Tyler O’Neill’s Redemption (6 page)

“Let’s go,” Tyler said to Richard’s blank face. “Let’s go back to Vegas. Play some cards, get a steak as big as our heads.”

“I’m making lasagna.”

“Screw the lasagna!” Tyler cried. “It’s time to go.”

“But we just got here. We haven’t found the gems.”

“Dad, if it’s about money, I’ve got more than—”

Richard shook his head. “I’m not taking your money.”

Tyler blew out a long breath and stared up at the ceiling. This totally misplaced sense of honor his father had could be such a pain in the butt. “You will live in my suite, charge meals to my room and wear my damn clothes, but you can’t take money from me?”

“Hey—” Richard wiped his hands off on the apron “—that’s taking care of one another. You’ll remember I did the same thing for you for years after you found me in Vegas.”

I was a kid!
Tyler wanted to yell.
I was your kid! It’s part of a father’s job description.

But the truth was, Richard often got the job description for father and sperm donor confused.

I should just leave. Leave him here to find these nonexistent gems.
Tyler’s feet twitched with the urge to turn around and walk away, leave Richard behind like he’d done to his family. Shuck them all like so many dirty socks.

If he could leave the best of them behind, why the hell couldn’t he walk away from the worst of them?

“I need you, son,” Richard said, his voice getting earnest, his eyes slightly damp. The old caring father routine—
I may have been absent, but you were never absent from my thoughts.
Tyler fell for that story hook, line and sinker more times than he’d like to admit.

“You need me to help you look for gems,” Tyler said, crossing his arms over his chest. “You could hire someone for that. Hell, we could get a cleaning crew in here and they’d—”

There was something off on Dad’s face, something raw. Something not manufactured and it looked like worry.

“What?” Tyler asked, feeling his stomach fall into his shoes.

“It’s not a big deal—”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“I was in a…thing…back in Los Angeles.”

“Oh, my God,” Tyler breathed, turning away from his father, fisting his hands in his hair. “Oh. My. God.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Richard said. Tyler heard him step forward and Tyler put up his hand. If the old man got closer there was a good chance Tyler would knock him out. “I swear to you, son, I didn’t do anything. But the friend I was staying with was arrested for credit-card fraud. I didn’t know what he was doing, but because—”

“But because you were staying with him, the police think you do.” Tyler sighed and looked his father hard in the eye, willing his father to tell the truth.

“I was questioned and released. I swear, son,” he said. “I had nothing to do with it. Credit-card fraud is for lowlifes.”

Tyler’s laughter was a hard bark that hurt his throat. “Good to know you have standards.”

“I just need…a change of scene, until things cool down. Just for a little while.”

“What if I decide to leave?”

“Then I’d wish you well,” he said, “but I better stay. Empty house and all.”

Empty house full of gems.

“It’s not your house.”

“Not yours, either.”

Son. Of. A. Bitch.

There was no way Tyler could leave now. It would be like walking away from a bomb with a lit fuse. There was simply no telling what kind of trouble Richard would get into unattended. And if he wasn’t here, Juliette would drive by, checking on The Manor. It was only a matter of time before she found Richard.

“I need a drink,” he muttered.

About Juliette. Lord, how was he going to be able to avoid her now? In a town this size? Impossible.

“What we need is to stop drinking, start looking,” Tyler said, drinking anyway.

“I’ve been looking,” Richard said, stretching back in his chair, crossing his legs at the ankles.

They sat on the back porch, the early afternoon sunlight a bright warm blanket across their legs, the whiskey a warm blanket in his stomach. Thoughts of Juliette like a sore tooth he just could not leave alone.

More whiskey would fix that, he thought, taking a half inch from the glass. Which was why he was drinking instead of looking, because first things, after all, were first.

Gotta get Juliette out of my head.

“Yeah? Where have you been looking?”

“I started in the basement,” Richard said, looking out over the maze and the greenhouse. “Boxes of paperwork. I tell you—” he smiled, shaking his head “—that little girl of mine is a packrat—”

Tyler stiffened, his skin suddenly too tight. Bright sparks in his head.
Don’t call her that,
he wanted to yell.
You don’t get to call her that.

But he bit back the words.

“Margot still raising orchids?” he asked, unable to look directly at his father without the help of much more booze.

“I wouldn’t know, son. Margot and I never discussed hobbies.”

