Give It All (10 page)

Fear had Duncan almost hoping, however, that it would be
never.
She knew him too deeply already, had too much power. To welcome her to see that most uncivilized side of him . . . Too much. He wasn’t sure he could survive being known so thoroughly by any one person. It’d feel too much like handing her a knife, inviting her to slit him wide open and handle his most vulnerable organs.

“I’ll keep all the photos,” she said, hefting the albums. “I’ll move them to the den and look at them later. Same as his journals or whatever these are.” She added three battered old notebooks to the pile, their spiral bindings squished and misshapen.

“What can I do?” Duncan asked.

“Um . . . You can clean, I guess. It’s pretty dusty in here. If you strip the bed, I’ll get the laundry started.”

He followed her out of the room, heading to the kitchen when she stopped to move the albums into a bookshelf. She’d left his bucket and gloves on the floor by the door, and he filled the former with hot water and found rags beneath the sink.

He stripped the bed and remade it with spare sheets Raina gave him, old, pilled flannel with an awful pattern of autumn leaves, but he was too weary of his own judgments to care. He turned his energies to the cleaning.

The room was dusty, but with every swipe of damp cotton, and every stripe of clean wall or wood they revealed, he felt the calm coming on. All the aggression he’d been feeling toward Raina—anger and attraction alike—dulled under the influence of the act.

He cleaned for what felt like half an hour, but as always, the act altered time. When he next checked his phone, he realized he’d been working for three times that long. His fingers were wrinkled, grime packed under his nails. He had aches and pains he hadn’t registered, and his eyes stung from the dust. He stood from where he’d been wiping down the baseboards, and surveyed the progress.

Better.

Not perfect, but a great improvement. He had to thank his compulsions at moments like this. Cheaper and more productive than the pills, and just as mood-altering.

He’d tackle the bathroom next, he decided, eager to poke through Raina’s cabinets—a more subtle version of the snooping she’d undertaken when she barged into his motel room this morning. Fair was fair. She’d seen inside him, against his will.
She owed him a few secrets of her own. And when she went down to babysit the bar, he’d most definitely be stealing a good long snoop through her bedroom.

But as he carried the bucket and rags into the den, the sight of her banished that righteousness. She was curled at the corner of the couch, the window behind her making her hair burn bright auburn at the edges. One of her dad’s notebooks was on her thighs, and her brow was furrowed, gaze scanning rapidly.

Peering into the shadows of one’s bathroom was one thing. Reading a dead loved one’s journal was quite another beast. Duncan knew that for a fact.

The moment it had become clear that his kind foster mother’s stroke was going to send Duncan away, he stole her bedside diary. He had it locked in his wall safe in San Diego, though he hadn’t read it in years. He didn’t need to—he’d memorized every fact he could glean about her from those two hundred twenty-nine handwritten pages. Turned her assessments of him into commandments, striving to embody the things she’d praised.
Hardworking. Smart. So eager for a job. I daresay he’s going to go places, this one, if he takes enough pride in himself. So preoccupied with order and fairness . . . With a thicker skin and a respectable accent, he could make a fine lawyer someday.

She’d seen something in him. Mapped out a path for him to follow with her words, a recipe that might make people like him, as she’d liked him. She’d
wanted
him. He’d done just as she’d prescribed. Thickened his skin, refined his accent, taken pride in himself. She’d been right—he had gone places. He was as alone as he’d been as a child, but he liked to imagine she’d be impressed with him nonetheless.

What had Raina’s father hoped for her, he had to wonder, and was it spelled out on the pages she held?

“What have you got there?”

Her eyes kept scanning, taking in line after line after line before she finally replied, “It’s a journal. Sort of.”

“Personal?”

“Yes. And no. Business plans, for the bar.”

That place had a business plan?
He moved to sit by her, approaching slowly and giving her plenty of time to tell him to fuck off.

“May I see?” he asked, scooting closer.

After a minute, she brought her feet to the floor and rested
the book on their touching thighs. Duncan fought to smother the fire that contact roused, focusing on the page.

There were drawings, as well as lists and notes. Business plan? No. More a journal of the man’s hopes and dreams. He’d sketched floor plans in a steady, elegant hand, making Duncan wonder if Raina had inherited her artistic side from him . . . and curious for the first time to see some of her tattoo work.

