Twice in a Lifetime (20 page)

“You’re in my seat,” a deep voice grumbled.

Drake turned to find a mountain of a man standing beside him. He was broad-shouldered, with muscles that strained against the fabric of his shirt. His expression was ugly, his frown so deep that Drake expected it would have taken him an hour to turn it into a smile. He wasn’t the man who’d left the seat.

“Nobody laid claim to it before I sat down,” he answered warily.

“Don’t matter none. I done told you it’s mine.”

There was a time, not all that long ago, when Drake would have taken the man’s threatening words as a challenge. He would’ve told the brute to get lost and then, when things inevitably went downhill from there, bunched up his fists and tried to give as good as he got. But he was a different man now. A new life with Clara beckoned to him, so close he could almost reach out and touch it. A barroom brawl wasn’t worth the hassle. It was easier to walk away.

“All right,” Drake said as he started to get out of the chair. “Let me grab my beer and then you can—”

But before he could finish, the man punched him in the face.

W
HY IN HEAVEN’S NAME
are you still
here
?”

Clara thought of her mother’s words as she turned her truck onto Main Street, struggling to shift gears. Up ahead, the setting sun was still high enough to shine in her eyes, forcing her to raise her hand for shade. Another day in Sunset was ending; families would soon sit together to eat dinner, to talk about work and school, to share a laugh.

But not Clara’s. Hers was as troubled as always.

Once Drake left to look for Tommy, Clara had gone back inside to wait for her mother to wake. She’d expected Christine to agree with her, to understand her reasons for staying behind, especially after the accidental fire.

She’d been dead wrong.

“Stop worrying about me,” Christine had scolded her. “All you should be concerned with is Tommy.”

“Drake is out looking for him.”

“Then get in your truck and do the same! Two sets of eyes are twice as good as one! Get going!”

And so Clara had been shooed out of the house. While Tommy had been absent longer than this before, even angrier from time to time, something about this felt different to her, more foreboding. Her heart raced faster, sweat slicked her palms, and her nerves felt frayed. She couldn’t have said exactly why, but she desperately needed to know that her son was safe.

Because she had sent Drake to look at Wilbur Marsh’s tavern, the most likely place to find her son, Clara checked elsewhere. She drove past his school, wondering when Tommy had last attended. She checked at Dowager’s Pond, a watering hole on Millicent Granger’s property where Tommy and his friends used to swim when they were younger. Clara passed the post office, the bakery, the movie theater, everywhere she could think he might be.

But so far, she hadn’t found him.

In the end, it was as if Tommy had vanished.

So here she was, making her third trip down Main Street, still looking, refusing to give up. But this time, something was different. Nearing the tavern, she noticed Drake’s car parked in the lot. Clara considered stopping, her foot hovering over the brake. She imagined that Drake was inside, talking with Tommy; the thought made her heart pound. But just as quickly as the impulse arrived, it passed; if her son
was
there, the last thing he’d want would be for his mother to come walking through the front door.

She drove on. She would leave this to Drake.

Besides, as the day had gone on, Clara had felt, more and more clearly, that there was one more place she had to go, one more person she had to talk to.

And it couldn’t wait any longer…

For a moment, Drake saw stars.

The first punch had clipped his chin; at the last possible instant, he’d turned his head, keeping the damage from being much worse. But the blow had still been enough to knock him down. His glass flew from his hand; it fell onto the floor and shattered into pieces. Stunned and disoriented, Drake tried to shake the cobwebs loose.

Get it together! Quick!

No sooner had Drake looked up than the other man was back on the attack. The brute raised a booted foot, determined to bring it crashing down on his head and end the fight before it had even really begun. Drake rose quickly to one knee, closing the distance between them while twisting to one side. The kick whizzed past his head, an inch from its intended target, and slammed hard onto the floor. Without hesitation, Drake threw a short punch into the soft flesh at the small of the man’s back. The goon let out a sharp bark of pain and moved away, angry and surprised that his seemingly bested victim had managed to fight back.

Drake rose to his feet, his head slowly clearing. “We don’t have to do this,” he said, wondering if he still had a chance to talk the other man down.

He didn’t. “Go to hell!” his attacker snarled, then charged.

