Homecoming, page 2
“Yep. It’s going to be loads of good times, I’m sure. See you around. Good luck with your quest.”
“Oh, I’m starting to think I’m going to need more than luck.”
They parted ways on the sidewalk, heading in different directions. Chase had extended an invitation to Charlie to join him, his brother Jason, and their friend Ethan Moore on several occasions, for dinner or poker night or the like. Because of his heavy workload, Charlie hadn’t yet been able to accept. As soon as he could, he intended to change that.
When he moved back to town, he’d needed a good attorney to take care of some personal things, as well as the odd business situation that would inevitably arise from time to time. Chase’s office had handled the closing when Charlie bought his house, and when they’d seen each other’s familiar face, they’d struck up a conversation. Any tension that had existed between them during high school was long gone, erased by the passage of time, aided by maturity.
He hadn’t gotten along with Chase back then, mostly because Charlie had had too big of a chip on his own shoulder. As Chase was the son of a much-loved town doctor and Charlie the son of the town drunk, they’d not exactly been on a level playing field, or at least not in Charlie’s mind.
But all that was in the past, and Charlie was looking forward to seeing if a friendship developed between them.
When he reached the front door of the Lighthouse, a pretty brunette and a blonde were coming out. He rushed to hold the door for them.
“Thank you,” the blonde said with a smile.
Charlie nodded, his smile widening as he took in her friend. He’d seen the blonde around town, but the brunette… he didn’t remember having seen her, and he certainly would have. He unabashedly watched her walk to her car, raising his coffee in a salute when she glanced back. He knew he’d never seen her before, but for some reason, she seemed familiar.
With a distracted shrug, he headed inside. If luck was on his side, he’d see her again when he had more time, and maybe they’d strike up a conversation. As much as he was interested in meeting Lauren, he wouldn’t ignore the universe if it placed a pretty, intriguing woman in his path. If he was meant to fall in love with a random stranger, it would happen. And if he was meant to spend forever with Lauren Grant… the powers that be would see that it occurred.
“I’m just as likely to end up a curmudgeonly old fart running the neighborhood kids off his lawn,” he muttered. But he hoped that wouldn’t be the case. Charlie wasn’t ashamed to admit that he wanted to settle down and build a family. He was tired of being alone, and a man could do worse than to find someone to love him until the day he died.
“Rita, who were those two ladies who just left?” he asked as he stopped at the hostess stand.
She looked up from where she’d been cleaning the seating chart. “Hmmm? Oh, you mean Beth and Lauren? They were here for the LBL meeting.”
Realization dawned and incredulity followed. He laughed. “LBL—Ladies Business League. And that would mean Lauren is Molly and Win’s daughter, right?”
“Yes. And Beth is our waitress Joely’s sister. Why? Is that important?” Rita frowned.
“No, just interesting, that’s all. Everything shaping up well enough today?”
They chatted for a minute about the day’s expectations. Before talk could turn more personal, he made an excuse to leave.
Joely Hudson caught up to him at the swinging doors. “You looked like a man trapped between a bear and a mountain lion just then.”
He leveled a stern look on the young woman, which went completely without effect. “Sounds like I just missed meeting your sister.”
“Um, yeah. And Lauren.” She grinned at him. “Chase mentioned you two were like ships in the night.”
“Don’t you have a table to bus or something?” He gently ruffled her hair.
Of all the people he worked with at the Lighthouse, Joely was one of his favorites. She was vivacious without being vapid, sassy without being mean, and he’d hate to see her go at the end of the week. But she was only part of the family temporarily, like him, having stepped in to help out a friend.
By the time he made it to the office, he had half a dozen tasks to handle, all of which were urgent and required immediate attention. But as he sat down with a sigh behind Sonny’s desk, he couldn’t help but think about Lauren.
He knew from seeing her pictures at Molly and Win’s that she was pretty. In most of them, she had long brown hair and a bright smile, the same smile she’d passed on to her daughter. But the pictures in no way conveyed the sense of life and vitality that surrounded her. Too, she’d gotten her hair cut at some point, as it now brushed the tops of her shoulders. It was a rich brown, sparkling with red and blond highlights, the kind of hair that tempted a man to run his fingers through it.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Clark,” he muttered as he sorted through the pile of messages, prioritizing them. “You’ve got a long way to go before you start thinking about those kinds of things.”
At the same time, it never hurt to have goals, and romancing the neighbor’s daughter was looking more and more like a worthy endeavor to pursue.
