Broken Wings (A Romantic Suspense) (87 page)

Quickly, I slip out of my jeans that I’ve been wearing all night, fish a rumpled pair of shorts out of my bag, yank them on, and tear out of the room. I take the steps two at a time, down to the first floor, but when I get to the backyard I catch only a glimpse of Alexis bobbing down the sidewalk, picking up speed as she warms herself up. It must be shy of six in the morning yet, the sun just barely up.

I start jogging after her. She doesn’t spot me, so I hang back. I let her take the lead, her ponytail swaying back and forth as her muscular legs pump and carry her forward faster and faster. She only slows when she crosses a road.

She’s headed for the memorial park. In the northeast of Paradise Falls, the old war memorial was built to commemorate the dead from World War I; since then smaller memorials have been added for every conflict after that. My grandfather’s name is on one of the monuments; he was shot down in Korea.

Alexis runs faster as she hits the foot path that winds through the park. It’s not a big place but heavily wooded, the old trees standing sentinel over the memorial and the path that winds around their roots. As she runs, squirrels dart out of her path and up the trees, and watch me warily as I jog past them.

I should say something to her, but I just let her go. She’s totally consumed in running, oblivious to the world around her at the same time she’s tuned into the terrain, weaving around cracks and dips in the worn old walking path, glancing at the places where the path crosses itself, finding it empty. There’s no one out this early but us.

Almost no one. Alexis slows as she approaches a couple on bicycles. They slow too, and I duck off the path before they spot me, slipping behind a tree. I weave my way along the path, crouching in the thick brush.

Alexis jogs up to the couple and stops, panting.

There’s a man and a woman. The man I don’t know, the woman tickles my memory and I can’t place her. She’s tall for a girl, almost six feet. It takes me a second to realize how tall she actually is, only from seeing her stand next to Alexis after she dismounts the bike. She has short reddish-brown hair that looks coppery when the light catches it, and a compact, athletic build.

The man is taller still, and well built. He’s got a tiny hint of a limp but he knows how to handle himself, it’s obviously in his every movement. They both move that way, in the reserved, oddly graceful manner of people who have a lot of conditioning and training.

Then it hits me. The hair, and the thin scar on her face, threw me. The redhead is one of the teachers from when we were in school. I don’t know the man.

I’m going to, though. He looks right at me.

“You can come out now.”

I freeze, and all three of them look over. Alexis scowls at me.

Slowly I rise, holding my hands away from my sides, not quite in a gesture of surrender but carefully, to make my intentions clear. I walk slowly down the path and stop a few feet away, taking a better look at them both. The man is big. I’m not sure I could take him.

“What are you doing here?” Alexis snaps.

“I was keeping an eye on you.”

“Who are they?” I nod at the pair, feigning ignorance. Although to be fair, I don’t know the woman’s name.

“I’m Jennifer Kane. This is my husband, Jacob.”

“Okay. You are…”

“Teachers,” the man says, smirking. “Why are you following Alexis?”

I shrug. “I was keeping an eye on her.”

“He’s my stepbrother,” Alexis says, coldly. “The older one.”

Jennifer looks at her, then looks at me. Her expression is neutral but there’s a flash of something in her eyes.

“You’re the one who disappeared?”

“I don’t think this is a safe place to talk,” I say, glancing around.

“We’re fine,” the man says. “We won’t be here long.”

“I don’t have anything for you anyway,” Alexis says. “He’s been busy with the festival junk all week. I had to make all the calls to set up the carnival and hire the clowns, and get the land from the church to use, all that crap.”

Hearing Alexis say junk and crap brings a smile to my face. She was as foul-mouthed as a sailor when we were kids, at least when we were alone.

Jennifer nods at me. “Should he be hearing this?”

Alexis sighs. “I don’t know. I don’t… can we talk?”

Jennifer nods. “Come on, hon. Let’s go for a walk. Jacob, keep an eye on him.”

The big man walks over to me while Jennifer and Alexis stride away, breaking into a jog.

I look at him. He looks at me.

“Should we get into a fist fight?” I ask.

