Mad River Road Read online

  “I guess I just need a little time,” Jamie said, her voice a plea.

  “Sure. We got time.” He grinned. “At least until tonight.”

  Jamie’s stomach lurched at the implications of that sentence.

  “You okay?” Brad asked.

  “Do you think we can stop soon? I could use some water.”

  “There’s some Coke in the back seat. I bought some when we stopped for gas.”

  “I’d really prefer water.”

  “Maybe later.”

  Jamie closed her eyes, tried counting to ten, and when that failed to calm her, to twenty. “Think we could listen to some music?” she asked when she felt more calm. Somewhere along the way, he’d turned off the radio. At the time, she’d welcomed the silence. Now it felt oppressive. As if she was expected to fill it.

  Brad pushed a button and the radio sprang to life, the upbeat twang of Shania Twain filling the car. Jamie hummed along, pretending to be engrossed in the insipid lyrics. “Up, up, up,” Shania was singing.

  “That’s not her real name, you know,” Brad said.

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. Her real name’s Eileen, if you can believe it. She comes from some little town in northern Ontario. Her parents were killed in a car crash, and she raised all her brothers and sisters by herself.”

  Jamie nodded. The story sounded vaguely familiar. “People magazine?”

  “Entertainment Tonight.”

  “You watch a lot of TV?”

  “Some. You?”

  “More than I should.”

  “Says who? Your mother and sister?”

  “I don’t remember my mother ever watching television. My sister claims she never watches anything but PBS.”

  “She’s a liar.”

  “I don’t think so. She’s a lawyer and—”

  “What? Lawyers never lie?”

  “I just meant that between her practice and her family, I don’t think she has a lot of time for TV, so she’s very picky about what she does watch.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Jamie shrugged. She never thought she’d find herself in the position of having to defend her sister. Or wanting to.

  “What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?” Brad asked, already smiling at the punch line to follow.

  Jamie shook her head. She didn’t know. She didn’t care.

  “A start.” Brad laughed.

  She wondered if her sister had heard that one. Cynthia hated lawyer jokes. She claimed they were no better than racist slurs. “My sister says everybody hates lawyers until they need one.”

  “And then they hate them even more.” Brad took a deep breath. “Lying, scum-sucking bastards. Somebody should round them all up and shoot them.”

  Jamie gasped at the vehemence of his assertion.

  “Okay, we won’t shoot your sister,” he said, softening.

  She tried to smile. “You sound like you’ve had some bad experiences with lawyers.”

  “Everybody has bad experiences with lawyers.”

  “I think my sister is a very good one.”

  “Yeah? How would you know? You ever watched her in court?”

  “She doesn’t go to court. She’s not a litigator.” LITIG8R, Jamie thought, remembering the first day of their trip, how long ago that seemed now, her misplaced hope, her lost innocence.

  “What kind of law does she practice?”

  “Corporate-commercial mostly, tax law, stuff like that.”

  “Sounds like a lot of laughs.”

  “She seems to like it.”

  “She likes the money.”

  “Everybody likes money.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  The truth, Jamie thought. What did that mean? Had anything he’d said to her over the course of the last few days been the truth?

  Did you really sell your computer business for an outlandish profit? she wanted to ask. Did you even own a computer business? Are you really a designer of software? Were you really staying at the Breakers because the lease on your apartment was up?

  Do you really have an ex-wife and a young son in Ohio? What really happened after she fled Laura Dennison’s house?

  “Who’s Grace Hastings?” she asked, the question jumping the queue to fall from the tip of her tongue.

  “What?”

  “Grace Hastings,” Jamie repeated. “Who is she, Brad?” She spoke his name in a conscious effort to show that she was starting to relate to him again on a more personal level, that they were beginning to reconnect.

  It seemed to work. He smiled, patted her hand as Jamie tried not to flinch or pull away. “Nobody you have to worry about.”

  “You had her credit card.”

  “Yeah, a lot of good it did me.”

  “Still …”

  “Grace was a friend of Beth’s.”

  “Beth?”

  “My ex.”

  “Oh, right.” Jamie paused. Less than twenty-four hours ago, she’d considered Beth Fisher both the luckiest and stupidest woman on earth. Lucky for having been married to Brad, stupid for having left him. As for the title Stupidest Woman on Earth—it was all hers now. “What does she look like?”

  Brad yawned, as if the topic were of little or no concern. “She’s pretty enough, I guess. What difference does it make?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what they say about curiosity.”

  “Just that I have these opposing pictures in my mind.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “One is tall, blond, kind of ethereal.”

  “Ethereal? What’s that?”

  “Extremely delicate, kind of angelic.”

  Brad shook his head. “Delicate, huh? Angelic?” He laughed derisively. “And the other picture?”

  “She’s shorter, darker, stronger.”

  “Guess she’s a bit of both,” Brad said, and laughed again.

  “And your son?” Did he even have a son? she wondered.

  “What about him?”

  “I forget what you told me his name is,” Jamie lied.

  “His name’s Corey,” Brad said as his face went dark.

  So he did have a son, Jamie thought. He wasn’t lying about that.

