Paradise County (31 page)

Neely returned just about the time Alex was starting to think that she was going to have to call down to Joe’s house to request that she come home. Security system or not, the thought of being alone in the house after dark spooked her, and the sun was beginning to set. Loath to do that—the very idea of having to do it made her mad—she was relieved when Neely came banging in through the back door just as the last orange rays of the sunset sank behind the horizon. As Alex was standing in the kitchen in front of the open refrigerator door contemplating which of its contents could best be made into a meal—cooking was emphatically not her strong suit, and she couldn’t summon up the tiniest pang of hunger anyway—she had only to turn her head to witness her sister’s entrance via the utility room.

“Alex, I’m back!” Neely yelled, then with her next breath started talking a mile a minute over her shoulder to Eli and two other teens, a boy and a girl, who followed her into the kitchen. Seeing Eli made Alex instantly think of Joe, and thinking of Joe was not what she wanted to do at the moment. Or any other moment for as long as she lived, for that matter.

“Hi, Miss Haywood,” Eli offered, glancing at her over Neely’s head.

There was no point in taking her anger at the father out on the son. Alex summoned a smile as she closed the refrigerator door.

“Hi, Eli,” she said, adding, “You can call me Alex, you know. I’m not that old.”

His crooked answering grin reminded her so much of Joe’s that it was all Alex could do not to turn away.

“Yeah, well, Dad’s a stickler on manners,” he said. “He’d get mad if I called you Alex.”

“If he gets mad, tell him …” Alex’s voice was silky, and it was all she could do to change what she had been going to say to the mild, “… that I said you could.”

“Eli’s going to drive me to school,” Neely said. Alex got her first good look at her sister as she moved into the middle of the kitchen, and her eyes widened. Quarter-sized splotches of dried mud covered Neely from head to toe. Her hair, teased by the wind into massive disorder, stood up around her head like the seeds of a blond dandelion. More mud, so thick it obscured the leather, caked her thick-soled sneakers. The teens with her were in no better shape. At least, Alex thought, the brick floor was easy to clean.

“Good God, what have you been doing? Making mud pies?”

Neely flashed her a withering look.

“Riding ATVs.” Eli’s voice sounded like Joe’s too.

“It was great,” Neely said. “We went through the creek. Oh, yeah, this is Heather Isaacson and David Saunders.”

“Hi,” Alex said. They echoed the greeting.

“Oh, cool, a cat. Where’d it come from?” Having spied Hannibal, who was on the floor lapping milk that Alex had been cozened into pouring for him from a bowl, Neely dropped to her knees and ran a hand down his furry spine. Hannibal responded by arching his back appreciatively even while continuing to inhale the milk.

“His name’s Hannibal. Apparently he lives here,” Alex replied, then turned her attention to Neely’s companions. One thing she had learned was that it was better to know Neely’s friends than not to know them. She was subject to fewer surprises that way. “Do you go to Shelby County High?”

“Yeah.”

Alex engaged them in small talk for a minute. It seemed that the trio were just dropping Neely off prior to going home themselves.

“See you at school tomorrow,” Heather said sweetly to Neely as they prepared to leave, and linked her arm rather ostentatiously with Eli’s. Eli immediately looked self-conscious, and he never so much as glanced down at the girl on his arm. Of course, Alex remembered now. Hadn’t a Heather been mentioned in the context of Eli’s girlfriend? This must be she. Clearly she was staking her claim for Neely to see.

However, Neely seemed to be taking her existence in stride, Alex was relieved to discover.

“Yeah, see you there,” Neely said, and smiled.

The visitors headed for the door.

“Oh, Dad said to give you this.” Apparently just remembering, Eli turned back to Alex and handed her the plastic grocery bag that he carried in one hand. “It’s your clothes and things from the other night, and one of the long-range walkie-talkies we use to keep in touch when we’re working on the farm. Dad said to tell you that if you take it upstairs with you, you can contact him anytime during the night, just like an intercom. If you should need to, that is. Even if the phones go out.”

“Thanks, Eli.” Alex smiled at the boy, accepted the bag without looking inside it, and set it on the nearest countertop with something of a thump. She would be calling Joe over an intercom approximately as soon as she would be sleeping with him again, which was to say, never. Eli gave her a heartbreakingly beautiful smile in return—shades of Joe again—and turned back to his friends, lifting a hand in farewell as he did so.

“Yo, Neely. Pick you up at seven-twenty. Good-bye, Miss Haywood. I mean Alex.”

“Is he the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen, or what?” Neely demanded rapturously of Alex after her friends were gone.

Not quite
was Alex’s immediate mental response, which made her mad, because the exception she’d been thinking of was Joe, of course.

“You know, I kind of think Eli might already have a girlfriend,” Alex pointed out without directly replying.

“You mean Heather?” Neely opened the refrigerator and grabbed a can of Diet Coke. “I’m not worried about her. She’s a virgin. She doesn’t put out.”

“Neely …” Alex was horrified. “You’re only fifteen. Eli’s not much older. You’re not really doing anything with him, are you? Truth?”

Neely laughed as she popped the top on the can. “When you tell me the truth about Daddy Studmuffin, I’ll tell you the truth about Eli. I’ve got to go wash some of this mud off. I’ll be back.”

Alex wasn’t sure how Joe felt about his teenage son having sex in general, but she certainly didn’t want to be around if he should discover Eli having sex with Neely.

“Oh, by the way,” Neely’s voice floated back to her from the powder room. “I’m thinking about having my tongue pierced. I’ve heard that you can give incredible blow jobs if you’ve got one of those metal studs in your tongue.”

