Darkness at the Edge of Town Read online

  “Cute,” I said. “Did the dress show off your legs?”

  “Not funny.”

  “Yes, it is,” I insisted. “It’s a joke—you’re supposed to laugh. If you don’t, then they’ll know they’re getting to you, and it’ll never stop. Didn’t you learn any of this in high school?”

  “I went to a military academy,” he said. “If someone did something like this, he had to run five miles and face a tribunal. It didn’t happen often.”

  “Poor baby. In that case, you want me to come down and shoot them for you?”

  Finally, he chuckled. “Tempting, very tempting.”

  “Seriously, though, things should die down now. Shelly was the last interview I’ve agreed to. I am now contractually obligated to lock myself in my house and write a book in three months. Some new scandal will grip the nation, and we’ll be yesterday’s news.”

  “I hope so.” He paused for a second. “Sorry for complaining. I am proud of you, Iris. I want you to know that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You’re not hiding away like last time. You’ve turned…hell into something positive. You’ve come a long way in such a short time. I see you on TV, and I’m amazed. You look so beaut—” He stopped himself. “Healthy—you look healthy.”

  Okay, yes, my heart skipped a beat when he almost said I was beautiful. Coming from a man who my friend Carol swore was designed by a committee of gay men and straight women, the sentiment meant a lot. I was by no means ugly; with long light-brown hair with flecks of blond in the right places, jade-green eyes, enough cleavage to rock a halter top, and no longer underweight, I got my fair share of compliments. But Luke Hudson fell into a whole other weight class. I’d actually seen waitresses fight to be the one to serve him. He had a large, muscular body, almost perfectly coiffed red hair, aquamarine eyes, and a killer smile when he used it. And if possible he looked better naked. The man was just…yummy. I often had to stop myself from thinking about him in those terms. Friends, just friends. I couldn’t handle anything else at that point. I’d just gotten him back. A flash of him lying on the floor of my basement after being shot three times crossed my mind. I said a silent prayer for the inventor of the Kevlar vest, hoping God had graced him with trillions of dollars and supermodels falling all over him.

  “Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I’ve, uh, been trying yoga.”

  “It, um, shows.” He cleared his throat. He did that when he was uncomfortable. “Sorry. So, uh, you’re leaving the circus, huh? Going back to Grafton?”

  “Yeah. I think I’m going to rent a car,” I found myself saying. It had been nothing but a thought until then. “If I never see the inside of an airport again it’ll be too soon.”

  “So, you’ll be driving through D.C. then?” he asked hopefully.

  “I…yes. Yes, I will be.” My subconscious was a tricky bitch.

  “Then we should have dinner or something.” He cleared his throat again. “Or, you know, we can…The symphony’s doing Handel at The Kennedy Center. I can get us tickets or…whatever.”

  I drew my knees up to my chest, forming a ball. “I-I’d like that.”

  “Good. Great. Excellent.” He cleared his throat again. “I can’t wait.”

  “Me either. It’ll be, um, good seeing you again,” I said. “If it weren’t for the publicity stills I’m pretty sure I’d forget what you looked like.” Yeah, like that’d ever happen.

  “I…yeah…okay then. Just let me know what time you’ll be in town.”

  “Okay. Great. I’ll, uh, let you know. I have a meeting with CBNN tomorrow morning, so I’ll probably be there by four?”

  “Okay. I’ll get the tickets. Clear my schedule. I…it’s a plan.”

  “Yeah. A plan.”

  “Okay then,” he said.

  “Okay.” The uncomfortable silence filled the air on both our ends. “I’m gonna go now.”

  “Yeah. Right. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.” He hung up.

  I hung up with another smile on my face. It would be good to see Luke again. The last time we were in the same room was two weeks before, when he was awarded the FBI’s Medal of Valor. We went out for a drink afterward—ginger ale for me—with some of his buddies, and I was quickly phased out of the conversation. I snuck out without even saying goodbye, which I heard no end of for a week after. At least at dinner and the symphony it would be just the two of us. Alone. After that realization, the panic hit.

