Seeing is Believing (12 page)

“That’s the hope. I’m staying here for a couple of weeks to help Gran clean up that blue house she has. Apparently she has rented it to Piper.” He forced himself to say her name out loud. Be casual. Admit to nothing. Engage in whatever he wanted to engage in with Piper Tucker without the interference of his family—that was his plan.

Of course, he hadn’t been home in a dozen years, so he’d forgotten how really impossible it was to keep his family out of his business. Hell, to keep the whole town out of his business.

“Oh, my Lord in heaven,” was Shelby’s opinion. “I swear, Brady Stritmeyer, if you hurt that girl there will be hell to pay.”

“Hurt what girl?” Lilly asked, adding enough syrup to her plate to coat ten pancakes.

Boston sighed. “There is no girl being hurt. Your mother is just overreacting.”

Brady had to agree. “Your mom thinks I’m a heartbreaker, Lil. Girls can’t resist my charms.” He reached over and snatched a piece of her bacon and crammed it in his mouth. “Yum.”

She giggled.

Piper reappeared in the doorway, wearing another sundress and holding her overnight bag in her hand. “I’m going to head out since you’re home, Shelby.”

“Don’t you want to eat breakfast?” Boston asked.

“No, I had some coffee. I’m good.” Her nervousness was obvious. She wasn’t making eye contact with anyone and she was bouncing on the heels of her feet.

Brady felt guilty for making her feel uncomfortable with his cousin. He was going home to Chicago, but Piper had to live here in Cuttersville.

“Well, thank you so much for staying with the girls,” Shelby said, looking flustered. She went over and hugged Piper, as did the twins.

“My pleasure. You know I’m happy to help out anytime.”

The thing was, Brady knew she meant that. She was sincere, and he found that really appealing. Frighteningly appealing.

“I’ll call you later,” he told her, when the hugging arms had cleared out and he could see her face.

She nodded.

Then before his cousin flipped her wig, Brady told Shelby, “Piper and I are going to do a little research on the original Brady Stritmeyer. I figured it can’t hurt to know a little more about my namesake.”

“I don’t think he’s your namesake. No one has ever said you were named for him.” Shelby made a face. “I say just leave it alone.”

“And I say I’m curious.”

Brady faced off with his cousin. This wasn’t about researching a dead guy, and they both knew it. It was about him spending time with Piper.

They were both stubborn, and chances were they would have stared each other down for an hour or two before either one of them caved. But Piper intervened.

“I’m sorry about the candlestick on the console table in the hall, Shelby. It seems to have fallen and broken.”

“What?” Shelby looked away, at Piper. “Oh, that’s okay. You know how clumsy I am.”

“Maybe it was Rachel,” Brady said, because he knew Piper would never say anything. “Didn’t she used to throw plates and stuff?”

Shelby’s eyebrows shot up. “Rachel? Geez, it’s been a while since she tossed anything. And her target is usually Boston.”

“I’m lucky that way,” her husband said.

With a few more murmured words and good-byes, Piper and Shelby went to the front door and Piper headed out.

“I think Rachel wanted to nail me, actually,” Brady commented when Shelby got back, not wanting his cousin to think Piper was to blame in any way.

“I don’t think she’s the only one who wants to do that,” Shelby said wryly.

Brady went for his coffee, ignoring that comment.

No one needed to know that the nailing had already occurred.

* * *

PIPER STOPPED FIVE HOUSES DOWN FROM THE MACNAMARAS
and pulled out her cell phone. Dialing her best friend, Cameron, she bit her fingernail and glanced backwards, irrationally worried that someone might come out of the house and see her parked here for no apparent reason. But she didn’t like to dial and drive. And she had to talk to someone before she exploded.

“Hello?” Cam sounded sleepy and annoyed.

“Hey. Are you busy?” It was an inane question but now she wasn’t sure where to start.

