Secrets of the Riverview Inn Page 11

  Iris tried to imagine what might happen when her husband saw her again after more than thirty years. But she couldn’t get her head around it. She doubted there would be open arms, but his last letter did say to come. Granted that was a few months ago, but—

  “Do you have a phone in your cabin?” Josie, at her elbow, whispered, while her mom talked to Alice about pregnancy cravings.

  “A phone?” Iris asked, leaning down to hear the whispering girl. “Of course.”

  “We don’t have one in our room,” she said. “My mom said it was broken.”

  “That’s too bad.” She tilted her head. “Do you have someone you want to call?”

  “Honey?” Josie’s mother asked. She had paused in the act of dishing up pasta. “One meatball or two?”

  “Two,” Josie answered, and the subject of phones seemed to be forgotten.

  “So, Sheila, JoBeth, what brings you to the hinterlands from Arizona?” Alice asked, happier with food in front of her. She was a radiant pregnant woman. Glowing and flushed. She appeared healthy, unlike Iris during pregnancy. She’d been sick and wasted with bone-deep tiredness and nausea.

  “The snow. We love it. Especially Sheila,” she answered, spooning pasta onto her plate and ignoring her friend’s scowl. “How are you doing in this weather?” she asked Alice. “I was pregnant with all—” she caught herself on the word boys “—my children during winter. I found it very hard.”

  “Not too bad.” Alice shrugged. “I’m getting a little cabin fever.”

  “A little?” Gabe asked, rolling his eyes.

  “Okay, I’m going totally bananas being locked up indoors all the time.” She grinned at her husband, but her voice had a certain bite that any pregnant woman would recognize. “Does that sound more accurate?”

  Iris remembered that feeling all too well. Cabin fever. Such an innocuous term for what it turned into.

  It had started innocently enough—a long winter with her first pregnancy. A terrible first trimester that turned into a worse second trimester. The joy everyone told her she should be feeling had been utterly absent. Instead she felt like a woman in a fog. Tired and sad and worried. Scared. And then the baby came and it got worse. She couldn’t sleep at night in fear of the baby not breathing. And just when she finally calmed and the pressure eased she got pregnant again and it started all over.

  Terrible. Worse. She went to visit her mother for two weeks, leaving Patrick alone with the babies. She told her mother she wished she were a bird that could fly away from what she was feeling. Eventually, like storm clouds, the fog passed and years went by.

  Then Patrick took a job two counties away and that harsh winter had turned into a wet spring. Gabe had had colds constantly and Max got chicken pox and she couldn’t take them outside.

  Cabin fever turned into feeling trapped, turned into feeling buried alive.

  And she couldn’t get out of bed. She couldn’t stop crying. She couldn’t stop wishing she were dead.

  “You have to get out,” she said, perhaps too stridently, judging by the way everyone’s eyes snapped toward her. “You have to take care of yourself. Make sure you have help.” She turned to Gabe. “You have to help her. She can’t do it all alone.”

  Sheila’s hand on her knee, her nails digging into her skin, finally registered and she shut her mouth. Too late.

  “I’m okay,” Alice said softly into the silence. “I get out and Gabe is very involved.”

  “Of course,” Iris said. Panic gripped her throat and she felt as though she were panting. She couldn’t get her breath. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I have no—”

  “Relax,” Sheila whispered into her ear. “It’s okay. Take a deep breath.”

  “I’m very sorry,” she said, when she could finally get enough air. “I just had—”

  “Bad pregnancies?” Alice asked, her eyes glued to Iris’s, and it was as if no one else was in the room.

  She nodded. “And after,” she said, through the lump in her throat. “Postpartum depression. Though at the time they didn’t diagnose it so easily.”

  “Me, too,” Delia said, and Iris looked at her. “For a year after Josie was born. It’s very hard. You don’t have to be embarrassed. I was on antianxiety meds for years. I wish I had some now,” she tried to joke to lighten the mood. But Iris, whose life was possible thanks to antianxiety medication, couldn’t laugh about it.

