The Final Victim(14)
She hasn't had any regrets about the whole thing really…
Well, not until now.
"So are we going to your house?"
"What, are you sick? No!" 'Then where?"
Silence.
"I don't want to go to the beach," she warns Kevin. "If that's what you were secretly planning."
"No one will be down there to see us. Not where we're going."
Her pulse quickens. "So? My mother finding out isn't the only reason I don't want to go to the beach."
"Yeah, well, the sun's not out?"
Right. Now what? She's been using a fake sun allergy to avoid meeting him there during the day these last few weeks. That, and the threat that her mother might find out about it.
But she can't use either of those excuses now.
And she'll have to go back to the beach sooner or later, won't she?
Besides, anywhere is better than gloomy old Oakgate, especially tonight, with everyone moping around after' Grandaddy's funeral.
Which is why she text messaged Kevin earlier and asked him to come get her. She didn't even have to tell him where to find her. After a few nights of sneaking out to meet him, the routine is set. He always picks her up just beyond the plantation gates, where she; waits in her usual spot in the shadows of a towering live oak.
As far as her mother and Royce know, she's locked safely and sullenly in her room.
As far as Lianna knows, nobody-other than Kevin,of course-is aware of the concealed panel leading to a secret door beside the fireplace. Nobody alive today, that is.
"The wipers on the bus go swish swish swish," Mimi Gaspar Johnston sings for perhaps the twentieth time today. "Swish swish swish. Swish swish sw-"
"Babe, have you seen my keys?" Unlike her son, Mimi welcomes the interruption. "On the hallway table," she tells her husband, who's standing in the doorway of the baby's room, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and clutching his travel mug.
Tow-headed, blue-eyed Cameron, who inherited his mother's coloring and his father's energetic personality, squirms in Mimi's arms as she tries to jam his arms into his blue and white striped pajama top.
Jed is speaking, but whatever he's saying is drowned out by Cameron shouting, "Sing, Mommy! Sing!" 'Just a second, Cam. What did you say, Jed?" "I said, I already checked there." "Milky, Mommy!"
"I promise you can have milk and cookies as soon as you're dressed, but you have to let me and Daddy talk," Mimi admonishes her son, then asks her husband, "Did you look under the pile of mail on the hall table?" "No, but-"
"Look under the pile of mail," Mimi says above Cameron's howl as, top on at last, she attempts to stick °ne of his chubby, wriggling legs into the pajama bottoms.
"I don't think they're there."
She shoves aside a sweat-dampened tendril of blond hair that has escaped her ponytail. 'They are."
"I don't think so." Jed turns on the heel of his steel, toed boot and leaves the room.
"Sing, Mommy!"
With an inner sigh, Mimi obliges. 'The wheels of the bus go-"
"No. Wipers! Swish swish, Mommy!" orders the mini! tyrant who has recendy possessed her sweet-tempered child.
Mimi sings about wipers swishing while getting his legs into his pajamas and his feet into the little suede soled blue Padders. As she lets him squirm out of her grasp at last, she ruefully notes that Cam is rapidly out-: growing both the slippers and the pajamas.
How the heck are they going to squeeze more out this month's already-exhausted budget? Mimi can't her mother to stretch her fixed income again-she ready paid for Cam's last checkup at the doctor's.
"Vail really need medical insurance," she recently admonished Mimi, as she often has. "If we hadn't had it when your father got sick…"
She always trails off at that point, but Mimi knows the rest of the story. Mimi knows her father had the best care possible after being diagnosed with lung disease knows that the doctors bought him more time. Tim enough to see his only daughter married and his first grandchild born.
"We'll get insurance, Mom." Yes, and someday, we'll get to Europe, too. 'Just as soon as Jed finds a regular job with benefits."
God only knows when that will be. Jed is back, standing in the doorway dangling his keys. "You were right." She interrupts her singing and her private budge worries with a satisfied, "Told you so."
"Do you have to say that?"
"Yes," she replies with a grin as Jed steps over scattered DUPLO blocks to embrace her, "I do."
Her son tugs on the hem of her homemade cutoff denim shorts as her husband pulls her close. "Milky, Mommy."
"Hmmm?" Exhausted, Mimi rests her head on Jed's shoulder. She can't help wishing she was already in bed, rather than facing household tasks she's been meaning to get to all day-and wishing that Jed was in bed with her, instead of heading out to start the overnight road-crew shift he's been working since last October, when a hurricane all but destroyed the southernmost of Achoco Island's two causeways.
Now there's only one way on and off the island, whose burgeoning population makes for frequent traffic tie-ups, particularly during beach season. Jed and the crew are under a lot of pressure to finish the job.