Chapter 3
“You have an admirer,” Beth said as they walked to their vehicles.
Lauren Taylor Grant gave a startled laugh. “Excuse me?”
“The cute guy who held the door for us. He’s watching us walk away.”
“He is not. Not me, anyhow.” Lauren quickly looked over her shoulder, mortified when he acknowledged her. “Oh, my God. He is.”
Beth snorted. “Told you, and his face didn’t light up like a kid at Christmas when he saw me. That was all for you. You should go for it.”
Mouth open with disbelief, all Lauren could do was scoff. “You know I don’t date.”
“I know you won’t date, and I understand why, at least on some level.” Beth’s voice wasn’t harsh, but neither did she pull her punches. “I also think it’s a damned, crying shame. I know, I know, I’ll mark the curse down and write an IOU to my mother’s swear jar.”
Lauren unlocked her car and tossed her bag inside. “It’s just that dating is such a hassle. Why bother when I know it won’t go anywhere?”
“Now that’s pathetic. You bother because it’s fun to dress up, to meet new people, and maybe when you’re least expecting it, it will go somewhere. If you won’t consider the cutie, at least agree to go out with Annie’s cousin on Friday night. She and I will be there with our dates, and it’s as safe a net as you could possibly have.”
Annie Tucker was the third point in the triangle made up by Lauren and Beth. The three of them had gone to high school together. While they’d been friendly then, it wasn’t until Lauren moved back to Leroy following her divorce five years earlier that their friendship had been cemented by blood, sweat, and tears.
Knowing she didn’t have a single excuse that wouldn’t sound, as Beth had said, pathetic, Lauren gave in. “Fine. I’ll text her and let her know.”
“Awesome! Oh, I’m so excited. You know the three of us will have fun, and we can torment Jason too, which is always good for kicks and giggles.” Annie’s date for the evening would be Beth’s brother, Jason. “I guess I’d better go do some work. I’m on the phones today, and I’m sure it’s going to be a madhouse.”
Lauren laughed. “Isn’t it always when you’re on call?” Beth was a reporter with the local paper, the Olman County Journal.
The pretty blonde made a face. “Oh, yes. It’s either madhouse crazy or bore-me-to-tears slow. There’s never any in-between. Talk to you soon. Don’t even think about chickening out, you hear me?” She waved as she got in her SUV.
As Lauren started her car and got the air going, she sighed. “Why do I feel like I just signed my life away? She’s right, you know. It’s just a date.”
She closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the rest. She was in no hurry to rush back to The Brown Bag, though she didn’t want to tarry too long. But it was nice to be able to sit for a few minutes and catch her breath. As a single mom, alone time wasn’t something she got very often.
Right now, her daughter, Ava, the light of her life and the reason she got up in the morning, was with her father, David, and his second wife, Josie, over in New Albany, a ninety-minute drive from Leroy. He’d stayed in his hometown after they divorced, as he was established with the police department in the area. He was a good father and a good husband to Josie, from what Lauren could tell. They were expecting their first child together, and as odd as it seemed to people who didn’t know the situation, Lauren was happy for them. She and Josie had even become friends.
Their arrangement wouldn’t work for a lot of divorced couples, but it was one the three of them were comfortable with. After all, long before they’d been a romantic couple, she and David had been friends. They never should have gotten married or even become intimate, and once they’d realized the marriage had been a mistake, they’d decided to walk away before their friendship was irretrievably broken.
Their parting hadn’t been entirely peaceful as, not long after Ava was born, Lauren had made the painful discovery that David had had an affair with a coworker. But once they’d gotten a bit of time and distance between them, they’d agreed to take the higher road for the sake of their daughter, whom they both adored. From there, the friendship had eventually returned.
As it was only nine thirty, she decided to swing by the library before going to work. She had a couple of books to drop off and a few to pick up, but the trip would be a quick-ish in and out.
She was still shaking her head at herself a couple of minutes later when she parked in front of the recently remodeled building. Beth really had hit the nail on the head with her comments about Lauren’s lack of a social life. She knew it wasn’t as simple for Lauren as just going out with anyone who asked, but it didn’t have to be as complicated as Lauren had made it over the last couple of years either. She’d used the excuse of getting the business up and running to get out of dating, but now that The Brown Bag was thriving, almost running itself to some degree, that excuse no longer held water.