Tyler stood and stepped onto the lush green grass, a miracle in the end-of-summer heat, and crossed the yard, his fingers touching the silvery green leaves of the trees. Soft. But not soft like Juliette.

“Hey, why the sudden interest in finding the gems, Ty?” Dad asked, following him across the grass. He stumbled a little, but righted himself with grace. Dad never could hold his liquor, but he was about the most gracious drunk Tyler had ever seen. Whiskey turned the old man into royalty. “This morning you could care less.”

“We’ve got nothing else to do,” Tyler said.

“You don’t believe me about the gems, do you?”

“I don’t believe one way or the other,” Tyler answered. And he didn’t. He didn’t actually care, either. At this point he was babysitter/bomb squad, and if the baby wanted to look for gems—what did it hurt?

“You aren’t excited about the money?” Dad asked.

Tyler shook his head. He had more money than he could spend in five years, and considering the way money rolled out of his hands, that was saying something.

But with this last win, he’d finally taken his brother, Carter’s, advice and talked to a money guy. Tyler got a nice little check every month from his investments.

Carter, he thought, the whiskey making him fond rather than irritated at the thought of his brother. Leave it to the Golden Boy to find a way to run a con on nothing.

Tyler stepped into the greenhouse, which was warm and humid, like breathing underwater. Plants lined a table, and more hung from baskets. No blooms, just the young shoots, green arrows out of dark soil.

Margot was starting over with her orchids and he had to wonder why. He took a sip and touched the soil in one of the baskets. Dry, but not very, considering Margot was on some cruise and Savannah was off falling in love in Paris.

Someone was watering the plants, and it could only be Juliette. Always Juliette.

He found the hose coiled in the corner and turned it on, finding the balance between a trickle and a flood, just like Margot taught him a million years ago.

“Orchids are particular,” she’d said, filling the hanging pan under a pink flower. “Some want water from the bottom, some want it from the top. Some want lots, some barely any.”

“Seems like a lot of work,” he’d said, pissed off at the world because he knew why he was here and that his mother was never coming back. He didn’t want to take
care of the damn plants, he wanted to smash them. Break those little pink flowers into pieces.

“That’s why I need your help,” she’d said, looking right at him, right down to that twitchy dark place. She knew he wanted to wreck her flowers. Wreck everything. And still she wanted his help.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, scowling
.

“I’ll show you,” she said, putting the hose in his hand.

“You think the gems are in here?” Richard asked, digging into one of the pots, crushing the green bud with his big, fat, clumsy fingers.

“No, Dad,” he said, and flicked the hose at him as if Richard was a cat digging in a house plant.

“Hey! Watch it!” Richard said, bouncing away, bumping into a worktable.

“I don’t think the gems are here,” he said. Splashing a little water in each of the pots, he didn’t know which was which. Which, if any, needed special care.

He turned off the hose, flinging it back in its corner. The last sip of whiskey burned a familiar trail down his throat. An odd longing bobbed in his chest, an unvoiced wish for something he didn’t even understand.

I miss this place,
he thought.
I miss Margot and Savannah. I miss Juliette.

He thought of who he’d been, that boy with those bright green dreams pushing out of the rotten soil his mother had planted him in.

The thought, as soon as it was fully formed and poisonous, was plucked out. Destroyed.

Wishing for something different was a waste. These were the cards he’d been dealt, and if he didn’t like them—too bad.

He was Tyler O’Neill, born a card man, from a long line of con men and petty crooks. This was his life.

And the best thing he could do for Juliette Tremblant was to keep himself and Dad far away from her.

He tested the weight of the tumbler in his hand. Tossing it. Catching it. Fine crystal, it was so perfect. Better than a baseball.

The tumbler rocketed through the air—a perfect arc, catching the light at its zenith, splashing rainbows across the courtyard—and then smashed against the stone wall, fracturing into a million glittering pieces.

“Tyler?” Dad asked, his voice careful.

“I’ll start in the upstairs bedrooms,” he said, and headed back to the house.

The mayor tore open a packet of Alka-Seltzer and dumped it into the glass at his elbow, the water exploding into bubbles. The man looked decidedly gray.

So, she imagined, did Father Michaels, the wrestling coach and Lou Brandt.

The good old boys really tied one on during those Sunday-night poker games.