“I wouldn’t.”

“So you guys are-”

“Alexis’ younger sister, May, is in my math class. She’s very good.”

“Yeah. Must run in the family. Alexis was always talented with numbers, too.”

“I know.”

“Okay, who are you people and why are you having clandestine meetings in the woods? You realize if I followed you here, somebody else could too right?”

He cocks his head to the side and gives me an odd look, and smiles thinly.

“Yes, and if they did I’d know.”

“Maybe I wasn’t really trying to hide.”

“Suit yourself.”

I clench my jaw, and it only seems to amuse him more.

“You’re military.”

“Was. Navy. You?”

“Army.”

“Huh. I didn’t realize they stacked shit that high in the Army.”

He looks at me, and then he laughs.

Uh, crisis averted.

“So you’re her stepbrother.”

I roll my eyes. “Of all the things I want to be for her, that’s not it.”

“Walk with me.”

He starts walking, and I fall in beside him, looking at the ground.

“Jennifer was concerned about May’s behavior at school. She came to me and we weighed our options. We’re mandated reporters, you understand what that means?”

“If you suspect abuse, you have to inform the authorities.”

“Yes, but sometimes the authorities can’t help.”

I look over at him. He looks straight ahead, a faint frown on his face. Funny how he has a matching scar, same place as his wife’s.

“So what does that mean, exactly?”

“Sometimes people have to take matters into their own hands. We approached May first and had a sit down with her, privately. Then she put us in contact with Alexis. Jennifer remembered her from school, but never had her in a class. You all were too old.”

“I don’t remember you.” I’d think I would.

“I was in the shit when you were in school… Hawk, is it?”

“Yeah. My real name is Howard, but don’t call me that.”

“Noted. Alexis was wary at first, afraid she found out. Then she told us everything.”

“Everything,” I repeat.

“She loves you.”

I stop. It feels like I just walked into a knife and it’s rooted in my stomach.

“You know what I did.”

“You left town when you turned eighteen. Dad threw you out?”

“More than that.”

“Tell me.”

I look at him. He folds his arms. Damn, he’s big. Scars, too. What the hell happened to him?

“I’ll wait,” he says.

I walk over to the nearest tree and lean against it.

“She told you everything. Alexis did.”

“She told us about Dorney Park. Just the two of us, not her sister. How you couldn’t stop looking at her and she pretended to be asleep so she could, and these are her words, cuddle with you on the way home.”

I just stare at him, gaping. Then I take a deep breath.

Then I tell him.

I relate the story slowly, and he asks no questions, makes no judgement. I start with the day I was made to leave, and work my way back from there. As he nods and scratches his chin I end up blurting out more stuff, how stupid I was, how much I missed her every miserable day.

When I finish he stays quiet for a long time. He puts his hands on his hips and sighs.

“There are times in a man’s life when he does what he has to do. In the moment when all the options are laid out before us, we have to choose the right one and go for it. If you had the information you had then, and only the information you had then, what would you do?”

I scuff my boot against the ground and answer without looking at him.

“The same thing. I’d rather she be alive and safe and hate me than…” I trail off. “That doesn’t matter, I left her to-”

“She had everything set up, you said.”

“Yeah.”

“School, job, she was leaving town too.”

“Yeah. She was supposed to be gone from this place. I knew her. She’d never come back, except to help out her sister, who wasn’t far behind. I had no idea my father was even involved with her mother, as far as I knew they only met once and it was years before I left. My father hated Alexis and her family. He wanted me to stay away from her anyway.”

Jacob rolls his massive shoulders and walks to stand next to me. He looks around, his sharp eyes darting from shadow to shadow.

“You know, it’s easy to wallow in regrets. They pull you in. Become a blanket. The past is a sunk cost, kid. What matters now is what you do with the future.”

Alexis

Now

Every time I look at Jennifer, I feel a little pathetic. When she sat me down and told me what she’s been through, it makes me feel silly and stupid for my own problems. She’s so strong, wearing the scar on her cheek like a badge of courage. Naturally I glance at her hand. She wears a glove over it all the time; right now it’s one of a matching pair of riding gloves but she always has one on.

