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“I don’t know,” Tessa said, and seemed to enjoy giving Miranda the bad news. “I heard Dan tell Mom this morning that Hunter had taken off, without so much as a good-bye or a note. His car was left at the train station in Portland late last night or early morning. You—you didn’t know?” She finally managed to get the pack open and plucked out a long Virginia Slim.
“I don’t believe you.” Miranda shook her head. This was just another one of Tessa’s fantasies, her lies. The girl was always making up stories, and for some reason Tessa was angry with her; she’d felt that tension, the unspoken accusations in Tessa’s eyes the minute she’d stepped into the old studio.
“Fine, don’t believe me, but it’s true. He’s gone. At least for a little while. I couldn’t hear all of the discussion, but . . .” She paused as she jabbed the cigarette into her mouth and struck a match. “. . . he’s definitely out of here. I, um, thought you knew.” She lit up and waved out the match. “Don’t give me any lectures about lung cancer.”
“It’s your body,” Miranda said, but her thoughts were a million miles away. Gone? Hunter was gone? Don’t believe her. She’s lying. She has to be. But why? Uncertainty, like a clenched fist, pummeled her. Trust Hunter. You love him. You can’t doubt him. There had to be some mistake. “Either you’re lying or your information is wrong.”
“I don’t think so. What’s wrong, Miranda? Are you so perfect no man would ever dump you?”
“No, but—”
“If you don’t believe me, ask Dan,” Tessa said, though some of the snarl had left her words. She looked away, refusing to meet M
iranda’s eyes, and ran her fingers over a table, disturbing the thin layer of dust that had accumulated ever since their mother had given up her art a year before. “The reason I believe it, is that I just got the feeling that Dan was upset. Really upset. He tried to hide it, for Mom’s sake, but there’s something going on, Miranda, and whatever it is, it’s not good.”
The baby. This was all about the baby. Hunter was probably going to look for work or something . . . maybe even sort things out in his mind. But he’d call, and he’d be back, and everything would work out. Unless he was running away. Oh, Lord, no. He wouldn’t leave her alone and pregnant. He couldn’t. And yet as she left Tessa sitting on the window ledge, Miranda noticed the storm clouds rolling in from the Pacific, and she felt a shiver of doom, as if the devil himself had taken his finger and run it down her spine.
Nineteen
“That’s right. He left. Without so much as sayin’ good-bye.” Dan Riley leaned on his rake and avoided Miranda’s gaze. A wiry man with thinning gray hair cropped into a crew cut and teeth yellowed by years of cigarettes and coffee, he lifted a baseball cap from his head and rubbed the back of his wrinkled neck in frustration. “Always knew the day would come when he’d move out. Didn’t expect it to come like it did.” His tired eyes found Miranda’s, then moved swiftly away, as if he was embarrassed, as if he knew or suspected something more. “I just wish I knew why. Why wouldn’t he talk it over with me first?”
Because he was scared—afraid of the responsibility of becoming a father, Miranda thought uneasily, but managed a thin smile. It had been three days since Tessa had told her that Hunter had left, but she hadn’t believed her younger sister, waiting to hear from him, keeping faith that he hadn’t run out on her.
Finally, this morning, she’d decided to speak with his father. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t talk to you,” she said, though it was a lie. Of course he wouldn’t confide in his father about this.
“No trouble is that bad.”
“Trouble?” Miranda repeated. “What trouble?”
Dan considered his answer and squeezed air through his teeth as he stared at the inside rim of his grimy cap. “That boy found trouble like a hound finds a dead rabbit. For years he . . . well, he and the police got to know each other real well. I always blamed it on him losing his ma at such a tender age. Anyway, in the past half a year he straightened out, paid his debt to society so to speak, managed to get his equivalency degree for high school and started taking classes down at the community college. I had a mind that he’d finally started walkin’ the straight and narrow.”
“He had,” she said, and Dan elevated a graying eyebrow, noiselessly challenging her defense of a boy that, to Dan’s knowledge, she barely knew.
“Hunt had changed a mite lately, was sneakin’ around, doin’ God only knows what.” Frowning, he replaced his tattered Dodgers baseball cap and dragged the rake over the ground around a mossy oak tree that had grown near the north side of the house. “Things’ve been different around here.” He looked up sharply. “Your ma—she find anyone to replace Ruby?”
Miranda shook her head. “Not yet; I think she’s still hoping Ruby will change her mind and come back to work for us.”
“I doubt it; that woman’s stubborn as they come when she has a mind to be. Besides, losin’ a child, well, there’s just no gittin’ over it. She won’t be back. Too many memories here—memories of the time that Jack was alive.” He raked a clump of old twigs and leaves into a small, decaying pile. “Kee-rist A’mighty, I just hope I hear from Hunt soon.”
Me too, Miranda thought, as a dark, foreboding sense of doom pounded in her heart. “You will.”
Scowling, he scratched at the ground again. “If I do, I’ll let you know, and if you hear . . . well, why would you?” But his eyes had sharpened when he looked up from his task and Miranda suspected for the first time since the start of her relationship with Hunter, his father was beginning to get the picture.
“I . . . I will,” she promised, crossing her fingers and silently praying that Hunter would call.
“And if he don’t, well . . . maybe he’s not worth the bother.” Scratching his neck until his whiskers rustled, he said, “There’s a lot you don’t know about that kind, Miss Holland. A lot he wouldn’t want anyone to know. But he was his mama’s boy and good to me.”
Miranda’s throat turned to cotton. “What don’t I know?”
“Nothin’ good.” He swiped at the ground again. “He had a side to him that was . . .” He frowned slightly. “. . . well, the Reverend Thatcher once called him evil.”
“Oh, no—”
“The Reverend, he went too far, was too judgmental, but Hunt has a streak in him that’s wild and will never be tamed.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said, and turned, her feet feeling sluggish, her heart pounding. As she left she thought he whispered, “Be careful, Missy,” but she wasn’t sure, and it could have been the sound of the wind hissing through dry leaves as it moved ever inland.
“The story I heard is that he was fooling around with a fourteen-year-old girl in Seaside.”