The other reason she hated dating, a reason she tried not to think of very often, was the incident that had changed her life forever. That terrible summer when she was sixteen, she’d lost contact with her two best friends due to circumstances she still didn’t fully understand, and it had left its mark on Lauren in many ways. Her ability to trust had been obliterated by the events of that summer, and she still hadn’t managed to get it back.
“You have a good life, you know,” she said as she went inside. But was it a complete life? Though she’d not admitted as much to anyone, she’d wondered lately if there wasn’t something more out there for her, if maybe she should start trying again. “So maybe it’s time you quit being a damned chicken and quit burying your head in the sand. ”
She knew that starting to date again would be the easy part. She didn’t doubt that if she made herself available, she’d have plenty of first dates to choose from. It was anything beyond that she didn’t seem to be any good at.
Regardless, it was time to try. She had to consider what example she was setting for Ava. She didn’t want the little girl to see her as a scared woman too afraid to reach past her own scars to search for happiness. While Lauren didn’t expect anything to come of this decision, she owed it to herself—and her daughter—to at least try.
“So text Annie and let her know you’re a go for the date. What’s the worst that can happen?”
After she’d finished her browsing, she checked out at the desk, chatting with Stella Moore, one of the librarians. As they were finishing up, electric fingers crawled up her spine and over her scalp. Lauren shuddered, glancing around.
“What’s wrong?” Stella asked.
“Nothing, I’m sure. My grandmother would say someone walked over my grave.” Lauren rubbed her arms. “Just the air conditioning or something, probably. I’ll see you around.”
“Of course. Say hi to your sweetie pie for me. When’s she back from her dad’s?”
“Saturday. It’s been nice having a quiet house, but I think after the first hour or two, I was ready to have her home.”
“I’ll bet you’ve caught up on your to-do list though,” the older woman said.
Lauren grinned. “That, my reading, and half my TV shows. Bye!”
Her smile faltered as she hurried to her car. Ordinarily, she loved spending time in the library but today, there’d been a malevolence within the friendly confines. She wasn’t sure what exactly had caused the weird feeling, but it was strong enough that it thoroughly creeped her out.
For all the world, she’d felt as though someone was watching her. She hadn’t seen anyone or anything that looked out of place, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had had their eyes on her.
Maybe it was because the events of the past were on her mind, but by the time she got to her car, the spot between her shoulder blades itched and the fine hairs on her arms were standing on end.
“Listen to your gut, girl. It’s there for a reason,” she muttered as she drove away, the prickly sensation fading as she got farther from the library. “It was probably an aberration or the AC, like I told Stella, but whatever caused that, I’m glad I left when I did. That was wholly unpleasant.”
By the time she got to The Brown Bag and parked behind the building, she felt normal again. Her phone rang, showing one of the café’s lines, as she stepped inside.
“Who’s calling me?” she asked the cook, Helga, as she sent the call to voice mail.
“Janet. The Lighthouse lost their main oven, and they need to borrow ours if they can.”
Lauren winced. “Ouch. Where is she?”
Helga nodded toward the dining room. “Gonna be a crazy day, boss lady.”
“In more ways than one.” Lauren pushed through the swinging doors.
Janet was beside the cash register, and Lauren whistled to catch her attention. As the hectic normalcy of the everyday chaos that came from running a restaurant descended, the incident at the library drifted to the back of her mind. She didn’t dismiss it fully, but there was no sense in dwelling on the weird feelings, not unless whatever had caused them made itself known. Right now, she had other things, tangible things, to deal with that took priority, and she was more than happy to let them.
Chapter 4
Troy Vernon moved through the library as though he had every right in the world to be there. All the while, he kept a close eye on the woman standing at the desk. It had been eleven years, but he’d recognized her as soon as she walked in.
He’d come in not because he liked to read but rather so he could access the Internet without anyone seeing what he was doing. After all, it didn’t pay to leave information lying around where his nosy wife or self-righteous mother could find it.
When his parents had decided to come back to Indiana a couple of months ago, he’d realized they might run into people who wouldn’t welcome them with open arms. Because of that, his mother avoided the Leroy area like the plague , preferring to stay closer to where they were calling home in neighboring Jefferson County.
But Troy had always possessed a reckless streak, and if he got bored—when he got bored—he liked to yank the tail of the dragon. That perverse nature had paid off in spades today with his sighting of Lauren. When he realized who she was, he’d followed her, staying back enough that she wouldn’t know he was there.
