Up at Butternut Lake: A Novel (33 page)

“Put these on your forehead,” he instructed her. She did, and their cool dampness made her feel better still.

“Thanks, Frankie,” she said softly, dabbing her face with the wet napkins.

He stood up and turned his attention to Bobby. “I think it’s time for you to clear out,” he said quietly. And Jax heard the menace in his voice.

“We’re not done here,” Bobby said, irritably. “Jax and I still have some things we need to talk about.”

“Oh, you’re done here, all right,” Frankie said. “You can walk out or I can carry you out, but either way, you’re leaving now.”

“This is none of your business,” Bobby whined.

“Yes, it is. Miss Jax is a friend of mine, and you’re obviously upsetting her. Now let’s go.”

Jax looked over at Bobby, wondering if he was going to try to fight Frankie. She was half hoping he would. There was no question in her mind of who would win that fight.

But Bobby was mean, not stupid. He leaned across the table. “I’ll see you later,” he said to Jax, in a way that made it seem as if he were spitting each word out at her. And then he slid out of the booth and walked out of the bar.

“I’ll be right back,” Frankie said to Jax, lumbering after him.

Jax’s first thought, after they left, was that she should leave, too. The only problem was, she didn’t trust her legs to work yet. Her second thought was that she’d made a terrible mistake. She’d risked her marriage and lost ten thousand dollars, all for nothing. Bobby wasn’t going to keep his end of the bargain. He’d never intended to keep it. And Jax was stuck with him. He’d never leave now. Why should he when there was always the possibility that he might get more money out of her?

She started to cry now, quietly at first, and then louder. She didn’t care if anyone noticed her or not. What difference did it make? Her life, as she knew it, was over. It would never be the same again.

She was sobbing, miserably and uncontrollably, when Frankie came back five minutes later.

“He’s gone,” he said darkly, barely managing to wedge himself into the other side of the booth.

She nodded, without looking up, and mopped her face with the already wet cocktail napkin.

“Miss Jax,” Frankie said, “I thought you should know. I didn’t just tell him to leave the bar. I told him to leave Butternut, too. I told him to leave, and not come back.”

Jax looked up at Frankie in surprise. “You did?”

Frankie nodded. “He was threatening you. Wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said. Because what was the point in lying anymore?

“I thought so,” Frankie said. “Anyway, I had a little talk with him. I can be pretty persuasive when I need to be.” He spoke with a ghost of a smile.

Jax sighed and unceremoniously blew her nose into a cocktail napkin. “Thank you, Frankie,” she said. “For trying to help, I mean. But Bobby has no intention of leaving here. He has . . . other plans.” At the thought of what those plans might be, another sob escaped her.

“No, Miss Jax. Listen,” Frankie said, leaning forward. “He’s leaving. And he’s not coming back.”

Jax looked back up at him again and shook her head, sadly.

“Frankie, I don’t know what Bobby told you. But he’ll be back. He’s not done with me, or my family, yet.”

“Oh, he’s done all right,” Frankie said, confidently. “Trust me.”

Jax sighed, and suddenly she felt so tired now that it was all she could do not to put her head down on the table and go to sleep. She opened her mouth to explain to Frankie, again, that he was wrong. But she couldn’t. She didn’t have the energy.

Frankie, though, saw the skepticism in her expression. He leaned across the table and said, in a soft but urgent tone, “Miss Jax, I told Bobby to clear out tonight. I told him if I ever saw him in Butternut again, I would kill him. Plain and simple.”

“Frankie, why would you say that?” Jax asked, genuinely surprised. She knew there were people who were intimidated by Frankie’s size. But she had never been one of them. She’d known, intuitively, that whatever his past, he was the gentlest of men.

“I said that because I meant it,” he said, his eyes narrowing with resolve.

“Frankie”—she shook her head—“you wouldn’t really kill him, would you?”

“Yes, I would. I’ve done it before,” he said, quietly. “Killed a man, I mean. And Bobby knows that. We did time in the same prison. I told Bobby I’d do it again in a heartbeat if he didn’t leave you alone. And he believed me. Trust me, Miss Jax. I saw it in his face.”

