Secrets of the Riverview Inn Page 6
“Dad says I look like his mom,” she said, not glancing up.
Delia nearly rolled her eyes. Josie couldn’t look less like Jared’s mother if she were green.
“You look like both of them,” Delia conceded, not arguing over the small things, as those books advised. “But mostly you look like you.”
Josie peeked at her out of the corner of her eyes and smiled.
Score one for mean old Mommy, Delia thought, pleased with even that small gesture and let her bones sink deeper into the chair.
Her back hurt from the past three days of hard labor, finishing the work on the spa. It was good work—mindless and demanding—and while she painted and hung pictures, her thoughts stopped turning in constant circles.
It felt good not to think and, as she sat in the sun now, she let go of her concerns, the demons.
You’ve earned it, she told herself, sipping her tea. Take a break for a second.
Peace. She could feel it, just a few breaths away.
From the other side of the kitchen door she heard the low rumble of Max’s voice and all melting in her body froze at the sound.
Avoiding Max was easy as he seemed to spend nearly every minute out in that clearing. So, even if she’d been looking for him or waiting for him to walk into a room or sit down to dinner—which she decidedly was not—it didn’t happen. Until now, and she found herself choking on her sudden nerves. Her body going warm in places it had no business going warm.
“Saddle up, kiddo,” she said to Josie, grabbing their coats from the hooks by the big front doors. “Let’s go for a ride.”
The look of pleasure on her daughter’s face indicated this little field trip into the wilds outside of the Riverview might be long overdue.
“Where are we going?” Josie asked, shrugging on her coat as they stepped into the frigid mountain air.
“Oh, I don’t know—”
Good Lord, why do people live here? she wondered, flipping her long hair out from under the collar of her coat. “Let’s go into town and get some hats and gloves and stuff.”
Josie stopped walking and Delia turned, waving her on, feeling the cold seep into her bones. “Come on, aren’t you freezing?”
“Are we going home?” Josie asked, the wind blowing her hair back.
“Not right now,” Delia said, stomping her feet to keep the circulation going. Her tennis shoes didn’t offer much by the way of warmth. “We’re going to—”
The expression on Josie’s face was colder than the snow and ice, the air that Delia breathed.
“Are we ever going home?”
Oh, sweetie, don’t ask me these questions.
She took a deep breath, the chill bracing her for the conversation. “I don’t know, Josie. Don’t you like it here?”
“No.” Delia could see the storm clouds brewing on her little girl’s face. Josie’s anger was something she got from her father, quick to come and just as quick to blow over.
“Oh, come on, that’s not what you said last night. Remember, you said you loved it here,” she cajoled.
“You said we’re on vacation, Mom,” Josie said, her voice echoing against the lodge and trees. “That’s what you said. This was a little trip.”
“Shh.” Delia approached her, wishing Josie would calm down so as to not make a scene. Josie leaped away from her. “I know I said that.” Delia tried to be calm. “But I like it here and I thought maybe we could stick around awhile.”
“I want to go home!” Josie cried.
“Well, we can’t right now.”
“Why not?”
Delia had no answer for that and Josie could tell.
“You’re just being mean.”
With that, Josie took off running through the parking lot, no doubt heading for the trail into the forest.
Damn, Delia could practically feel eyes watching her from the windows of the inn.
Delia caught up with her daughter at the edge of the parking lot. She snagged the hood of Josie’s jacket and held on tight.
“Josie, I need you to calm down.”
“I want to go home! I want my daddy! Why won’t you let me talk to my daddy!” she cried again, pulling away even though Delia got on her knees and wrapped her little girl in her arms.
Snow seeped through Delia’s pants and her knees went numb even as regret gripped her heart.
She’d told her daughter half-truths and white lies in order to protect her from her dad’s crimes. Josie didn’t know that Jared had attacked Delia that night in Chris’s cabin. Josie didn’t know of the years of escalating emotional abuse.
Delia wondered, kneeling in the snow-filled parking lot a thousand miles from home, what was the point of keeping Jared’s secrets from his daughter. Why protect him?
But she knew she wasn’t protecting him. She was protecting her daughter.
And while Jared was a rat bastard and deserved jail time—and more—for his crimes, she wasn’t going to put her daughter in the position she’d been after her mother left—the child keeper of an adult hate that would rob her of her father and her childhood.
Delia was stuck, hoping Jared wouldn’t find them. Would maybe give up and they would never have to face a trial or the media frenzy. Her skin crawled at the thought of her daughter on the witness stand or being led, crying and scared, past a group of reporters shouting questions and accusations about Jared’s criminal life.
What would be left of Josie’s childhood after that? What innocence could withstand something so ugly and scary?
That was what she was trying to protect: her daughter’s girlhood, her faith in her father and maybe, in a bigger sense, her faith in humanity.
“I want to go home!” Josie pushed and pushed, trying to get away, and the more she pushed, the harder Delia held her. She’d been avoiding this moment since Josie woke up the morning after the attack, looked out the window at the Ozark Mountains and asked her what they were doing.