“I was busy sleeping until thirty seconds ago. It’s the crack of my ass on a Sunday. And I know you’re not in trouble, because you’re never in trouble, so please tell me no one has died or been diagnosed with cancer.”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that. It’s just that, well, you know how Shelby has that cousin who lives in Chicago—Brady?”

Cameron hadn’t moved to Cuttersville until seventh grade. By then, Piper had had hair and Anita had left town, but Piper still hadn’t made any true friends. Cameron had strolled into middle school, fresh from the big city, his father transferred to the Samson Plastics plant in Cuttersville from New Jersey, a bridge ride from Manhattan. He had expensive and trendy sneakers and he was Jewish, which essentially made him an alien in rural Ohio. He and Piper had forged the bond of misfits, though Cameron had never lacked an ounce of confidence. He just had no interest in deer hunting.

“Yeah? The one who makes you cream when you mention him?”

Cameron was also incredibly straightforward. Piper grimaced. “That is not true.”

“Oh, come on. The guy was like your childhood fantasy, admit it. He was probably who you were thinking about when you humped your stuffed animals.”

That had her speechless for a second. It had never even occurred to her to hump her stuffed animals, and the fact that Cameron assumed that was commonplace was mildly disturbing. Not that she hadn’t masturbated, but she had named her stuffed animals. It would have been far too weird to take advantage of them like that. It wasn’t like they could give their consent.

“Anyways,” she told him pointedly. “He’s back in town. He showed up at Shelby’s unannounced Friday night.” In the rain. Then he’d taken his shirt off. Piper sighed in delight at the memory, goose bumps rising on her arms.

Cameron yawned. “Panty pudding time.”

Ew. Piper started to question why she had called him. But she couldn’t stop herself from blurting out, “I slept with him.”

The laziness left Cameron’s voice. “Really?” he asked in amazement.

“Yes. And I’m not sure what I should do now.”

“Sleep with him again. Unless it sucked. Did it suck?”

“No.” That, she could say most emphatically. “But it was quick. And quiet, because the girls were home. I feel terrible about that. I mean, what if we were caught?”

“Where were you, the kitchen table?” Cameron sounded delighted by the prospect.

“No. In the bedroom. With the door locked.”

“Then you wouldn’t have gotten caught. And you didn’t get caught. So don’t get stressed after the fact. Is he going back to Chi-town today? That doesn’t leave you much time to get another spread eagle in.”

“He’s actually staying for a couple of weeks. In the house that his grandmother is renovating. The house I just rented.”

“What? You’re moving out of your parents’?”

“Yes.”

“Hallelujah.” After they had both graduated from Ohio University, Cameron had moved to Cincinnati, which wasn’t the same as being a stone’s throw from Manhattan like his childhood, but it wasn’t cornfields and bait shops either. He had access to Thai food and an apartment of his own to keep meticulously clean. Cam was a neat freak who liked his privacy, and he couldn’t understand why Piper hadn’t followed the same path as him. “What brought this on? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that your girlhood crush shows up and suddenly you want to move out.”

“No, it’s probably not a coincidence. But I feel weird inside, anxious. What am I doing?”

“Listening to your lust. I mean your gut. Come on, don’t freak yourself out. Moving out will be good for you. You’re still close to your family and yet you can live your own life. Sleep with a man without feeling guilty. You’ve never been good at taking something for yourself, so here’s your chance.”

He was right. She didn’t take anything for herself. But giving was much more satisfying than taking. Unless it was Brady. She had definitely enjoyed taking him.

Piper glanced around the quiet street, forcing her shoulders to relax. Why was she so tense?

Because Shelby didn’t approve. It had been written all over her face. It was clearly why she had come home early.

Approval was very important to Piper.

But she found that suddenly her need to please herself was almost equally as important.

“You’re right.”

“Duh.”

She laughed. “And a bit of an egomaniac.”

“I’ve never denied it.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell Cameron about being plagued by Rachel all weekend, but Cameron was skeptical about spirits. He also had a deep-seated disdain for magician David Copperfield, but Piper wasn’t sure if the two were related or not.

