Coming Back Home

"Then my dad got sick with cancer. Mom had died years before. We moved back here to take care of him, thinking it would only be for a couple of months at most. It turned out to be over a year. She made a few comments about the situation, but even she knew that saying we should abandon him was a step too far. Then he died." I paused and took a sip of my beer.

"That's when things started downhill. I wasn't willing to sell this place; I'm the fourth generation in this house."

"Wow," Madison said. "That's, like, forever. I think the longest I've lived anywhere was about five years."

"Yeah, it's important to me, and I'd like to raise kids here someday."

"So why not keep it?"

"Because selling it was the only way we could have the down payment to buy a place in New York. Suddenly that's what renting an apartment in Manhattan turned into ... buying a condo in the East Village. She'd paint this picture of having lunches in cute little places with artsy friends. She'd tell me I'd like going to boho bars where we guys could try whiskies. Not that either of us knew anyone in New York.

"I had no idea how we'd afford that. Anne hadn't had a job in a year, and on just my salary, the mortgage and taxes would have killed us. I guess I should have hammered on that instead of blowing up. But I didn't. Instead, I dug in a little harder than maybe I should have.

"I told her no fuckin' way were we spending over a million bucks to get a one-bedroom place just so she could go to 'cute' little places for lunch. I said flat-out no to selling this place. I said another no to moving back to New Jersey if the goal was saving to buy in New York. We could save a lot faster out here.

"That, apparently"—my voice oozed sarcasm—"was tantamount to torture. Expecting her to endure Seylerton when she'd already been successful at shaking its dust off her sandals once ... oh my God, the inhumanity! It was headed for a knock-down, drag-out fight."

I snorted, bitterly amused at the memory.

"But it never came."

That startled Madison.

"Nope. A month later she just left. And you know how she whitewashed the reason to make herself not look bad."

I looked over at her. She was rapt.

"And now I've met you more than halfway, so leave me alone."

"There's more to the story."

"Go away, Madison. Leave me alone."

I went up to my room, closing the door firmly.

"Hey, Madison," I called out.

She stuck her head in my door.

"I want you to take a look at something I found." I turned the monitor so she could see it. It was a page on the Oregon State Police's site entitled "Missing Persons." I pointed to a picture of a dark-brown-haired teenager with pale skin and a light scattering of freckles on her nose. Below it was a name, age, height, weight, a "last seen" date, and contact information for the West Kincaid Police Department.

"Look familiar?"

She stared at it silently.

"The thing is, while I know you don't give a damn about Dave and probably not much of one about your mother, I suspect there are friends and maybe other family who are probably heartbroken."

"I called my best friend from my dad's before I left Boston and told her I was okay."

"But I'm guessing you swore her to secrecy, or we wouldn't be seeing this."

Her expression got stubborn. "I'm not going back."

"No one's saying you should. But maybe you could let the rest of the people know?"

"You want me to call them?" At my shrug, she shook her head. "Then I'll have to deal with all the calls from everyone."

"Have you heard of blocking your number? You know, star six sev—"

"No!" She cut my teasing reply off. "I don't feel like dealing with all the 'you have to come home' bullshit. There's enough stress in my life without that drama. I don't want to talk to anyone yet."

"Spoken like someone who's not ready to be on their own." I let a little whip creep into my tone. "People are hurting right now. I don't know anything about your life before, but I know that much because you're the type of person who would have had people who cared."

She didn't want to meet my eyes. When she finally did, I saw a little extra moisture in the corners. "Will, I'm afraid I'll cave under the stress of arguing, and my life will fall apart again just when it's getting on track." It was a plea, not defiance.

"Then send a video from a temporary email account and delete the account after."

"You've got an answer for everything, don't you?"

"What can I say, young padawan? The master, I am."

"You're such a nerd." She said it with a certain amount of affectionate amusement despite her upset. I could see the wheels turning.

"Can I say whatever I want?"

"It's your video."

"If I do this, I'm not going to come across as, like, some stupid-ass bimbo who just ran away because her parents wouldn't give her a new phone."

I shrugged.

Ten minutes later, she played me the first version.

"It's your call," I said. "But I bet you're open to a charge of libel since you give his name and accuse him of being a pedophile." She looked mulish. "Madison, do you need more problems right now? Legal ones?" After a few seconds of struggle, I could see the message sink in.

