The Winter Lodge (23 page)

In her office above the bakery, she had separated things into neat stacks. For some reason, the neatness of the stacks pleased her and made her feel less anxious. And definitely caused her to worry that she was turning eccentric.

And of course, Jenny knew she wasn’t turning eccentric at all. She was stalling. She was putting off everything—even her dreamed-about trip to New York—because she’d been avoiding something.

No more, she thought, grabbing her jacket and purse. There was something she needed to do, and putting it off was not going to make it any easier. Fifteen minutes later, she was knocking on the front door of the Alger house. It was a big ranch-style home with a view of the river. From a distance, it appeared grand and imposing, pretentious, even. Up close, she noticed peeling paint on the trim and crumbling brickwork—an air of neglect. Perhaps it had started when Matthew’s wife had left, suddenly and without explanation, years ago. This was one of the reasons Jenny felt a connection to Zach. Both of their mothers had walked away.

When no one came to the door, Jenny felt both frustrated and relieved. This was a reprieve. She didn’t have to do it today. She gave one last knock and leaned on the bell.

Nothing. There was no one home, and here it was dusk, the windows all dark. As she was turning to go back to her car, the front door cracked open.

“Jenny?” Zach Alger looked as though he’d just rolled out of bed, with rumpled hair and flushed cheeks. He was wearing an oversize plaid hunting jacket. “Is something the matter?”

All right,
she thought.
Let’s get this over with.
“I need to talk to you, Zach.”

“Sure. I can come by the bakery—”

“Now.”

“Okay. Let me grab my boots.”

“You don’t need boots. I drove all the way out here. We can talk inside.”

“But—”

“It’s important.” Due to her insistence on going to the city, Rourke had been giving her lessons in self-defense. One of the basic tenets was self-assurance. Walk into situations as though you’re in charge, and you won’t be challenged. She put the concept to the test, gave the door a shove and strode into the house.

The place was freezing cold, and her footfalls echoed on bare floors. She paused, momentarily forgetting her self-assurance. “Uh, is there somewhere we can sit down and talk?

Actually, where do you keep your computer? I need to show you something.”

Zach looked as though he wanted to throw up. It was quite possible he already knew why she’d come. He said, “The, um, my computer’s not working.”

She could probably make her point without it. “Fine, then let’s just have a seat.”

His shoulders slumped as he turned and led the way down a dark hallway to the kitchen, where weak gray light streamed in through unadorned windows. A small stack of white cardboard bakery boxes littered the counter. Catching her look, Zach said, “It was discard stuff, I swear it. That’s all I ever bring home.”

Not quite, Jenny thought. She grew increasingly confused, though. She had never been to the Algers’ home before, yet the condition of the place shocked her. It was frigid here, and there was barely a stick of furniture. Maybe it was the lack of a feminine touch, she rationalized.

But that wasn’t it. Even Greg Bellamy kept his house warm. Even Rourke, the Ho Ho-eating bachelor, had
furniture.

“Zach, is everything all right?”

He indicated a pair of three-legged stools at the counter. “We can sit over here.”

“You didn’t answer me. Is everything all right?”

“Sure,” he said. “Everything’s great.”

She took a video-storage disk out of her purse and showed it to him in its plastic holder.

“This was what I wanted to show you on the computer.” She didn’t see a computer. She suspected there wasn’t one in the house. “We don’t need to look at it, though. It’s the security video from the bakery. I suspect you know what’s on it.”

Wild alarm flashed in his eyes. Then he made a visible effort to compose himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do, Zach.” Jenny found it hard to speak. She felt absolutely terrible. “I’m the only one who’s seen this. I don’t review it every day, so I don’t know how many times this scene has been repeated, but the camera doesn’t lie. When I saw this, it was like a punch in the gut.”

She had watched it over and over again, certain she was making a mistake. But no, Zach was very deliberate. He moved a tall rack in front of the camera eye. What he didn’t know—

what no one but Jenny knew—was that there were two other camera lenses aimed at the counter.

“Help me out here, Zach,” she said. “Please. I want to understand.”

His face was as pale as the snow, his eyes milk-glass blue. He looked like a statue, unmoving, unfeeling.

Then, finally, he hung his head and began to talk. “We’re broke,” he admitted. “My dad and me. No one’s supposed to know.”

