Page 4 of The Courting of Bristol Keats
Tyghan walked to his bed, shrugging on the robe that lay across it. He looked at the white fur rug beneath his bare feet. Quiet seconds ticked by. Eris knew Tyghan was as shrewd as he was explosive and would weigh his choices carefully. He glanced up at Eris. “You can handle it. She won’t even know I’m there. I’ll remain hidden.”
“But I will know.”
Tyghan’s bright eyes darkened. “All right,” he conceded. “I’ll stay out of it, but squeeze her. Make her choose, or I will.”
CHAPTER 3
The empty stretch of road was as serene as any Monet landscape, bright with poppies and golden yarrow sprouting among wild field grasses. It should have spawned dreamy thoughts of lazy spring days and picnics. But Bristol wasn’t thinking about poppies or picnics. Instead, she wondered what it was like to die at the side of the road.
She wondered about the pain. Was it unbearable? What was it like to lie there broken and bleeding, not knowing if anyone would find you before death did? What were those minutes filled with? Disbelief? Bargaining with an unknown god? Whispering hasty messages of love to your family and hoping that, by some miracle, they would hear them? Or was it filled with wondering about the person who hit you? Was it deliberate because they were settling an old debt?
They were morbid thoughts, Bristol knew, but they crept into her mind every time she passed the makeshift memorial on the side of the road. It marked the place where Logan Keats died five months ago. Who had made the memorial, she didn’t know—townsfolk he had become friendly with? Everyone had taken to him in Bowskeep. He was a hard man not to like. But she had already knocked the memorial down twice, scattering the rocks with her foot and throwing the tattered silk flowers over the barbed wire into the neighboring field. Within days the memorial reappeared.
The sheriff’s report said there were no brake marks, that the person who hit Logan may not have known it in those early morning hours. There was a light fog that day. The driver might have mistaken the thump for a rabbit. They were thick along that stretch of road. Sheriff Orley had hit several himself. One of them badly dented his right fender.
Logan Keats was six-foot-four, a large, broad-shouldered man, more suited to wielding a javelin than an artist’s brush.
He’d had his heavy duffle of art supplies slung over his back.
The thump he made would have been loud and hard and damaging.
Logan Keats was not mistaken for a rabbit.
There was no question in Bristol’s mind, it was a hit-and-run. Only one question lingered. Was it an accident—or calculated?
She paused at the rebuilt memorial, her feet straddling her bike, peering down the road one way and then the other, revisiting the question that never had answers. The shoulder was wide, the road straight and flat, but it might have been a distracted driver looking at their phone.
Heat flushed her temples. The driver hadn’t even stopped to see if he had a pulse. No one knew how long he suffered at the side of the road before the sheriff found him, mangled and still, his art supplies scattered along the highway. Sheriff Orley spared Bristol and her sisters the task of identifying him.You don’t want to see. You don’t want to remember him that way.
She swung her foot out, kicking the top stones off the memorial, the sun-bleached flowers tumbling with them.I don’t want to remember him this way either.
Bristol only wanted to remember the man who was kind and tender, the man who painted with thoughtful strokes, because there was more to being an artist than forcing paint onto a canvas. It was a way of seeing and listening, and he did both in equal measure. He was a man who adored his daughters as much as he had his wife. Whenever one of them got lost, he always came for them, his large hand wrapping around theirs. That was the man she wanted to remember, not the one who was broken long before he died.
She resumed her trek into town but at a slower pace. She had lied to Harper. She wasn’t going to be late. Probably early. And Sal wouldn’t kill her even if she was late. Sal was mostly chill. Her job was a bright spot in her life, and she was grateful for it. Sal took a chance on her when no one else would. But Harper’s eyes, when they struggled not to be sad, wrenched something so tightly inside her, Bristol couldn’t breathe. All she saw was her father. All six-foot-four of him, trying to carry on, trying to smile. It was worse than watching him sob.
He had died sad, never getting over his wife’s death.
His easy smile, his laughter, the brightness that had always been in his eyes, it was doused and gone forever.
For that, Bristol would never forgive her mother for leaving him, for sneaking out of their lives and dying so carelessly.
At her funeral, Cat had sobbed.
Harper had sobbed.
Bristol sat dry-eyed in the front pew staring at the urn of ashes that had once been their mother, silently wondering,Why?
It was Cat who had called her—a year ago, today.
Come home.
And then more earnestly,Come home. We need you. Mother is missing.
Bristol went, of course. She had no choice. Cat’s voice broke her. Still, she had hesitated, afraid if she returned, she would never leave again—even if she wasn’t leaving much behind.
For over a year, she had drifted aimlessly, maybe because it was the only life she knew, picking up odd jobs that paid her under the table, working booths at swap meets, staying in cheap motels, running and rootless, afraid to get attached and then lose it all again—embracing the shadows she thought she was running from. When she finally lucked into a plum housesitting job, she forced herself to dig in. For two months she worked to pull together the loose threads of her life, doing things normal people did, like getting a birth certificate—even if it was fake—the only kind she could get. Her parents had never bothered with paperwork. She began to entertain dreams. Big ones that included universities, and art, and travel of a different kind.
A week after she returned home, Leanna Keats’s body was found.