About thirty minutes later—I suspect after several attempts based upon the continuous stop and start of not-quite-intelligible talking I heard—she came back. The friendly dark-brown-haired woman stared at the lens, not smiling but not frowning either. The backdrop was a plain putty-colored wall with a lighter square where a picture was taken down: the front hall.

"This is for police officers who are looking for Madison Dwyer of 218 Forest Glen Drive in West Kincaid. I didn't know you were looking until a friend showed me your Missing Persons page. Thank you for being concerned, and I'm sorry for any trouble you took on my behalf. This is just to let you know that I'm not dead and not trafficked somewhere. See?"

The selfie video showed her moving to the front door, taking a key out of her pocket, and opening it.

"Not locked in an upstairs room somewhere, not hooked on heroin. I needed to leave because I was only seventeen and really didn't want to have sex with a man old enough to be, like, my father. I'm now eighteen. I'm an adult. I'm doing fine and I'm not coming back."

Before I could consider any more, she clicked Send.

"It's going to the police, to several high school friends, my mother, and my aunt so that the family will know in case Mom pretends she never got it."

"Well, that will set tongues wagging," I observed.

"I hope so. The age of consent in Oregon is eighteen. I checked." She met my look. "Fuck him."

"I'm Tammy Strickland, Madison's mother."

Those words, spoken by the woman who had just rung my doorbell, certainly weren't what I expected that day.

"What are you doing here?"

The words came from behind me. I turned to the hostile young woman behind me.

"I've come for you, Maddy."

"How did you find me?"

"I hired an agency that looked at some kind of address on your email and then they tracked it down by what they could see out the front door in your video."

Madison looked at me accusingly. I had been the one to suggest she contact home.

"Hey," I said. "I should probably have considered IP addresses, but I wasn't the one who took a picture of my street or hit Send before anyone could think about it for two seconds."

She grimaced and shrugged to admit the fairness of that.

"I'll be in the den," I said firmly. "You two can use the living room."

Ten seconds later, Madison poked her head through the den door.

"We're going to be in the kitchen, not the living room. Please stay here," she said. At my stare, the corner of her mouth quirked slightly. She remembered how easily one could hear what went on in the kitchen from the den. "So you'll know," she said enigmatically.

"I've come to take you home, dear" was Tammy's opening salvo. No "How are you?" or "I've missed you."

"I'm not going with you."

"Maddy, you are. I know you think you're an adult"—Tammy ignored the quiet "I am" and bulled on—"but you're not really. You haven't even graduated high school yet, so you're hardly prepared to face the real world. I mean, come on! The very fact that you've failed your senior year and haven't graduated is proof enough."

"I'm not going with you."

"This isn't your home."

"Will's fine with me being here."

"Maddy, there's only one reason an older man keeps a young woman around, and it's not a good—"

"A fifty-one-year-old man?"

"Will doesn't look fifty-one to me. I think he's probably mid-thirties, but that's a big gap at this stage in your life."

I had to bite my cheek to keep from laughing. I didn't know anything about Madison's stepfather, Dave, but I'd bet he was precisely fifty-one years old.

"Maybe he is." I could hear the twin to my amusement in Madison's voice. I wondered if Tammy could and wondered what it meant. "But whatever Will's age is, he's been more of an adult role model than my parents ... or step-bastard ... ever were."

"Oh, honey. I know it can seem that way. I was eighteen once myself, and I know how profound someone a little older can seem. But you have to trust me ... trust us. We're doing what's best for you."

"Whoa! Doing? What are you doing?"

"I'm taking you home. If Mr. Dannreuther makes any trouble ... well ... Dave has already contacted an attorney in the area. He advised him about the situation of a young girl being isolated with an older man and asked him to contact the relevant authorities. And based upon some things I heard when I got to town, I called the attorney to add that I had evidence that your physical wellbeing was in jeopardy as well as your ... umm ..." Tammy trailed off.

You could hear a pin drop in the silence as Madison absorbed this news. When she spoke, her voice was controlled.

"I'm ashamed that you'd lie about a good man just because you resented the fact that he'd replaced my worthless mother."