The mayor drained the glass in three large gulps and then wiped his face. “The kid looked like he’d gotten into it with a freight train.”

“His father, sir.”

“His father did that?” Juliette nodded.

“Merde,” Mayor Bourdage whispered. He set his empty glass down on a coaster, taking a long moment to push the glass and coaster across his giant desk.

“If you don’t mind me asking, Mayor, do you just want an update or was there something you needed from me?”

“What are you going to do with that boy?” he asked.

As Gaetan leaned back in his chair, sunlight fell across his face and he winced. Swearing, he rolled his chair out of the sun’s direct path.

His concern for Miguel might just be the help she needed, but she had to be sure of the mayor’s sympathies first.

“Why are you asking, sir? It’s not city-hall business.”

“I found the kid trying to steal that car, Juliette. That makes it my business. And this isn’t the first time he’s been brought in.”

Gaetan slipped on a pair of reading glasses and opened a file on his desk, and Juliette recognized Miguel’s sheet.
How in the world did he get that?
Juliette thought, standing speechless and stupid.

“He was brought in a few weeks ago for getting in a fistfight with his father? At the…” He scanned the page, lifting a sheet.

“The grocery store.”
Owens,
she thought, a tidal wave of anger sweeping through her. This was the last straw. The man needed to be reminded who was boss and damn if she didn’t look forward to reminding him.

“Witnesses say your boy attacked his father. And yet you let him go.”

This was it. Her reckoning for making the wrong call with Miguel.

“We brought him and his father in, they both cooled off, and we let them both go. Miguel has never been charged with anything. Or convicted. He’s a boy with absolutely no guidance. His father is an abusive drunk, his mother is gone. He’s trying to keep his sister safe.”

“By attempting to steal a car?”

Juliette sighed. “I know what it looks like, but if we send him to DOC you know what will happen.”

“I do indeed.” Mayor Bourdage nodded. “But you’re walking a very thin line here, Chief. So, I ask again, what are you going to do?”

“I’m working on it,” she said, unsure of what she could do with Miguel. “I thought maybe he could clean some cars after school.”

Mayor Bourdage’s eyebrows hit his hairline. “Boy tried to steal a car and you’re making him clean squad units?”

“It’s a beginning,” she said, feeling her ears burn. “But we have no community service arrangements, no programs for at-risk kids, no counseling for families—”

“We’re a town of two thousand people. The parish handles all that. Foster homes and—”

“We need something here, in Bonne Terre. Our juvenile-perpetrated crime is up almost a hundred percent over the last two years.”

“Which is a good reason not to let this boy off—perhaps we need to make an example out of him. It’s what your father would have done.”

Her teeth itched at the mention of her father, but she wasn’t about to air family laundry in the mayor’s office.

“He’s the wrong kid for that,” she said. “The last two kids we sent over to DOC came back worse.”

“You know, I hired you because I knew you would change the department. And you have—in the six months you’ve been here, you’ve done great work, Chief.”

Juliette blinked, the compliment sideswiping her. “Thank you, Mayor,” she said, feeling a hot blush inch its way up her neck.

“But there’s only so much leeway I can give you before people start to notice,” he said. “People are used to the way your father did things. And you’re coming real close to blurring the lines of your job.”

“Like you said, it’s a small town, Mayor. People already notice, they just don’t care.” She glanced pointedly at his empty glass of Alka-Seltzer and lifted one eyebrow.

A poker game, in a church of all places, and the whole town knew and let it slide.

They stared at each other for a long moment and Juliette wondered if maybe she’d overstepped—he was the mayor, for crying out loud.

But then he laughed and Juliette nearly sagged with relief. “You’re right. But this kid gets brought in one more time—even if it’s for milk and cookies—and I’m going to start to care. And that ain’t good for either of you.” He didn’t bother veiling the threat. “You ready to risk your job over this kid?”

“It won’t come to that, sir,” she said.

“I certainly hope not.” He looked back down at his desk. “Thank you, Chief.”

“Thank you,” she said before turning to leave.

“How did it go with Tyler, when he found out the boy tried to steal his car?” he asked before she got to the door.

“He’s not pressing charges.” She shrugged. “So, pretty well.”

“I have to say, I’m surprised. The boy named the damn car.”

The boy,
she thought bitterly,
probably named his damn penis.

“Well,” she said with a tight smile. “Tyler has always been one for surprises.”