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Something about the way the boy said it set alarms off in Amelia’s mind. “What, exactly?”
David looked at her, then looked away, then looked sideways back at her again. Her worry increased, but she reined it in, telling herself to remember that he had to take his time, but he eventually opened up.
“I’m going away,” he finally blurted out.
“Away?”
“To live somewhere else.”
This startled her, but she knew if she peppered him with questions he would clam up. So she settled on one thing she knew was true. “I’ll miss you,” she said simply.
He looked startled, then pleased, then he blushed. She knew when he felt his cheeks heat, because he lowered his head again.
“Where are you going?” she asked, careful to keep her tone casual.
He didn’t raise his head. He tapped his fingers in a restless rhythm. Took a deep breath, let it out.
“I’m going to live with my brother,” he said in the same kind of rush.
“Your brother?” She was genuinely startled now.
“Yeah. Luke. Luke McGuire. My half brother, really. You don’t know him, he was gone before you came here.”
No, she didn’t know him. But she knew of him. It was hard to live in Santiago Beach and not know of the town bad boy who had departed the morning after the high school graduation he’d barely achieved and never been back. Luke McGuire might have been gone for better than eight years, but his reputation had lingered.
“I didn’t realize you were in touch with him,” she said carefully. “You never mentioned him before.”
“He’ll be coming to get me soon,” David said.
Amelia noticed he hadn’t answered her directly, but didn’t belabor the point. “When? Do I have time to get you a going-away present?”
Again the boy blushed. “I…don’t really know. Not yet, anyway. But he’s coming. I know he is.”
For a moment David sounded like a child waiting for Santa Claus, and she wondered if the arrival of the brother was as much a fantasy. She also wondered, as she had before, if the phantom brother wasn’t part of David’s problem, if because some people expected him to be just like his troublemaking brother, it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
David met her gaze then, his jaw set and his chin up. “You’ll see. So will my mom. She can’t keep him away, even though she hates him.”
Amelia considered that. Ordinarily her response would have been something soothing, assuring the boy his mother surely didn’t really hate his brother. But she had met David’s mother, knew that Jackie was very conscious of appearances and hated to be embarrassed. Given Luke’s reputation and what the woman had no doubt gone through raising him, she could easily believe there was no love lost between the two.
“It must be difficult, if he and your mother don’t get along, but you want to go live with him.”
“She doesn’t know about it. Yet,” he added, his expression turning mutinous.
“Does she even know you’ve been in touch?”
“No. Yes.”
Well, Amelia thought, there’s a teenage response for you. She waited, knowing David would explain if she just waited.
“I mean she knows I wrote to him, but she stole my first letter before the mail lady picked it up. I found it in the trash.”
Amelia smothered a sigh; she couldn’t think of anything more likely to make an already resistant teenager downright stubborn. But it wasn’t her place to pass judgment on his mother’s parenting skills.
“So you wrote again?”
He nodded, a little fiercely, the blond hair flopping in time with the movement. “Couple of weeks ago. And I took it to the post office myself. I even bought the stamp myself, ’cause I know she started counting the ones in her desk. She puts a mark on the next one on the roll. She thinks I’m too dumb to figure that out.”
Amelia couldn’t imagine living that way. Her parents might have been older and a bit fussy in their ways, but she had never had to live with this kind of subterfuge and mistrust.
“And what did your brother say?”
“He hasn’t answered. Yet.” This time the “yet” was in an entirely different tone, one of stubbornly determined hope. “I think he’s just gonna come and get me. He doesn’t have time for writing letters.”
“He doesn’t?”
“Nah, he’s too busy.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m not sure, but cool stuff. He’d never have some boring job or wear a tie or nothing like that.”
“But you don’t know what he does do?”
“No. But he’s not in jail, like my mom says!”
Amelia’s breath caught. “Jail?”
“She just says that. She’s always said it, that he was probably in jail somewhere. She’s always sayin’ bad things about him.”