  “Nothing is going to happen to Alice,” Gabe said, his chin out, his eyes hard. “She’s got lots of help here. She doesn’t need to go anywhere. And scaring her isn’t going to help her.”

  “It’s not scaring me, Gabe,” Alice said, putting her hand on Gabe’s arm. “Postpartum depression is a reality and we should probably talk about. I know my mother didn’t have it, but we don’t know about your mother—”

  “Alice,” Max said, his voice quiet.

  “Well, come on, we have to—”

  “I’m going to help Tim bring out the salad,” Gabe said, rising from the table.

  He left a vacuum behind him and Iris felt as though her head might pop. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know you, I have no business—”

  “It’s okay,” Alice assured her. “My husband just has…issues.” That was all she said, but Iris filled in the blanks. Her boy had issues because his mother had walked out in the middle of the night when he was eight years old. She had walked out and she had never come back.

  “Who doesn’t?” Sheila said, her voice fierce in a way that Iris knew she was supposed to take to heart. It was supposed to bolster her suddenly drowning spirits.

  “Amen,” Max said. He wiped his mouth with his napkin then stood, towering over all of them. “If you’ll excuse me I need to run into town before we get all that snow we’re supposed to.”

  Josie, Iris noticed, beamed up at the man but her mother, Delia, flushed and cut her meatball into careful, minuscule bites.

  Issues. It seemed they had a tableful of them.

  Max left and Tim and Gabe reappeared with a tossed salad that Iris didn’t have an appetite for. Everyone else ate, discussing the snowstorm expected tomorrow and Iris wished she could turn back time—ten minutes or thirty years—and do it all over again, only right this time.

  “I’m sorry,” Gabe said to her, startling her from her careful study of her plate. “I’m a first-time father with a lot of fears. I didn’t mean to jump on you like that.”

  So charming. So gracious. But she could tell that if she weren’t a paying guest—a woman he’d have to see at this same table meal after meal until she left—he wouldn’t apologize.

  He could hold a grudge as well as his father.

  The evidence was right there in the charming smile that didn’t reach his cold eyes.

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  For so much. For everything.

  “Josie?” Delia called, and Iris turned to see the seat beside her empty. “Did you see Josie leave?”

  The pretty woman’s face was hard, scared, her blue eyes frantic.

  “No,” she answered, and everyone craned their necks to look around the room.

  “She’s probably in the kitchen,” Alice said.

  “Probably,” Delia said, obviously not believing it. The scrape of her chair as she stood was like nails on a chalkboard.

  “She was asking me if the phone in my cottage worked,” Iris told Delia and the sudden tension in the woman hit Iris like a tidal wave. “There was someone she wanted to call.”

  9

  Josie wasn’t in the older women’s cottage. She wasn’t trying to use the broken cell phone in their rooms. The kitchen was empty.

  Delia wanted to scream. She wanted to fist her hands in her hair and howl at the moon. Josie had gone looking for a phone, Delia shook her head in worried disbelief.

  Her house of cards was in ruins at her feet.

  “Found her!” Gabe’s voice echoed through the empty lodge.

  In the upstairs hallway Delia whirled outside the
ir rooms toward the empty room where Patrick Mitchell usually lived. She ran down the hallway and turned left to see Gabe standing in the threshold propping open the door with his foot.

  “She’s inside,” he said. “Dad’s gotten lax about locking his door since there haven’t been any guests.”

  Delia nodded, rage and fear a fist in her throat that she could barely breathe around. She pushed open the door farther, and Gabe left, a soothing pat on her shoulder as he walked away.

  “Josie?”

  Her little girl sat on the bed, a slice of moonlight around her. Her eyes in the half-light were eerie. Glowing with hurt and indignation. The room smelled of anger, of explosive emotions, and Delia knew with one wrong move their relationship—such as it was—would blow into a million pieces that she’d never be able to get back together.

  What did the divorce books say about this?