“Sweetheart, I need you to calm down.”
“I want my daddy! Why won’t you let me call him?” Josie screamed, tears running down her cheeks, and Delia felt anger flame in her stomach. Even while trying to keep her little girl safe, she was still second choice.
“Josie.” Her voice was a little firmer, trying to break through Josie’s meltdown before all the Mitchells walked out to witness this special maternal moment.
Just like that, Delia felt a burning heat at the back of her neck, a sense that he was here. As if every nerve ending was a radar seeking him out, only coming alive when he arrived.
“Everything okay?”
Delia hung her head for a brief moment, and Josie went absolutely still in her arms. Of course. Of course it would be him. Max. The silent watcher. Coming out of hiding to participate in this scene. Her skin suddenly felt hot, as though his gaze could scorch her through the sweater and coat she wore, across the distance of the parking lot and the cold air between them.
She felt touched. Burned.
“We’re fine,” she said over her shoulder. Max stood at the kitchen door, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. His shirt was red and his hair looked blue-black in the sunlight.
Why him of all people?
Her daughter stopped fighting her then and she knew the answer. Delia had left her little girl with Jared for six weeks.
She deserved Max and her torn feelings about him and her wayward instincts and confused trust. She deserved him and more.
“Max,” Josie said, her tantrum gone. She waved shyly at the man. Delia didn’t look but she was sure he waved back.
She sensed him behind her awhile longer, but she didn’t turn, didn’t face him or engage him. She needed him gone.
Then he was. She didn’t hear him or see him leave. She simply felt his absence like a cold draft sweeping across her spine.
“Sweetie,” she finally said to her daughter, wiping the fine red-blond hair off her face. “Can we talk about what’s bothering you? I can’t help you if you don’t talk to
me.”
Josie’s chin was out, her eyes red and wet, her face mutinous.
“Please?” Delia asked, following the counsel of those books to the letter. “I don’t want you to be upset or angry.”
“You said we were on vacation,” Josie said, squinting at her.
“We are,” Delia protested, splitting hairs.
“But now you’ve got a job. You don’t get jobs when you’re on vacation.”
“I know.” Delia tried to hold her daughter’s mittened hands, but Josie jerked them away. “But this isn’t a normal vacation.”
“Why can’t I just go home to Dad? You can have your job here and I can live with Dad. Like before.”
When you left. The words, though unsaid, practically echoed through the forest, around the buildings, stabbing Delia right in the heart.
She took a deep breath. The Daddy’s-at-a-conference excuse had clearly lost its effectiveness and, while she’d tried to avoid telling Josie the truth, she couldn’t concoct another lie. She didn’t have it in her. “Your dad is in trouble right now, and you can’t live with him.”
“What trouble?”
“Remember when we were watching TV and you saw that guy who’d been arrested and you said that you’d seen him before? That he was living with Dad?”
“Yeah, Dave. Dad said he was staying with us until his apartment was ready.”
“Well, your dad was working with him. Doing some really bad things.”
Josie’s face screwed up in petulant disbelief. “No, he wasn’t! Daddy is a policeman,” she said, as if Delia had never heard of the word before. “Policemen don’t do bad things.”
Anger exploded across Delia’s nerve endings and she stood. “Well, if he didn’t do bad things, why was that bad man living with you?”
“I told you he was waiting for his apartment to get ready.”
Delia almost laughed, incredulously. It was so simple in Josie’s world. Dad was one of the good guys. Mom, on the other hand, was questionable.
“Josie, you just have to believe me. Dad has to get some stuff straightened out about what…Dave was doing.” She hated that her daughter even knew his name. That Jared would be so stupid as to let that man step into the same house as his daughter.
She recognized she left a lot to be desired as a mother, but surely on the spectrum of bad parenting, Jared’s mistakes had to place him in proximity to her.
But Josie missed her father. It was written all over her face.
“But why did we have to leave?” Josie asked. “We could have stayed and helped him.”
“He wanted us to go,” Delia lied. “He wanted us to be safe.”
Josie digested that fabrication and Delia could see it made her feel better. She breathed a silent sigh of relief.
“When can I talk to him?” she asked.
“Not yet, he’ll call when he’s able to talk.”
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for these lies.
“But he doesn’t know where we are.” Josie was growing emotional. “How will he know where to call us?”
“I have my cell phone. He knows how to get a hold of us.” Delia didn’t bother to tell Josie that after the conversation three nights ago she’d destroyed it. She’d have to get a new one, for use as a prop.
Delia wrapped her daughter in a hug, which she didn’t return. She hadn’t returned one of Delia’s hugs since she’d moved out and been granted partial custody on weekends and Wednesday nights. Delia could only imagine what Jared had told Josie, what lies he’d fed their daughter so she’d love him more than Delia. And no amount of love or affection melted the ice her daughter was cloaked in.
“You understand why I had to leave, don’t you?” she asked for what had to be the hundredth time. “Why I went to France?”
“Yes,” Josie said, playing with the zipper on her coat. “Grandma was sick.”
