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“It’s your dad,” he said. “The cops and paramedics found him on the Mecklin Road Bridge. He didn’t recognize them. He called for your mother.” He waited, as if to let it sink in.
It did with a thud. “He didn’t know she was dead?”
“Eventually he remembered.” Maybe Van kept stopping because he didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what to say. Of all the scenarios she’d imagined drawing her home, this was the one she really hadn’t wanted to face. “I’m sorry,” Van said.
“How bad is he?” Her grandmother had died after battling Alzheimer’s disease. Her father had deeply feared a similar fate. “Is this a one-night problem, or could it be my grandmother’s illness?”
“I don’t know.” Van’s weariness scared her more than his words.
“Mommy?”
“Everything’s all right.” Straightening, she yanked the frying pan off the burner and spoke firmly, to comfort her child and to keep Van from guessing she was talking to a little one.
Hope, who’d been through too much, misunderstood and ran to her room. Cassie followed her into the hall. She couldn’t explain Van to Hope or her to him.
“I have to come home.” She’d been raised by a loving mother and a responsible father who’d taught her to think of others. Rarely had she been selfish in her life—not because she was noble, but because her parents had never accepted such behavior. But—home?
She’d dreaded this day for five years, had felt it threatening like a bag of bricks hanging over her head.
She pulled herself together. “I’m coming.”
“I can take care of him.” Van stopped again.
“How?” she asked. “You’re not his next of kin. You’re not even family anymore.”
His breathing deepened. How could she possibly hurt him after all this time?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, you’re right. It was crazy to offer. Not long after you left, he also told me to stay away. But I thought maybe that was an excuse I was happy to take.”
“I don’t want to know—” It was too late to catch up on what had happened after she’d left. The time they’d shared had belonged to someone else. It didn’t feel like hers any longer. “I’ll be on my way as soon as I can get a flight.”
“Wait, Cassie. Let me pick you up at the airport.”
So she could explain Hope at baggage claim? Not a chance. “I’ll be fine.”
His silence ran thick, full of words unsaid. Their relationship had ended unnaturally when she’d walked away, but she hadn’t been willing to wait for the usual recriminations and anger. The rape had humiliated Van and her father. She’d hated them both until she realized she’d never love Hope while she nourished bitterness.
“Thank you for calling,” she said, “and for helping my father. I’ll take over as soon as I get there, and you can go back to your own life.”
“I’m trying to warn you he isn’t the same.” He didn’t seem to hear anything she said, as if he had an agenda and was checking off the items. “I don’t think he’s been eating, and I don’t know when he last took a shower.”
“That’s not my dad.” An image of him burned in her mind. “They’ll keep him in the hospital until I get there?”
“I doubt they’d let him out. When should I expect you?”
“As soon as I can make a reservation. Your number must be on my phone. I’ll call you back.”
“Let me give it to you to make sure.”
She wrote it down. “Thank you,” she said.
“Cassie?”
She bit her lip. Hard. Her arms and legs felt heavy, strange. As if she were channeling someone else’s feelings. If only Van would stop saying her name. “What?”
“Are you all right?”
He’d always cared. That had never been the problem, but his concern left her empty now. “Fine.”
A few seconds went by. She should hang up, cut off the thick voice that had haunted her dreams a lot longer than the monster’s who’d broken into their bathroom. The monster’s voice only terrified her.
Van’s made her lonely, reminded her how it felt to be intimate. Not sex, but trust and talk and safety.
“Should I get you a room at the hotel?” he asked.
She wasn’t about to put Hope on display for the kind, but too-quick-to-pity citizens of Honesty. “I’ll stay at Dad’s house.”
“Maybe you’d like to try Beth’s fishing lodge? She had some trouble last year, but the place is up and running again. She got married last summer and she and her husband renovated—”
Running on wasn’t like him. “I’ll stay at home.” She’d had to give up Beth’s unstinting friendship, and it was too late to start over or explain.
“Okay.” His tone tightened. “Don’t forget to let me know when you’ll be here.”
For the first time since high school, he didn’t say I love you as he hung up. Even the last time—months after she’d left, while Hope had kicked lazily in her belly and Van had begged for another chance, and she’d asked him to stop calling, he’d said it.
She clicked the off button, sliding her palms over her face as if to wipe away memories of Van that flew at her. Always laughing—as she ran her hands through his silky dark blond hair. As he took her mouth with his. Laughter dying as he moved his body above hers.