Peering casually around one of the bookshelves, he saw her leaving. Once the library lady had her back turned, he eased past, hoping he wasn’t too late to catch sight of his cousin’s car.
He knew she owned a place in town, a bakery or some such thing. He’d done his homework and looked her up the first chance he’d gotten once they were back in Indiana. A man who didn’t do his homework was all too often a man who ended up in jail. Troy had learned that lesson the hard way.
He’d also looked up her parents, the goody two-shoes pricks who’d helped ruin his father’s life. He’d been disappointed to see that Win and Molly Taylor were both still living, going about their lives happily.
“You fuckers never give us a thought, I’ll bet,” he muttered as he edged up to the library’s glass double doors and looked out. He was close enough to the parking lot that he could easily make out Lauren behind the wheel of a crossover SUV that was pulling out. When he saw that the rear windshield was empty of any stickers, he hissed out a breath. “Shit. No handy little stick family to tell me how big of a risk you’ll be to hassle. Eh. That just makes the game more fun.”
He’d long since decided to toy with Lauren as much as he could. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do with his time. He was a wanted man back in Georgia, and as he’d yet to make the acquaintance of anyone who could provide him with a fake ID, the only jobs he could find in Indiana were ones that paid under the table. Most of those were taken by illegals, so that left Troy with a lot of time on his hands.
“Never a good thing,” he said as he walked to the little gray car that belonged to his wife. “Nope, it’s never smart to let a man like me get bored. All kinds of shit happens.”
For now, he’d go pick up his wife, who was at the clinic for a pregnancy checkup. She was five months along with their second kid, who would no doubt be another whiny brat Troy had no interest in raising. But when he’d gotten fifteen-year-old Iris pregnant three years earlier, his options had been either the wrong end of a shotgun or saying “I do” in front of a preacher. He’d decided married life wasn’t such a bad choice to have to make.
Her daddy didn’t give a damn what happened to her after he’d “made an honest woman of her,” so Troy could pretty well do whatever he wanted and no one would say a thing, least of all Iris. Her father had just wanted her off his own plate and maybe to use Troy to punish Iris’s mother a bit in the process. They were divorced, and the woman hated Troy’s guts. Iris’s father, Junior, wasn’t above using his daughter to get revenge.
“Oh, I’m starting to think I’m going to need more than luck.”
They parted ways on the sidewalk, heading in different directions. Chase had extended an invitation to Charlie to join him, his brother Jason, and their friend Ethan Moore on several occasions, for dinner or poker night or the like. Because of his heavy workload, Charlie hadn’t yet been able to accept. As soon as he could, he intended to change that.
When he moved back to town, he’d needed a good attorney to take care of some personal things, as well as the odd business situation that would inevitably arise from time to time. Chase’s office had handled the closing when Charlie bought his house, and when they’d seen each other’s familiar face, they’d struck up a conversation. Any tension that had existed between them during high school was long gone, erased by the passage of time, aided by maturity.
He hadn’t gotten along with Chase back then, mostly because Charlie had had too big of a chip on his own shoulder. As Chase was the son of a much-loved town doctor and Charlie the son of the town drunk, they’d not exactly been on a level playing field, or at least not in Charlie’s mind.
But all that was in the past, and Charlie was looking forward to seeing if a friendship developed between them.
When he reached the front door of the Lighthouse, a pretty brunette and a blonde were coming out. He rushed to hold the door for them.
“Thank you,” the blonde said with a smile.
Charlie nodded, his smile widening as he took in her friend. He’d seen the blonde around town, but the brunette… he didn’t remember having seen her, and he certainly would have. He unabashedly watched her walk to her car, raising his coffee in a salute when she glanced back. He knew he’d never seen her before, but for some reason, she seemed familiar.
With a distracted shrug, he headed inside. If luck was on his side, he’d see her again when he had more time, and maybe they’d strike up a conversation. As much as he was interested in meeting Lauren, he wouldn’t ignore the universe if it placed a pretty, intriguing woman in his path. If he was meant to fall in love with a random stranger, it would happen. And if he was meant to spend forever with Lauren Grant… the powers that be would see that it occurred.
“I’m just as likely to end up a curmudgeonly old fart running the neighborhood kids off his lawn,” he muttered. But he hoped that wouldn’t be the case. Charlie wasn’t ashamed to admit that he wanted to settle down and build a family. He was tired of being alone, and a man could do worse than to find someone to love him until the day he died.
