Into the Storm (Signal Bend #3)(15)

And that meant Show needed to stay away. He was fresh out of love.

A huge crow cawed and landed in the middle of the yard, cocking its head at him and bringing him out of his thoughts. If he’d ridden out this way just to sit on the porch and brood, then he was a truly lost cause. He needed to honor his Daze in some way. He couldn’t lay flowers at her grave; Holly had taken her body to Arkansas and buried her there. This was the only thing he could think of to do.

With a sigh, he stood and crossed the porch. Opening the red door, he entered his dim, dead house and climbed the stairs to his dead daughter’s room.

He stood outside her closed door, which was covered with quotes from her favorite books, handwritten on little pieces of paper. Daze was all about the books. She was fifteen when she died, but she hadn’t yet really begun to think about boys much. She wasn’t a girly girl. Her sisters were—they loved dolls and dress-up and glitter. Daze had liked to read. She’d liked to hike and swim and fish. She’d worn glasses and braces and kept her hair short. She’d favored jeans and t-shirts. She’d had a quiet but sharp sense of humor that had gone over her mother’s head—which was often a very good thing. She’d liked his bike and his kutte. She’d wanted to ride with him, but Holly wouldn’t hear of it, and Show had deferred to his wife in most things at home. He’d wanted a quiet, stable home, and Holly had a tenacious need to win and a tendency to gnaw at every disagreement until it was a full-blown fight. It had dawned on Show in the past year that she’d probably hated the club so much not only because of what they were or did, but because it was one of the very few fights he’d pushed hard enough to win.

As he stood in the hallway, that last morning played out vividly in Show’s mind. He’d been all business, trying to have the morning go as quickly and quietly as possible. He and Holly had fought hard the night before—which meant Holly had screamed at him and he’d taken it, trying to get her to quiet down. Will Keller had been killed and his property burnt to the ground, and everyone had known it was Lawrence Ellis who’d done it, trying to get control of that property so he could build a meth factory on it. Ellis was a powerful man and seemingly untouchable. He had been, anyway, until his personal feelings got in the way and he’d made the mistake of taking Lilli. Now, he was dead, and Lilli owned the Keller property, where she’d built the B&B in Will’s honor.

The morning after the fire, the day that Ellis had orchestrated the attack on Isaac and Show’s families, the attack that had killed Daisy and destroyed his family, he’d met Daze in the hallway, as she’d come out of the bathroom. She’d been wearing a 4-H t-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms. He’d seen in her eyes that she’d heard the whole fight, during which Holly had shrieked, among other things, that he was going to get them all killed.

Daze had said nothing at first. She’d simply wrapped her long, skinny arms around his waist and leaned her head on his chest. He’d put his hands on her narrow shoulders and kissed her head.

Then she’d said, “I love you, Dad. Be safe today.”

He’d said, “Yep. Love you, too, Daze.” Then she’d unwound herself from him and gone back to her room, closing the door between them.

The next time he’d seen her, she’d been lying dead on a gurney.

He wrapped his hand around the knob and opened her door.

Shit. But for the dust and stale air, it was as if she were simply elsewhere in the house. Her bed was unmade, and her 4-H t-shirt and flannel bottoms were wadded up on her pillow. The book she’d been reading was tented on her little round nightstand, under his old gooseneck lamp. He walked over and picked it up, blowing the dust off the cover. Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Looked like science fiction.

She’d started to read a lot of science fiction over that last summer, turned on to it by her ninth-grade English teacher. She’d been trying to get him to read some of it, too, but he’d found it silly.

That same teacher had taught her to write in her books, to mark passages she especially liked and to make notes about what they’d made her feel. She’d talked often about that teacher, Mr. Radev. Show had figured she had a little crush. With orange pen, she’d underlined a passage on one of the pages her last





book had been open to:


Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

In the margin, in her tiny, round hand, she’d written, “Restless.” Show smiled, feeling like he understood. Even out of context, the passage was sensual, even sexy. There was desire in it. He thought about his Daze lying in her bed that last night, after her parents’ fight had finally ended, reading this passage, feeling restless and not sure why. His sweet, innocent girl.

He sat down on her twin bed with its battered wicker headboard, held her book to his chest, and wept.

He had no sense of how long he’d let his grief have its way, but when he was able to compose himself, he folded over a corner of the page she’d left open, and he closed the book. Sitting on her bed, he took in her room. It was by far the smallest room in the house. Not much more than a closet—in fact, it didn’t even have a closet. It had been Holly’s crafting room. She was a big crafter, always working on some kind of project, usually adding more Americana crap to the house. Red, white, and blue everything, that was Holly’s style. A lot of women around Signal Bend seemed to share her taste, to the extent that they could afford taste.