She flinched and grabbed the wall. “Hope?” After a deep breath, she hurried to her daughter’s room. “I have to tell you some things.”
“No, Mommy. I’m mad. You talked mean to me.”
“I’m sorry, honey.” She was so careful. She tried never to raise her voice, never to let Hope see a hint of brutality anywhere. Her stomach lurched as she remembered the softness of the intruder’s body this afternoon. The human body was so fragile.
And the psyche more so.
“Who was on the phone?” Hope asked, with eyes only for her doll.
“A man I used to know—a friend of my father’s.”
“Huh?” Hope’s eyes rounded and she dropped the doll on her pink-flowered comforter. “You have a daddy?”
Cassie tilted her head back. She’d never even mentioned him? “I have a father,” she said. “He’s sick and he needs me to look after him.”
“Like when I’m sick?” Hope grabbed her hand. “Ooh, will we make him glasses of ice water and toast?”
“We can make anything that will help him feel better. Let’s talk about it over our eggs. Help me warm them up?”
“VAN, TAKE THESE KEYS.” Frail in his hospital gown, Leo Warne covered them with his hand, like a spy passing off a top secret microfiche. “They’re not safe here. Someone will steal them and break into the house and clean me out.” Leo’s eyes darted toward the door and back.
Van suppressed a shudder. He’d loved the man like a father. How could he have abandoned him? “Don’t worry. Cassie’s going to stay at the house. Your stuff will be safe.”
“Stop looking at me like I’m a stranger. I’m not sick.” He nodded toward the ceiling as if someone were watching them from above. “I’m just a smart old man. Something no one in this town likes. I know how they treated Cassie. They made her leave, looking down on her after that man…” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple as big as an egg in his too-thin throat. “Like the rape was her fault. No one took care of her.” He skewered Van with blue eyes that were so much like Cassie’s. “Not even you.”
Van gripped the edge of Leo’s rolling tray. “The rape repulsed me. Cassie never did. I should have protected her, but I couldn’t even make her see I still loved her.”
“Because you didn’t. I know. I know it all. I walk around this town in the night. No one sees me. I’m invisible.”
Van stared, his own good sense returning. “You’re tired and sick and you need to be cared for.” Van dared to stroke Leo’s thin hair as he would have touched his own father—or his child, if he and Cassie had been so lucky. “You’ll get better and you’ll start remembering.”
“I remember everything. People laughed at her and they said she deserved it. They said she should have been more careful. She was asking for it.”
“Those are your own fears talking. It never happened.”
“It was worse. You don’t even know. She won’t come home now.”
“She’ll be here tomorrow. She’s planning to stay at your house.”
The house. With his heart breaking for his broken friend, he felt anxious. What would Cassie walk into in her childhood home? If Leo hadn’t washed himself in weeks, he certainly hadn’t cleaned the house.
Cassie had enough to face. No one had understood why she’d run away from Honesty. Her former neighbors would flood her with casseroles. They’d sympathize with her about Leo’s illness and they’d fish for answers about why she’d stayed away so long.
They’d tried often enough to extract the truth from Van, but no one seemed to realize she hadn’t been content to cut the town out of her life. She’d had no more room for her father or her ex-husband, either.
“Leo, I’m heading over to your house for a while. Just to make sure everything’s ready for Cassie.”
“I’ll give you a buck and a half to mow the lawn.” Leo dug for a nonexistent pocket. “It’s not worth that much, but I know you. You’ll just spend it on a Coca-Cola with Cassie, and you shouldn’t be paying for her treats.”
Van felt as if he’d run face first into a wall, but Leo didn’t seem to realize it was December. “Pay me later.” Van wondered which lawn guy had flirted with Cassie. Van hadn’t noticed her as more than a cute kid until after he’d been working in the bank for almost a year and she’d started college.
He pushed his fist against his chest. They’d been a family once, the three of them. He kissed his former father-in-law’s head and hurried out.
At the nurses’ station, he backed up and asked them to call if Leo’s condition changed. Despite all signs to the contrary, he hoped Leo might improve before Cassie arrived. Good food, warmth and attentive care had to give him a chance.
The Warnes lived across the lake from Beth’s fishing lodge. Van pulled up to Leo’s place to find Trey Lockwood, one of last night’s EMTs, banging away at the front porch with a hammer. Trey stopped and brushed back his ball cap with a weary sigh. He pulled a couple of nails from between his lips.
