When I’d finished my second bowl of cereal, I rinsed out the bowl and tucked my dishes away in the second dishwasher. I’d forgotten how great it was to have a dishwasher instead of a sink full of dishes. I then went outside to the warm May sun, looking for more answers.
Cameron’s car was parked at the top of the circular driveway. All four doors of the Audi were opened and Rocco was crouched over the passenger side seat with a spray bottle.
There was so much happening outside and big people walking around that it took a while for my brain to fully consider what my eyes were seeing. Four white, cubed passenger minivans with darkened windows were lined up at the far end of the driveway. Men were buzzing around the property, some leaning against the vans, basking in the sunshine, and others walking about, intent on some mysterious task. Then there were the men that were away from the driveway, past the grass clearing, all the way down to the edge of the woods; these men stood in a row along the property line, about twenty feet from each other, and watched the scene from the shadows of the trees—their long barreled guns either in hand or holstered over their large shoulders.
I sped to Rocco who was muttering and shaking his head, absorbed intensely in a discussion with himself.
“Need any help?” I offered keenly, withholding the alarm in my throat.
He glanced up and chewed on my proposal for a minute.
“Better not,” he said, sighing. “I don’t want to get in trouble again for talking to the inmate.”
“Is that what I am?” I wondered, keeping a corner of my eye on the gun-wielders.
Rocco shrugged. “Apparently.”
While he sprayed some kind of deodorizer on the front passenger seat, I sat on the backseat, with my legs swinging out the side. I leaned my face forward in the outside air—because it was really stinky inside the car.
“Who are all those people?” I asked him.
He didn’t look up. “What people?”
I pointed my thumb in the direction of the gunners. “The men with the guns,” I said, to start with.
“Guards,” Cameron answered as he approached the car with Meatball at his heels. I noticed that he had showered. His hair was still dripping, and he had changed from jeans and red T-shirt—to jeans and gray T-shirt.
“What are they guarding?” I managed to ask.
“Precious cargo,” he replied quickly before changing the subject, starting with a cruelly charming smile. “I heard you got my kid brother back for putting that bump on your head.”
“Whatever,” Rocco mumbled without lifting his head to acknowledge his brother.
Still smiling, Cameron glanced at me, motioning his head toward Rocco, silently asking me what Rocco’s problem was.
I shrugged in response; though my guess was that Rocco had probably been berated by the one called Spider for chitchatting with me—the prisoner—earlier.
Cameron wasn’t fazed by his brother’s crankiness. “Come on. I’ll show you around.” By the time I realized that his hand had grazed the small of my back to lead me back to the house, he had already pulled it away. Meatball happily followed us.
“Where are we … exactly?” I probed.
“Vermont.”
“Were not in New York State anymore?” I said before I had time to take the shock out of my voice.
He peered from the corner of his eye. “Vermont is a different state, yes.”
“Okay,” I said slowly and took a breath while he kept his eye on my expression. “And what is this place?”
He pointed to the house. “It used to be a shelter for forest firefighters back in the day. I bought it a couple of years ago.”
I was stunned. “This is your house?”
He nodded. “It was basically just a barn, but I had it fixed up. I kept the tin roof and restored the façade. Everything else is new.”
He led me through the front door, past the archway and through the now familiar kitchen, toward the hallway where I had been accosted by Carly the night before. We stopped in front of the washroom.
“I never realized how filthy it was until I actually had to shower in it,” he said, his lips curled in disgust. He quickly closed the door and we kept moving.
“Spider … Tiny … Rocco,” he pointed out as we passed each of the three doors on the left. Spider’s room looked untouched. The bed was made up so tight you could bounce a dime off it. Rocco’s room was a pigsty: the bed unmade, clothes piled on the floor.
“Who’s Tiny?”
“You can’t miss him,” he chuckled, “He’s the fat guy who usually hangs around Spider or me.”
My eyebrows drew together. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why call him Tiny … if he obviously isn’t?”
“That’s what makes it so funny,” he said, but I caught him slightly rolling his eyes as he said this.
“Besides,” he added as he opened one of the double doors at the end of the hall, “would you be willing to call that guy fat to his face?”
Cameron had a point.
When we walked through the double-doors, Cameron watched as my chin dropped. It was a room of tall bookshelves and pale suede chairs and couch. The high ceiling had exposed dark wood beams that ran across it. There was a fireplace between the two long windows that faced the back of the property, and the opposite wall was layered of soft gray and rose stones.
“It’s gorgeous,” I whispered, instinctively letting my hand slide over the stones as I strolled deeper into the room.
“Nobody ever uses this room,” he said after a barely audible clearing of his throat.
I folded my arms and investigated the book titles on the shelves, rising up and down on my tiptoes, while Cameron stood by.
“There’s a piano in the corner. You can come here and play whenever you want,” he told me.
“I wouldn’t put anyone through that kind of torture.”
“Don’t you play?”
There was accusation in his tone and I could feel myself reddening.
“I’ve been subjected to piano lessons my whole life,” I explained dully. “My last piano teacher ran off crying after accusing me of purposefully being tone-deaf. She had a nervous breakdown.”
Cameron’s eyes widened, and suddenly a full bellowed laugh escaped him. It was so unexpected, that I took a step back.
I noticed something different about Cameron—something that had been there since he had arrived that morning, something that had only intensified since he had come to meet Rocco and me by his car. His cheeks were slightly flushed. The tired and anxious creases around his eyes were almost gone. He looked decidedly younger.