  The song ended, Shania disappeared, and the DJ announced it was time for the news. There followed a story about the latest skirmish in Iraq and the most recent suicide bombing in Israel. A woman in Oklahoma had been awarded a substantial settlement against a local furniture store after she’d tripped over an unruly child and broken her leg while shopping for a new sofa, this despite the fact the unruly child was her own.

  “I should have had her lawyer,” Brad remarked.

  “Why did you need a lawyer?”

  “Still no answers in the brutal slaying of an Atlanta woman early this morning,” the announcer continued.

  Brad switched the channels.

  “Wait. What was that?” Please let there be a mistake, Jamie was thinking, her mind racing in several different directions at once. Please let me have misheard. Let the newscaster be talking about somebody else. Don’t let it be what I think it is.

  “Fresh crisis in the Middle East,” another announcer was saying.

  Again Brad changed the channel.

  “I’m Margaret Sokoloff and this is the four o’clock news.”

  Once more, the channel abruptly disappeared, to be replaced by another. “Police are still puzzling over the brutal murder of an Atlanta woman in the early hours of the morning,” a man intoned.

  “Leave it,” Jamie urged as Brad’s hand ran out of buttons to push.

  “Jamie—”

  “Leave it.”

  Brad shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

  “The body of Laura Dennison, age fifty-seven, was discovered by her son, Mark Dennison, at eight o’clock this morning when he stopped by for breakfast on his way to work.”

  Jamie felt her body go instantly numb. Please God, thi
s wasn’t happening.

  “The Buckhead resident had been beaten to death. Police say they are currently without suspects in the vicious slaying and are refusing to speculate—”

  The sound of Jamie’s ragged breathing filled the car as Brad snapped off the radio. “Now don’t start getting all upset.”

  “You killed her,” Jamie whispered as the scenery began spinning around her.

  “Hey, she had it coming, after all the mean things she did to you.”

  “You killed her.”

  “It was an accident, Jamie.”

  “An accident?”

  “I was just trying to protect you.”

  “Protect me?”

  “She recognized you, Jamie. I tried to reason with her. I tried to tell her I’d never heard of anybody named Jamie, but she just laughed in my face. I tried to explain that we only wanted what was rightfully yours, and that’s when she started screaming, said she was going to call the police, said she was going to see you rot in jail for the rest of your life. And I couldn’t let that happen. So I hit her. But the old bitch kept on screaming. So I had to keep hitting her until she stopped.”

  “You told me you were able to persuade her.…”

  “You were freaking out. What else was I supposed to tell you? You didn’t really believe any of that crap. I know you didn’t.”

  He was right, Jamie realized, the revelation rendering her mute. She’d known the truth all along. What other truth could there be?

  “I did it for you, Jamie-girl.”

  Jamie pressed her forehead against the car’s side window. She closed her eyes and prayed for oblivion.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Lily sat at her kitchen table, pen poised over a blank sheet of paper, trying to corral the series of random thoughts that were circling her brain like a bunch of noisy insects, to give them structure and direction, infuse them with something approaching drama. Except how much drama could she create out of a Sunday afternoon spent chaperoning two five-year-old boys at the movies? Unless she was a deranged, sexually repressed babysitter and one of the boys an alien spawn or a precocious serial killer. And hadn’t those ideas been done already?

  Not that it mattered. Give a hundred writers the same idea and you’ll get a hundred different stories, she recalled one of her creative writing teachers saying. So while a good idea was always an asset, what was even more important was what one did with it. And right now, unfortunately, she wasn’t doing much of anything.

  Stick to what you know, she thought. “Well, I know sexual repression, that’s for sure.” Or at the very least, sexual frustration, she silently amended, wondering how long it had been since she’d had sex. Who was she kidding? she thought impatiently. She knew exactly how long it had been. Her mind raced back to that March night almost fourteen months ago, and she jumped to her feet, refusing to think of it further. She went to the sink and poured herself a glass of cold water, although she wasn’t thirsty, and stared out the back window at the darkening sky. It was almost eight o’clock. The days were definitely getting longer. Time was moving so quickly. Summer would be here before she knew it. And then fall. And then another winter. Another March. How much more time could she afford to waste? “At some point I have to get on with my life,” she announced to the surrounding silence. “Get moving,” she said. “Get laid.” She wondered what Jeff Dawson was doing, wondered what he’d look like naked. “Oh, please,” she groused, gulping down her water, as if to douse whatever fires might be smoldering inside her, then returned to her seat at the kitchen table. She regripped her pen, tighter than required, so that the nail from her index finger was digging uncomfortably into the side of her middle finger. She thought for several seconds, then scribbled down a few words, underlining them with exaggerated care.

  Moving On

  By Lily Rogers

  “So far, so good.” She looked to the ceiling. “Now what?”

  I should probably check on Michael, she decided, half out of her chair before she reminded herself she’d looked in on him less than ten minutes before. He was sound asleep, exhausted from his busy day. She glanced at her watch, noting barely a minute had passed since her last peek. She could watch TV, she thought. Or read. Or phone Jeff Dawson, tell him again how much she’d enjoyed their evening together, maybe suggest he might like to drop over for a cup of coffee. Naked. “Oh, for God’s sake. Get a grip.”