Alex shuddered inwardly. Then, knowing—hoping?—Neely had said that last just to be shocking, she didn’t reply.

Ignore, Joe had said. Ignore, ignore.

It was full dark outside by this time, with the soft purple light of a late fall twilight having faded away, and in contrast the kitchen was brightly warm and brightly lit. With Hannibal stretched out purring on a kitchen counter—Alex had tried without success to shoo him down, but she was more intimidated by him than he was by her—the scene was warmly domestic. When Neely returned to the kitchen, Alex headed off all conversation about Eli and tongue studs by asking her what she wanted for supper.

“We can have tuna sandwiches, or I can make an omelet,” she added.

“Your omelets suck,” Neely said succinctly, perching on a barstool and resting her chin in her hand. Traitorously rewarding Hannibal for his insubordination, she began to stroke his fur. “Why don’t we just order pizza?”

“They have pizza delivery way out here?” Surprised, Alex looked around from the refrigerator, the contents of which she was once again perusing, and took a moment to scowl at the smug-looking cat who seemed to be smiling at her before switching her attention back to Neely. “What makes you think so?”

“Eli said that’s what they’re having for dinner. He said his dad’s grumpy, and doesn’t feel like cooking tonight.”

So Joe was grumpy, was he? That was an interesting bit of news.

“Pizza it is, then.” Closing the refrigerator door, Alex found a phone book and, after a little difficulty locating the proper store, managed to order food. When she put down the phone, Neely was looking at her pensively, one hand resting on Hannibal’s fur, the other propping her chin.

Twenty-seven

W
hat?” Alex asked, knowing that look of Neely’s of old.

“Alex, do you think Daddy felt anything? I mean, when he shot himself? Do you think it hurt?”

Alex winced, and her stomach started to knot. “Oh, God, Neely. I don’t know. I don’t think so. It would have been so fast. Instantaneous, almost.”

“The night he died I had this weird dream.”

“What kind of dream?”

“I dreamed he called me on the phone at school and told me he loved me. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear his voice on the phone. It was so real, Alex, that when they woke me up and told me he was dead I didn’t believe them at first. I said he couldn’t be dead, because I’d just been talking to him on the phone.”

Alex stared at her sister as an icy finger ran down her spine. When she spoke, the words came slowly. “I had a dream about him calling me on the phone, too. When we were at Joe’s house the other night. Only I couldn’t understand what he was trying to say.”

For a moment they simply looked at each other.

“You want to know the really weird thing?” Neely asked.

Alex wasn’t sure she did. She could feel the knot of grief forming in her stomach again. “What?”

“The next night, after he died, after I’d flown home, the phone in my room kept ringing all night long. For real, I mean. I wasn’t asleep. I’d pick it up, and there’d be no one there. Just this kind of echoing silence. It must have happened four or five times. I finally took the phone off the hook, but I never did go to sleep.”

“It was probably a crank caller,” Alex managed. “Someone who knew Daddy had died.”

“Or do you think maybe he’s trying to contact us?” Neely asked in a small voice. “Like from beyond the grave?”

Alex could feel goose bumps rising on her skin.

“Oh, Neely, you watch too many horror movies,” she said with some asperity, trying to shake off the disturbing image. She had wondered that, too, but of course the dreams that they were both having were probably some standard manifestation of grief, and not a netherworldly version of
Contact.
Joe said he had had them too… .

Alex told Neely that, trying her best to sound calmly rational, and leaving out the part about Joe.

“The thing is,” Neely said, clearly not fully convinced by Alex’s careful explanation, “that if Daddy were going to call me right after he died like that, that might be the reason. To tell me he loved me, I mean. He never once said it while he was alive.”

At the look on her sister’s face, Alex’s heart broke for her. Here, of course, was the explanation for all Neely’s bad behavior. Her sister had lacked a parent’s love.

“He did love you,” Alex said. “He just wasn’t good at showing it, that’s all.”

“He showed you.” Neely’s voice was suddenly stark. “It was never any secret that he thought you were God’s gift to the universe. It was always Alex this and Alex that. He never even wanted me around.”

“Neely… .” Alex was appalled. Neely’s words were the exact truth, but all these years she had hoped that somehow her sister hadn’t noticed.

“Oh, don’t worry, I don’t blame you,” Neely said, sounding suddenly bored as she slid off the barstool. “You’re wonderful, everybody knows that. Not to change the subject, but what do you think I ought to wear to school tomorrow? I didn’t bring much with me: we’ll have to get the gorgon to send my clothes.”

“Neely, you’re wonderful, too,” Alex said fiercely, ignoring the blatant attempt to change the subject.

“Yeah, yeah,” Neely said with a dismissive wave, already on her way out of the room.

Staring after her sister, Alex felt the sudden prick of tears sting her eyes. She had loved her father, but there was no denying that he had been a neglectful parent, and his total lack of interest in his younger daughter had obviously hurt Neely deeply. In a physical sense, he had never been there for Alex, either, but, as she had gotten older at least, she had known that he loved her.

Her impulse was to go after Neely and talk this thing through, but she knew her sister: for her, for now, the conversation was over. She’d revealed as much of her heart as she could bear to reveal.

At that moment the doorbell rang. Glad of a diversion, Alex went to answer it, Hannibal trailing at her heels. It was the pizza. Alex paid, and carried the warm, fragrant box into the den, which was the coziest room downstairs and, in addition, boasted a large-screen TV. They watched TV as they ate, or at least Neely ate and Alex nibbled, and the subject of their father didn’t come up again.