“Are you going home anytime soon?” she asked him instead.

“Not until Thanksgiving, unless my mother guilts me. They say Catholics can load the guilt on their kids, but my mother is the master of Jewish guilt. If I meet a hot girl between now and then, though, my mother can forget it.”

Said the guy who had never once had to doubt his parents’ love for him.

Piper, on the other hand, was never going to leave Cuttersville.

It was the way it was.

Chapter Eight

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” SHELBY ASKED BRADY
shrilly.

He paused in the foyer and turned back to see his cousin standing with her hands on her hips.

“Really? I am not one of your kids.” He wouldn’t care that she was inquiring except that she was acting nuts. Like she might ground him if she found condoms in his backpack. “And I’m thirty-one, in case you’d forgotten.”

“What? I was just asking,” she said begrudgingly. “If you’re going to see Gran, I was going to see if you could give her some of the tomatoes from my garden.”

Uh-huh. “I’m not going to see Gran.”

“No? Alright, then.”

She was dying of curiosity, he could tell, but Brady wasn’t about to oblige her. “See you later. I won’t be back for dinner.”

With that, he left Shelby writhing in agony as to what he was doing, and he hopped in his car and backed out of the drive, the gravel crunching beneath the tires a reminder of his childhood. He had the windows open to the beautiful September weather, and the air smelled clean, fragrant. Like freshly cut grass and wood baking in the sun. It wasn’t a bad thing to grow up in a small town. He’d had a lot of freedom to roam about and he’d spent a lot of time outdoors. When had he started to feel so discontent?

He wasn’t sure. Had it just been teen angst or had it been something else? A desire to escape family? Prove something?

It was too hard to step back into the battered Converse shoes of his teen years and come up with any legitimate answers. All he knew was that when the letter arrived with his acceptance into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he had never felt so excited about anything in his whole life. Even nailing Joelle for the first time hadn’t brought quite the same heady buzz, and that was saying a lot because he’d been finessing entrance into her pants for months. When he’d been given the green light, he’d thought he’d died and gone to heaven. But not even that first full sexual experience had felt as good as knowing he was going somewhere. Getting out.

Now where was he? He drummed his fingers on his steering wheel.

Nowhere.

Right back where he started, equally as broke, and with the same piss-poor attitude. Only now he had failure weighing him down. Not only had his art ambitions come to a whole lot of nothing, but his post-art compromise career had ended as well. That left him wearing the label of big old loser, in his opinion.

Which was why he should not be spending any more time with Piper Tucker. She deserved better than what he had to offer.

But that hadn’t stopped him from calling her and making arrangements to meet her in the cemetery. As he pulled up to the Lakeview Cemetery, with nary a lake in sight, now or at any time in the past, Brady saw that Piper was already there. Of course. She was punctual. Reliable. Considerate.

No, he didn’t have anything to offer her in terms of a future or a relationship. He knew that. Had already established that in his head. So why did he keep circling that stupid thought? Because it was stupid.

But the truth was, he had something to offer her now. He had charm and skill in satisfying women. It was going to give him a great deal of satisfaction to satisfy her, something Brady suspected had never really been offered Piper. She was a giver, not a taker. Obviously he had his selfish reasons for wanting to have sex with her, but he could at least justify to himself that he was giving something to her. Regular good Samaritan, that was him.

He snorted at his own thoughts.

Piper was leaning against the weathered fence posts, wearing a flowy pink skirt that was shorter than what she had left Shelby’s in that morning. It gave a nice view of her legs, though he was disappointed to see that her cleavage was covered with a tight white T-shirt. But then he thought about how that particular shirt would look wet, like how she had looked Friday night after taking the dog out, and he was instantly hard and appeased. He didn’t always have to see the cleavage. Sometimes a little mystery was good for the soul. Since his soul needed some help, clearly picturing Piper with her breasts pushing through wet cotton was a good thing.

