Marta Perry - Abandon the Dark

Rachel had been the Amish girl from the farm on the other side of the creek, and Meredith the one who lived in the house next door. Apparently she still did, from what Lainey remembered of her great-aunt’s letters. It was hard to imagine someone as bright and energetic as Meredith had been settling down in a place like Deer Run.

People did, she supposed. Her thoughts went back to Jake. He had, obviously. Maybe he liked being the big fish in the small pond.

What was he saying to Zeb Stoltzfus? She couldn’t help feeling a sliver of uneasiness, despite Jake’s assurances. Jake had claimed he didn’t support the idea of Zeb controlling Rebecca’s assets or her care, but what if he liked the idea of Lainey doing it even less? Despite those few moments when they’d seemed to click, he’d clearly thought Rebecca had made a mistake in naming her.

Lainey’s cell phone rang, and her nerves seemed to jangle in tune with it. She’d given the hospital her cell number. Dropping the dish towel, she snatched up the phone.

“Hello?”

For a moment there was nothing. Then a voice, a muffled, hoarse whisper that might have been a man or a woman, muttered a string of the abuse and obscenities that had grown all too familiar in recent weeks.

She yanked the phone away from her ear and punched the off key. Her stomach churned, and her ear tingled as if something ugly had crawled inside.

She wrapped her arms around herself, trying not to shake. She ought to be getting used to it. The calls had come in a steady stream since Joanna Marcus had so publicly attempted suicide. She’d tried reporting them to the police in St. Louis. The officer she spoke with had looked as if he thought she deserved what she got.

But those calls had come on her landline at the apartment in St. Louis. How had someone gotten the number of her cell phone? Of course, anyone who’d worked in the ad agency could easily have access to her cell number. Her stomach churned at the thought that the caller might be someone she knew.

Lainey reached out to turn off the phone and realized she couldn’t. That number was the only way the hospital could reach her.

At least she could be smart enough to check the caller before she answered. After a string of remarkably stupid decisions, surely she could manage that.

Lainey ran her hand through tangled curls. She was not going to go through it all again. But the memories, once started, unrolled in her mind like a disaster movie, where one wrong choice led inexorably to another.

Dating your boss was stupid. She knew that, but she’d let Phillip Marcus charm her anyway. She’d let it get serious, more so than she ever did, believing him when he said he and his wife had been legally separated for a year, that his divorce would be final in a matter of months, that he was free of a marriage both of them agreed was a mistake.

Lainey had bought it all, and now she looked at her actions with disgust. Anyone would think she’d been a starry-eyed eighteen-year-old instead of a cynical thirty.

If it had ended quietly, she’d still have been ashamed, but at least it would have been a private shame. But Joanna, the wife Phillip had insisted wanted to be rid of him, had called in to a radio talk show, announcing she had taken a massive dose of sleeping pills and naming Lainey as the worthless tramp who had stolen her husband.

The paramedics had been in time to save her, thank God. If she’d been anyone else, the whole affair might have passed from the media’s attention in twenty-four hours. But Joanna’s family was a prominent one—her father a judge, her brother a state senator. Lainey had been completely unprepared for the level of vitriol launched at her.

Maybe she’d deserved it, but she hadn’t expected it to follow her here. She’d been wrong, it seemed.

A loud meow, followed by a scratching at the back door, jerked her out of that profitless line of thought. She hurried to open the back door.

“All right, all right. You don’t have to make scratch marks on the door.”

The black cat walked inside, tail high, with an air of owning the place. He sat down on the exact spot where she had fed him the previous night and looked at her.

“Doesn’t your owner feed you?” She opened the cabinet and retrieved a can of tuna. “If this keeps up, I’ll have to lay in a supply of cat food. I don’t imagine that Aunt Rebecca can afford to keep you in tuna.”

The cat followed her every move with unblinking green eyes. When she set the bowl down in front of him he stared at her for another moment and then tucked in.

She couldn’t help smiling. “You have a fine sense of your own importance, I’ll say that for you.” At least he’d announced himself at the door this time, instead of appearing out of nowhere.

A knock at the front door pulled her away from contemplation of the cat. She went quickly to the front of the house and swung the door open. Maybe Jake...

But two women stood on the front porch, looking at her with an expectation that reminded her of the cat.

“Don’t you know us, Lainey?” The taller woman brushed a wing of silky brown hair behind her ear. “I think I’d know you anywhere.”

The pieces fell into place. “Meredith, of course. And Rachel. I was just thinking about you. Please, come in.”

Strange, to see them now when the only images in her mind were of a tomboy in braids and blue jeans and a sweet-faced Amish girl, blond hair drawn back under a kapp, dress reaching below her knees. Memories began to filter through the intervening years—of giggling slumber parties and secrets shared in the tree house Meredith’s father had built in her backyard. It was as if Lainey had a whole life she’d forgotten, just waiting for her to remember.

“You’ve changed. Still, I guess we’ve all grown up, haven’t we?” She followed them into the living room. They seemed to know their way around the house as well as she did, which wasn’t really surprising.

Rachel chuckled. “You’re thinking that I’ve really changed, right? It’s a shock when you’re expecting an Amish woman in kapp and apron.” She gestured toward her jeans and cotton sweater.

“I think Aunt Rebecca wrote to me about it when you came back to Deer Run.” Lainey’s brain finally caught up. She probably should have reread Aunt Rebecca’s letters on her way here. “You have a little girl, don’t you?”

Rachel’s face lit with maternal pride. “Mandy. We’re next door, actually.” She gestured toward what was the last house in the village. “I’ve turned my mother-in-law’s old home into a bed-and-breakfast.”

“And I’m still on the opposite side of your aunt’s house, so we have you surrounded,” Meredith said.

“Just like old times.” It was oddly familiar to be here with them, even though she’d thought of them so seldom in recent years.

Meredith sat down in a rocker. “I run my accounting business out of my home.”

“Accounting?” Lainey shook her head. “It seemed to me you were going to be an astronaut. Or run a dude ranch out West.”

“That summer must have been the end of my cowgirl phase,” Meredith said, brown eyes smiling at the memory. “It finally occurred to me that I was afraid of horses, something that limited my cowgirl ambitions. As I recall, you were going to live in Paris and be an artist. What happened?”

“I discovered I wasn’t that talented.” Funny, how easy it was to admit that to them. Maybe the bond they’d formed then was more durable than she would have expected. “I ended up working for an advertising agency.” At least, that’s what she had been doing. Technically, at the moment she was unemployed.

“Life seldom turns out the way we dream it will when we’re ten,” Rachel said. “But you were a wonderful artist. We still have the scrapbook from that summer with your drawings.”