It was like a mask had been taken off … or put on—I couldn’t be sure … but I liked it more than I ought to. We headed back through the foyer and down the stairs to the lower level.
“How old are you, Cameron?” I wondered aloud as we walked into a den.
“This is where the guys hang out when they’re not working,” he explained. The space had everything to keep overgrown children entertained: a stocked kitchen, ping-pong and pool table, a big screen TV, and a wall of movies and video games. It also had patio doors that opened up onto the pool outside.
“Are you avoiding my question on purpose?” I put to him.
“What? Oh, I’m twenty-six,” he answered, distracted.
While my thoughts were trying to process how my twenty-six-year-old tour guide slash kidnapper could afford the mansion I was sightseeing, we were making our way down another hallway.
“Some of the night guards sleep in here,” he whispered, pointing at the bedroom doors that were closed. I could hear off-tempo snoring and wheezing through the door.
At the end of the hall was a pumpkin orange, fully equipped gym with windows that looked out onto the pool.
There were also two men in the middle of the room and a large opened box next to them.
“It’s a high-speed treadmill,” Cameron proudly announced. “You know, so that you can still do the same stuff you normally do.”
We paused to watch the confused men arguing over the instructions manual, surrounded by pieces of something.
“Well,” he added, “it will eventually be a treadmill.”
When I had figured out that this gift was meant for me to use while I served my indefinite sentence, I said thank you, put an unadulterated smile on my face, and followed him out to the pool.
By that point, I had so many questions for Cameron that I didn’t even know where to start. My jumbled thoughts were only worsened by the luminous smiles he kept throwing my way. I didn’t understand any of it and it was hardly a fair fight.
We rolled up our jeans, and plunged our feet into the cool water. Cameron peered over my knees with a huge grin on his face.
“What?” I stuttered.
“I’m looking for that weird toe you were telling my brother about,” he chuckled and glanced back at my face.
“News sure travels fast around here,” I mumbled, red spots speckling my cheeks.
“Rocco thought it was pretty funny,” he said with a shrug. “Why did you name your teddy bear Booger?”
“It’s not a very good story,” I stalled.
“Try me,” he pressed.
I sighed, “Booger was my brother Bill’s bear before it was mine. Bill had already named him Booger before he gave him to me.”
Without blinking, Cameron moved on from my boring story to another one. “And your favorite book is
Rumble Fish
. Isn’t it a bit childish for you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never read it.”
“It looked used,” he challenged.
I glared up. “You mean the copy that you found hidden under my pillow in my room?”
He nodded and shamelessly grinned.
“I keep trying to read it, but never get past the front cover,” I explained. When I peered up, I saw the confused look on his face.
I sighed again. “I had just finished reading the first chapter when my brother died. Now I can’t seem to pick up where I left off and move on to the next chapter.” I could feel the golf ball rolling around in my throat as I said this.
The look of discomfort on Cameron’s face was one of the reasons I avoided talking about Bill. There was always that point when people hesitated, trying to find the right thing to say, only to realize that there was nothing that they could say to make it better.
Cameron simply moved back to the safe, but boring story. “Did Booger ever recover from the ironing incident?”
I mirrored his sly smile. “My nanny Maria sewed a button on top of the melted eye, but it was too big and the wrong color. Booger never looked at me in the same way again.”
I realized my mistake as soon as it was out of my mouth. I never used the word
nanny
; people automatically associated it with the words
trust
fund
.
But Cameron thankfully didn’t seem to notice—though I still couldn’t fathom why he’d want to hear about a bear called Booger.
“Where’s Booger now?” he asked, enjoying himself.
“On my bed, in my parents’ house.”
His brow furrowed. “Why didn’t you take Booger with you to college?”
“I didn’t want to be the weird girl who still sleeps with teddy bears,” I quickly replied. Then something occurred to me, “How’d you know I’m in college?”
“Some of your bins were stacked with thick school books. I assumed that you were a college girl,” he quickly answered.
“You seem to assume a lot.”
He looked me in the eyes. “Was I wrong?”
“No.” I sulked.
“Explain to me one more thing,” he said, his eyes unyielding. “Why did you tell Rocco all that stuff about yourself?”
“I was trying to form a bond between us so that he wouldn’t want to kill me anymore,” I admitted with embarrassment.
He laughed. “Where did you get that from?”
“TV—I think.”
A moment of quiet came, and we dangled our feet into the warm water. He smelled like shaving cream—I took a long breath, and I carefully started to gawk at him from my peripheral. When his hand pressed against the ground to slightly readjust his seating, the muscles of his forearm tightly shifted with him. I also noticed a marking peeking out below the sleeve of his T-shirt.
Without warning, he turned his head and caught me staring. “What?”
Words briefly escaped me.
Like an idiot, I reached past his chest and touched the skin of his arm. This seemed to have caught him off guard. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t move an inch either.
“Is that a tattoo?” I asked shyly.
He finally understood and lifted up his sleeve. There was a cross tattooed on his bicep.
“You have a scar in the middle of the cross,” I remarked.
He watched my expression before he explained, “Bullet wound.”
I tried to hide my shock. “Did the tattoo come before or after the … bullet?”
“After,” he replied, never taking his eyes off my face. He seemed to debate something before pulling down on the collar of his shirt. On the middle of his upper chest, was another cross, with another mark—bullet wound—in the middle.