Winter (Four Seasons #1) (36 page)

“
JUST SHUT
THE HELL UP!
” The outburst rings through
the Reid’s residence. Everyone falls silent. Luke stands and walks
across the kitchen, concern written all over his face. Pure terror
washes through me as my mother’s words ring out loud and clear in
my ears.
Sex offender’s
register
. What the hell did he do? For
once, my mother is quiet on the other end of the phone. I draw in a
deep breath and say what I should have said a long time ago. “You
can’t control my life when you want nothing to do with it, Amanda.
When all you want to do is throw money at me like I’m a problem you
can buy off and make disappear. I’m glad that you’re here, that
you’ve helped Brandon, but from here on out, I don’t want to see
you. I don’t want your money, and I certainly don’t need you
interfering in my love life when you can’t even be honest enough
with your own partner to admit that I damn well exist!”

I slam the
handset down so hard that the phone falls off the wall and bounces
off the counter, cracking open and spilling wires everywhere like
guts. That’s how I feel right now: raw, torn open, exposed. My
insides on the outside.

Luke stares at
the broken phone, his hands twitching at his sides. He looks
nervous. “What was that about?”

I can’t think.
I’m wound too tight to say anything but those three words—the words
threatening to take the one good thing in my life and destroy it
forever. “Sex offender’s register?”

Laney shoots
to her feet, her hand covering her mouth. Luke reels back, his face
draining of all color. “What?” he says breathlessly.

“
My mom…she
said you should be on the sex offender’s register. She said that’s
why my dad was mentoring you. Was she telling the
truth?”

Pain, an
awful, gut wrenching pain, flashes across Luke’s face. He doesn’t
need to answer me, but he does. “Yes.”

The single
word is like a punch to my gut. I stumble back, hands reaching out
for the tabletop to support myself. “What…” I can’t even finish. I
want to ask him what happened, what he did. But the knowledge will
destroy me, I’m sure of it.

“
Avery, wait.
It’s really not what you think. I swear, if you’ll just
listen—”

I pull myself
together and rush past him, straight into his bedroom. I can’t, I
just can’t. I’m throwing my few items of clothing into my bag when
Laney enters in after me.

“
It’s not as
simple as any of that,” she says quietly, wringing her hands. He
was twelve years old. His father…”

Oh God.
Twelve years old
.
Who
is
he? Who is
this guy I’ve grown up around my whole life? The guy who watched
over me from afar for so long. The guy who I slept with. Who I
stupidly let myself fall in love with. My stomach twists violently,
and suddenly I’m shoving past Luke’s mom and running for the
bathroom. My knees explode with pain as I fall to the floor and
bring up everything I’ve eaten today. I throw up until my eyes are
streaming tears.

I don’t go
back into Luke’s room. I walk straight back into the kitchen and
pick up my keys, ignoring Luke, who’s still frozen to the spot,
staring blindly at the shattered telephone on the floor. I bite
back a sob when I see the endless sorrow in his eyes. He looks up
at me finally—pain, regret, anger, fear—and that’s my breaking
point. I race out of the kitchen, out of the front door, fumbling
with my keys before I eventually manage to get into Brandon’s
beater and tear away.

Twenty Nine

Home

I’VE NEVER
been good at driving in snow. Ben, Brandon’s employee at the auto
mechanics, mentioned that he would put chains on the tires of our
borrowed car if we brought it back in today, but we didn’t get
around to it. The wheels spin each time I slide through a corner at
break neck speeds, and through my tears I’m only vaguely aware of
how close I come to rolling the vehicle.

My eyes are
red raw by the time I reach Brandon’s house. I park the truck and
jump out, determined to lock myself in the one place I’m likely to
feel safe in this godforsaken town: my old bedroom. But when I
reach the front door, a police officer, a fresh faced guy with the
beginnings of a fuzzy mustache, blocks the way.

“
Whoa, missy!
You can’t go in there.”

“
What?”

“
Police
investigation. We’re carrying out a search warrant right now. You
can’t go in.” He tucks his thumbs into his belt and rocks back on
his heels, looking me up and down. “Hey, aren’t you Maxwell
Breslin’s girl?”

