Little Girl Gone (An Afton Tangler Thriller #1)(13)

Still, on this dark and frosty January night, people called it home.

Inside a large farm kitchen with outdated Kelvinator appliances, two women and a man sat at a battered wooden table under a heavy wrought iron light fixture. They sipped coffee, poked at pieces of meat that rested, gray and well done, on an oval platter, and ate Oreo cookies directly from the bag. Perched atop the refrigerator, overlooking this scene of tragic domesticity, was an enormous stuffed woodchuck, all flashing teeth and claws.

While Marjorie Sorenson crafted reborn dolls, Ronnie worked at his beloved taxidermy projects. And he was good at it, almost as skilled as Marjorie at breathing a startling reality into inanimate objects.

Ronnie’s girlfriend, Sharice Williams, known as Shake to all her friends and anyone who’d ever stuffed a dollar bill down her G-string, sat at the table with them. She was eyeing the two of them carefully, trying to read the temperature in the room.

Finally, after a few minutes of noisy chewing, Ronnie said, to no one in particular, “Shake and me was gonna go hang out at Judge’s.”

Flat, cobra eyes suddenly drilled into him. “This girl’s not going anywhere,” Marjorie told her son. “Especially not to some dimey bar like Judge’s. In case you hadn’t noticed, she’s due to have a baby any day now.”

“I’m bored,” Shake whined. “There’s nothin’ to do here.”

Shake was Ronnie’s latest girlfriend. He didn’t bed many women, but those he did seemed to share some common traits—they tended to be dirt poor, estranged from their families, and pretty enough, but in a worn-out, used-up way. Shake had been forced to give up pole dancing some five months ago when Buddy Yaruso, the manager at Club Paradise out on County Road A-2, had touched a hand to her distended belly, stuck a twenty-dollar bill in her panties, and fired her on the spot. He’d told her that a pregnant exotic dancer wasn’t good for business. It just reminded his club patrons of what they were trying to forget about at home.

Shake had cried a river of tears, thinking how unfair it all was. Still, she wasn’t about to score a job as Kim Kardashian’s personal stylist, and that chief financial officer job at Coca-Cola just wasn’t on the horizon. So hanging out with Ronnie and his old lady for a while seemed to be all right. Not good, just all right.

“Waaaaaah!” came a loud, demanding wail from down the hall.

“I wish that thing would shut up,” Shake said. She looked at Marjorie, who pointedly ignored her as she lit another Kool cigarette. She turned her gaze toward Ronnie. “Where’d that kid come from anyway?”

“I told ya,” Marjorie said. “She’s my cousin’s kid. Picked her up when we was in The Cities yesterday.” She flicked a piece of hardened food gunk off her sweatshirt. “Gonna watch her for a while.”

“Yeah?” Shake said. Suspicious eyes flitted across the table. “You got cousins in The Cities?” she asked Ronnie.

Ronnie pushed limp green beans across his plate and into his watery gravy. “Sure.” He hadn’t been much interested in Shake lately, now that she was all fat and swollen and crabby. Right now his brain was occupied with someone else. All day long he’d been replaying his encounter with the skinny blond babysitter. That bitch had been . . . unbelievably hot. He shifted in his chair, practically overwhelmed by feelings of lust and need.

Marjorie focused on Shake. “It wouldn’t hurt you none to practice with that baby,” she said. She was busy sawing at a piece of overdone strip steak with a dull steak knife. The broiler in the damn stove was on the blink again and she’d had to pan fry the meat. Now it tasted more like liver than steak.

“Practice?” came Shake’s derisive hoot. “What for?” One of her hands was drawn unconsciously to her swollen belly. “I’m gonna give this baby up for adoption anyhow.” She massaged the mass under her stretched-out Pantera T-shirt. “So what’s the harm if we go over to Judge’s and have a couple of drinks?” Shake was particularly fond of Crapple Bombs, a lethal concoction of Red Bull, Crown Royal, and Apple Pucker. “Who’s gonna be the wiser?”

“Don’t get smart with me, girlie,” Marjorie snapped. “You’re a guest in my house. Your old man disowned you and threw you out on your scrawny ass, remember?”

Shake gave a mirthless laugh. “Only because your precious son knocked me up.” They’d played this blame game before. Always going round and round in an endless loop, never coming to any sort of resolution.

“If it’s even mine,” Ronnie said.

Hurt showed in Shake’s eyes. “It is. You know it is.”

“What the hell did you think was gonna happen?” Marjorie asked. “Prancing around onstage with shiny sequins pasted over your titties, wearing hooker heels and bending over to show your cooch?” She snorted. “Exotic dancer. Hah.”

Shake had been a crowd favorite at Club Paradise. Unhappy men from all over the North Country had come, flashlights in hand, to sit at the bar and shine their wavering beam at Shake’s moneymaker.

“Go see if the baby’s wet,” Marjorie ordered Shake. The kid had been in their house for less than twenty-four hours and already things were in an uproar.

“Babies are always wet,” Shake said, toying with what was left of her unappetizing dinner. “Besides, I gotta get changed if we’re going out.” She threw a hopeful glance at Ronnie. Unfortunately, he could be a real limp dick when it came to standing up to his mother. In fact, if she’d known how much of a momma’s boy he really was, she never would have moved in here in the first place. Shake regretted that she hadn’t just run away. Take a bus to Chicago and figure something out. Now it was too late. Now she was due any day, fat and waddling, unattractive, a prisoner of her unborn child.