Of course not, she thought bitterly. Matthew Alger was a proud man and an aspiring mayoral candidate, to boot. She could easily see how a man like that would sacrifice his own son

’s safety for the sake of appearances. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think anyone knows,” she said.

“Please don’t say anything.” His voice was low, urgent. “He’d kill me if he knew I told anyone.” He gestured at the evidence in her hand. “I meant to put back what I took as soon as I was able.” He flinched. “Are you going to tell Rourke?”

The question surprised Jenny. It had never occurred to her to hand this over to Rourke. “I would never do that. I can’t imagine what you were thinking, Zach, but I know there’s got to be some explanation, and I’m here to listen.”

Zach kept his eyes on the floor. A sense of shame seemed to roll off him in waves. He wasn’t a bad kid, Jenny knew. But he was in big trouble.

“Zach?” she whispered.

“He—my dad—keeps saying he’s got some scheme going, that I should just be patient and it’ll all work out. That’s all I know, swear to God.”

She tried to imagine how Matthew had managed to dig himself into such a deep hole. He didn’t seem the type to be on drugs or alcohol, but some people were good at hiding it.

“Online gambling,” Zach muttered as though sensing her speculation. “He’s addicted to it, or something. It’s crazy, you know, but he can’t stay away. He wins a little and he’s all, like, we’

re on easy street now. And then he loses that and more. It started last fall and just got worse and worse. So really, the computer’s working. It’s the only thing he won’t hock or sell.”

“I’m sorry,” Jenny said. She had only a vague understanding of the phenomenon; she did know that people could get into big trouble with it. “I don’t know what to say, except that you need to convince him to get help for his problem. You can’t compromise yourself just to get him out of a bind, do you understand, Zach?”

“He doesn’t know I took money from the bakery. I just needed it to pay the gas bill.”

“Tell you what. Let’s take a look at the utility bills. I’m going to take care of them so you don’t freeze to death.”

“I shouldn’t let you—”

“But you’re going to, so let’s not waste time arguing.”

He took a deep breath, and the tension seemed to drain out of him. The expression on his face brought tears to her eyes. All this boy needed was someone to understand him, to show him a little compassion. “Zach, when was the last time you were in touch with your mother?”

“We don’t talk,” he said hurriedly. “She’s got, like, this whole new life in California, and she’s expecting a baby and all. I’m not telling her about this.”

Jenny gritted her teeth in frustration. “I want to help,” she said, “but I need a little cooperation from you. For starters, you need to promise you’ll talk to your dad, make him get help.”

“What, you think I haven’t done that?”

“Keep doing it. Don’t give up on him, Zach.”

“Fine,” he said, sounding tired and far older than his years. “I know what he’ll say, though.

He just needs a little more time. There’s a big jackpot with his name on it, and once he gets his hands on that, we won’t have to worry about a thing.” At last, Zach lifted his gaze to hers. His eyes, those extraordinary pale eyes, held a world of pain. “Yeah, right,” he said.

Sixteen

D
aisy had been raised to expect much of herself, yet she always fell short and managed to disappoint herself time and time again. So working at the bakery was a surprise. She liked it and was good at it, a new concept for her. This made her realize that maybe the problem wasn’t her.

Maybe the problem was buying into other people’s expectations.

“You look happy,” said Zach, who was moving racks out to the loading dock.

“I am,” she said, stepping out into the cold winter day with him. “I mean, it’s totally crazy, but I like everything about working here—the smells, the other employees, the customers. It’s fantastic.”

He grinned at her. “You’re right—crazy.”

“If so, then it’s a good kind of crazy. You know, what’s funny is I’ve had a lot of jobs, and I hated them all. See, at my school in the city, we had to do these rotations to explore different careers. But they were all the ‘right’ kind of careers. Wall Street, PR, law, the legislature. No way would they have sent someone to work in a bakery.”

He drew down the back door of the truck and locked it. They had decided to spend their break taking a walk because Daisy wanted to shoot some pictures. As they started walking, Zach pulled out a cigarette. She plucked it from his hand before he could light it. “Oh, no you don’t,” she warned.

“Great, so you’re some kind of antismoking radical.”

“Ex-smoker,” she admitted.

“You?”