Amelia felt an unexpected tug of sympathy for the absent Luke McGuire. “You were young when he left, weren’t you?” she asked gently.
“I was almost eight.” He sounded defensive. “I remember him really good. He was really cool. He used to take me with him places, unless he was with some girl. And sometimes at night, you know, when I was real little, when I couldn’t go to sleep, he’d sneak in and read to me.”
And there it was, Amelia thought. The birth of a reader. Somehow she never would have expected the inspiration to be the disreputable Luke.
Primed now, David kept on, extolling the virtues of his long gone half brother.
“And he’d bring me stuff, not stuff you buy, he didn’t have much money, but stuff like a neat rock, or a feather, that kind of thing. I’d put it away in my special box—” He stopped suddenly before adding sourly, “Before my mother found it and threw it all away.”
Amelia sighed again. She herself had had a collection of leaves she had pressed and dried, all the different ones she could find. Her mother hadn’t liked having them around, she thought they were dirty, but Amelia loved to look at them, and that was all that had really mattered; the collection had stayed.
Thanks, Mom, she whispered silently, as she often did to both the parents she still missed so much. And never had it mattered less than it did at this moment that they hadn’t been her biological parents.
“People say he was kind of a…troublemaker,” she said carefully; she didn’t want to join a chorus, but she did want to know if David was utterly blind to any faults his brother had.
“Yeah, he got in some trouble.” The boy said it with a kind of relish that made Amelia nervous; she wondered if this was the key to David’s new friends, who seemed to find—or make—trouble wherever they went. “He was no nerd like my mom likes, he had fun, he went out at night, hung with his buddies, and they did whatever they felt like. Didn’t pay any attention to stupid rules.”
Or laws? Amelia wondered. She tried to remember any specifics she’d ever heard about the wayward Luke, but all she could call up was the general impression of a teenage boy gone wild. What she did know was that David appeared to be heading in the same direction; there was far too much of a gleam in his eyes when he spoke of the older brother he clearly admired. And while she could appreciate—indeed, she’d been pleasantly surprised and touched by—David’s childhood recollections of another side of his brother, she was afraid it was the wild side he was trying to emulate.
Perhaps his mother had the right idea, after all.
“—window broken out, and some of that disgusting graffiti sprayed all over!”
“How awful,” Amelia agreed as she rang up Mrs. Clancy’s gardening magazines.
“Those boys are getting out of hand,” the older woman said ominously. “It was bad enough when they would harass people on the street, blocking the sidewalks, riding those awful skateboards so fast they could kill a person if they knocked them down, which they nearly did many times. But now this…somebody should do something!”
Somebody being somebody other than herself, Amelia guessed. Mrs. Clancy was of the speak-loudly-and-let-someone-else-carry-the-stick school. She was a formidable, large woman in her late sixties, with silver hair she was proud of saying hadn’t been cut since she was sixteen, and if she had ever known what it was like to be young and bored in a small town, she’d clearly forgotten.
Diplomatically, Amelia changed the subject to one she knew the woman could never resist. “Going for that prizewinning rose again next year?”
The woman’s eyes lit up. “I’ll beat that Louise Doyle yet, you just wait and see.”
Mrs. Clancy chattered on as Amelia slipped the magazines into a bag. “I wish you luck,” she said as she handed them over with a smile. “I always love walking by your garden.”
That much, at least, was true. And Mrs. Clancy left the store happy, and would return next month as usual. Amelia had once wondered why she didn’t subscribe and save herself the trip, but soon figured out that this was the only time the poor woman had away from the recently retired Mr. Clancy, and she wasn’t about to give it up.
Amelia glanced at the clock; she was five minutes past closing. Not unusual for her, but tonight she was a bit tired; she’d had her kickboxing class early this morning, and this afternoon she’d gotten in several shipments of books to be shelved, and handling it all herself was getting wearing. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to hire someone, she liked her quiet times in the shop when she could actually read herself—it was hard to recommend sincerely a book you hadn’t read—and she was getting by on only Sundays off, even with the long hours. By opening at ten and staying open until eight, she managed to serve everyone fairly well and had enough down time during the ten hours the store was open to get some other things done, although she still came in an hour or more before opening to deal with things that took uninterrupted concentration.