“You killed a man?” Jax asked, disregarding the rest of what he’d said.

“I did,” Frankie said.

“Why?” she asked, saying the first thing that came to her mind.

“The ‘why’ is not important,” he said, with a wave of his enormous hand.

“It is to me,” Jax said.

He frowned, thinking it over. “Okay,” he said, finally. “I’ll tell you what happened. But it stays here, in this booth, all right? Not even Miss Caroline knows this.”

She nodded and then hiccuped loudly.

He smiled and pushed her Coke closer to her. She sipped it, obediently.

“I grew up in this family that was . . . kind of crazy, I guess,” he said, with a sigh, his enormous shoulders hunching over. “My dad skipped out on us. My mom did her best, but honestly, Miss Jax, even her best wasn’t very good. She always had some boyfriend around. And most of them, well, they weren’t exactly the kind of guys who’d toss a baseball around with me, if you know what I mean.”

Jax knew what he meant.

“Anyway,” he continued, “one of Mom’s boyfriends liked to knock my little sister and me around. When I got bigger, of course, that wasn’t a problem. But by then, I guess, the damage had been done. Because when my sister got married,
way
too young, she married a guy just like my mom’s boyfriend. He was a real hothead. He’d have a bad day at work, or whatever, and he’d come home and, you know, blow off steam by . . .” He looked away, struggling with the memory.

Jax reached across the table and tried, ineffectually, to hold his enormous hand in her own small one. “It’s okay, Frankie. I get it,” she whispered.

“Anyway,” he said, “it made me crazy, the way he treated her. There wasn’t a lot that I loved in this world, but I loved her. She was a sweet little thing. Believe it or not, even with me for a brother, she wasn’t much bigger than you, Miss Jax. And I . . . I couldn’t stand to see her living that way. So I came over one night to have a talk with her husband. He’d been drinking. And we started fighting. I was stronger than he was, but he had a knife. I didn’t see it until it was too late. He was going to use it on me so I . . .” His voice trailed off.

“But, Frankie, that was self-defense, wasn’t it? Why did you still go to prison?”

“Well, the DA saw it differently, I guess,” he said with a shrug.

“Oh, Frankie,” Jax said, her eyes filling with tears again. “I’m sorry. It seems so unfair. But, Frankie, it still doesn’t explain why you’d threaten to kill Bobby.”

He thought about it for a moment and she could see that he was struggling, again, to translate his thoughts into words. He wasn’t much of a talker, Frankie. Or at least he hadn’t been before tonight.

“I guess I’d kill Bobby to protect you,” he said finally, after a long silence. “You and Jeremy. And the girls, of course. All of you, you helped me,” he said, simply. “When I came to Butternut, straight from prison, Miss Caroline and your family, you all took a chance on me, and I’ve never forgotten it. I never will forget it.”

“Frankie, we didn’t do that much,” Jax protested.

“You did
plenty
for me,” Frankie said. “When Miss Caroline gave me that job, I had nowhere to live. Nobody wanted to rent to an ex-con, but Jeremy helped me find that apartment over the Laundromat. He even cosigned the lease.”

Jax nodded thoughtfully. She remembered Jeremy doing that, but it hadn’t surprised her. That was just the kind of person he was.

“Then, after I moved in,” Frankie continued, “it turned out the apartment needed a lot of work, but I didn’t have any money saved yet. Jeremy helped me again. He gave me a line of credit at the hardware store, and I got what I needed and I did the improvements myself. I know you haven’t been there, Miss Jax, but it’s real nice now. Cozy, I think you’d call it.”

Jax smiled at his choice of words. She had known that Jeremy had helped Frankie then, too. “But, Frankie,” she said now, “you paid the money back. You don’t owe us anything. Not anymore.”