  Moving On

  By Lily Rogers

  It suddenly occurred to Nancy Firestone as she was walking her young son home from school that three of the men she’d slept with in the last five years were dead.

  “Oh, my,” Lily said, staring at the piece of paper. Where had that come from?

  She was supposed to be writing about what she knew, and the truth was she’d only been with one man in the last five years.

  One had died of a heart attack, one had succumbed to a brain tumor, and the third had driven his motorcycle into a massive, and massively unforgiving, trunk of a tree.

  “Oh, that’s great. Just great.” Lily ripped the paper from its pad and tore it into half a dozen pieces, crumpling the pieces in her fists before throwing them to the floor. What had she just decided about moving on? She started again.

  Moving On

  By Lily Rogers

  It suddenly occurred to Nancy Firestone as she was walking her daughter home from school that three of the men she’d slept with in the last five years were dead. One had been hit by a car as he was crossing a busy intersection, one had been felled by a sudden heart attack, and the third had been shot in the head by person or persons unknown.

  “That’s better.” If she wasn’t going to stick with what she knew, she might as well go all out. Except, where exactly was she supposed to go now? “I should describe her.”

  At five feet ten and a half inches, Nancy Firestone was taller than she should have been, considering neither of her parents stood taller than five and a half feet. Her nose was long, her lips full, her hair a shade too black for her pale complexion. But by far her most outstanding feature was her eyes, which were big and blue and always seemed to know more than they were letting on. Her eyes were full of secrets, a man had once whispered in her ear, and Nancy had thrown her head back and laughed out loud.

  Lily lowered her pen to the table, wondering at what point Nancy Firestone had morphed into Emma Frost. And what had Dylan meant this afternoon when he said his mother had been named after Rachel’s baby on Friends?

  “You mean they have the same name,” she’d corrected absently as the lights in the movie theater grew dim. She’d watched Dylan dig his little fist into his large bag of buttered popcorn, scattering almost half the popcorn into her lap in the process.

  “No,” he’d insisted, scrambling to scoop up the errant kernels, shoveling one handful of popcorn after another into his mouth, as if he were afraid she might snatch the whole bag away from him without warning. “She had another name before, except I’m not supposed to tell anybody that.”

  He’d then gone on to state that Dylan wasn’t his real name either, that it was the name of some kid who lived in Beverly Hills, and he didn’t like it, so his mother had promised he could choose his own name next time. Except he wasn’t supposed to tell anybody that either. Lily had smiled and assured him his secret was safe with her.

  Lily shook her head in grudging admiration. She could use some of Dylan’s overactive imagination right about now.

  He was such a strange little boy, she decided. Silent and wary one minute, voluble and open the next. Fearless in so many ways, and yet afraid of his own shadow. He blew hot and cold, as her mother used to say. Rather like Emma in that regard, Lily thought. You never quite knew what either of them was thinking or where you stood. Like tonight, when she’d brought Dylan home. Emma had been polite but distant, looking through her instead of at her, barely acknowledging Lily’s compliment about her hair, the unmistakable odor of freshly smoked cigarettes clinging to her pretty, peach cardigan like adh
esive tape. “That’s a pretty sweater,” Lily said, trying again. “Is it new?”

  “No, of course not,” came Emma’s sharp response, when a simple no would have sufficed.

  “You stink!” Dylan had suddenly shouted, bursting into tears and accusing his mother of reneging on her promise to quit smoking.

  Emma had insisted she reeked of tobacco only because she’d had coffee with an old friend who “smoked like a chimney.”

  “What old friend?” Dylan asked, although his question went unanswered, even after he asked it a second time.

  Two angry, red circles had materialized on Emma’s cheeks, and she’d hurriedly thanked Lily for showing her son such a good time. Then she’d effectively showed Lily the door. “Thanks again,” she’d said as the screen door closed in Lily’s face.

  What was that all about? Lily wondered now, trying not to make too much of it. After all, Emma had always been more than a little aloof. It wasn’t until the mix-up with the mail that she’d deigned to acknowledge Lily with more than the occasional wave. Still, Lily had hoped they were on the road to becoming friends. Had something happened today to make Emma change her mind?

  “Okay,” Lily said, turning her attention back to her writing and picking up her pen, flipping to a new, blank page. “How about we try something a little different?”

  Moving On

  By Lily Rogers

  It had been almost two years since Nancy Firestone had sex.

  Uh-oh.

  The last time had been, as the saying went, nasty, brutish, and short. A fitting end to a marriage that had been an ill fit from the start.

  Lily stared at the sentences she’d just written, her breath freezing in her lungs. What was she doing? She tore the page from the pad in one determined swipe, squishing the offending words into a tight ball before hurling the paper across the room, where it bounced toward the previous reject. What the hell was she doing?

  She regripped her pen, began scribbling furiously on the next page.

  Moving On

  By Lily Rogers