But dealing with those heavy cartons of books was a different matter than mental exercise, and tonight she was tired.
She went through her closing up ritual quickly and almost thoughtlessly; she’d done it so often she thought she could do it in her sleep. The register was totaled out and locked, the back door closed and secured, and she decided to put off cleaning the restroom until tomorrow morning. She picked up her small purse, flipped out the lights and made her way to the front door.
She was turning to lock it from the outside when she heard the sound. A low, throaty growl that sounded almost more animal than mechanical. She chalked that bit of anthropomorphism up to her weary state as she turned to look; it was a motorcycle, that was all.
All?
The word echoed in her mind as she stared. A motorcycle, yes. But she’d never seen anything like the picture that greeted her eyes now, riding out of the twilight. The bike was big and sleek and shiny black, but she barely noticed it as it cruised past, growling as if in protest at the slow pace. All she could do was stare at the man astride the low-slung, snarling beast.
He was dressed like a walking advertisement for some rebel motorcycle gang, except that the declarations of affiliation were missing. Plain, unmarked black leather jacket and boots, black jeans, and a pair of wraparound, black framed sunglasses with mirrored lenses. She thought she caught a glint of gold at his left earlobe. His hair was nearly as dark as the bike, and more than long enough to whip back like a mane in the wind of his passage. His face was unshaven, but not bearded, and beneath that his skin was tan, as if he spent a lot of his time outdoors. Probably on that monster, she thought a little numbly.
Instinctively she drew back in some alarm; she didn’t want to draw the attention of this intruder. He looked like the personification of everything she’d been fascinated by as a girl but had been too terrified to go near. That hadn’t changed much, she thought, as she became aware that her heart was racing in her chest.
She noticed a duffel bag fastened to the rack behind the seat of the bike. Was he traveling, then? Did he just travel about the country as the spirit moved him, like some fictional character in a weekly action show or something? She nearly sighed aloud.
She caught herself and smothered the familiar yearning to be something other than what she was. The words to an old song came to her, something about a man who was the wrong kind of paradise. This man would be just that for a woman. For this mouse of a woman, at least, she admitted, knowing herself too well to think she could ever even begin to handle a man like that.
As he went past the store she saw a helmet—also, of course, gleaming black—hooked to the back of the bike, and wondered if he ever bothered to wear it, or if he just carried it in the hopes of talking himself out of a ticket in this mandatory helmet state.
She thought she saw his head move slightly, but if he glanced her way at all, she couldn’t tell behind the mirrored glasses. She doubted it; there was nothing to draw his attention. She couldn’t imagine what it would take to interest such a man. The bike had California plates, but he didn’t seem to fit here in Santiago Beach. This was a sun and surf town, and he was a splash of the wild side.
The wild side.
Suddenly she knew. With an instinctive certainty she couldn’t question, she knew.
Luke McGuire was back in town.
Chapter 2
Santiago Beach hadn’t changed a bit, Luke thought. Oh, there was some new development around the edges, some new houses and the occasional strip mall, but the downtown district hadn’t changed at all. It was still the quaint, villagelike, tourist-attracting place, the main drag with the incredibly hokey name of Main Street, that had bored him to distraction. Everybody seemed to think living near the beach was the dream life for any kid, but it hadn’t been for him.
No, it hadn’t changed much at all. He had, though. He had to admit that. Not, he amended with an inward grin, that he resisted gunning the Harley’s engine on occasion, just to break the smothering quiet. That it also turned heads, made people either gape at him or eye him suspiciously—or even with shock, like the woman outside the bookstore—was just a side benefit.