I don't know which was more of a shock for Tammy, the echo of the very words she'd said to her daughter, the arctic tone in which they were delivered, or the scathing judgment they contained.

"I'd slap you too," Madison continued, "but I don't want to sink to your level. For your information, not that, like, you deserve it, Will worked very hard to keep me out of his bed. You hear me? Not in. Out! So there ... Mom." The tone thawed on that final word, revealed the molten anger underneath.

Tammy made the mistake of bringing her husband into it. "Dear, Dave is willing to forget the whole thing. You misinterpreted his natural desire to be a father to you and talk about your relationships with the boys in your school. You overreacted. We'll put this—"

I could hear the shock Madison felt etching her every word.

"Oh my God! You're actually, like, trying to pin this on me." The tone morphed into pure battery acid.

"Fuck you both! I will never go back to that pedophile, and I will never go back to a mother who refuses to believe her own daughter when she's molested. Leave." As her mother started to protest, Madison's rage finally broke free and her voice skyrocketed. "Get out! And tell your fucking lawyer that when Will sues all your sorry asses for slander, I'm going to testify that you admitted you made all of it up."

"Maddy!" The cry was plaintive.

"Get. The fuck. OUT!"

It was time to intervene. As Tammy started another protest, I stepped into the room.

"Ms. Strickland. It's time for you to leave."

"You! This is none of your—"

I cut her off by moving into her personal space. "Now."

She shrank from the anger radiating from someone six inches taller and a hell of a lot stronger.

"Don't you dare touch me!" she screeched. She reached over and grabbed Madison's elbow. "Maddy, come on, we need to go."

"I wouldn't dream of touching you," I said. I pulled out my phone and dialed. Madison steadfastly refused to be compelled, and the little tableau held as my call went through.

"Hello. This is Will Dannreuther at 83 Pine Street. Could you send a patrol car? I have someone trespassing who refuses to leave." Tammy's eyes opened wide. "No, we're not in danger. We know the intruder, and she's no real threat."

After thanking the dispatcher and hanging up, I gave Madison a little nod. "I figure five or ten minutes. The police will probably want to speak to you without me present. I'll be in the den." At the protest I saw form in her eyes, I added, "It's okay. It's the right thing for them to do when someone might be being coerced."

My eyes swiveled to her mother, who stayed mute as I gave her a cold smile.

"If you're still here when they arrive, I will be pressing charges for trespass. And jerk on that arm any harder"—my eyes went to Tammy's futile pulling at Madison's elbow—"and I'll be glad to corroborate simple assault if Madison also presses charges."

I'm sure Tammy's rental passed the patrol car as it came down Pine Street. She'd kept up her insistence almost to the last second, growing ever more infuriated at Madison's snide countdown of minutes.

"You didn't tell me they came to talk to you earlier," Madison accused me when they were gone. I'd been right: they had wanted to talk to her with me not present. I could see she was a little rattled; one-on-one with the police would do that to a teenager. As she would say, "Shit just got real."

"I told them you had a house key, friends you went out with, and weren't at home because you'd been working at Bothwell for a while. Then I showed them your birth certificate—sorry for going into your stuff—to prove you were eighteen. They said they'd follow up with you tomorrow morning just to be sure." I smiled.

"Me mentioning Bothwell was what had them ease up. Everybody in this town would bust a gut laughing at the idea that Carrie Schaeffer wasn't capable of: A) figuring out that a young woman who worked for her needed help, and B) providing that help, even if it meant arranging an ass-kicking for some guy. Some of her hired hands are seriously tough guys, and they'd do anything for her."

She stared at me; I had no idea what thoughts were going through her head. Finally, she turned to go, then hesitated. She turned back.

"Is the offer of helping me figure out GED stuff, like, umm, still good?"

Defiance of a parent's judgment was always a potent motivator for a teen.

So, I got my ass kicked. Not super thoroughly, but enough that I wasn't happy.

"Danny boy!"

I knew without turning who that voice belonged to. Patrick Mackey. I was out on the side of the Sunoco station, putting some air in a tire.

I looked up at the tall figure.

"You know Anne's back," he said.

"Yep."

"She didn't come back to you, though."

"Nope."

He smirked.

