Prodigal

Chapter 10

10

Adam hadn’t called Iris when he’d left Pennsylvania several hours earlier because he hadn’t known he was coming, not exactly. And he hadn’t known what to say. The good thing was, most of the things he was reticent to talk about, his grandmother was content to ignore as well.

He hadn’t called Iris when he’d left JJ’s either, and yet there she was.

The rain had let up, but it was still cold. Iris stood on the front step, waiting, pulling a chunky sweater tightly around her chest and shoulders. She looked good, younger than she had any right to, as many people as she’d raised and buried in her life. Her white-blonde hair fell to her shoulders with a hint of wave, much more bohemian than she’d ever allow any of her clients to be. If she still cut hair. Adam was ashamed to realize he didn’t even know, not for sure. He slung his duffel over his shoulder.

“I thought I might be seeing you. So you heard about the girl?” Iris asked.

Her words echoed JJ’s so closely, Adam had to suppress a little chill and spend some effort on his most charming grin. “Did you ever stop to think I might just have come back to see you?”

“Not for a minute, you pretty boy,” she said, still smiling. She put her arm around his free shoulder when he reached the front door, but withdrew it almost as quickly. “Ugh, you’re wet. Come on in before you catch your death of cold. Did you eat yet?”

“Yeah, I had something.” Cheese popcorn, and maybe a bowl of cereal about twelve hours ago.

“Uh-huh,” she said, heading toward the kitchen. “I’ll make you a decent meal while you go get changed.”

Adam ran upstairs and took a quick, hot shower. It didn’t wake him up, but it gave him a nice, if temporary, fuzzy feeling that all was right with the world. It also helped that Iris had kept a room for him, just as she’d always done, ever since his parents died.

He tucked his duffel in the open closet to keep from tripping over it in the small room. Iris had removed the closet doors when he’d first moved in, traumatized and terrified that someone—or something—was hiding there. His grandmother was lucky she wasn’t a hunchback, all the nights he’d startled awake to find her dozing in a child’s hard, wooden chair next to his bed.

He sat in that same wooden chair and looked around. The room had belonged to Iris’s son Bo years before Adam’s arrival, though he’d never found any sign of his dead uncle in it. The bedroom walls were mostly bare, but a shelf on one side held a baseball and mitt; the skateboard Adam had desperately wanted but rarely ridden because there was no paved surface close enough; a pair of swim goggles (turned out the water at Poplar Creek was brown all the way down to its muddy bottom, not just at the surface); a crate of paperback books and National Geographic magazines; and a few other remnants from his childhood. The truth is, he and Danny and JJ hadn’t needed much in the way of stuff to entertain themselves. They were feral, imaginative kids. On summer days, they’d disappear in the morning and return in the evening just before dark, with a couple of clandestine kitchen runs in between.

Of course, all that changed when Danny was taken. People got funny around Adam after that—superstitious, Iris said. JJ said stupid. Adam and Danny had been best friends, Adam was there when Danny was taken (along with a dozen or so other Cub Scouts), and Adam had already had such bad luck in his short life. It didn’t help that Adam had difficulty dealing with his friend’s disappearance, including a return of his vivid nightmares. Adam finished out the school year in Cold Springs—barely—but then Iris sent him to live with an aunt in Pennsylvania. That didn’t quite work out, and it was on to a cousin’s somewhere else in the state, and then on to another home from there. By the time Adam graduated high school, he’d lived with at least half a dozen friends and family members.

In the first years of his Exile—that was JJ’s word for it—Iris still allowed Adam to spend his summers in Cold Springs with her. Wherever he found himself living during the school year, he counted the days until he could return to this very room. Adam must have been about fifteen when—through a combination of familial dysfunction and teenaged rebellion—the summer visits stopped. He hadn’t spent more than a night or two at a time in Cold Springs since, and then never leaving Iris’s house. But his room was always waiting, often for years at a time, with fresh sheets and enough clean clothes in the right sizes to get by. He pulled a pair of sweats and a T-shirt from the dresser and breathed deeply. No matter how long he’d been gone, the clothes Iris had waiting always smelled better than anything he’d washed himself at the laundromat. Or lately, in the bathroom sink.

An enticing aroma pulled Adam from his reverie and down the stairs to the kitchen. Iris checked something in the microwave, put it back, and punched a few buttons before returning to monitor a skillet. Adam bent over and rested his head on her shoulder.

“Thank you, Iris.”

“Try not to drool on my shoulder, kiddo,” she said, leaning her head into his.

He straightened, embarrassed to realize that was a real possibility, and stared at the mouth-watering, flour-dipped meat in the skillet. “Is that tenderloin?” he asked.

“Your favorite,” she said. “After all, you coming to visit is a special occasion.”

Was there a hint of judgment in her voice, or was he being overly sensitive? Adam spent a lot of time asking himself that question around his grandmother, and he didn’t think that was an accident. Hers was a subtle manipulation.

“I thought deer season didn’t start until next month,” he said.

The microwave dinged. Iris turned off the stove before pushing Adam toward the kitchen table. “What are you, the game warden now? Go sit down and get out from underfoot. What do you want to drink—milk?”

