Pawn (Nightmares Trilogy #1) (9 page)

The man laughed again. “You’re too
young to have long days.”

I laughed too. “You’re telling
me.”

While the man, who I assumed was the
owner, left to fix my coffee, I perused the menu. I had no
appetite. Anticipation twisted my stomach into knots, and I doubted
there was room left for food. When he returned with a steaming mug,
brimming with dark liquid and smelling like heaven, I ordered the
first thing that came to mind: Pancakes. I never ate pancakes, not
since I had become too old for the server to add a whip cream
smiley face.

“Mind if I turn on some music?” the
man called from behind the counter. “I like to cook to
music.”

“Not a bit,” I told him.

I absentmindedly hummed
along with a tune that sounded vaguely familiar but wasn’t sure I
actually knew. I folded my napkin into a small square, then
unfolded the paper and smoothed the creases. By the time my food
arrived, the napkin was nothing more than white confetti piled
neatly next to my coffee cup. I kept shooting furtive glances out
the window, but no new cars joined the Bug in the parking lot. The
cell phone sitting on the
Formica
table didn’t buzz once.

The
man
slid a plate with three fluffy
pancakes onto
the
placemat
. A whip cream grin smiled up at
me. Two brown M&M’s served as eyes and a maraschino cherry
provided the nose. I stared at the creation, then up at the
man.

“My granddaughter is about your age.
She still likes her hotcakes this way,” he told me with a wink of
one crinkly eye. Then, to my surprise, he eased himself into the
booth across from me. “Hot date with your beau?” he
asked.

“No. My dad,” I said. “He was supposed
to be here at six.” I looked at the time on my cell again, even
though I had checked it just before the pancakes arrived. 6:12
p.m.

“I’m sure he’ll be here. Only
something very important keeps a man from his daughter.”

Or an overzealous bitch of
a mother
, I thought.

“Is this your place?” I asked him, not
sure what else to say since he apparently wasn’t going
anywhere.

“Sure is. Owned it for thirty years,”
he said proudly.

I picked up my knife and fork and
started cutting the pancakes. While I wasn’t hungry, I also didn’t
want to offend the man after he’d gone through all of the trouble
of making me a smiley dinner.

A bell tinkled and my head shot around
to face the door, heart in my throat. Disappointment washed over
when I saw a couple in leather chaps holding motorcycle helmets
standing there.

“Duty calls,” the Moonlight’s owner
told me and left to greet the newcomers.

I checked my phone again. 6:21 p.m.
Where was he? I’d inherited my punctuality from my mother, not my
father. So I shouldn’t have been all that surprised that he was
late. But he had been so insistent on this meeting, and it had been
so long since we’d seen each other, that I’d hoped he was as eager
to see me as I was to see him. Worry and agitation warred in my
mind. Where was he?

Seven o’clock came and went with no
sign of my father. He hadn’t called to say he was running late or
that something had come up. Every time my phone buzzed I jumped.
Texts from my mother, Devon, Mandy, and Elizabeth went unanswered
as my worry gave way to panic.

Had something happened to him? Had he
been in a car accident on his way to the diner? Or worse, had my
mother found out about the rendezvous and intercepted him? Devon
might be a good liar, but my mother was an excellent interrogator.
After shaking images of Devon sweating out chicken nugget fumes
under a too-bright bulb while my mother fired questions faster than
an automatic rifle, I decided to call home.

“Endora, I was just about to call
you,” my mother said when she answered our house phone. “Devon told
me you guys were going to church for Lent this evening.”

Church? That was Devon’s great lie?
Her parents weren’t staunch agnostics like my mom, but they only
exercised their Catholic faith on Christmas Eve.

“Um, yeah. The service just
ended. We’re grabbing dinner now. I’ll be home
in a little,” I
told her, glad I
wasn’t actually sitting in a church lying to my mother and earning
a check mark in the
hell-bound
column.

“That sounds good. I will be here when
you arrive,” Mom said.

Great
, I thought.
Now I’m going to have
to lie to her face
. I’d been banking on
her working late.

“Cool. See you soon,” I replied, then
quickly hung up before she had a chance to ask me a question I
didn’t know the answer to, like whether I’d taken communion. I
could never remember if I was supposed to take it to be nice or
decline since I wasn’t Catholic.

“Still waiting?” the old man asked,
rejoining me at the table. He set a check, facedown, next to my
half-eaten breakfast.

“Guess I got stood up,” I said, trying
to smile despite the hollow feeling overtaking my insides. I took
my debit card from my wallet and handed it to him without looking
at the check.

The man took my card but didn’t leave.
His eyes were glued to the card’s face.

“Andrews? You aren’t Mark Andrews’
daughter, are you?” he asked, searching my face for some common
denominator between me and my father. “You don’t take after him.
Lucky girl.”

People always told me I
looked like my mom. Besides being athletic, my father and I didn’t
seem
to share any genes.
If Mom had any sense of humor, there would
definitely be a family joke about the milkman being my biological
father.

“You know my dad?” I asked with
disbelief.

“He’s one of my regulars,” the man
informed me.

Regulars? As in he came to the
Moonlight on a regular basis? My mind was reeling. That wasn’t
possible. If my father came to this diner on a regular basis, that
meant he was regularly within twenty miles of my house, just twenty
miles from me. And he’d never tried to see me. Sure, Mom made it
next to impossible for him to come to the house, but what about
school? Or a lacrosse game? If he had bothered to move out to
Westwood, why didn’t he at least take a chance and come see
me?