“Rita, who were those two ladies who just left?” he asked as he stopped at the hostess stand.
She looked up from where she’d been cleaning the seating chart. “Hmmm? Oh, you mean Beth and Lauren? They were here for the LBL meeting.”
Realization dawned and incredulity followed. He laughed. “LBL—Ladies Business League. And that would mean Lauren is Molly and Win’s daughter, right?”
“Yes. And Beth is our waitress Joely’s sister. Why? Is that important?” Rita frowned.
“No, just interesting, that’s all. Everything shaping up well enough today?”
They chatted for a minute about the day’s expectations. Before talk could turn more personal, he made an excuse to leave.
Joely Hudson caught up to him at the swinging doors. “You looked like a man trapped between a bear and a mountain lion just then.”
He leveled a stern look on the young woman, which went completely without effect. “Sounds like I just missed meeting your sister.”
“Um, yeah. And Lauren.” She grinned at him. “Chase mentioned you two were like ships in the night.”
“Don’t you have a table to bus or something?” He gently ruffled her hair.
Of all the people he worked with at the Lighthouse, Joely was one of his favorites. She was vivacious without being vapid, sassy without being mean, and he’d hate to see her go at the end of the week. But she was only part of the family temporarily, like him, having stepped in to help out a friend.
By the time he made it to the office, he had half a dozen tasks to handle, all of which were urgent and required immediate attention. But as he sat down with a sigh behind Sonny’s desk, he couldn’t help but think about Lauren.
He knew from seeing her pictures at Molly and Win’s that she was pretty. In most of them, she had long brown hair and a bright smile, the same smile she’d passed on to her daughter. But the pictures in no way conveyed the sense of life and vitality that surrounded her. Too, she’d gotten her hair cut at some point, as it now brushed the tops of her shoulders. It was a rich brown, sparkling with red and blond highlights, the kind of hair that tempted a man to run his fingers through it.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Clark,” he muttered as he sorted through the pile of messages, prioritizing them. “You’ve got a long way to go before you start thinking about those kinds of things.”
At the same time, it never hurt to have goals, and romancing the neighbor’s daughter was looking more and more like a worthy endeavor to pursue.
Chapter 3
“You have an admirer,” Beth said as they walked to their vehicles.
Lauren Taylor Grant gave a startled laugh. “Excuse me?”
“The cute guy who held the door for us. He’s watching us walk away.”
“He is not. Not me, anyhow.” Lauren quickly looked over her shoulder, mortified when he acknowledged her. “Oh, my God. He is.”
Beth snorted. “Told you, and his face didn’t light up like a kid at Christmas when he saw me. That was all for you. You should go for it.”
Mouth open with disbelief, all Lauren could do was scoff. “You know I don’t date.”
“I know you won’t date, and I understand why, at least on some level.” Beth’s voice wasn’t harsh, but neither did she pull her punches. “I also think it’s a damned, crying shame. I know, I know, I’ll mark the curse down and write an IOU to my mother’s swear jar.”
Lauren unlocked her car and tossed her bag inside. “It’s just that dating is such a hassle. Why bother when I know it won’t go anywhere?”
“Now that’s pathetic. You bother because it’s fun to dress up, to meet new people, and maybe when you’re least expecting it, it will go somewhere. If you won’t consider the cutie, at least agree to go out with Annie’s cousin on Friday night. She and I will be there with our dates, and it’s as safe a net as you could possibly have.”
Annie Tucker was the third point in the triangle made up by Lauren and Beth. The three of them had gone to high school together. While they’d been friendly then, it wasn’t until Lauren moved back to Leroy following her divorce five years earlier that their friendship had been cemented by blood, sweat, and tears.
Knowing she didn’t have a single excuse that wouldn’t sound, as Beth had said, pathetic, Lauren gave in. “Fine. I’ll text her and let her know.”
“Awesome! Oh, I’m so excited. You know the three of us will have fun, and we can torment Jason too, which is always good for kicks and giggles.” Annie’s date for the evening would be Beth’s brother, Jason. “I guess I’d better go do some work. I’m on the phones today, and I’m sure it’s going to be a madhouse.”
Lauren laughed. “Isn’t it always when you’re on call?” Beth was a reporter with the local paper, the Olman County Journal.
The pretty blonde made a face. “Oh, yes. It’s either madhouse crazy or bore-me-to-tears slow. There’s never any in-between. Talk to you soon. Don’t even think about chickening out, you hear me?” She waved as she got in her SUV.