“I wanted you to come visit,” she said, and Josie looked at her boots.
“That’s not what Dad told me,” she murmured. Delia, while not surprised that her husband had said such things, was surprised that Josie revealed it. Maybe there was a thaw coming after all.
“Dad got it wrong,” Delia said. “I think he was mad at me and didn’t want to let you come.”
Josie shot her a highly dubious look that spoke all too clearly of how perfect her father still was in her eyes.
“I would like to make up for that time I was away,” Delia said hopefully.
Josie’s gaze practically screamed, You’re my mom, you should already know me. But Delia wasn’t sure if she projected that guilt onto her daughter. She didn’t know what was real anymore. What was real and what had been fabricated by Jared. Her father. Her own fear-crazed head.
“How about if we start with a drive into Athens to get a hot chocolate?” she asked.
“With whipped cream?”
“Like there could be any other kind.”
Delia held out her hand, wishing her daughter would just take it without looking at the offering as though it was a snake that might bite.
“I miss Daddy.”
Delia bit her lip to keep from screaming. “I know you do,” she managed to say, calm and adultlike. “How about this? Anytime you get lonesome for Daddy, you can talk about him with me.”
Josie shook her head. “You don’t like him.”
Truer words had never been spoken. But Delia could see where Josie was going with this.
“You can’t talk to Max about your dad.”
Josie blinked up at Delia. “Why not?” she whispered.
“Because—” She crouched, stalling for time. I almost spilled everything to him the other night. But I didn’t and we’ve got to be strong. No one can be trusted.
“Because the trouble your dad is in is secret. He could get in more trouble.”
More lies. Protecting Josie. Protecting Jared.
What am I supposed to do? What is the right way here?
Slowly, Josie nodded and turned away from where Max had stood.
“Let’s see what Athens has to offer. Okay?”
Josie agreed and they crossed the parking lot to the car. The crisis had been averted, but Delia knew Josie was no dummy and all the hot chocolate and white lies in the world weren’t going to satisfy her much longer.
And Jared would find them sooner or later. Delia knew that, in her bones and gut and the damaged skin around her neck.
She either had to run again, or find a way to stop him.
Max watched Delia through the window in the kitchen door. Josie was having an average kid meltdown. On the other hand, Delia—while she may not be aware of it, and certainly would hate that she was displaying it—was close to something nuclear.
The desperation on her beautiful face pulled at him, tugged at his conscience. Tempted all those fine and noble characteristics about being a cop that he was trying to ignore.
The woman needed help. She needed help with her daughter and she needed help with whatever secret burden she carried on those thin straight shoulders.
I am not, he told himself, the man for that job.
“Whatcha looking at?”
Max turned to find his sister-in-law behind him, drinking a big glass of skim milk and looking like she carried a bowling ball under her green shirt.
“Nothing,” he said, burning with embarrassment that he’d been caught watching Delia and Josie.
Of course, as he left the window Alice stepped forward to see for herself.
Nosy. Everyone here was so damn nosy. It’s what he got for working with his family.
“Ah.” She gazed at him over her shoulder, her dark eyes twinkling. “Gabe said you had a thing for her.”
He just scowled and poured himself more coffee.
“She’s pretty,” Alice probed.
“She’s trouble,” he said, without thinking. Alice’s eyebrows skyrocketed and he cursed himself. “I don’t have a thing for her. I’m just saying I think she’s hiding something.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged as she turned to rest her hip against the counter, and stroked her hand idly over that bowling ball. “Investigate, or something.”
He shook his head, nearly laughing. He was going to stay far away from Delia and her little girl.
“Where’s the dad?” Alice asked then took a swig of her milk. “Has she said anything about him? Are they divorced or—”
At some point he’d been teaching her how to hunt, he thought, but then folded the thought up and put it away where he’d been keeping it since that day in the spa.
“There have been no interrogations, Alice,” he chided.
“Well, you should find out,” she said with a grin. “It would be bad news to fall in love with a married woman.”
He spun away before she could see all the color drain from his face. It was a lesson he’d already learned.
He screwed the cap onto his travel mug of coffee, nodded at his nosy sister-in-law then headed for quieter pastures.
“No one believes you, you know,” she said as he was halfway out the door to the dining room.
He sighed, but played along because she was pregnant with his niece or nephew and he loved her. “Believes what?”
“That you’re such a hard-ass. Underneath all those flinty glares and scary scars you’re a softy.”
His stomach squeezed tight and he found it momentarily hard to swallow. She was right. He was too soft. That was why he had left the force. Why that teenager and his father were dead. Max had let his heart make decisions when it had no business getting involved.
He glanced at Alice and she cocked her head to the window behind her, where Delia was taking Josie’s hand and leading her to the car. “She might need you, Max. And maybe, you might need her.”
“I don’t need anything,” he said, to both of them and he hit the door without looking back.
5
Delia set down the holistic health catalog and typed out the last of her order. She was using Gabe’s computer to place the order online and since the Riverview already had an account with the company for the shampoo and soaps in all the rooms, she didn’t need to worry about payment.