Snapping out a sharp jab, Drake punched his opponent’s nose, feeling it crunch and sending blood spurting, but it wasn’t enough to keep the other man at bay. The brute slammed into him, driving him into the bar and forcing the air from his lungs. Chairs and patrons scattered.

One punch struck his ribs, then another. An elbow cut his cheekbone; the blood left a hot, wet trail down his face to go along with the pain.

But Drake wasn’t about to fall. Not again. He hadn’t started this fight, but he would damn well finish it.

Drake gave the thug a hard shove in the middle of his chest, forcing the man back and giving himself some room. He took a small step forward, put his weight on his front foot, and with all the strength he could muster, smashed his fist into his opponent’s jaw. Sharp pain shot from his hand down his arm, but he ignored it, hitting the man again and again, on his jaw, deep into his stomach, and once again in the nose. The man wobbled like a chair missing a leg.

“Summabitch…” the goon mumbled through busted lips, bloody saliva leaking down the front of his shirt.

But the brute wasn’t finished yet. He reared back, nearly toppling over, and threw a haymaker that Drake easily dodged.

With his opponent completely off balance, it was a simple matter for Drake to grab the man’s shoulder and spin him around. He cocked his hand and threw a hard, heavy punch that landed flush with the side of the brute’s face. The man fell, not slowly like a tree, but more like a load of bricks, quickly and with a lot of clatter. One second he was upright, the next he was flat on his back. His eyes fluttered once, twice, then fell shut and still.

Drake didn’t let his guard down.

Even though his body ached, he looked quickly around the bar, expecting another attack from some tough or drunk who wanted to keep the brawl going. But no one moved. Every face in the place was turned toward him: he noticed expressions of disbelief, most likely those who couldn’t believe he’d won; some were entertained, their mouths curled in devilish grins; there were even a few who looked embarrassed by their own curiosity, turning away quickly when they caught Drake’s eye. Even the couple at the jukebox had stopped kissing to watch, still wrapped in each other’s arms, the music playing beneath them the only sound in the bar besides his own fevered breaths.

But it was the bartender’s reaction that surprised Drake the most.

While everyone else in the bar was dumbfounded, the man who ran it calmly grabbed another glass, filled it with beer, and sat it on the counter.

“I reckon you could use this,” he said. When Drake reached into his pocket to fish out a few more coins, the bartender waved him off. “No charge.”

“Much obliged,” Drake answered. He grabbed the beer and took a deep draw, wincing because of his split lip, but the drink was worth the discomfort.

When he finished, Drake took another look around the bar; nothing had changed. Standing there, every eye in the place still on him, he understood he couldn’t wait for Tommy here. Though the bartender had extended a favor, a compassionate act for the victor, he was a stranger in Sunset. Even if there weren’t splatters of blood down the front of his shirt, he stood out like a sore thumb. To stay would be risky. He had to return to Clara without her son.

When he left, the sound of voices returned.

The silence went with him.

Clara drove into the cemetery. The sun hung just below the treetops, painting the clouds a deep, dark orange, a color like rust. A pair of crows was startled by her sudden arrival, flapping their wings as they leaped from tombstones, cawing loudly to voice their displeasure at being interrupted.

For hours, she had been looking for Tommy. From one side of town to the other, out into the countryside, at every place she thought her son might go, returning to some in order to check again, but there had been no sign.

Through it all, Clara had felt the pull of the cemetery.

She had ignored it for as long as she could, so when she’d finally surrendered and decided to go, she’d told herself that she was just being thorough; after all, Tommy had been there recently, getting arrested for allegedly breaking a tombstone. But deep down, Clara knew there was another reason.

One that has everything to do with Drake McCoy…

Lost in thought, she drove down the same path she always took, meandering along the creek, shadowed by trees. At the next intersection, she braked to look toward where, the last time she was there, workmen had been loading the broken stone; the space remained empty, the identity of the deceased known only to the family he or she had left behind.

Clara moved on.

Up another short hill, she pulled over and shut off the engine. She stared out the dirty windshield at Joe’s grave. Her heart raced.

It was hard to believe she had been here only a few days earlier to mark the anniversary of Joe’s death. So much had changed in that short time. Since Drake had come into her life, she wasn’t the same person. With his decision to stay in Sunset, to remain by her side, things would undoubtedly change even more. Because of that, in her heart, Clara had known she had to come here to try to explain it all to Joe, her dead husband, the first man she’d given her heart.