“It isn’t that I
owe
you anything,” he said, carefully. “It’s that people like you, you’re good people, that’s all. And maybe, in your life, you’ve seen mostly good people, too. But, Miss Jax, from where I’ve sat, I’ve seen mostly bad. Or maybe just too damaged to be good anymore. Anyway, it’s what makes me want to protect someone like you and your family. You’re kind. Sweet. Innocent-like. And I want you to stay that way.”

But Jax’s mind had caught on the word
innocent.
Her eyes dropped to the table. “I don’t know how innocent I am,” she said softly. “The truth’s a lot more complicated than that.”

But Frankie disagreed. “I don’t mean I think you’re perfect, Miss Jax. Everyone makes mistakes. But like Miss Caroline always says, everyone deserves a second chance. Or most people.” His eyes darkened, and Jax knew he was referring to Bobby.

She sighed now, taking another tiny sip of her Coke. She’d stopped crying, at least in part because Frankie had distracted her by telling her about his own life. Now, inevitably, though, her thoughts returned to her own situation.

“Frankie, do you really think Bobby will stay away from here now?”

“I know he will,” he said calmly.

“And if he doesn’t?”

“You let me worry about that. But for now, Miss Jax, I need to walk you to your car. Things are already starting to go south around here.”

Jax glanced around, suddenly aware of some commotion at the bar. She’d been oblivious to her surroundings, but now she realized how much more crowded the place had gotten. How much rowdier, too.

“Come on, I’ll take you out through the kitchen,” Frankie said. “The owner here’s a friend of mine.”

Frankie cleared a path for her, and Jax followed him, obediently, through the kitchen and out into the parking lot. Then he walked her to her pickup.

“Thanks, Frankie,” she said, reaching up to hug him. It wasn’t easy. Her arms couldn’t even come close to spanning his girth, but she did her best. And he patted her awkwardly on the back with one of his huge hands.

“Frankie?” she said, thinking of something. She stood back and looked up at him. “Whatever happened to your sister?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking down. “After what happened, she never spoke to me again. She said she’d loved her husband. Go figure, huh?” He tried to smile, but Jax saw he couldn’t.

Jax closed her eyes, just for a second. It seemed to her, sometimes, that there was altogether too much pain in the world.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Frankie said, seeing her expression. “Things didn’t work out too badly. I did my time, and I learned how to cook while I was doing it. And my sister? Maybe she figured things out. Who knows? Maybe she even met a nice guy.”

“I hope so,” Jax said, hugging him again.

But as they were hugging, Jax felt another one of the false contractions she’d been having lately. This one, though, was stronger than the others. So strong it momentarily took her breath away. It felt amazingly close to the real thing.

She sucked in a little breath, and Frankie looked down at her with concern.

“It’s the baby,” Jax explained, running a hand over her belly. “She’s just making her presence known.”

Frankie nodded, doubtfully. “You two better be getting home,” he said, opening the front door of her pickup for her. She climbed in and let him close it behind her. And then, looking at her, Frankie grinned, his first true smile of the night.

“Now go home to those beautiful little girls,” he said cheerfully. “And give them each a kiss good night.”

“I’ll do that,” Jax said, gratefully, starting up the truck. And she did.

CHAPTER 26

B
ut the next night, less than twenty-four hours after she’d left the Mosquito Inn, Jax was back in her pickup again. This time, though, she drove out to Butternut Lake.

“
Jax?
” Allie said to herself, standing at the kitchen window and holding a just-washed dinner dish in her hands. She put the dish in the dish rack, wiped her hands on a hand towel, and hurried out to meet her just as Jax was sliding awkwardly out of her truck.

“Jax,” she said, reprovingly, and she would have said more, but something about Jax’s demeanor stopped her. Maybe it was the way her shoulders were set, or the way her jaw was clenched. But whatever it was, Jax looked determined. Absolutely determined. And not at all like a woman paying a casual social call. She looked like a woman on a mission.

“Jax? What is it?” Allie asked, swallowing the lecture she’d planned on giving her again. The one about not driving alone, at night, in the country, at this stage of her pregnancy.

“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” Jax said, “but your phone was busy and—”