“Looks about right,” Duncan said, meaning the floor plan. Same horseshoe layout of the bar, and the pool table and jukebox were right where her dad had meant them to be.

Raina turned a page, and the spread had several magazine and catalog scraps taped to it. The furniture and fixtures pictured were outdated, but handsome. Far nicer than what Benji’s currently boasted. He pointed to an image of finely lathed spindles that created a lattice around the top of a bar, stained a dark, lustrous brown. “Those are quite nice.”

“And this,” she said, their fingers nearly touching as she tapped another photo. It pictured recessed shelving, backlit to illuminate rows of liquor bottles. “Kind of eighties, but I like the general idea.”

“Indeed.”

“There’s pages of this. Pictures he liked, budgets he’d sketched out for stuff—mostly stuff I’ve never seen downstairs.”

“A wish list?”

She shook her head. “Plans. To-do lists, but they’re all dated in the months before I got dumped on his doorstep. Look, here’s when it happened—December third. I was born December first, we’re pretty sure.” She turned to the dated page, to a single entry, on a single line.

December 3. Going to need to rethink the mahogany.

He glanced up to find her smiling faintly, then looked back to the page. December fourth’s entry was a far different sort of list, in a far messier, more frantic hand.

Things we need: crib, car seat, diapers!!! stroller, formula, powder? lotion? birth certificate?? Must talk to Janine.

“Who’s Janine?” he asked.

“Janine Wasco. She and her husband own the drugstore—though it’s only her now. I can just see my dad running in there with me, like, wrapped in a tablecloth or stuck in a picnic basket or something, asking her what he needed to keep me alive. She has five kids—she’d have set him straight.”

“The poor bastard. I can only imagine what a demanding little terror you must have been.”

She elbowed him for that. “Anyhow, that’s where all the interior decorating clippings end. Look.” She turned a page, then another, another, each looking much the same—primitive spreadsheets of projected bills and income.

“He wanted so much more than he ever accomplished downstairs. He’d planned to put a kitchen in the back. I never knew that. He even made notes about what the menu would look like. Curlicues and all.”

Duncan tried to gauge her expression, but her sadness was a flat, unreadable expanse. He angled for clues to how she felt about it all, offering, “I doubt he’s ever regretted trading his dreams of a fine dining establishment for fatherhood and a slightly more colorful bar.”

“He never made me think Benji’s wasn’t exactly what he’d wanted it to be . . . But to see it all here, in ink on paper. Everything he’d imagined, and how little of it he actually got to realize.”

“Change is coming,” Duncan said gently, just as Astrid leaped onto the next cushion to assert herself into the scene. “Property scouts will be here soon. There’s no reason to think perhaps you couldn’t partner with one of them, find some middle ground between their business model and maybe achieving a few of your father’s original goals.”

She shook her head. “You know what those people are going to want to open. Chain steak houses, with fake Wild West memorabilia hanging off every blank inch of wall. I’m no businesswoman—not really. They’ll steamroll me. Turn this place into whatever they want. Downstairs might be rough, but he did it all with his own hands.”

Duncan nodded, having imagined the same fate for the bar himself. He’d only offered the lie to make her feel better.

Raina closed the notebook with a sigh. “Well. That sobered me up. How’s the bedroom coming?”

Duncan smiled as he stroked his cat, thinking they sounded like an old married couple. “Considerably less dusty.”

“Not sure what you’re paying me a hundred bucks a night for,” she said, rubbing her face, “when you have to clean your own room before it’s habitable.”

“Perhaps the first night could be gratis.” Perhaps they could all be gratis, if her little remark about not wanting his money
anymore, should they start fucking, had been more than an idle come-on. Best to get his mind off the question, though. “Where do you do your tattooing?”

She nodded toward the kitchen. “Room through there. You want to see?”

Did he want to see the space in which she drew indelible images across strange men’s naked skin? “No, thank you.”

“I keep it locked—my equipment’s the most expensive thing I own. But anytime you want a tour . . . or an estimate.” She raised her eyebrows hopefully.