Daisy knew what he was thinking. She looked like the all-American girl, the kind who could do no wrong. That was why she used to get away with so many things.

“So here’s the stupid part,” she said. “Not only did I know smoking would kill me, I knew it would drive my parents nuts.”

“Did it work?” he asked her. “Did you drive them nuts?”

“No,” she said with a bitter laugh. “They drove each other nuts. Me, they just kind of ignored.” Divorce did that to kids, no matter how hard people worked to make it bearable. The truth was, when a married couple was doing all the emotional work of breaking up, the kids got pushed aside.

They stopped in the city park, which was a study in black and white—the wrought-iron fence, benches and tables against the snow. The steel tubes of the swing set. The black granite of the statue of Avalon’s founder. Daisy took out her camera. Zach took back the cigarette and lit it.

She acted unimpressed, although she couldn’t help it—he looked sexy in a kind of bad-boy way. “Lean against that tree,” she said. “I’ll take your picture.”

He shrugged, and then complied. He was getting used to her habit of taking pictures, and by now was relaxed in front of the camera.

She took a few more shots. Zach had an interesting face—bony angles counterbalanced with full lips, and that shock of straight, white-blond hair. Wreathed by a thread of cigarette smoke, he looked intense and for some reason, sad.

“Very
Rebel Without a Cause,
” she said, capturing him in profile, his gaze looking into some distance she couldn’t see, a helix of smoke rising from the tip of the cigarette.

“What’s that?”

All right, this was something she needed to get used to. Kids at her old school got all references to classic films and books. Here in Avalon, she found herself explaining things. “It’s an old movie about a middle-class teenager pointlessly rebelling.” Which, on reflection, sounded far too familiar for comfort. “A chain-smoking teenager,” she added.

“So what got you to quit?” he asked.

“Someone I met last summer.” She ducked her head, suddenly filled with an urge to smile.

“Julian Gastineaux.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Nothing like that.” She gave in to the urge. Julian was certainly good-looking enough to be boyfriend material. But like Daisy, he wasn’t looking for that when they met.

“We had jobs together at Camp Kioga,” she explained to Zach. “He went back to California, though.” Like Sonnet, Julian was biracial. He was absolutely gorgeous, too, but he had an incredibly sad life. He and Daisy kept in touch by e-mail every day. Sometimes twice a day. Sometimes six times a day. But…boyfriend?

“And all he wanted,” she told Zach, “was to go to college and learn to be a pilot. Anyway, he’s the one who made me see how stupid it was, the smoking. We had this ritual burning of my last pack of cigarettes. Because I realized the only one I was hurting was myself.”

“If you’re expecting me to be all, ‘Okay, I’m motivated, I’m going to quit,’ you’re wrong.”

“I don’t expect you to do anything.” It would be nice, Daisy thought, if getting rid of the cigarettes and pot had been the pivotal moment for her. Nice and neat. Her teenage rebellion concluded with a positive act. It didn’t work that way, because the things that made her crazy didn’t end. She knew it was no coincidence that she started having careless sex with Logan O’

Donnell the same day her mom announced she’d be working overseas for a year.

“My dad used to work up at Camp Kioga,” Zach said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yep. Back in the day.”

Daisy put away her camera and shivered. When Sonnet’s mother, Nina Romano, had asked her if she’d seen a doctor, she had been like a deer in headlights. And of course, her stunned reaction had totally given her away.

Oh, she had tried to cover. She’d said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Nina—God, Mayor Romano—had not pressed the issue. Instead, she had scribbled a name and number on a Post-It note and said, “I figure, being new in town, you’d want to find a good doctor.”

So far, Daisy had dialed the number so many times, she had it memorized. But then, as soon as a voice said, “Dr. Benson’s office,” she hung up. She was being totally stupid about it.

Every day she put off making a decision, her options were narrowing.

“You all right?” Zach asked. “You look all pale.”

“Do I?”

“Is anything wrong?”

For some reason, that did it. For far too long, Daisy had been keeping a tight rein on herself. Anyone looking at her would see a regular high-school girl, but just beneath her clean-cut, all-American surface was a hysterical girl barely hanging on to sanity. She felt herself unraveling, and she laughed as it happened, and the more Zach stared at her, the funnier it seemed.