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She looked over at Darren, who sat a little straighter at the mention of her.
“Do you want to talk about her?” he asked. No one liked to say her name too loudly after she’d gone missing. The sheriff back then decided she was a runaway based on her journals, where she said she couldn’t wait to get far away from Cider Creek.
“We can,” Reese said, wondering if there could be a connection. “To your point, she disappeared a long time ago.”
“You were her best friend,” he pointed out, not that he needed to. It had been common knowledge.
“Which is why I know she didn’t run away,” she said. “She would have contacted me back then to let me know a plan so I could go with her. If anyone was going to run away, it would have been me.”
“The sheriff at the time collected evidence from your text messages, your laptop and, if memory serves, your journal,” he said.
Having someone dig into her personal thoughts was the worst kind of awful for a teenager. Since Duncan Hayes had been an “upstanding” citizen, the sheriff had returned her personal items to him. He’d made no secret of reading every page, and all the frustration she’d vented about him came to light. She’d been mortified. But it served him right on some level since he was the one who’d forced her to turn over the items in the first place in the name of cooperation.
“That’s right,” she said. “It gave my grandfather an eyeful.”
“Your mother intervened,” he pointed out.
“As best as she could,” Reese stated. “There was only so much anyone could do when it came to Duncan Hayes. Every time someone speaks his name with reverence, I want to roll my eyes.” It was probably a jerk move to hate him now that he was dead, but she had a long history of not liking the man, and he’d given her every reason to.
“He was bigger than the room,” Darren agreed. “Used to scare the living daylights out of me, threatening to take me out back behind the barn and whip me if I ever laid a hand on you.”
“It almost sounds noble when you put it like that,” she said, “but he was only ever worried about me or my sister Liz coming home knocked up. His concern had everything to do with keeping up appearances. He didn’t care if I ruined my life one way or the other as long as he came out smelling like a rose.”
“That’s probably true,” he admitted. “It’s probably parenting that’s making me soft now, but I’d like to believe he cared about you and that had something to do with his reasoning.”
“Did you know Rory has a daughter?” Reese asked.
“Your brother? When?” Darren asked.
“Liv is almost thirteen years old,” Reese said. She heard the hint of pride in her own voice even though she’d never met Liv face-to-face.
“How did that happen?” he asked before putting a hand up to stop her from answering and, therefore, stating the obvious. “Iknowhow it happened. How is it that no one knew?”
“Duncan Hayes ran Rory off the second he found out him and his old girlfriend got pregnant,” she informed him. More proof that her grandfather had only cared about his own image. “My brother hid his child from the family all these years after Duncan practically forced him out of town at eighteen and Rory was too embarrassed to tell anyone until recently.”
“There goes my hope your grandfather couldn’t be all bad,” he said.
“Believe me when I say that I wish it wasn’t true,” she said. “But those are the facts and we never spoke about it to anyone.”
“What happened to Rory and his daughter?” he asked.
“My brother started a successful construction company and brought his daughter up on his own after his girlfriend decided being a young mother was too hard,” she said. The news had come across in a group text and, rather than come home, Reese had called her brother to get the details. Rory had practically begged her to come back to visit so she could meet Liv. Was that the real reason she was in Cider Creek? “Liv sounds like a real sweetheart. A firecracker, but a sweetie nonetheless.”
“Sounds like I need to call him for parenting advice,” Darren said.
“You seem like you’re doing all right so far,” she said, hearing the hint of pride in her own voice.
Darren didn’t look so confident in his abilities. “I’ve been able to get the hang of changing diapers and wiping more behinds than I ever wanted to see and, believe me, I’m exhausted. More than during any calving season I’ve ever experienced. I’ve rocked each one of the girls through their colicky phase and stressed over their first colds and fevers. The thing is, I feel like this might actually be the easy part. Like, it only gets harder from here.”
“You’re probably just remembering all the trouble you used to get into as a teenager,” she said with a small smile. “You weren’t a bad boy, but you liked to play pranks and generally give teachers a run for their money.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” he said with wide eyes, like she’d just caught on to something. “There’s probably going to be some karmic retribution for all my past sins.”
She swatted a hand at him. “You did things but it’s not like you were a criminal. You were actually a good kid.”
“I doubt Coach Waterston would agree with that statement,” he countered.
Darren had tucked one of those fake blood capsules people use at Halloween into the man’s favorite ball cap. The baseball coach had a habit of hitting himself with the flat of his palm on top of his head before he ripped into someone, and that someone was usually Darren.