She had to tell him that she was falling in love with another man.

For more than nine years now, Clara had been alone. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a man had come along. But to accept Drake into her life, she knew that she needed to make peace with her past. She would never forget Joe, or even stop loving him, but she had to stop mourning. Holding their memories too close wouldn’t allow her to make new ones. Just thinking about what she had to do, what she had to say now, brought tears to her eyes.

She opened the truck door and got out. When she reached Joe’s plot, she got down on one knee and placed a hand on the stone.

“Joe,” Clara said, her voice cracking. “We need to talk…”

Drake crossed the parking lot and headed for the Plymouth, gravel crunching beneath his feet. Absently, he ran a hand across his already bruising chin, tender from the punches he’d taken. Reaching inside his mouth, he wiggled an aching tooth, wondering if it didn’t feel loose. He wasn’t a vain man, would’ve had a hard time calling himself handsome, but after what had just happened, he could only imagine what he’d look like in the morning. Hopefully, Clara wouldn’t find it
too
hard to look at him.

Try as he might, Drake couldn’t figure out why the brute had attacked him. He hadn’t seemed drunk. Drake hadn’t been flirting with his lady. Out of the blue, the man had demanded the seat, but then, when Drake agreed to surrender it, he’d thrown a punch. It didn’t make any damn sense. He had seen plenty of brawls before, some born out of family feuds, others from some version of love gone wrong or another, plenty on account of too much drink. However, most of them had had a reason, no matter how misguided. Drake shook his head; there wasn’t much point in thinking about something he wasn’t ever going to understand.

But then, just as he was fishing his keys from his pocket, he saw something that made him pause.

Another row of cars past the Plymouth, the bar’s parking lot ended up against an empty lot. On the far side, a dirt road fronted a row of run-down houses, one with an upstairs window busted out and dark; it looked like the building was winking. But what had caught Drake’s attention was a person walking quickly down the road, a man with his hands stuffed into his pockets. As Drake watched, the figure stepped out of the growing shadows, lengthening by the second as the sun slowly but steadily descended, his face turned up to the weak light for only an instant. Drake hadn’t gotten a long look, but it had been enough.

It was Tommy. Drake was sure of it.

He hurried after him, determined not to let Clara’s son out of his sight.

“Tommy!” he shouted, but the kid didn’t stop; was it Drake’s imagination or had he quickened his step?

Still aching from the bar brawl, Drake moved as quickly as he could, ignoring the pain, but before he could catch up, the figure turned down a narrow alleyway between two buildings. Moments later, Drake did the same, but he immediately had to stop to keep from running into someone.

“Watch it, fella!” a surprised voice yelled.

In the murky gloom, Drake couldn’t make out the man’s features; he helped Drake out by striking a match, cupping his hands, and lighting a cigarette. Before he shook out the flame, Drake got a good look; beady little eyes that made him resemble a rat, along with a crooked nose, probably broken a time or two.

He wasn’t Tommy.

But was he the man Drake had been following? His clothes looked about right, but that didn’t mean much; the same was true for his size. Maybe Drake had imagined the resemblance to Tommy; he had wanted to find Clara’s son so badly that his mind convinced him that the man was someone he was not. Maybe the punches he had taken during the fight were worse than he thought.

Then again, maybe he
had
seen Tommy…

Drake peered down the alley. With the disappearing light, it was like looking into a deep well. He couldn’t see clearly more than twenty feet in front of his face.

“Did someone just come past here?” Drake asked.

The man took a deep drag on his cigarette, his eyes narrowing. “You lookin’ for trouble?” he growled.

Drake thought about pressing the issue, but instead mumbled an apology and walked away. He’d already been in one fight; he didn’t need another. Besides, even if it
had
been Tommy, the boy was long gone by now.

Retracing his steps, Drake found he had another surprise waiting for him. A young woman was leaning against his car. Surprisingly, he recognized her; she’d been standing behind the bar when he arrived. She grinned, the look meant to be seductive, as if she was sizing him up. Her arms were folded across her chest beneath her breasts, purposefully pushing them up and out.

“Decide to go for a walk?” she asked.

“I thought I’d get a breath of fresh air,” Drake answered.

“Good,” the woman replied as she pushed off the Plymouth and closed the short distance between them. “You’re going to need it.”