As Lauren started her car and got the air going, she sighed. “Why do I feel like I just signed my life away? She’s right, you know. It’s just a date.”
She closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the rest. She was in no hurry to rush back to The Brown Bag, though she didn’t want to tarry too long. But it was nice to be able to sit for a few minutes and catch her breath. As a single mom, alone time wasn’t something she got very often.
Right now, her daughter, Ava, the light of her life and the reason she got up in the morning, was with her father, David, and his second wife, Josie, over in New Albany, a ninety-minute drive from Leroy. He’d stayed in his hometown after they divorced, as he was established with the police department in the area. He was a good father and a good husband to Josie, from what Lauren could tell. They were expecting their first child together, and as odd as it seemed to people who didn’t know the situation, Lauren was happy for them. She and Josie had even become friends.
Their arrangement wouldn’t work for a lot of divorced couples, but it was one the three of them were comfortable with. After all, long before they’d been a romantic couple, she and David had been friends. They never should have gotten married or even become intimate, and once they’d realized the marriage had been a mistake, they’d decided to walk away before their friendship was irretrievably broken.
Their parting hadn’t been entirely peaceful as, not long after Ava was born, Lauren had made the painful discovery that David had had an affair with a coworker. But once they’d gotten a bit of time and distance between them, they’d agreed to take the higher road for the sake of their daughter, whom they both adored. From there, the friendship had eventually returned.
As it was only nine thirty, she decided to swing by the library before going to work. She had a couple of books to drop off and a few to pick up, but the trip would be a quick-ish in and out.
She was still shaking her head at herself a couple of minutes later when she parked in front of the recently remodeled building. Beth really had hit the nail on the head with her comments about Lauren’s lack of a social life. She knew it wasn’t as simple for Lauren as just going out with anyone who asked, but it didn’t have to be as complicated as Lauren had made it over the last couple of years either. She’d used the excuse of getting the business up and running to get out of dating, but now that The Brown Bag was thriving, almost running itself to some degree, that excuse no longer held water.
The other reason she hated dating, a reason she tried not to think of very often, was the incident that had changed her life forever. That terrible summer when she was sixteen, she’d lost contact with her two best friends due to circumstances she still didn’t fully understand, and it had left its mark on Lauren in many ways. Her ability to trust had been obliterated by the events of that summer, and she still hadn’t managed to get it back.
“You have a good life, you know,” she said as she went inside. But was it a complete life? Though she’d not admitted as much to anyone, she’d wondered lately if there wasn’t something more out there for her, if maybe she should start trying again. “So maybe it’s time you quit being a damned chicken and quit burying your head in the sand. ”
She knew that starting to date again would be the easy part. She didn’t doubt that if she made herself available, she’d have plenty of first dates to choose from. It was anything beyond that she didn’t seem to be any good at.
Regardless, it was time to try. She had to consider what example she was setting for Ava. She didn’t want the little girl to see her as a scared woman too afraid to reach past her own scars to search for happiness. While Lauren didn’t expect anything to come of this decision, she owed it to herself—and her daughter—to at least try.
“So text Annie and let her know you’re a go for the date. What’s the worst that can happen?”
After she’d finished her browsing, she checked out at the desk, chatting with Stella Moore, one of the librarians. As they were finishing up, electric fingers crawled up her spine and over her scalp. Lauren shuddered, glancing around.
“What’s wrong?” Stella asked.
“Nothing, I’m sure. My grandmother would say someone walked over my grave.” Lauren rubbed her arms. “Just the air conditioning or something, probably. I’ll see you around.”
“Of course. Say hi to your sweetie pie for me. When’s she back from her dad’s?”
“Saturday. It’s been nice having a quiet house, but I think after the first hour or two, I was ready to have her home.”
“I’ll bet you’ve caught up on your to-do list though,” the older woman said.
Lauren grinned. “That, my reading, and half my TV shows. Bye!”
Her smile faltered as she hurried to her car. Ordinarily, she loved spending time in the library but today, there’d been a malevolence within the friendly confines. She wasn’t sure what exactly had caused the weird feeling, but it was strong enough that it thoroughly creeped her out.
For all the world, she’d felt as though someone was watching her. She hadn’t seen anyone or anything that looked out of place, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had had their eyes on her.