It was messed-up logic and he knew it, but hey, he wasn’t hurting anyone.

Parking next to her truck, he shook his head at her choice in vehicles. He supposed it made sense for a girl raised on a farm, but Piper looked too small, too feminine, to drive such a large, utilitarian car.

“That’s quite a truck there,” he told her when he stepped out of his own car, which looked small and pathetic next to hers. It felt like his nuts had shrunk, and he didn’t like it.

She smiled. “My dad chose it. He figured if I was the biggest thing on the road I’d win in a collision.”

That didn’t surprise him at all. Danny Tucker was a practical man. But it made Piper look like a kid driving her dad’s truck without his permission. Brady was smart enough not to mention that thought out loud, however. “I always wanted a truck when I was a teenager,” he told her honestly.

“Why? So you could do doughnuts in the snow?” She peeled herself off the fence as he came closer, her hand nervously going up to her neck, in a gesture he was starting to recognize.

“No. So I could park it in a cornfield somewhere and convince a girl to do it in the truck bed with me, under the stars.” It had seemed wildly romantic and sexy to him at the time.

Now that he thought about it, it still did. He hadn’t done the dirty outside since he’d left home. It was hard to get it on in public when the only outdoor space you had was the stoop to the intercom buzzer of your apartment building. Cops tended to object to pulling out body parts on a sidewalk.

“Oh, yeah?” Piper brushed past him, giving him a flirtatious smile. “I guess that never worked out for you.”

“There’s still time,” he said, following her like a tail-wagging mutt.

“You in the market for a truck?”

“No. But I figure yours would work just fine for us.” Now that the idea had popped into his head, he was kind of liking the thought of tossing some blankets into the back of Piper’s truck and climbing in with her.

She laughed. “That’s presumptuous, you know.”

“You’re the one who dropped your robe,” he teased, reaching out and snagging her hand, because, well, it was there, and he wanted to hold it.

God, he acted like a sixteen-year-old around her. Silly and greedy and intent on showing off. But he had to say, he was definitely enjoying himself.

“I don’t think you minded at the time.”

“I most definitely did not mind. But it would lead me to believe that you’re willing to have some fun with me in the back of a truck.” Now that the idea had taken hold, he glanced around, wondering where they could find some privacy right now. Too bad it was the middle of the day and they were on the edge of town with no natural barriers. The church next to them was empty, abandoned a couple of decades earlier, but they weren’t that far from the hardware store and the diner, so this wasn’t the ideal location. Not to mention, you know, the whole dead people thing. Probably a bit of a mood killer.

“Maybe. You’ll have to do a lot of convincing, though. Despite my earlier behavior, I’m not much of a risk taker. Getting caught scares me.”

They walked into the cemetery, which was moderately neglected. The grass needed to be cut and there were weeds infiltrating the paths, but the headstones looked tended to.

“I guess I can’t say anything about that. It’s been a while since I took any risks.” The thought made him feel a little glum. “Though I never cared much about getting caught. Shelby will vouch for me on that.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure there’s anything admirable about intentional disdain.”

His eyebrow shot up and he dropped her hand. Was she reprimanding him? Because that was not hot. “I don’t think not worrying about others’ opinions is the same as disdain.”

“Maybe not.” Piper looked around at the headstones. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in here. That’s a good thing, I suppose.”

Not sure why she had dropped that line of conversation so suddenly, Brady decided not to worry about it. He was probably imagining judgment because he was feeling a little defensive. Failure tended to do that to a guy. “My grandfather’s buried here but he died long before I was born.”

“I don’t like cemeteries. I tend to see things other people don’t see.”

Brady hadn’t even thought about that. While Piper had originally downplayed her interaction with ghosts, claiming she hadn’t really seen them since she was a kid, it was clear now that wasn’t true. At all. She had seen enough that she’d chosen the route of avoiding any circumstances that might increase her odds of encounters. It explained the wariness she was wearing on her face.

