Maggie Shayne - Thicker Than Water

“Yeah, it’s me, Mom.”

Julie appeared in the foyer, then lunged at Dawn and wrapped her in a fierce bear hug that squeezed the breath from her lungs. “My God, I was so worried,” she said, her voice quivering with relief and love.

Then, just as suddenly, she released Dawn from the mamma-bear-hug and stepped back to stare at her. The motherly relief in her eyes faded fast, and her voice took on a firmer, sharper tone. “Just where have you been, young lady?”

Dawn took a breath, lifted her chin. Her mother detested lies above all things, which was kind of ironic, considering, Dawn thought a little rebelliously. Still, she knew it would be best to just get the truth out and face the music. “Okay,” she said. “I snuck out. I’m sorry. It was wrong, and it’ll never happen again.”

“Snuck out where? And with whom?”

Heaven help the sixteen-year-old with a reporter for a mom, she thought. Julie Jones didn’t know how to accept anything less than who, what, where, when, why and how from anyone. Especially her own kid.

“Come on, Mom, it was a mistake. I’m sixteen. I’m not a little kid anymore, and I said I was sorry.”

“Dawn.” There was that warning tone in her voice, the one Dawn knew not to mess with.

“All right,” she said with a heavy sigh. “If you must know every detail, there was a party on the lakeshore, down by the landing. A bunch of kids, a little bonfire, a boom box and a pile of CDs. I left after you went to bed and walked down there with a friend. A female friend, but I’m not going to tell you which one, because if I do, you’ll call her mom and get her into trouble, too. Consider it protecting a source.”

Her mother lifted her perfectly shaped eyebrows and gave two slow blinks of her pretty brown eyes that told Dawn she was treading on thin ice. “Was there alcohol at this party?”

“Not at first. About an hour ago a carload of kids from F. M. high showed up with a couple of cases. Things started getting a little crazy, so my friend and I decided to leave.”

“It was Kayla Matthews, wasn’t it?”

Dawn didn’t answer. “I didn’t drink, Mom. Smell.” She blew toward her mother’s face.

Her mother actually took her up on the offer and sniffed her breath, then seemed only slightly relieved. “What else? Were there drugs?”

Dawn licked her lips, lowered her eyes. “I thought I caught a whiff of weed just before we took off, but I didn’t see it.”

“I see.”

“Mom, it was just harmless fun. I didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, aside from the sneaking out without asking.” She lifted her head, thinking fast. “Besides, you snuck out tonight, too. In my Jeep.”

Her mother’s eyes widened just enough to tell Dawn she wasn’t supposed to know about her little midnight run. “Dawnie, you were on foot, in the dark, without me even knowing you’d left. Suppose, on your way down to that party, you and Kayla had encountered a predator?”

“I never said Kayla was with me!” Her mom didn’t even pause.

“Suppose some fiftysomething pervert with a taste for teenage girls had happened by? Would there have been any harm then? My God, I wouldn’t even have known you were missing until morning!”

“Oh, come on, you knew I was missing the second you came home from wherever you were tonight. You don’t miss a thing. Besides, I wasn’t alone, and nothing happened.”

“Don’t you even watch the news I have to read every night, Dawnie? Don’t you realize what kind of risk you were taking?” Sighing, shaking her head, she turned and walked back into the living room, reaching for the telephone.

Dawn raced after her. “What are you doing? Who are you calling?”

“The police, of course.”

“Mom, you can’t!”

She paused in dialing, the phone in her hand. “Dawnie, how am I going to feel if I go in to work tomorrow and someone hands me some copy about a carload of Fayetteville-Manlius students who crashed on their way home from a party? You said yourself they brought beer. Did they have a designated driver?”

Dawn swallowed the lie that leaped to her throat, lowered her head, shook it slowly. “No. They were all drinking.”

“Then may be a patrol car will get there before they leave, and maybe they’ll get home alive tonight.” She finished dialing.

Dawn sighed hard enough to make her mother fully aware of her feelings about this, then stalked through to the stairs and up them.

“We’re not finished here, Dawn. You’re grounded. Two weeks. No arguments.”

“Whatever,” Dawn muttered. God, everyone was going to know who had ratted them out. She and Kayla were the only two who’d left the party early. She closed her bedroom door with a bang and flopped facefirst onto her bed. She would be the most hated junior in Cazenovia High School tomorrow.

It wasn’t fair. Her mom was keeping secrets, too. Big ones. But it was okay for her to sneak around and hide things. Just not for Dawn. It was such a double standard.

She punched her pillow, buried her face in it and wished for a solution.

A pebble hit her window. Then another. She scrambled off the bed, yanked the curtains wide and stared through the open window. Kayla stood on the back lawn, in the spill of light from her bedroom. “I thought you went home.”

Kayla rubbed her arms, glanced behind her. “Something creeped me out. You get in trouble?”

“Yeah, some.”

“Grounded?”

“Two weeks.”

“Bummer.”

The bushes that formed the boundary between the neat back lawn and the untamed field that sloped downhill to the lake shore moved, as if something were creeping through them. Dawn frowned, and Kayla turned her head quickly. There was nothing there. Just the wind, Dawn thought. “My mom’s on the phone, narc-ing out the party.”

Kayla shivered. “I should go back down to the landing and tell everyone before I head home.”

“I wouldn’t. She might just call your mom next. I didn’t say your name, but she’s not stupid.”

Again the bushes moved. This time Dawn swore she saw a shape, a dark shadow, moving with them. Someone was out there, watching.

“Jesus, Kayla, get in here!”

Kayla moved a few steps closer to the house. “I gotta get home. My parents will kill me if they go to check my room and find me gone.”

The shadow moved again, looking so much like a dark, menacing human shape this time that Dawn opened her mouth to scream.

But before the sound escaped, there was a sudden, brighter pool of light flooding the back lawn, and the shadow vanished in its glow. A second later, Dawn realized the light was coming from her own house’s open back door when she heard her mother say, “You might as well come on in, Kayla.”

Kayla grimaced but hurried inside, seeming almost as relieved as she was upset at being caught. Dawn went downstairs to do damage control, telling herself all the way that she probably hadn’t seen a damn thing, other than maybe a stray deer or a nightbird. Her mother’s paranoid tendencies were finally starting to rub off on her.

Every person in the newsroom looked up when Julie burst in the next morning, ten minutes late.

Bryan, her assistant, who’d been on her heels from the front entrance all the way to the newsroom, talking all the way, finally managed to thrust the cup of coffee he was carrying into her hands.

“Rough night?” the news director, Allan Westcott asked.

“No sleep. Did you get my fax?”

“Yeah. It came in at 5:00 a.m.” Westcott shuffled the pages in front of him. “Your report says the body was discovered around midnight?”

She nodded.

“So why the delay?”

She had to say something, and admitting that she’d been out rifling through the dead man’s apartment in the wee hours was out of the question, nor were Dawn’s antics any of the man’s business. By the time she’d phoned the police about the party, called Kayla’s parents, lectured the girls while awaiting Mr. and Mrs. Matthewses’ arrival, seen Kayla safely off, double-checked the locks and gotten Dawn back into bed, it had been four-thirty. She’d barely had time to type up the details, reread them to be sure she hadn’t included anything she wasn’t supposed to know and fax the report to the station.