Jamie purposely let Harley walk ahead of her so her daughter wouldn’t be seen entering with her mother. But today Harley decided to hang back, her steps slowing, almost as if she were waiting for Jamie to catch up.
They reached the double doors together. Harley made no move to open them, so Jamie, aware that students were coming up the steps behind them, clasped a handle.
“Mom,” Harley said, in that tone that bodes serious stuff is about to be revealed.
Jamie’s pulse sped up again. She looked into the anxious face of her daughter. Her heart clutched. “Yeah?”
“I had a weird nightmare. Grandma was standing at the door to her house and saying something I couldn’t hear.”
“My mom?” The hairs on the back of Jamie’s arms lifted.
“I think it was . . . ‘come home.’”
Jamie’s ears buzzed. She felt faint. She could see the same image of her mother, as if Harley had planted it in front of her eyes.
“Mom! You okay? Mom?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Jamie drew a breath. “I’m fine. I gotta . . . make a call. You go ahead.”
“Jesus. You’re freaking me out!”
“Just . . . give me a minute.”
Harley threw her an angry, frightened look as Jamie stumbled back down the stairs, breaking through a clutch of girls who called hello to Harley. She shoved her hand into the purse slung over her shoulder, scrabbling for her cell. Pulled out the phone.
One missed call.
Mom.
How hadn’t she heard it?
She punched in the number and it rang and rang and finally went to voice mail. She clicked off, feeling like she was having an out-of-body experience.
There was a message, she realized belatedly.
Heart beating heavily, she pushed the button. She was oblivious to the noise surrounding her, the students parting around her as she stood on the grass by the flagpole, the sea of faces blurring as if in an impressionistic landscape.
“Hi, Jamie. You should come home. Mom’s dead,” Emma’s voice said matter-of-factly. “You’d better come home. The po-po’s here. Mom’s dead. And I’m gonna need help.”
Chapter Three
It took two weeks for Jamie to put things together, sell her already secondhand furniture, ship necessary items to River Glen, and generally wrap up her life in Los Angeles. When she was finished, she was surprised at how little there really was to do to effect the move. She’d thought Harley might object to being yanked out of school when the school year had barely begun, but she was completely sanguine and almost eager for the move, if you could even use the word “eager” when describing the teenager. Resistant, recalcitrant, suspicious, and reluctant were better adjectives.
However, Jamie had overheard a snippet of conversation between Harley and a friend, and it appeared that a boy Harley had been interested in had been seen with one of Harley’s friends. “It doesn’t matter, I’m leaving,” Harley had told the person on the other end of the call. “They can do whatever the hell they want.”
So maybe that was the reason Jamie hadn’t heard one word of flak. As soon as she’d announced that they were moving back to Oregon, Harley had started packing up, as if she’d just been waiting for her mother to make that decision.
They stuffed the Camry to the gills and drove straight through, almost sixteen hours from Los Angeles to River Glen, taking a few bathroom stops and two turnoffs for fast food drive-throughs. Harley, who was flirting with vegetarianism, had fallen on her Big Mac like a ravenous wolf, and Jamie had hidden a faint smile and done the same. They were in crisis, of a sort. They could get back to being their better selves once they were home.
Home.
As the miles passed beneath the Camry’s balding tires, Jamie’s thoughts hovered around her mother and Emma and the events of eighteen years earlier. The guilt she’d felt upon leaving, which had been a constant companion, was magnified a thousand times. Though she knew none of it was her fault, like always, she couldn’t quite make herself believe it. If she hadn’t wanted to go to the Stillwell party so badly, if she hadn’t switched her babysitting job with Emma, if she hadn’t raced off to her new life with Paul so eagerly, almost maniacally, maybe all their lives would have been substantially better.
Except now Mom was dead. She’d died on the very night Jamie—and Harley, apparently—had received those eerily creepy messages of her death. Irene Whelan was a victim of heart failure, according to Emma, who was very short on serious information. Jamie managed to connect with Theo Reskett, from the Thrift Shop, but she, too, had been kept in the dark about Mom’s deteriorating health.
“Emma never said a word,” Theo revealed. “You’d think she would have told me, but she never said a word about your mother.”
No one had told Jamie either that Mom was ailing from heart disease and had been for a while.
But then, you didn’t ask, did you? You didn’t want to know.
That wasn’t exactly true . . . she had wanted to know. She just hadn’t wanted to be sucked into a conversation with Mom, or even Emma, that would go round and round and only serve to exacerbate her guilt, which it invariably did.
Theo owned and managed Theo’s Thrift Shop, Emma’s place of employment ever since she’d recovered from the attack that nearly killed her. Since Mom’s death, Theo had stepped in and stayed with Emma, though Emma had insisted that she was fully capable of taking care of herself, which was almost true, except it wasn’t. Emma left alone was a little like leaving a teenager in charge of a house