“Mark comes in a couple times a week.
Sits in that booth over there,” the man pointed at a corner table,
“sets up his laptop and spreads out all his paperwork. Actually, he
left a couple pages here last week. I’ve been waiting for him to
show up again so I can give them to him.”

I barely heard the words over the
roaring of blood filling my ears. How could Dad have done this to
me? If nothing else, I’d been eighteen for nearly a week. He could
have shown up on my doorstep and all my mother could have done was
ask him to leave. All her connections and court orders no longer
mattered. A part of me hated both of them at that
moment.

“Why don’t I give you the folder? That
way you can give it to him when you two finally catch up?” the man
was saying.

“Sure,” I replied numbly, not really
sure what I had just agreed to.

The Moonlight’s owner was
gone and back in what
felt
like the blink of an eye. He handed me a manila
folder. I didn’t open it. I had no interest in
my father’s latest obsession.

“Meal is on the house, dear,” the old
man told me. “Any child of Mark’s is always welcome
here.”

I knew I should thank him. Say
something, anything. But I couldn’t formulate coherent thoughts,
much less words. Instead, I just blinked up at him from the
booth.

The man’s expression grew soft,
grandfatherly. He twisted a battered gold ring around one gnarled
finger on his left hand. “Endora, is it? He calls you Eel when he
talks about you. I know your dad loves you very much. Talks about
you all the time. Whatever kept him from being here today must have
been real important.”

“He talks about me?” I mumbled
hopefully.

“All the time.” The man offered me his
hand and helped me stand on my unsteady legs.

I started for the door. Remembering my
manners, I spun and called to the diner owner. “Mr.…” I started to
say, then realized I didn’t know his name.

“Haverty. Henry Haverty,” he
supplied.

“Thank you, Mr. Haverty,” I told him.
“If you see him, my dad, will you tell him to call me?”

“Of course.”

I drove on autopilot, my hands and
feet going through the motions while my mind tried to make sense of
what Mr. Haverty had just told me.

The drive home passed in a haze. I
cycled through a laundry list of emotions, starting with anger and
ending with zeal. The former was due to my father’s rebuke, the
latter due to the knowledge that he lived close by. Maybe he’d
stood me up today, but he had moved to Westwood to be closer to me.
That was something at least.

When I turned into my
driveway, I was surprised to find my house looming before me.
Mom’s
Saab
was
parked in front of the garage, and I knew I needed to pull it
together before I saw her. The moment she realized I was upset the
cross-examination would begin.

Mom was working at the kitchen table
when I entered the house. Her profile was visible from the foyer.
Black hair was fastened at the nape of her neck and a pencil
protruded from the corner of her mouth. I eased the front door
closed behind me, hoping she was too caught up in her work to
notice. I made it all the way to the third step before a creaky
board betrayed me.

“Endora?” called Mom.

I swore under my breath. “Yeah, it’s
me, Mom,” I called back.

“How was church?” She sounded
distracted, and I knew that I could tell her I’d seen the light and
found Jesus during the sermon and she would have responded with,
“That’s nice.”

All I said was, “Not bad.”

“That’s nice. What are you going to do
now?” asked Mom.

“Homework,” I
replied.
And ponder why people have
children they don’t want,
I added
silently. Between my mother’s standoffish nature and my father
being a no-show for our dinner date, I was feeling very
unloved.

“Good. I hope you’re getting in enough
studying for your advanced placement exams. They are coming up
soon,” Mom said, never taking her eyes off of the legal pad in
front of her.

“I am,” I promised. “Well, good
night.” With that I headed upstairs.

“Good night,” Mom muttered.

No sooner had I pulled my
cell phone from my jeans pocket
than
it rang. Eagerly, I checked the
display, praying it would say “BLOCKED.” No such luck. Devon’s
number appeared on the screen.

“How did it go?” she demanded before I
finished saying hello.

“It didn’t,” I told her. “He stood me
up.”

“What?? Are you serious?” Devon was
incredulous. “He didn’t call, text, anything??”

I sighed heavily. “No. But the owner
of the Moonlight told me my dad is a regular there,” I said,
speaking softly in case my mother had developed supersonic hearing
while I wasn’t paying attention.

“So he lives in Westwood?”

“Or close by,” I replied.

“Did the owner say anything else? How
often does he come in?”

“A couple of times a week,
apparently. And no, Mr. Haverty didn’t say anything else.” I
paused, unsure whether to tell her about the folder of papers the
old man had given me. Not that I wanted to keep them a
secret;
I just doubted that they
had anything to do with anything. Dad was a
professor, or at least he used to be. He spent
all of his free
time researching one
thing or another. He and Devon were alike in that respect. No
questions left behind.

“He did give me some papers Dad left
there the other day, though,” I finally admitted.

“What kind of papers?”

I glanced at the manila folder poking
out of my bag. “No clue. Didn’t look.”

Devon gave an exasperated sigh. “You
are the least curious person I have ever met, Eel,” she
clucked.

“Hardly,” I muttered. “I
just don’t have your
penchant
f
or demanding knowledge.”

“What can I say? I’m
curious like a cat. That’s why
they call
me Whiskers
.”

I laughed. That was one of Devon’s
favorite sayings.

“You’re worried about him, aren’t
you?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “I mean, he
insisted we meet in person to discuss something. But then he’s a
no-show? Wouldn’t you be worried?”

“I’m sure he has a really good
excuse,” Devon replied in a tone that suggested she didn’t believe
that at all. “Give it a couple of days before you send out the
hounds.”