  Oh, fuck, I thought. I’d just agreed to dinner and a show. It had been a while—okay, two years, three months, and five days—but if memory served, dinner and a show was a date. Did I just agree to a date with Luke Hudson?

  “Oh, God,” I muttered as I picked up my phone again and called Carol. She was my sole female friend and my current advisor on all things romantic. Or at least she was the only person I trusted not to gossip about me or sell stories. Even my students had cashed in on my celebrity gravy train. I didn’t fault them too much, since I had as well. But Carol was a true friend who always helped me get my head on straight.

  She picked up on the third ring. “Hello?” Carol asked in her milk-and-honey Southern accent. I was instantly homesick. It had been over three weeks since I’d been home and that was only for a night. I’d been living on planes and in hotels since I signed with Miranda and she began my press tour. I missed my home, my friends, and especially my German shepherd, Gus, more and more as the days went on. I would have started traveling earlier but wanted to stay and make sure Gus was okay after his surgery.

  “Hey, Carol, it’s Iris.”

  She squealed like a little girl on the other end. “Oh, I’d hoped it was you!” she shrieked in excitement. “How’d it go? Is Shelly real short? I read somewhere she’s barely five feet. Is it true? Did you get me an autograph?”

  “It went fine. She is short. And yes, I got you an autograph.”

  She squealed again, so loud I had to pull the phone away from my ear. “I can’t believe you got to meet Shelly Monroe. I am so jealous.”

  “Well, next time I go, I’ll get you backstage so you can meet her too.”

  “I am going to hold you to that, Iris Ballard.”

  I smiled to myself. “How’s Gus?”

  Yeah, I missed the big lug. I adopted him after the Meriwether attack for protection but spent most of the time protecting him from the various creatures who inhabited the woods behind my house, mainly squirrels and the stray cats I feed. Yet when Shepherd broke into my house, Gus stepped up, biting that maniac’s leg, and getting shot in the process. But my Gus wouldn’t let a little thing like losing a leg stop him. After a few weeks he was running around, galloping like a small pony, or at least that’s what the videos Carol sent me showed. She did tell me he milked his wounds for everything they were worth. When she’d skimp on the dog food, he’d begin whining and licking his stump until she acquiesced. So I now owned a 120-pound, three-legged dog with no shame. It wasn’t exactly what the breeder advertised in the brochure.

  “Hungry.”

  “Glad to know he misses me,” I chuckled.

  “Of course he misses you. We all miss you. When you comin’ home?”

  “Soon. Probably the day after tomorrow. I’m gonna rent a car, drive back down. Spend the night in D.C.”

  “Spend the night in D.C., huh?” she asked with an air of mischief. “Are you plannin’ on seein’ a certain hunky federal agent while you’re there?”

  Two months before, if I’d even mentioned the name Luke Hudson to Carol she’d sneer and roll her eyes, but after his encounter with Shepherd she practically had a hot flash. I was sure it had something to do with the fact that he almost died saving my life. That would have certainly done it. Okay, I was blushing again. Just the thought of going on a date with him made me blush.

  “Actually, that’s why I’m calling,” I admitted. “I just got off the phone with him and…” I couldn’t say it.

  “And what?” she asked impatiently. �
��Did you two get into another fight?”

  “No! Nothing like that. In fact, he…” I just couldn’t say it.

  “Girl, spit it out!”

  “He asked me out to dinner and the symphony, and I said yes,” I blurted out.

  There was that squeal again. “Y’all are going on a date! About damn time.”

  “It’s not a date,” I clarified. “It’s a…it’s a date?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, do you want it to be?” she asked.

  That was the question. Did I want Luke? The question made my stomach lurch. “I don’t know,” I replied in a hollow voice. “I mean, he’s my best friend. We have such…history. I…” I sighed. “I don’t know if I’m ready to be in a relationship with anyone, let alone Luke Hudson.”

  “Hon,” she said sympathetically, “it’s been over two years since Hayden died. That’s long enough to put your life on hold. He’d want you to move on. Be happy.”

  “With the man I cheated on him with? Even Hayden had his limits.” I looked down with a frown. “I still miss him, you know.”

