Page 19 of Shattered
CHAPTER 6
Mel
A loud knock banged on the front door. I rolled over, looking at the alarm clock.Rourke?I must have been having a nightmare or a wet dream about him, but why would it be him? It was eight a.m. Not the time for any respectable human being to be awake. At least, not if you worked the night shift, or murdered people for a living.
I put on my glasses, shuffled on a large sweatshirt, then ambled to the front door. In the peephole, I saw a head of jet-black pin-straight hair, topped with frameless glasses that were both stylish and judgmental. The woman raised an eyebrow and knocked again, then checked her knuckles for dirt. It was Beth Foley. My mother.
It had been almost five years since I had spoken to her. What was she doing here?
“Beth?” I asked.
She immediately lifted her chin, looking down her nose at me. “Why weren’t you at the Sage and Ivy Board of Directors Dinner?”
I blinked. “Because I didn’t know I was invited?”
“Your father had explained long ago that when he died, you had to take over his position as a director. Youagreed.”
“I was sixteen.”
“Nonetheless. You didn’t even attend the funeral.”
Was she actually going to go on about this right now? That was over a year ago.
“It’s not like you invited me to that either. My roommate showed me the obituary. He was already buried by the time you put it in the paper.”
She lifted her brows. “Maybe if you actually tried to call once in a while, we—” she stopped, her eyes pinching to her nose to hold back the emotion, then corrected herself, “—Iwould have told you.”
When I told my parents that I was getting an art degree, they had locked me out of the house. Left my things on the front porch. I banged the front door until my hands were bloody and my voice was hoarse. Had she forgotten that I had called every day during that first year on my own? How she never once answered a call? Let her voicemail box go full so that I couldn’t leave another message. Some I sobbed through, some I delivered in an unemotional tone. And others? I screamed.
Maybe I had an anger problem. But I didn’t know what would work to get their attention. I tried anything I could think of until my mind went blank, and I realized that they didn’t care.
I sighed and crossed my arms. That had happened a long, long time ago now, but seeing her face for the first time in years made those old emotions come rushing back: guilt, shame, anger.
I looked away. “Why are you here?” I asked.
“I heard about your roommate.” She shook her head. “I’ve got a friend in the police department who told me.” Always with the connections. It’s not like she could have possibly heard something on the evening news like a normal person. “Terrible thing to happen to anyone.”
“So what? After abandoning me for years, you suddenly feel the need to protect me?”
“That killer was in this house, Mel. Heknowswhere you live. What makes you think he won’t come for you too?”
Maybe she hadn’t listened to the news at all. “Because I don’t fit his primary target?”
“But you never know when those kinds of creatures will decide to clean up loose ends.”
Loose ends? “The killer is not a ‘creature,’ Beth. He’s a human.”
“You know I hate it when you call me that,” she mumbled. “And I’m not here to argue about what it means to be a human.” She grabbed my hands. I didn’t know whether to recoil or to squeeze back tightly. The argument, though irritating, was like slipping immediately back into our old patterns. A familiarity that I had missed for a long, long time.
But was slipping back into old habits a good thing?
“I’m here to offer you a job,” she continued. I wrinkled my nose. A job? “The art teacher is retiring at Sage and Ivy Preparatory Academy. All you have to do is show up to the interview. Pretend to try.”
The last I had checked, Beth was the headteacher of the middle schoolers at the private boarding school. She had fought hard for her position, starting off as a regular substitute teacher, until finally, she found an open position teaching sixth grade. My parents had always hoped that I would become a doctor, or a scientist, or at least join the family in educating rich children. Until finally, those dreams for my future disappeared into the silence.
A lot had changed since then. Dropping out of art school. Moving in with Colin and finding Jake. Trying to live that starving artist’s lifestyle and failing miserably, taking a job at the high-end entertainment club instead. My mother had left me as an eighteen-year-old student, and now, I was a twenty-three-year-old entertainment server.
Not a painter. Not a student. Not even a teacher.A server.