Adam shuddered. He’d stopped drinking milk when he was ten, but Iris never stopped offering. She had it in her head that it was good for him, and when Iris got something in her head, it was there to stay. Adam pirouetted around her, getting a glass of water as she made him a plate: deer tenderloin, baked potato and a green salad. She narrowed her eyes and shook her head when he was a little too generous with the Ranch dressing.

“What?” he asked, indignant but grinning. “I’m a growing boy.”

“You better hope not. Once you’ve passed thirty, the only growing you do is out.” Iris settled down across from him with a mug of something hot and herbal. “Not that you couldn’t stand a few more pounds right now. Have you been eating?”

Adam chewed and moaned around the tender meat. “Yeah, but not like this,” he said, dropping a forkful of potato on its way to his mouth.

“Then don’t eat like a starving person,” she said. “Show some manners. You been over to see JJ?”

Adam looked at Iris, trying to figure out the subtext in her question, but the woman had several decades of practice on him. And he was tired. He nodded, then took a sip of water. “Stopped there first. Why didn’t you tell me about her dad?”

Iris raised an eyebrow. So you could do what? That’s what her eyes were saying, but fortunately her heart was much more kind. She shrugged. “Hard to see a man like that, so physically strong all his life, laid so low. Shrinking away to nothing so fast. If I ever get cancer, you’re gonna have to get me a pistol or pull the trigger on that rifle of your grandfather’s I’ve got in the back room. I am not spending my last days the way Max Tulley did…” She trailed off, drifting into some other place—uncertain future or unshakeable past, Adam couldn’t tell—before changing the subject. “I imagine it’s pretty crazy over by JJ’s now, what with the Nicholson girl. You see anybody else?”

Adam finished his plate with a sigh. “You mean, did anybody see me? You’re as bad as JJ.” One reason Adam visited so rarely was that Iris apparently expected the town to arrive on her doorstep carrying torches and demand his surrender. He wasn’t sure what crime he had to answer for, but Iris had lived here her whole life, so Adam figured she wasn’t entirely wrong.

Iris continued to stare, waiting for an answer. If it weren’t for the malleability of her morals, or more accurately, a total disregard for any laws she happened to disagree with, his grandmother would have made a fine cop.

“There was a group of guys at JJ’s, just come back from looking for the girl. I don’t think anyone recognized me. I didn’t recognize them.” Adam stood and rinsed his dish in the sink. He tried to speak nonchalantly over the sound of the tap. “Except maybe Leslie Beck.”

“Leslie Beck?”

Adam turned to see his grandmother resting her face in her hands. He placed his hands on her shoulders and gave them a little squeeze. “It’ll be okay.”

She sighed and rose to see to the greasy skillet. “Fine, it’ll be okay. But you need to stay clear of Leslie Beck. You know his brother’s a sheriff deputy now?”

“Yeah, JJ mentioned that. I always thought Luther was all right,” Adam said.

Iris made a sound suspiciously like a snort. “Honey, there ain’t a Beck been made that’s ‘all right.’ Don’t you go underestimating a single one of them. The meanness that was in their grandfather made my own husband seem a saint. And that he surely was not.”

Adam’s grandfather had died before Adam was born—shot himself deer hunting, too drunk to stand without leaning on his loaded rifle—but Adam had heard enough stories over the years that he was not sorry he’d never met the man. He waited until Iris set the skillet in the sink to soak before giving her a big hug from behind. This time, he noticed the prominent bones of her arms and shoulders, the thin veneer of flesh over her ribs that the cardigan had hidden.

“I think the pot was calling the kettle black,” he said. “You been eating lately?”

“Of course I have. I’m not an i***t,” Iris said, squeezing him back. “I have to take old Mrs. Gunderson to a doctor’s appointment in Plattsville tomorrow morning, so you’re on your own for breakfast.”

Iris turned to face him. It didn’t matter how long he’d been gone, she never asked him where he’d come from, what he’d left behind, or how long he was staying. It was almost as if he were a wild animal she was afraid of spooking. That’s why her next question surprised him.

“Adam, why are you here?”

He tried to look straight ahead, over the top of Iris’s head at the kitchen cabinets, while he got his thoughts in order. When that didn’t work, he gazed at the ceiling, but the words he needed weren’t there either.

“Sweetie?” Iris asked gently.

He took a deep breath, and the thought that had haunted him for the past eight hours tumbled out. “Do you think there could be a connection between this girl and Danny?”

Iris reached up to touch his face. “No matter what you do, you can’t bring Danny back. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know,” Adam said.

And he did, except for the part of him that was still a child back in Dead Hollow, looking down at the ground where there used to be a sleeping bag, and out at the dark woods where there was nothing. Not anymore.

“I’m going to bed now. Thank you, Iris. Love you.”

“I love you, darling. Sleep well.”

It wasn’t until he flopped into bed, rolled onto his side, and pulled the blanket over his head that Adam realized his grandmother hadn’t answered his question. Exhaustion weighed on his eyelids like an extra moon’s gravity. Tomorrow. He’d press her on it tomorrow…