I breathe
through the urge to punch him square in the mouth and peer through
the door past him, where more officers are tearing Brandon’s house
apart. “How long will you be?”

The young
officer shrugs. “We just started, ma’am. Could take hours. Even
then, you ain’t gonna be allowed inside. Not until them federal
agents have given the final say so.”

Chloe Mathers
emerges from Brandon’s kitchen into the hallway and stops dead when
she sees me. She holds spools of unraveled film in her latex gloved
hands, and it twists and curls down to the floor in
eight-millimeter tentacles. She thrusts her hands out at another
young officer fumbling to pull equipment out of what looks like a
fancy fishing tackle box. “Bag this. Label it
kitchen
.” The young officer takes it
and Chloe makes her way down the hallways towards me, her
expression stoic. “Can’t be here, Iris,” she says stiffly. All of
her warmth from earlier has vanished. However, the stern pull of
her eyebrows softens a little when she looks at me properly.
“Everything okay?”

I watch the
police officer winding the film around and around, trying to tidy
it up enough to get it into an evidence bag, fighting back even
more tears. “What is that?”

Chloe looks
over her shoulder, tucking her cropped mousey brown hair behind her
ear. “There’s a lot of film here, darlin’. I’m sure there’s nothing
untoward on it, but we’re finding it in the strangest of places.
Gotta check it out. Where’s Luke?”

A body-wide
shiver slams through my body at the mention of his name. If I lose
concentration, if I let it slip just for a second, I’m going to be
a sobbing mess all over again. I can’t do that in front of
strangers. “He’s at home.”

“
Don’t you
think you should get back there, sweetie? The roads are going to be
impassable soon. Snow’s coming down hard and fast.” And it really
is. The clouds overhead are loaded, pregnant looking things,
dirty grey and filled to bursting.

“
I’m not
staying there tonight,” I tell Chloe. “I’m staying…” And I realize
I only have one place left to go. One place I know my mother won’t
bother me, where I’ll be able to lock myself away and not have to
deal with Luke, the secrets, the uniforms pulling Brandon’s life
apart. “I’m staying up at the old place,” I say, every single
muscle in my body tightening at the prospect.

******

It takes
twenty-five minutes to drive out to my old family home. Despite
being off the beaten track, tucked away down hair-pinning, twisting
roads set back from the main town, it should normally only take
half that time, but with the snow coming down thicker than ever, I
have to take it slow. The beater’s engine starts making a strange
whistling, grinding sound about halfway up to the old house, and I
spend the later half of the journey praying angrily that the thing
holds out until I make it to the house. It does hold out, but only
just. Steam is billowing from the hood as I park up outside the
house where I grew up, and it’s difficult to tell whether it’s just
because the engine is hot or if there is something more sinister
going on underneath the hood.

I glare
hatefully at the rundown truck and then turn to the house. My chest
squeezes painfully as a flood of memories surge over me—my dad
clearing out the gutters; him shooting hoops with me around the
side of the house where the steel ring is still bolted to the side
of the building; my dad and I sitting in the car as he showed me
how to operate a car for the first time. He’d promised to teach me
properly when I was old enough, but of course that never happened.
He’d died a horrible death, and a stranger had been paid to teach
me how to drive. I pull out an all too familiar key, one I haven’t
used in over five years, suck in a deep breath, and walk up the
driveway. The front door opens easily. I hurry inside, not wanting
to loiter there. That single spot carries perhaps the most painful
memory of all—Luke standing there in his uniform, Chloe Mathers at
his side, as he told my mother that my dad was dead.

Inside, the
house is warm, and the upstairs landing is lit by a yellowing
light. My throat swells so badly it feels like it’s going to close
off altogether. I know Brandon maintains the place well, keeps it
clean and heated, and the lights must be to deter would be
burglars, but I’m caught off guard by how
right
it feels here. Lived in. Like
my dad is still sitting in his study, his old records hissing and
scratching out sounds of old sixties music while he grades papers
for school. I wander around the ground floor, a little stunned by
the fact that everything is as it used to be. Caricature drawings
of me and dad are still pinned to the fridge; there’s even one of
Mom tacked up there, too, a huge shit eating grin on her comically
too-big mouth. Cooking utensils still hang from hooks over the
oven, like someone still prepares food here, and the remote control
for the television still sits on the arm rest of Dad’s favourite
chair.

