Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(41)

Gravel lots so overgrown that actual trees, albeit scrubby ones, were growing up where customers had once parked. A boot shop. A video store. A gas station. A butcher. The police station. All gone but for their skeletons, becoming brittle and crumbling.

But then, a few hundred feet toward the town square, Signal Bend shook off its caul of decline and began to sparkle. The Chop House had just gotten new awnings and a new sign. Marie’s had a new roof, and they’d recently re-graveled the lot with white quartz, so it sparkled in the spring sun. Valhalla Vin, the wine bar owned by the Horde, looked positively elegant, and would not have been out of place in the swankiest Connecticut suburb. Tasha’s clinic was bright and gleaming. The Main Street shops, only a few blocks on either side of the street, had all been remodeled not long before Adrienne had first come to town, and they all had freshly painted signs on gleaming new windows. They bustled on the weekends, their stock looking fresh—though most of it was antique (the real kind or the ‘junque’ kind, depending on the shop).

The town square itself looked like something out of a Frank Capra movie—the town hall and the library bookending a park with a gazebo in the center, and benches and roses scattered quaintly, all of it looking bright and shiny. And the neighborhoods surrounding the core of the town were reviving. Houses that had been derelict when she’d started visiting were now restored and inhabited. People had moved to Signal Bend, despite its out-of-the-way-ness or because of it, and were giving it energy.

But still that death around its edges. It creeped Adrienne out; even as she recognized that the growth and development was new, it was hard not to think that it was the decay that was taking over. At a minimum, there seemed to be a battle between the new and the old, being waged just under the surface. Sometimes, looking through her lens and catching the uncomfortable juxtaposition in a tiny detail, she literally got the shivers.

One midweek afternoon about two weeks or so since she’d moved into the manager’s suite, Adrienne was strolling along the wooden walk in front of some of the Main Street shops, her camera in her hand, looking for images worthy of her lens. When she walked through this area, she always paid particular attention to the shop windows. Some shops had random mishmashes of goods up front, as if the display window was nothing more than a storage shelf. Others made conscious displays and refreshed them frequently. She found she liked the random windows best; there was always some kind of pattern she could discern, and the pattern she saw changed from time to time, even if the goods themselves did not.

Fosse’s Finds, one of the larger shops, full mostly of real antiques, was one that had a neat display in the window, and it changed weekly, from what Adrienne could tell in the few weeks she’d been in town.

Adrienne was less interested in that window, and she was almost past it when her brain processed something she’d seen at the corner of her eye. A smallish red square. A ‘Help Wanted’ sign, the kind sold at office supply stores, red with white letters, a white field under the word ‘Wanted.” Neatly printed in black Sharpie in that white field was the word Afternoons.

Adrienne stood and stared at that sign for a long time. She felt a pull forward, into the store. But if she applied for a job, then she was making a choice about her life. Was she ready to do that? She’d spent the last few weeks taking something of a mental vacation, always pushing her worries about her life to the side, unwilling to contemplate the kind of plans her father was constantly reminding her she needed to make.

She’d been content to just be, hanging out with Badger as much as possible, seeing Shannon and Show, wandering around town and in the countryside. Getting better at riding horses.

She spoke to or texted her father every day; if she hadn’t, he would have been on the next flight out.

But she’d been noncommittal, giving him vague answers and evasions, telling him she wasn’t ready to take the next step. He asked every day whether she was safe, and he wanted details, sure that the longer she stayed in Signal Bend, connected to the Horde, the more likely she would get hurt—or maybe go bad somehow. He was getting frustrated with her, she could tell, but she hadn’t been ready to be specific.

What if she was ready to be specific but the answer she gave him meant that she stayed away from home? Made a new home? How would she tell him that? What would he do?

She stepped back from the shop and continued down the boardwalk. Two shops down, she stopped again. She’d already made a choice, hadn’t she? She wouldn’t leave Badger. Even if she were inclined to try a long distance thing with him, she wouldn’t leave him now, when he was still struggling with his demons.

She loved him. He loved her. He needed her. She wasn’t going anywhere.

She turned around and went into Fosse’s Finds.



oOo



“A phone call! To what do I owe such a great honor, dove?” Charles Renard’s rich bass voice, a faint Jamaican lilt still noticeable even after forty years in the U.S., rolled into his daughter’s ear.

Adrienne resisted sighing audibly. Starting right off with the guilt trip, he was. “Papa, don’t be dramatic.

We text every day, and we spoke a few days ago.”

“Yes, but I called you. I believe this is the third time only that you’ve called me since you left. Is everything all right?”

Well, yes. Everything was good. She was excited, but she was fairly certain that her excitement was about to take a hit. “Yes, Papa. Everything’s great. I have some things to tell you.”