  “I called Dad,” Josie said, a gauntlet thrown down between them.

  Delia’s head spun. They’d have to go. Now. She wanted to grab Josie by the arm and drag her from this place. Run and run and run.

  “What did you say?” she whispered in a voice that barely sounded like her own.

  “That I’m building a fort and it’s snowing and I miss him and you got a job.”

  She tasted blood from where she bit her lip. “Did you tell him where we are?”

  Josie shook her head. “Gabe came in and I hung up.”

  “You shouldn’t be in here, Jos.”

  “I wouldn’t have to be in here if you’d let me use the phone.”

  “I told you. Dad’s in—”

  “Dad said that was bullshit. That you’re a liar and a—”

  “Watch your mouth!”

  “Liar! Liar, liar, liar!” Josie leaped off the bed and threw herself against Delia, pushing at her and slapping her legs. “I hate you! I hate you!” she screamed.

  “Stop it, Josie. Stop it.” Delia tried to grab her daughter’s hands. But Josie was quick and a year of anger gave her superstrength and Delia’s legs stung from her daughter’s fists.

  “I want to go home. I want my Daddy.”

  “Jos, your father is in—”

  “Why do you keep lying to me? Dad said he’s not in any trouble. That he wasn’t at a convention. He’s waiting for me, Mom. He misses me.”

  “I’m sure he does. But we still can’t go home—”

  Josie shoved again and Delia toppled against the closed door. “Why? Why are you saying that?”

  Frustration and fear bubbled over and spilled across the room. “Because your father is a bad man, Josie!” Delia cried. “He’s hurt a lot of people.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, those families in the van who died in the desert.”

  Again Josie’s head shook. “They caught the guy that did that.”

  “I know.” Delia dropped down to her knees, hoping to look into Josie’s shadowed face. There were no books written about this situation. Her daughter wasn’t found in a textbook and they were going to have to do this on their own. “But that guy was working with your dad.”

  “So, why didn’t they arrest Dad? Huh? If he had something to do with it?”

  Delia looked at the ceiling. How did she explain this to her little girl? The evil web of golf buddies, the twisted society of comrades who protected one another, the betrayal and pain that they created at others’ expense. At hers.

  She blinked back sudden tears. Her ex-husband. The man she’d loved and vowed to care for in good times and bad, had wrapped his fingers around her neck and tried to kill her.

  “He hurt me, Josie,” she finally said, sending the words she had never wanted to say into the world.

  “How?” Josie asked after a moment.

  Delia decided to skip the past two years of belittling, the verbal slaps and emotional punches he’d landed. Instead, she slid down on her bottom, sideways, into the white moonlight, boxed by the window.

  Lifting her chin, she pulled down the high collar of her gray turtleneck and revealed to her daughter the bruises on her neck.

  She shut her eyes and prayed she was doing the right thing.

  Josie’s little fingers pressed the purple-black heart of the worst of the bruises and Delia winced. “What happened?” Josie asked, her voice trembling and scared, as though she was caught on some scary edge of something.

  Knowing how that felt, having lived the past few weeks on that edge herself, Delia wanted so badly to pull her daughter away from that edge, away from the fall that would change everything.

  But she couldn’t. She had to push her over and it broke her heart more than anything Jared had ever done to her.

  “He was very mad at me, Josie. Because I told him that I was going to tell the police about the man—Dave—who had been living with you.”

  “Why would that make him mad?”

  “Because it was supposed to be a secret. You weren’t supposed to know. You got up late that night you saw him, remember? You went to the bathroom and saw him on the couch.”

  Josie nodded.

  “Well, if people knew about that, your dad would get in trouble. Big trouble.”

  “He’d go to jail,” Josie said. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. She got it. She understood.

  “Right. And—”

  “And he doesn’t want to, so he did that to you so you wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  Delia hiccuped a cry of relief. Of weary gratitude.

