

Her grandfather had died right in this house. Was that spooking her? She turned. Thought about it and almost wished his ghost would appear. He loved to talk about the old days and she’d listen to him. She’d ask him to tell her the story of how he and grandma met. Neither of them ever tired of it.

Rain pattering on the roof was normally as restful as a lullaby, but tonight it drummed like a headache. The chintz curtains flapped at the window, which she’d left open a crack to let in fresh air.

What would grandpa tell her to do? If he was here and she could ask him. The thought of making a success all on her own, with her lack of education and her wild past against her, was not conducive to relaxation and sleep. And grandpa didn’t seem inclined to visit and give advice. But then when had she listened to his advice? How many times had he suggested she finish high school through one of those adult programs? She could probably even do it online. And now, she thought, she was ready to take that advice. Why not? It was a start.

She turned again in the single bed whose mattress hugged her with every turn. It didn’t matter what she thought about, so long as it wasn’t Tom. Or Eric.

Or any living human being on the planet with a penis.

There were definitely too many of those and all they ever did was screw up her life, she thought miserably. She’d never really been on her own. Maybe it was time to see what she could do. A high school diploma would allow her to go to college if she wanted to. Get herself trained for something. It wasn’t too late.

The old house creaked and moaned around her. She still wasn’t accustomed to the nighttime noises and they could be unsettling, reminding her she was all alone in a hundred-and-something-year-old house where her grandfather had died—and who knew how many others?

She knew her grandfather’s ghost would only want to help and protect her, but even a benign spirit walking at night had her eyes opening in the dark, because it certainly sounded like something strange was going on.

There was a tapping, scraping sound that seemed to be coming from close by, as though bony fingers were tapping the wood siding outside her window.

She’d heard that sound before.

Sitting up in bed so fast she almost hit the dormer ceiling, she recalled those wild nights of her youth when she’d flouted authority every chance she got, going so far as to invite boys to climb right up into her bedroom.

Looking back now, she suspected she’d wanted to get caught, wanted to shock her grandparents in some way, perhaps punish them for giving her a home so her mother was free to abandon her. Whatever the reasons inside her seething teenage brain, her grandparents, as far as she knew, never found out about those boys who’d climbed the sturdy vine and shared her bed.

Alex knew, but she never said anything. Sure, she disapproved, even tried to read her a couple of lectures, but Gill wasn’t going to listen to a geek her own age who, she suspected, was jealous.

Maybe her grandfather had known all along. Maybe he was slapping the wisteria against the wall in some poltergeist punishment from the afterlife.

It wouldn’t surprise Gill. Life seemed perpetually to punish her.

The last boy she’d invited to climb the wisteria, the one she’d wanted more than any other, hadn’t bothered.

Tom.

She thumped back into bed. Well, she could forget that old fantasy. Tom hadn’t climbed in her window when he was young and as foolish as a man like him would probably ever be. If he hadn’t done it then, he wouldn’t do it now.

Would he?

Another rattling scrape. Her eyes flew open. What if he hadn’t gone away? What if it was Tom out there now?

She jerked upright and ran, barefoot, across the room to the window.
The warped wooden frame squealed and fought her as she yanked on it but finally she got it open and stuck her head out.

Surely, she was wrong.

Rain pelted the back of her head as she blinked down into the darkened garden. Sure enough, a bulky, dark shape was attempting to climb the wisteria, which was probably as old as the house and hadn’t been pruned, fertilized, or cared for since her grandmother died.

She knew it was Tom climbing up. She recognized the shape of his head. And he was clutching that bouquet in his teeth.