  “I know. He’d be so proud of you.”

  “I hope so.”

  “As for the date thing, just…go with the flow. If it’s right, it’s right. You’ll know.”

  “You’re such a romantic.”

  “I know, but I ain’t wrong.” She pauses. “Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you. Your mother called.”

  My eyes narrowed. “My mother?”

  “Yeah. Not ten minutes ago. She was looking for ya. Said it was real important, and she didn’t have your new number.”

  That couldn’t be good. My mother never called me, except on holidays and my birthday, and even then the conversations never lasted more than a few minutes. “Okay, thanks, Carol.”

  “Hope everything’s all right. She sounded mighty upset.”

  “I’m sure everything’s fine. I’ll see you in a couple days, okay?”

  “Yeah. Or longer. Just go with the flow.”

  “Not funny,” I said sternly. “Hug your son and Gus for me. Bye.”

  I hung up the phone, but after a long sigh, I called my mother. She picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mom, it’s Iris.”

  “Oh, my good Lord, Iris!” she said breathlessly, sounding utterly relieved, as if I’d just told her the tumor was benign. “Thank you, God! I’ve been trying to reach you all day! Nobody had your number!”

  “Yeah, I had to get a new phone. I forgot to send you the new number. Sorry. So, what’s up?”

  “Oh, Iris, I…” She began to weep softly. “I’m so glad you called. I can’t, I—” She started really sobbing. I sat straight up as if someone had just stuck a rod up my ass. She hadn’t cried like that since she sat by my bedside and told me my husband was dead.

  “Mom, what is it?” I practically shouted. “What’s the matter?” She couldn’t stop crying long enough to form words. My anxiety grew with each sob. “Mommy, what is it?” I asked desperately. “What’s the matter?”

  “It-It’s your brother. Billy,” she finally managed to say after a few deep breaths. “You need to come home. Come home, baby. Right now.”

  Chapter 2

  Things I’d rather have been doing than returning to Grey Mills: being spread-eagle in the stirrups at the gynecologist. Standing in line at the DMV behind a farting man for eight hours. Running through a minefield swarmed by bees. Any of those would have been better than having to spend even one hour in Grey Mills, Pennsylvania. You can’t go home? Goddamn, how I wished that were true as I drove to my hometown hellhole.

  And the weather agreed it was hell. Even in the Northeast the humidity and almost 90-degree temperatures were unbearable. Below freezing cold in the winter, hellish in the summer. God, I hated Grey Mills.

  I should have been getting ready for my not-a-date with Luke, not driving to America’s armpit. I had a book to write. A dog to make up for weeks of neglect with. I wanted to go home. I wanted to listen to Handel with a gorgeous man by my side. If Billy wasn’t in trouble, he sure as hell would be when I got there.

  After I got Mom calmed down enough to form complete sentences, she filled me in on what fresh hell my twin brother had gotten himself into. According to my mother, my brother had joined a cult—although with her as the messenger that could have meant he’d really just joined a book club or went on a golf retreat. My mom was always overprotective when it came to Billy. She’d learned her lesson about worrying about me when I was twelve and single-handedly fought off some pervert, breaking his nose and one of his testicles. That and anytime she tried to coddle me, I’d roll my eyes or physically brush her off. I’d always been the independent type. My twin brother, not so much.

  I loved my brother, I truly did, but we were as different as salt and pepper. Where I was driven, he was lackadaisical. I wouldn’t trust a nun, but Billy would let people he’d known for a month move into his apartment. The little blips in life knocked him for a loop, where only death and taxes fully demolished my reserve. He was sensitive and loving, and I was proud of my ice-queen reputation. It was almost as if we didn’t come from the same gene pool, forget being twins. Or I just took after our sperm donor. God, perish the thought. I’d killed two men and even I wasn’t as big an asshole as he was.

  The sign to Grey Mills welcomed me, or it would have if the town council had ever bothered to paint it since 1917. Apparently Grey Mills hadn’t always been a shithole. The Grey family settled the town in 1809 and immediately began leveling thousands of acres of forest at their lumber mill. The family owned fifty square miles of land, and when the trees were cleared, they made a second profit selling off parcels of land. Without the Greys there wouldn’t have been the surrounding towns of Dunlop, Petersen, or Niagaraville, with Grey Mills being the epicenter of the county.

