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She watched as the two kindergartners scribbled on the blank printer paper with her mix of highlighters and promo pens. Grabbing toys from the crime scene would have been wrong. Bree’s hand trembled hours later as she tried to process the broken picture frames and overturned furniture as she called out to Misty. Finding a shrink once her world stopped spinning would be a priority, one for all of them. Not that they were her wards or anything, but John Welch didn’t seem the type of stepfather who would step in and take care of the twins’ mental health, and someone had to.
“Auntie Bree, look,” Jane said with a bright smile as she held up the stick-figured people in various sizes, shapes, and colors.
Was she supposed to be watching for emotional damage played out in a mix of pencil and markers? How did one deal with a child who came knocking, barefoot, on a neighbor’s door because “Mommy won’t make breakfast or play” at nearly noon? Thank God it was a weekend, or she would have been in her office. Then what would the kids have done?
Misty played it off when it came to the neighbors that were jealous of her, but the neighborhood was full of generational upper-middle-class people all striving to lose themiddlemoniker in their class. They didn’t appreciate a trailer park girl who’d found redemption with her prince in the local government.Pretty Womangave a false narrative. Vivian would never be accepted, even with all of Edward’s money and power. Misty could play suburban mom all she wanted, but there was a stain shadowing her that couldn’t be rubbed out.
“It’s pretty, Jane,” Bree said, praying the young girl would somehow be able to survive this tragedy.
Once pictures were taken of their blood-covered feet, Bree had bathed the two kids and cleaned them up. A social worker had grabbed a few days’ worth of clothing from their rooms, and Bree made sure they were fed. As she tucked back the child’s dark brown hair with an old headband, Jane’s gray eyes blinked up at her. The kid had to have seen shit before because she wasn’t crying out for her mama or even drawing pictures without sunshine in the corner.
“I’ll give it to Mommy. It’ll make her smile,” Jane said, and clarification slammed into Bree. The kids had no idea their mother was dead. Who would broach the subject with them?
“Jane, has Mommy ever slept this hard before?” Bree wondered since there were weeks when she didn’t even get so much as a wave from Misty’s front door.
“Yeah, sometimes, but yelling makes you sleepy.”
“Does it now?” Bree questioned, hoping to pull any lost memory from the child as she rested her chin on her upturned palm.
“Yep, that’s why sometimes Mommy says, ‘Go outside and run around.’ It’s to make us sleepy like she gets.”
“She get sleepy with Daddy John?” Bree leaned forward and rested her forearms on her knees.
“All daddies make Mommy sleepy,” she replied. Jane let out a long sigh, then leaned in to tell a secret. “My’s and Aiddie’s daddy makes her the sleepiest.”
“From yelling?” Bree asked because she’d only caught glimpses of the kids’ father. What she knew of him came from Misty’s tales of misspent youth.
“They yell so much they have to take naps, but Daddy John makes them stop.”
Suddenly John’s demand to be in the house when the kids saw their father made sense. Misty liked to say she had a broken picker when it came to men. John aside, her past was filled with losers and assholes, but even he gave Bree vibes, telling her the picker was still broken.
It didn’t matter at this point. Police were supposed to be investigating. John was out of town, and if she wanted to be honest with herself, she wished it was him because the alternative was a random break-in, and the security of the bedroom neighborhood she’d found would be shattered.
“What’s Aiden drawing?”
“Motorcycles and cars,” Jane said, crinkling her nose and making all the dark freckles on her pale skin bunch together. “Car fumes and perfumes make boys dumb.”
Bree had to hold back a laugh on that one. The sass in Jane was as strong as the silence in Aiden. The last thing she needed to do was encourage the girl.
“I’m hungry,” she whined, and Aiden’s head perked up. He’d insisted she spike the thick black hair he had on the top of his head after he was dressed.
“I have some more grapes and strawberries.”
“Ugh, I suppose,” Jane replied, and Bree got up to make them up a plate with fruit, cheese, and crackers.
She wasn’t opposed to a night or two with the kids, but her fridge would need a serious filling to feed these two properly. Was it too late to order pizza for them? They couldn’t live on takeout alone. Then again, boxed meals and quick snacks were Misty’s go-tos. Bree did love the two urchins, and for some reason they’d picked her out as the safe neighbor. Maybe because her darker skin and buzzed short hair made her stand out as much as they did. Brand-named clothes aside, she wasn’t the typical resident in Creosote Springs. This wasn’t the affluent black neighborhood she was raised in, and the twins hadn’t started their life here either. According to Misty, she was trailer trash and only caught John’s eye when she was outside of the courthouse, crying as she struggled to wrangle the twins and tempt them with a near-empty bag of Goldfish.
The rumble of a motorcycle made both kids perk up all Pavlov’s dog style. Only a handful of times had she seen the man who triggered Misty to get a little lost look when explaining him. Usually he arrived in a pickup truck since a set of twins didn’t exactly fit on the back of an Indian Scout Bobber and the man wasn’t one to have a sidecar. The way Misty told it, the few times she was allowed to sit on the bike was to straddle the guy’s waist in the middle of a parking lot with a very short skirt giving ease of access. Even after she found out she was pregnant, the two never made it to the place where they were a couple. Instead, she was a good fuck, which meant she never got to ride bitch, as she called it. Her younger, wilder days still danced in her eyes when she spoke of them.
“Daddy!” Aiden finally spoke up as he rushed to the front door and struggled with the handle.
“It’s locked,” Bree said as she ran to stop the five-year-old from bursting from the house. “Let me see. It might not be who you think it is.”
The same gray eyes blinked up with innocent wonder toward Bree, pleading with her to stop being dumb and let him go to the guy who randomly spends a few hours with them at his convenience. Misty bitched about his faux fatherhood, how she wished he’d sign away his rights and let John adopt them. But her ex used them for a sick leverage, and right now the only thing Bree knew was her best friend would never want him taking the twins.
“Stay here. Let me see who’s pulling in my driveway.”
“It’s my daddy,” Aiden said with a stomp of his foot and darkening to his eyes.