Duncan smirked and stood. “I’ll check on the laundry. And you’re probably due downstairs.” The sun was nearing the mountains, and it’d be dark soon. With the dusk came the more demanding patrons, and that peak was going to steal Duncan’s company, along with the daylight. He wouldn’t be going down himself, this evening. Not after nearly falling on his face in front of all those yahoos the night before. Not with his name so freshly linked to the bribery allegations. Those things wouldn’t keep him away for long, but not tonight.

“I’d better make a phone call,” he said, heading for the easy chair where he’d left his laptop and cell. He found Flores’s card in his dossier and entered the digits.

“Flores.”

“It’s Duncan Welch.”

“Ah. Welch. I was just thinking about you.”

“How flattering.”

“Not calling to apologize for your lady friend, I hope? I’ve been called way worse, you know.”

“I’m merely calling to let you know my premises have changed.”

“What?”

“Don’t panic. I’ve not gone far. I’m staying with my . . . acquaintance,” he revised, his eyes meeting Raina’s dark ones across the room for the hottest instant. To call her a friend would’ve been a familiarity too far. “In the apartment above Benji’s Saloon, on Station Street.”

“That dump, huh?”

Duncan felt heat flash up the back of his neck.

“Doesn’t seem your style.”

Duncan cooled himself. “Despite the surety your little folder might suggest that you possess, you don’t know me, Mr. Flores. Not remotely.”

“Why the move?”

“Concerned parties have suggested, perhaps with some prudence, that I might be wise to stay with a friend during this investigation. Seeing as how I’m not a favorite with the locals, and now I’ve been tarred by these ridiculous charges—”

“I get it. Let’s save our discussion of the case for a future meeting, shall we?”

“Just keeping you apprised.”

“Speaking of meetings, we need to have another one. Tomorrow. Eight thirty, at the sheriff’s department.”

“Oh dear, I hope I shan’t miss Mass.”

“You and me both,” Flores said, his eye roll audible. “I just want to go over a few things with you.”

“Fine.”

A pause, a tiny huff of a laugh. “Raina Harper, huh?”

“Excuse me?”

Papers shuffled behind Flores’s voice. “Raina Catherine Harper. Owner of Benji’s Saloon. Your greatest defender, also your roommate now?”

“She may be.”

“She may also be friends with some of the locals who’ve admitted to getting themselves involved in a certain little homegrown investigation against Charles Tremblay. I’m sure you know all that.”

“I’m sure I do.”

“I’m sure you can appreciate that it’ll look odd to some people, you fraternizing further with casino opponents—ones who’ve arguably impeded justice, and trespassed on—”

“Ones who’ve outed two potential murderers, who’d been poised to get away with their crimes, if not for those meddling kids.”

Raina laughed, then quit eavesdropping and disappeared into the kitchen.

“Yes,” Duncan continued, “I’m sure I can appreciate it. I trespassed with them, you’ll recall. That fraternization should be no bombshell.”

“Listen, Duncan.”

He sighed, the familiarity shtick so fucking maddening. “Yes, Ramon?”

An equally annoyed sigh answered him. “You want to convince everyone you’re one of the good kids, don’t go sitting
yourself at the back of the bus with the troublemakers. With saloon owners and parolees.”

“Your concern has been noted,” Duncan said. “As, I trust, has been my new address.”

Another sigh. “Yeah. Fine.”

“Good night, then, Agent Flores.”

“Counselor Welch.”

They hung up.

Raina returned, leaning against the wall just inside the door with her arms crossed, a funny look on her face.

Duncan polished his phone’s screen on the hem of his tee. “Yes?”

“They tell you I’m a bad influence?”

“Not you specifically,” he fibbed.

She smirked. “You’re a terrible liar. He tell you not to stay here?”

“Not precisely.”

“You tell him what happened to your car?”

“No. I’ve lost enough freedom already—I’m not getting locked away in a safe house just because some yokel can afford a can of spray paint.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

He smiled. “Because you’d do precisely the same thing, in my position.”

Her eyes narrowed, the look telling him he was right. And that perhaps they weren’t that different, after all.

The room felt very still. Very stifling, all at once, that phone call having let the stress of everything intrude on what had been a strangely pleasant, strangely
human
afternoon.