  The Greys weren’t done after becoming land barons. When the lumber and land ran out, they had the wherewithal to venture into the steel business. The Civil War broke out and the Greys became the modern equivalent of billionaires. But those were the halcyon days. Donald Grey lost most of the family fortune in the 1929 crash and had to sell his interest in the mill to the Keyes family of Pittsburgh. The mill and the town barely survived until World War II, and then came the seventies and eighties and the steel crash. The Greys cashed out their greater share and the mill soon shut down, taking all the jobs with it. That was the Grey Mills I grew up in. It went from twenty thousand to two thousand residents, with most of the commercial downtown area nothing but empty storefronts. Only the liquor store and Starbucks made any profit. If not for the Walmart and Target in neighboring towns, everyone would have starved.

  Yet the Grey family hadn’t been touched. They invested in real estate in Philadelphia and I heard weathered the 2008 recession well enough. They managed to keep Grey Manor, their ten-room mansion on a small hill, the very house Billy and I were conceived in. It was a story as old as time. The naive seventeen-year-old virgin maid catches the eye of the thirty-year-old married cad. Girl gets herself pregnant to trap him, but instead finds herself jobless and called a slut by just about everyone in town. Billy cried when we found out bastard wasn’t a term of endearment.

  Yes, I was so looking forward to spending a few days there. The basement with Shepherd was preferable.

  When I pulled into Meadowland Lane I was shocked by how much it, like the rest of the town, had deteriorated since I’d last been there. The recession hit the town hard, and it was already an eighty-pound weakling before. A handful of houses were boarded up or crumbling from years of abandonment and neglect. Not even foreclosure hunters wanted them. Only one or two had For Sale signs and looked empty, but there were pockets of life here and there. One such pocket belonged to Jay and Edie Ballard, my grandparents, and Faye and Khairo Lange, my mother and stepfather. Mom and Khairo bought the house next door to my childhood home in a foreclosure sale. She had a decent living as a maid in
a hotel and he as an orderly at a local retirement home, I guess making enough to scrape by.

  They were the lucky ones.

  I pulled into the driveway of my grandparents’ home and shut off the engine of my rented Ford Focus with a long sigh. Two days, I thought. Forty-eight hours. You can survive that long. You can. Not that I could change my mind about staying if I’d wanted to. My grandfather must have been watching through the window for my arrival because the moment I finished sighing, he walked out the front door. He was still spry for a man in his seventies. He’d been completely bald as long as I could remember, with a stark white goatee. He’d also always walked with a slight limp, the result of losing a foot in an accident at the mill way before I was born. It never slowed him down, not for a moment.

  Let’s do this.

  I climbed out of the car and was immediately treated to a bear hug from Grandpa. “Hello, Smarty Pants,” he said as the smell of sandalwood instantly made me feel at home.

  I hugged him back just as tight. “Old man.”

  He released me and looked me up and down. “You look good, Smarts. Real good. A shit sight better than when I last saw you. Finally got some meat back on those bones.”

  I absolutely inherited my bluntness from my grandfather. “People keep taking me out to dinner. I’ve gained ten pounds.”

  “You’re going to gain ten more staying here. Edie’s already made a whole plate of cookies and is working on lunch now. Chicken potpie for lunch, then ribs tonight.”

  “She doesn’t have to do that,” I said.

  “Of course she does. Our celebrity granddaughter’s home! Plus we’re your grandparents. It’s our job to spoil you.”

  I walked to the trunk and retrieved my enormous suitcases. Five weeks on the road required a lot of clothes. Grandpa knew better than to offer his help. I’d been refusing it since I could talk. “Well, I insist on paying for groceries from here on out. It’s the least I can do for letting me stay here on such short notice.”

  We started walking toward the ranch-style brick house. “Not going to say no, Smarts. It’ll be the first time we’ve had a millionaire sleeping in the spare room.”