But down deep, he was no longer the kid who had done that kind of thing just for thrills, just to build on the reputation that had already begun to snowball. Now he did it for…what? Nostalgia?
Lord, nostalgic at twenty-six, he thought with a rueful twist of his lips. Back then, at eighteen, you thought anybody on the far side of thirty was decrepit, and now you’re thinking people can still be young at forty.
He wondered if at thirty he would push that back to fifty, then at forty to sixty, continually pushing the boundaries back so that they were a safe distance away.
And he wondered if just coming back here was making him lose his mind. He never thought about this kind of thing at home. Of course, at home his thoughts were focused mainly on how to keep himself and everyone else alive through the next adventure. He rarely thought about Santiago Beach at all; in his mind, his past consisted of the last eight years.
But it was amazing to him how quickly he relapsed, just from seeing the old, familiar things, all in their old, familiar places. The faces might be different—although some had looked familiar—but the effect they had on him was the same. He immediately felt cramped, trapped, and he found himself wondering if his favorite secret hideout, the place no one had ever found, was still there.
The urge to turn the bike around and head for the high country was tremendous.
But he couldn’t. He had to find Davie first, make sure he was all right. He’d wrestled with it for days, but now that he’d decided, now that he’d arrived, he wasn’t going to turn tail and run until he’d done what he’d come here for. He really wasn’t that kid anymore, desperate and weary of fighting a battle he could never, ever win.
He’d learned well in the past eight years. He’d learned how to depend only on himself, learned how to take care of himself, and most of all, he’d learned how it felt to win. And he liked it.
He wasn’t going to let this place beat him again.
She wouldn’t have sought her out, Amelia thought, but now that Jackie Hiller was right here, she should say something. She would never betray David’s confidence, but she was worried. Especially if she was right about that dark, wild apparition she’d seen riding down Main Street.
The image, still so vivid in her mind, gave her a slight shiver. She knew she’d grown up within the boundaries of a strict childhood and been further limited by her own natural shyness; men like the one on that motorcycle had had no part in her life. But if that were indeed Luke McGuire, Amelia could easily see how David had built his half brother up into an almost mythological being in his mind.
She shook off the odd feeling. Jackie was coming out of the community center, and Amelia wondered if she had been giving one of her speeches. That was where Amelia had first met her a couple of years ago, at a meeting of the local Chamber of Commerce, where the woman had earnestly, passionately, almost too vehemently, pitched her views on the problem of teenage pregnancy. For a decade now she had been giving lectures at local schools and communities on the subject, and from what Amelia had heard, she was quite zealous in her crusade.
The woman was dressed impeccably, as usual; Amelia didn’t think she’d ever seen her without perfect makeup, tasteful gold jewelry and medium heels. Her dress was tailored yet feminine, and looked very expensive. Her hair was perfectly blond, exquisitely cut and looked equally expensive. In all, a package Amelia doubted she could ever put together; she had the money, but not the time. Not time she wanted to spend on that kind of production, anyway.
But that wasn’t what she was here for. Steeling herself, she waited until Jackie finished speaking to a woman outside the doors of the center, then approached.
“Mrs. Hiller?”
Jackie turned, an all-purpose smile on her face. It changed slightly when she saw Amelia, apparently recognizing her as someone she had met before.
“Amelia Blair. Of Blairs’ Books.”
“Ah, of course!” Her greeting was effusive and, for all Amelia could tell, genuine. “How nice to see you again. I’ve been meaning to stop in and see you.”
Amelia blinked. She had? As far as she knew, the woman had never set foot in the store before; whatever her reading tastes were, if any, she satisfied them elsewhere.
“I wanted to talk to you about carrying our new newsletter,” Jackie went on. “I understand you have several teenagers who come in regularly?”
“Yes,” Amelia said, recovering. “Yes, I do.”
“It’s free, of course. And I’m sure you’ll want to help in getting out such an important message.”
Amelia couldn’t argue about the importance of the message, but she didn’t like the assumption that she would agree, sight unseen.