I trace my
fingers over the buttons, not wanting to disturb it in case Dad was
the last person to touch it. I know he probably wasn’t. The police
came through here and jacked everything up the same way they are
doing over at Brandon’s, but I can’t help myself. The house is full
of small reminders, each one bringing me back to him, bringing me
closer to the ghost of my father.

Upstairs is
even worse. My bedroom is still the bedroom of a fourteen-year-old
girl. Band posters hang from the walls, and everything seems far
too pink. I can’t remember ever liking pink this much. I pull the
comforter from my old four-poster bed and drag it down the hallway
towards my dad’s study.

The smell of
old leather and musty books hits me with the force of freight train
when I enter the room. Mom had removers pack up all her stuff when
she left the house, but she clearly never had them pack up Dad’s
belongings. His study is a little jumbled, books out of place,
papers strewn across his old mahogany desk, but other than that
it’s how I remember it. The battered old La-Z-Boy that he refused
to throw out still sits in the corner by the window, and the
archaic projector he used to love watching home movies on remains
hooked up, pointed at the blank, white wall at the far end of the
room that he kept bare specifically for that purpose.

I dump my
comforter onto the La-Z-Boy and pace the room, running my hands
over the shelves and nick-knacks, the clay disasters I constructed
in kindergarten that he clung to with such fierce price, the photos
of him and my mother back when she used to smile and they seemed
deliriously happy. I have no idea what changed to make that
happiness disappear, but the looks on their young faces as they
hold onto one another like nothing will ever tear them apart makes
me unbelievably sad.

I desperately
want to call Morgan then, just to have someone to talk to, to fill
the silence in this empty, lonely house. My mother still has my
cell phone, though. I pick up the phone on my dad’s desk and I’m
surprised when I hear a dial tone. Surprised and relieved. I punch
in Morgan’s number and sit down in my dad’s old desk chair,
pivoting from side to side as the line rings.

I’m terrible
at sharing my problems. I have no experience with it all, no matter
how hard Brandon tried to draw me out of my shell and discuss my
issues when I went to live with him. I’m so lost in trying to
figure out how I’m going to talk to Morgan about everything that’s
happened, is happening right now, that I don’t realize how long the
phone has been ringing out for. And then I get it. She’s not going
to pick up. I place the handset back in its cradle and stare at the
grain of my dad’s desk, numb and lost.

I’m
alone.

I’ve never
needed my dad more than I do right now. Just a hug, the sound of
his voice, the smile on his face would be enough to fix everything.
Then the idea hits me, and I grab hold of it with two hands. His
projector.

I leap up from
the chair and drop to my knees, focusing on the drawers to his
desk. I know he kept his old reels in the larger bottom drawer,
ordered neatly in rows with handwritten labels describing each
one’s contents. It was always locked unless he was in there. I used
to sneak in here when I was small to try and watch them, but I
could never find where he kept the key. Thankfully, when I pull on
it, the drawer slides open noiselessly. But all the films are
gone.

I feel hollow,
like I’ve lost him all over again. I slump back against the wall,
my knees drawn up to my chin, and I let a few tears slide down my
face. Anger takes a hold in the pit of my stomach as I consider
what could have happened to them. The only conclusion I can come to
is that Amanda must have thrown them away. I give her the benefit
of the doubt for a moment, the judicious thing to do, but I know
she wouldn’t have thought twice about trashing them. In fact, she
probably had a bonfire in the back yard and watched on with grim
satisfaction, arms crossed, as the flames ate my childhood and all
evidence of how wonderful and loving my father had been towards me.
Most of the films featured Dad and me alone, after all. She was
gone most of the time, fighting battles in court that kept her from
participating in the role-plays and games she considered juvenile.
Which they were, of course, but I
was
juvenile. I was a little girl,
who wanted both of her parents to be around. To love
her.