Maybe it was because the events of the past were on her mind, but by the time she got to her car, the spot between her shoulder blades itched and the fine hairs on her arms were standing on end.
“Listen to your gut, girl. It’s there for a reason,” she muttered as she drove away, the prickly sensation fading as she got farther from the library. “It was probably an aberration or the AC, like I told Stella, but whatever caused that, I’m glad I left when I did. That was wholly unpleasant.”
By the time she got to The Brown Bag and parked behind the building, she felt normal again. Her phone rang, showing one of the café’s lines, as she stepped inside.
“Who’s calling me?” she asked the cook, Helga, as she sent the call to voice mail.
“Janet. The Lighthouse lost their main oven, and they need to borrow ours if they can.”
Lauren winced. “Ouch. Where is she?”
Helga nodded toward the dining room. “Gonna be a crazy day, boss lady.”
“In more ways than one.” Lauren pushed through the swinging doors.
Janet was beside the cash register, and Lauren whistled to catch her attention. As the hectic normalcy of the everyday chaos that came from running a restaurant descended, the incident at the library drifted to the back of her mind. She didn’t dismiss it fully, but there was no sense in dwelling on the weird feelings, not unless whatever had caused them made itself known. Right now, she had other things, tangible things, to deal with that took priority, and she was more than happy to let them.
Chapter 4
Troy Vernon moved through the library as though he had every right in the world to be there. All the while, he kept a close eye on the woman standing at the desk. It had been eleven years, but he’d recognized her as soon as she walked in.
He’d come in not because he liked to read but rather so he could access the Internet without anyone seeing what he was doing. After all, it didn’t pay to leave information lying around where his nosy wife or self-righteous mother could find it.
When his parents had decided to come back to Indiana a couple of months ago, he’d realized they might run into people who wouldn’t welcome them with open arms. Because of that, his mother avoided the Leroy area like the plague , preferring to stay closer to where they were calling home in neighboring Jefferson County.
But Troy had always possessed a reckless streak, and if he got bored—when he got bored—he liked to yank the tail of the dragon. That perverse nature had paid off in spades today with his sighting of Lauren. When he realized who she was, he’d followed her, staying back enough that she wouldn’t know he was there.
Peering casually around one of the bookshelves, he saw her leaving. Once the library lady had her back turned, he eased past, hoping he wasn’t too late to catch sight of his cousin’s car.
He knew she owned a place in town, a bakery or some such thing. He’d done his homework and looked her up the first chance he’d gotten once they were back in Indiana. A man who didn’t do his homework was all too often a man who ended up in jail. Troy had learned that lesson the hard way.
He’d also looked up her parents, the goody two-shoes pricks who’d helped ruin his father’s life. He’d been disappointed to see that Win and Molly Taylor were both still living, going about their lives happily.
“You fuckers never give us a thought, I’ll bet,” he muttered as he edged up to the library’s glass double doors and looked out. He was close enough to the parking lot that he could easily make out Lauren behind the wheel of a crossover SUV that was pulling out. When he saw that the rear windshield was empty of any stickers, he hissed out a breath. “Shit. No handy little stick family to tell me how big of a risk you’ll be to hassle. Eh. That just makes the game more fun.”
He’d long since decided to toy with Lauren as much as he could. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do with his time. He was a wanted man back in Georgia, and as he’d yet to make the acquaintance of anyone who could provide him with a fake ID, the only jobs he could find in Indiana were ones that paid under the table. Most of those were taken by illegals, so that left Troy with a lot of time on his hands.
“Never a good thing,” he said as he walked to the little gray car that belonged to his wife. “Nope, it’s never smart to let a man like me get bored. All kinds of shit happens.”
For now, he’d go pick up his wife, who was at the clinic for a pregnancy checkup. She was five months along with their second kid, who would no doubt be another whiny brat Troy had no interest in raising. But when he’d gotten fifteen-year-old Iris pregnant three years earlier, his options had been either the wrong end of a shotgun or saying “I do” in front of a preacher. He’d decided married life wasn’t such a bad choice to have to make.
Her daddy didn’t give a damn what happened to her after he’d “made an honest woman of her,” so Troy could pretty well do whatever he wanted and no one would say a thing, least of all Iris. Her father had just wanted her off his own plate and maybe to use Troy to punish Iris’s mother a bit in the process. They were divorced, and the woman hated Troy’s guts. Iris’s father, Junior, wasn’t above using his daughter to get revenge.