  Josie traced the yellow edge of one of the bruises. “He’s probably really sorry, Mom. He didn’t mean it. He was just scared. You know how you get mad at me when you think I’ve run off? That’s—”

  Delia’s relief and gratitude crashed and burned.

  “It doesn’t make it okay, Josie. We’ve told you that, haven’t we? We’ve said there is no reason ever for another person to hurt someone who is smaller or weaker than them.”

  Josie nodded and Delia waited for the cosmos to give her an answer. A way to turn.

  Josie’s eyes were full of tears. “I’m scared, Mommy,” she whispered, and Delia pulled her daughter into her arms. Hugging her tight. Ignoring the fact that Josie didn’t hug her back.

  “Me, too, sweetie. Me, too.”

  Just like that she knew what she had to do.

  Josie had passed from fitful sleep into a deep slumber, her mouth open and slightly snoring. Her closed eyelids appeared to be bruised and it strengthened Delia’s resolve.

  She pulled the heavy warm blankets up higher around Josie’s shoulders and smoothed back the red-blond hair that slid over her face before easing out the door of their room.

  Jared might, at this moment, be on his way here, having traced Josie’s call, or gathered what he needed to know from what Josie had told him, not knowing she was leading a murderer to their doorstep.

  The stairs didn’t creak under her feet and the chair, as she slid it away from the small bar in the corner of the dining room, didn’t scrape against the floor. It was silent. Dark. She was alone. Again.

  Since her cell phone was broken, she used the house phone on the edge of the bar and called her cousin, Samantha.

  “Serenity House and if this is you, Jared, I’ve already called the cops and the next time—”

  Delia closed her eyes, her worst fears confirmed. “It’s me, Samantha. Delia.”

  “Oh my good Lord, sweetheart, what the hell is going on? Jared has had me on speed dial all night. You’d think I knew something—”

  “Josie called him,” she said, feeling a calm seep into her blood. This was inevitable and it felt good to not swim upstream against this decision anymore.

  “She didn’t tell him where we were, other than that it was snowy. But I’m sure it lit a fire under him.”

  “I’ll say.” Samantha paused and Delia could practically see her in the cluttered office of her shelter. “You finally coming to your senses?”

  “I’m not going to tell you where we are, Samantha. And I’m not going back th
ere. He’ll—” She took a ragged breath. “It’s too dangerous. But I want the name and number of the private investigator you use. I’m ready to put Jared away.”

  “Atta, girl, Dee, I’ve got it right here.”

  “I don’t know how this works. I don’t have any money, right now. I mean, does he take credit cards? Does he have some kind of installment plan?”

  “It’s okay, sweetheart. He owes me some favors and when you talk to him just tell him you’re my cousin. J.D. is the best and Jared made lots of mistakes. It will be a cakewalk for my guy.”

  “When did you get so dangerous?” Delia asked, her head spinning.

  “When did you?” Samantha asked.

  The memory of Max’s lips on her throat blazed through her body. Some of this dangerous courage she owed to him. Hard to believe, impossible to put into words, but he’d proved to her that if she wanted any kind of future for Josie—for herself—she needed to do this.

  Bad men did not lurk around every corner. There were still people in this world she could trust.

  “I know you’re scared,” Samantha said. “But you’re doing the right thing.”

  “I know.” Delia nodded in the dark. At this moment, it was the only thing she was sure of.

  Max entered the inn through the kitchen, unsure of whether he was relieved or worried that the network had come up with nothing regarding a possible kidnapping, or possible attempted murder in Texas involving a woman matching Delia’s description.

  The absence only proved Delia had never filed charges against her husband. And that her husband was not reporting Josie—if Josie was her real name—missing.

  So, nothing confirmed but nothing put to bed, either.

  What he needed was a straight answer from Delia. Since that was about as likely as Max taking the job Joe had brought up again tonight, he’d have to make do with whatever leftover dessert was in the fridge and a cold beer to get him through the night.

  There were certain advantages to this job, he acknowledged while opening the fridge to find some kind of chocolate-caramel brownie situation, that being a cop just didn’t have.