“I didn’t expect to find anyone else here,” Van said. “What’s wrong with the porch?”
Trey stepped on a board and it squeaked. “Ann and I didn’t realize we should have checked on him.”
“Has he been acting odd for long?”
“He definitely changed after Cassie…” He didn’t say the words and Van was just as glad. “We thought you probably knew, but you weren’t welcome here, either.”
“I’d have forced my way in.” He took in the paint peeling off the siding. Why hadn’t he driven past once in a while? The answer would keep him from facing himself in a mirror for a while. He’d been a coward. Pretending Leo and Cassie didn’t matter anymore had been easier than fighting them for a few pathetic minutes of their time.
“You look gutted,” Trey said. “People think everyone knows what goes on in small towns. But the doors shut here, just like anywhere else, and some things you can’t know.”
Trey was a smart guy. “The door didn’t shut on this.” Van pulled Leo’s keys out of his jacket pocket. “I’ll see how things look inside.”
“Yeah. Good luck. Let me know if I can help.”
“Thanks.” Van trod the rickety boards with care. He dreaded opening the door. “Cassie’s due back tomorrow.”
“You don’t want her to see what’s been going on with her dad.”
“I can’t protect her from what’s happened to her father, but I’d like to clean this place a little.”
“She shouldn’t have left.” Even after five years, Van turned to defend Cassie, but Trey tested the next step, looking regretful. He’d been Cassie’s friend, too. He yanked and the plank gave way with a scream. “None of us asked her to go. None of us wanted her to.”
“It was my fault,” Van said, surprising himself. “Not hers.” A floorboard groaned as he eased across it. A strong wind could send the porch across the lake to Beth’s yard. “It’s too late to talk about the past,” he said.
“You gotta talk to someone.” Trey held a nail against the board and hammered. “Sometime.” He added another nail. “Or it’ll drive you crazy.”
“Yeah?” Van turned the key in the lock, but it took determination, as if Leo hadn’t locked it in five years. He looked over his shoulder at the lake. Leo rented a boathouse down there, hidden by the pines. Three years ago, Van had discovered it open, and he’d locked it to keep it safe from vandals. He’d left a note, telling Leo to get in touch with him for the lock’s combination, but Leo had never called about it.
Trey was watching. “I’ll finish out here. I know a guy who can repaint fast. Cassie’ll feel at home.”
Van nodded. “Thanks for the help and the therapy.”
The EMT grinned. “Free of charge, buddy.”
He went back to work, and Van turned the doorknob and shoved it open. The hinges screamed for oil. A stench of decay and dirt almost knocked him back down the steps.
“God.” He stared at newspapers and canned goods stacked in ranks like soldiers waiting to march down the hall. On each tread of the staircase along the right wall, three packages of paper towels stood side by side.
He pushed the door wide and went searching for the source of the smell. It was easy to trace it to the dining room.
Food. Old, old food, and food as new as last night’s dinner.
He slammed his hand over his mouth like any heroine in one of the old movies his sister loved to watch. Apparently, Leo had thought getting the food to the dining room was enough. There were china plates on the table, but at some point he’d switched to paper and plastic utensils.
And then he’d stopped washing dishes. He’d neatly aligned the plates and the cups and glassware and, eventually, he’d done the same with the throwaway stuff, unless he hadn’t finished his meal. Those plates perched on any surface—and the floor.
Compulsive neatness and haphazard filth. How had it made sense?
The kitchen was even crazier. Completely spotless, except there wasn’t a dish to be found, beyond the paper and plastic in the cabinets where the real stuff used to be stored.
“Dear God, Leo.”
In the back of his mind, Van had blamed Leo for Cassie’s leaving. If her beloved father hadn’t been ashamed, maybe Cassie would have given Van another chance, but Leo’s humiliation had blinded her. She’d taken Van’s revulsion at his inability to help her, for shame like her father’s.
He choked in a breath and grabbed a garbage bag from beneath the sink. He set to work, realizing he’d misread Leo. They’d tried to live with their guilt in different ways.
He’d been unable to touch his wife, and Leo had stopped living in a world that made sense.
“HOW MUCH LONGER, Mommy?” From her car seat in the back of their rental, Hope flipped her cloth doll, Penny, in circles until the arms coiled like springs. “Where is my grampa, anyway?”
