Amanda Stevens: Nighttime Guardian

“It’s August now. It’s been a long time, Nathan.”

“At least you remember me,” he said.

“Oh, I remember you all right.” She wasn’t likely to forget the kid who had dared her to meet him down by the river at midnight so they could watch for the Pearl River Monster together. Nor would she forget that he’d stood her up that night. If he’d been there to corroborate her story, Shelby never would have become such an object of ridicule.

At least that was the way she’d felt back then. But time had put that night in perspective. It hadn’t been Nathan’s fault that her imagination had conjured up a monster, or that, after the initial terror, she’d enjoyed the rush of attention. It hadn’t been his fault that maybe, just maybe, she’d embellished her memory of that night because the spotlight had somehow made her abandonment more bearable. She’d been dropped on her grandmother’s doorstep that summer by parents who didn’t want her. Didn’t love her. But for a while, everyone in Arcadia had adored her.

Then, of course, they’d turned on her.

But Nathan hadn’t. He’d broken his word to her that night, but he’d stood by her in the humiliating days afterward.

Hey, Shelby, seen any monsters lately?

Where’s your monster, Shelby?

You shut your face, Nathan would tell the smirking crowd of kids who gathered around Shelby. Before I shut it for you.

And then, inevitably, a fight would ensue. Nathan had been so scrawny, he’d almost always gotten his butt kicked, but he’d never once backed down.

Judging by his conversation with Dewayne Mill-sap, Nathan was still just as stubborn. But Shelby doubted he’d be the underdog in a skirmish nowadays. He looked strong, capable, almost formidable in the darkness as he stared down at her.

He’d turned out to be an attractive man, from what she could see. She wondered what he thought of her.

He grinned suddenly, as if reading her mind. “Look at you, all grown up.”

“I should hope so,” she said dryly. “I’m thirty years old.”

“Where did the time go?” he said softly.

“It…vanished.” Just like my monster.

He tipped his head slightly, gazing down at her. “I heard you were living out on the west coast. What brings you back here?”

“I came to help my grandmother,” Shelby said. “She broke her hip.”

“Yeah, I heard about that, too. Is she going to be okay?”

“The doctors think she’ll make a full recovery, but she’ll be out of commission for quite some time. She asked me to come back and run the shop for her.”

“Why not your uncle James?”

“He’s a busy man,” Shelby said. There was no need for further elaboration, because Nathan knew as well as she that James Westmoreland was not a man who could be trusted, not even by his own mother. That was why Annabel had been compelled to call Shelby for help.

James was so much younger than Shelby’s father that he was more like a cousin or an older brother in age, but he and Shelby had never been close. When Shelby had first come to live with her grandmother, her uncle’s coldness had hurt her feelings, but she’d learned to stay out of his way. Everything had been okay for a while, but then James had gone and told that awful lie, claimed the monster sighting had been his idea so the family business could profit from the influx of tourists. He’d been willing to tarnish his own reputation in order to defame a nine-year-old girl, and to this day, Shelby didn’t understand why.

Nathan had fallen silent, and she followed his gaze across the yard. They were bringing the body up the bank. The stretcher was covered, but Shelby couldn’t bear to look. She turned her gaze instead to the river. The water looked iridescent, shimmering like an opal in the moonlight. On the far side, trees crowded the bank, and the fronds of a weeping willow trailed like fingers across the glassy surface.

She wrapped her arms around her middle, shivering in the warm June night. “Why don’t you believe it was an accident?” she asked softly.

Nathan glanced at her in surprise, as if he’d forgotten her presence. “What?” Then, shrugging, he said, “It doesn’t add up. A lot of things don’t add up around here.”

“Such as?”

He hesitated. “Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

He didn’t strike her as the paranoid type, but then, she hadn’t known him since they were kids. “You mentioned Takamura earlier.”

“Yeah. Do you remember him?”

“Vaguely.” Shelby remembered one afternoon coming back home after a day on the river with Nathan. Her grandmother was sitting on the front porch, clearly upset, as a long, black car pulled away from the house.

“What’s the matter, Grandmother?” Shelby asked worriedly.

“That man!” Her grandmother’s tone was scathing. “He thinks he can barter for anything he pleases, but I’ve got news for him. Some things around here just aren’t for sale!”

Only recently, Shelby’s grandmother had mentioned Takamura again. She’d said he was still trying to buy the supply of freshwater pearls she’d acquired from a man named Wilson Tubb years ago. Most of the jewelry she sold in her shop now was made from pearls that came from the original collection, although she still bought from a few local divers. But the river pearls were almost gone now because the mussel beds had been so badly depleted by pollution and by dredging by people like Takamura.

“He takes and takes and takes,” Annabel had said with scorn. “But one of these days, the river is going to claim a price.”

Maybe it already had, Shelby thought, glancing at the shrouded stretcher being loaded into the hearse.

She could feel Nathan’s gaze on her and she glanced up at him. “You’re still a reporter, I take it.”

He shrugged. “Some might say that’s debatable. I work at the Argus now.”

“Your uncle’s paper?” Memories of past headlines flashed through Shelby’s mind. Virgil Dallas had pursed her relentlessly after her monster sighting that night. His stories had drawn reporters from all over the country, had made her a celebrity, but like everyone else in town, he’d turned on her after James had told his lies. “Why did you come back to Arcadia?” she asked Nathan. “As I recall, you couldn’t wait to get away from this place.”

Something flickered in his eyes, an emotion Shelby couldn’t define. “Things change.”

“Yes,” she agreed quietly. “They do.”

He paused, his gaze deep and unfathomable in the moonlight. “I’ve thought about you over the years, Shelby. Wondered where you were, how you were doing.”

The way he said her name sent a soft shiver up her spine. “I’ve thought about you, too,” she admitted.

“Have you?” He sounded surprised. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how the more things change, the more they stay the same? Look at us. For years we lived on opposite sides of the country, thousands of miles apart. And yet here we both are. Back where we started.”

“Full circle,” Shelby murmured. “Maybe it’s fate.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. But there was an edge of bitterness in his voice when he added, “Fate can play some pretty strange tricks all right.”

NATHAN CLIMBED into his Bronco and waited for the procession of police cars and the hearse to pull out so that he could fall in line behind them. From his rearview mirror, he could see Shelby standing in the yard, gazing after them. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness, but the way she lingered on the lawn, looking a little lost, reminded him of the way she’d seemed that first summer she’d come to live with her grandmother.

Mentally he calculated the years, shocked again to realize how much time had passed since he’d last seen her. And yet the moment he’d heard her name, he’d felt that old, tingling sensation along his backbone. That old awareness.