“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen?” he asked. “You have to have some good stories.”

“The worst was the time I tried to pet a cow that wasn’t there. God, I was so embarrassed. We were on a school trip and I tried to pretend I’d done it on purpose. But the girls in my class weren’t buying it. It gave them one more reason to make fun of me.”

The thought of little Piper, the way Brady remembered, solemn and wise beyond her years, enduring the taunts of her classmates, gave him a pit in his gut. “Jealous bitches.”

Piper laughed. “I don’t think a single one of them was jealous of me, but that’s sweet of you to say.”

“I don’t understand bullying. Why does anyone enjoy making someone else feel so terrible?” Brady had been well liked in school and he had moved easily between groups of students, despite his penchant for rebellious hairstyles. He had never really understood what the big deal was—why a jock couldn’t be friends with a brainiac or an emo kid. “There was this one kid in school . . . He was really small and had these thick glasses. You know what it’s like here. Not every family can afford those freaking featherweight lenses, so these glasses were thick. And one time a couple of football players were harassing him on the bus. They were punching him, and I stepped in between and took a hit to the side of the head. Got back up and nailed the asshole in the gut.” Brady dropped Piper’s hand and squatted down beside a headstone to read it. He shrugged up at her. “I felt like a superhero defending the weak.”

Come to think of it, he might have been more selfless in his youth.

“I got my ass kicked but it was worth it. Then my dad grounded me for fighting. When I tried to explain what had happened, he told me I shouldn’t have interfered.” Brady hadn’t really remembered that until right that very second. “That the little loser needed to learn to stand up for himself.” He furrowed his eyebrows, the pit in his stomach growing, a hot bile rising up in his mouth. No wonder he hadn’t gotten along with his father. “Good advice, huh?”

Piper stood there, her hair trailing down towards him like an aggressive vine, tendrils swaying and reaching for him, the sun behind her head. “That’s terrible advice. Your father should be ashamed of himself. Everyone deserves compassion.”

As she squatted down beside him, Brady thought that it would be a very wonderful thing to be loved by a woman as compassionate as Piper. What would it feel like to see that face on the end of every day, to see a love that would never bend or break, never demand or accuse? Needing to look away, or she would see his confusion, Brady stared at the headstone.
Edith Pearl Magnus, Beloved Wife and Mother
. Not what he was looking for. Or who, rather. Or was he looking for something else entirely? Beloved wife and mother . . .

“You were a nice guy, Brady, defender of small boys on the bus and a butterfly painter for bald girls.”

He’d forgotten about the butterfly mural. He’d taken a fair amount of pride in that job. “Your dad paid me to paint those,” he said, feeling melancholy. He didn’t want credit where none was due.

“I know,” she said. “But you were nice to me, and that was natural. No one paid for that. Kindness always has an impact.”

Brady was no hero, so he just smiled. “So do butterflies, apparently. I should have taken a picture of that wall.”

“Oh, it’s still there. My grandparents live in that house, but the room was never painted.”

“Really?” Though he shouldn’t be surprised. Things didn’t change here for no reason. There was an attitude that you didn’t fix something unless it was broken.

“Really.” She smiled at him. “What you’re looking for isn’t this close to the entrance to the cemetery.”

“How do you know?” Brady looked around. It wasn’t a big cemetery, but given that he had no clue where Brady was buried, the task to find his headstone seemed a little daunting.

“Because there’s a ghost over there, the one we call the Blond Man, from Shelby and Boston’s house. He’s waving to me. I think that must be the first Brady Stritmeyer.”

The hairs on the back of Brady’s neck stood straight up and did the tango. Holy crap. “He’s here? In the cemetery?” He studied her face. Piper looked scared, but like she was trying to cover up that fact. “Have you ever seen him outside of the house before?”

“No. I didn’t know the spirits could travel like that. But this is a cemetery, so I guess it’s not surprising that he could be here, too.” She stood up. “Should we go see?”