"Didn't think so, after what you did. Yeah, I know she's said maybe we got it a little wrong." I noted the "maybe" and "little" in that sentence and wondered how I'd ever liked that woman. "Way I figure it, she's just too nice to keep kicking you now that you're down. She knows we all know what a piece of bird turd you are."

"You know what, Patrick? I don't give a rat's ass what you think. You want Anne, go for it. I stopped caring a while ago, long about the time she took up with Gordy."

"Even fuckin' shithead Gordy's better than you, huh? Anne and me've gone on a date, but she tells me she needs a little time before she even thinks about getting serious again. I can live with that. But you know what, Danny boy? You can't hold onto women."

I didn't know or care what he meant.

"Well, Patrick, then I guess there's nothing to talk about. Have a nice day. Preferably somewhere else."

But he wasn't done with his entertainment for the day.

"You got yourself a new woman living with you now. I hear she's pretty young. Some slut you picked up off the street, I hear."

That made me angry.

"No, I wouldn't say she was a slut." Okay, anger can get you into trouble. Maybe I emphasized "she" just a bit too much. Okay, maybe it came out like it was the whole point of the sentence. I'm human and Anne had screwed me over ... in addition to screwing Gordy.

The huge left hand grabbed the fold of my jacket and hauled me to my feet before I could react. The even huger right fist slammed into my gut.

"Don't you ever talk about Anne White that way!" he hissed.

I landed my own jab into his ribs. I know it didn't feel good to him. I wasn't weak even if I didn't play linebacker in school. But he just shook it off and hit me again. Patrick Mackey was big, and Patrick Mackey was strong. I was in trouble. He held me from collapsing as I tried not to vomit from the blows to my stomach. Serious trouble.

"PATRICK!" The bellow came from twenty feet away. "I've called the police." He let go of me, causing me to double over, and turned to see Edna, the owner of the gas station, standing there with her phone in her hand. "I saw everything, including that you hit Will when he was defenseless."

The two of them locked eyes, but Edna won. Patrick was an utter asshole, but Patrick wasn't a bully. He didn't like the implication that he'd thrown a sucker punch. He glared at her, glared at me, then turned and stomped over to his truck.

"You okay, Will?" she asked, her eyes following my assailant.

"In a minute, yeah."

The police arrived, checked that I was okay, and listened to what Edna had to say. They nodded. They were locals; they knew where the currents of bad blood lay in town and weren't surprised.

One of the two, Matt, walked over to me. He and I had gone to high school together.

"Want to press charges? Edna would rather not have to testify. Local boy and all."

"No. Though I wouldn't mind one of you putting a word in his ear that there better not be a next time."

He nodded. "Absolutely. I'll do it."

He looked down at his feet then up to meet my eyes squarely. "I heard from Old Man White that maybe Anne's story doesn't hold water."

I was surprised. It had been a few weeks, but I hadn't expected Anne's father to change his mind no matter what Doug Hagerty said.

"Speaking for myself, I'm sorry I thought what I did. We have to take the woman's side seriously because statistics show ... well, you know what can happen. But I'm sorry."

Matt was a good guy, and he'd never singled me out the way a cop can if he wants to teach a lesson. I couldn't blame him because, yeah, women do become punching bags for their husbands more often than vice-versa.

"Don't sweat it. Just let Patrick know that next time, he's the one up on battery charges, not me."

God, my gut ached. So did my heart. What the fuck had I done to deserve a town despising me? Sure, some of them were starting to come around, but not all.

After the police had left, Edna had looked me over. "You good?" she asked again.

I nodded.

"I don't hold with beatin' on people." There was no mistaking the subtext. She saw me read her.

"But where there's smoke, maybe there's fire?" I asked, trying to keep the sourness to a minimum. She'd just saved my ass, after all.

She shrugged. "I dunno 'bout nuthin'."

The idea of a whiskey as an anesthetic sounded good. Not the ordinary stuff, some of that bottle of Balvenie 21 my dad had left.

One turned to two, both poured with a heavy hand. A modicum of common sense surfaced when it came time for the third ... not that there wasn't a third because it was only a modicum of common sense. But I did realize I needed to switch to something that didn't cost two hundred and fifty bucks a bottle. I was pouring a Jameson's when Madison came in.