Her left hand is a sight to see. She grabbed a knife blade to save herself and it bit down to the bone, making her fingers mostly useless. There’s a big puckered scar along the base of all her fingers, which have oddly thinned out and the skin grown close to the bone.

I don’t know how she survived that.

“How long has he been in town?”

I know who she means. She knows more about how I feel about Hawk than anybody. I told some of it to her husband but not all. It was such a relief to say something to somebody, and not May.

May annoys me with her optimism sometimes. Long after I gave up hope, she’d tell me that Hawk has to come back sometime, he has a reason, he wouldn’t just leave us. After a few arguments we just stopped talking about it. Now he is back, and I don’t know what to do.

“Since yesterday I guess,” I sigh. “That’s the first time I saw him anyway.”

I tell her what happened, about the hot dog and the alley. I don’t tell her everything but she’s smart, she’ll fill in the gaps. I don’t have to explain, she just nods.

“You feel like he betrayed you.”

“Yes,” I sigh, my chest tightening. “I hate myself for feeling that way.”

“It’s all right to feel betrayed. I can’t say I’m happy with him just up and leaving you without a word and never contacting you again.”

“You’re not?” I glance at her. “Of course you’re not. I can’t just take him back.”

“Why not?”

I stop and shrug. “How am I supposed to ever trust him again?”

“I’m not going to tell you what to do. You have to find that on your own.”

She must see the look on my face. She sighs and touches my shoulder with her bad hand.

“I know how you feel. There was a time when I couldn’t trust any man, not any one in particular. It took a lot of work for me to bring Jacob into my life. I wouldn’t wish what I’ve been through on anyone.”

I nod.

She starts walking again. “Sometimes we think we’re in the right place and we’re not. I was married once before.”

“I remember. Your husband…”

“Yes. The bridge.”

“My dad.”

“I know, hon.”

“After that.” I stop to look through a gap in the trees. The sun is shining on the meadow where the fireworks display went off last night. “Hawk was the only thing in my life that was right. May needed me, I couldn’t lean on her. He never asked anything in return. He gave me whatever I needed after my dad died.”

She steps beside me and listens. She’s good at that. Listening.

“Why was I so stupid? It took until the last day of school before I knew what it was. Just… something in the way he looked at me that day was different. He looked at me like he’d…”

“Never seen you before,” Jennifer says, softly.

“Yeah. I pretended to sleep on the bus so I could hold him.”

“I remember. I was there.”

I blink a few times. “Yeah, you were, weren’t you?”

“I should have said something. Public displays of affection and all that, but I decided, who cares? It’s not like it mattered. You’d effectively graduated and it made me happy to see two young people happy with each other. That was a dark time for me. The next four years were dark. Little spots like that got me through it.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

She looks at me with one eyebrow raised, and folds her arms over her chest. “I think you do.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“If he’s right for you, if it’s right for you, then you just know. Sometimes that feeling isn’t as strong as our fears, but it’s there, and no matter how many reasons you find to fight it, it never goes away. Once that torch is lit, it never goes out.”

“Never?”

She shakes her head.

“How long did it take you to figure it out with Jacob?”

“Figure it out? Too long. It was there the first day, though. He looked at me like he’d never seen me before.”

To my own surprise, I sniff a little and rub at my eyes.

“What do I do?”

She sighs. “I just told you… okay, look. Why don’t you trust him?”

“What, like specifically? He wouldn’t tell me why he left.”

“Nothing at all?”

“He said if he told me I’d be in danger.”

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

I start to answer but go quiet.

“I don’t know. It sounds like an excuse.”

Jennifer shrugs. “Lots of times, things sound like an excuse when they’re not. Lots of excuses sound true, or they wouldn’t work. Maybe you should try asking him again. It sounds like he’s trying to protect you.”

My own fingers dig into my arms. “Protect me? Where was he to protect me when I needed him, Jennifer? They strapped me to a table and injected me with drugs. I wanted him so bad it hurt. All I wanted was for him to come get me and get me out of there and take me away and make it better.”