Collier thumped him hard on the arm.
“Wouldn’t know.” Mercy affected a pleasant non-smile. “Don’t much care. I’m just glad to get out of the swamp again.”
Collier nodded, like he approved of that answer. “Like I said: we’re glad you’re here.” He cranked his bike again and it snarled to life. “See you tonight?”
“Yup.”
The three rode off down the lot and Mercy watched them go, hands in his pockets. Wondering just how many people would give him that questioning look, or even dare to mention Ava out loud. They might have been glad to have him back, but there was a warning there: Don’t push Ghost again.
Right: no fresh starts.
Four
Fourteen years ago
Ava was eight. She wasn’t supposed to be in the chapel. It was forbidden, actually. No women, no children. Certainly no children who would grow up to become women. But the room held an intolerable fascination for her, always had. Its cinderblock walls were cluttered with Lean Dogs flags, pennants, a tattered Old Glory, the Stars and Bars, countless photographs. A local artist had fashioned the club dog from welded steel scraps, and it ran behind the chair at the head of the table.
The table: it had been a dining room table once, a heavy relic of some pre-Civil War mansion with sturdy legs carved with intricate vines and bundles of grapes so round and shiny they looked edible. Ava thought she may have tried that once, when she was even smaller, during one of her other unforgiveable ventures into the chapel. Talk about forbidden fruit.
The table stretched from one end of the rectangular room to the other, a hulking mass of cherry that was kept oiled and buffed at all times. Beneath the stale clouds of lingering cigarette smoke, she could smell the furniture polish that the prospects worked into the wood with small slow circles of soft rags. Twenty chairs ringed it, each a solid, weighty work of art with engraved vines and knobby clawed arms and threadbare red velvet seats that had nearly been chafed away by the years and years of denim-covered asses.
There was a matching piece that went with the table, taken from that same antebellum mansion that had yielded up the table: a buffet cabinet, with green marble top, thick veins of white and black streaking through the stone. Instead of the grapes or the vines, its double doors were carved with an entire vineyard, an Italian hillside with its rolling dales of grape vines growing on their frames, a great house with three chimneys rising behind. It had always enthralled her, the way each tiny detail, each window, each grape leaf, was captured with stunning accuracy and realism. When she stared at it, it transformed from its true cherry tones: she saw the blue of the sky, the emerald of the vines, the rich brown of the earth, dusty between the rows, where the workers had trod. She was in a bad habit of sitting in front of the buffet and simply staring, letting her daydreams catch hold of her and pull her up from the chapel, spiral her through the ceiling, above the clubhouse, until she floated somewhere nameless and boundaryless, where her mind was all that limited her adventures.
She…
Someone was coming. Several someones, judging by the low thud of boots. She heard the male voice – “in here” – and her ears perked at the sound of her father’s familiar tenor. James was with him, she heard. And there was a third…that one she didn’t recognize. He had a deep voice, and a funny accent she’d never heard before.
Too late to escape, she realized they were coming into the chapel. She’d never been caught during one of her private sojourns into this special and forbidden place, but she wasn’t eager to find out what would happen if she was. In a series of practiced motions, she swung open the doors of the buffet, whisked herself inside, and pulled them shut again. She could sit sideways, with her legs drawn up, and a single thread of light seeped through the two doors, striking her across her thighs, giving her just enough of a glow to see the dim shapes of her small hands. She breathed slowly, shallowly, and went perfectly still, listening, as her father, James, and the stranger entered the chapel, closed the door behind them, and took seats at the table.
The thick clawed feet of the chairs scraped at the hardwood floor as they drew back and were scooted forward again. Someone coughed; James, she thought.
Then Ghost said, “Mercy, Justin filled you in on our situation?”
In a deep voice that cupped each word in soft hands, smoked and easy, the stranger, Mercy, said, “Yes, sir. It’s the Carpathians giving you trouble, right?”
That was a word she wasn’t supposed to know, the Carpathians. She didn’t know much, if she admitted it – no one told her things. But she was small and church-mouse-silent most of the time; she heard snatches of conversation. She knew the Carpathians were another club, and that they were no friends of Daddy’s.
“Yeah,” Ghost said. “It started out with them wanting a pissing contest. Let ‘em piss, I thought. But then there was that business with Laverne.”
Ava went cold inside at the mention of Laverne, her stomach knotting painfully like when she gorged herself on Tootsie Rolls each Halloween. Laverne was Pat’s old lady; she was thirty-two, dark-haired, and left bright red lipstick prints behind on Ava’s cheeks when she kissed her and fussed over what a “doll” she was. She smelled like thick smoky perfume and her high heels made click-click sounds when she walked through the clubhouse, or Maggie’s kitchen.
Two weeks ago, Pat had called the house and asked if Laverne had been by. Ava remembered the moment: Maggie toweling her damp hands on the tail of her shirt as she cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder and frowned at the wet stack of clean plates she’d left on the counter. “No, I haven’t seen her today. Have you tried the salon?” But Laverne hadn’t been at the salon; she hadn’t been anywhere that any of them could find. Three days later, Ava learned through an eavesdropping session as her mother talked on the phone to Nell, the police found Laverne’s body in the backseat of a Cadillac parked under the bridge. She was dead, badly beaten, and had been raped – a word Ava wouldn’t understand for a few more years.
Since the incident, after the black-curtained funeral, a pall had settled over the club. The Carpathians were on the tips of everyone’s tongues. Ava felt the churning in the atmosphere, the restless need for male action.
James said, “We heard what you’ve been doing in New Orleans,” in his crusty smoker’s voice. “Bob says you do good work.”
“Well…” the stranger said. “That’s nice o’ him.” His voice – there was such depth to it, layers of richness she’d never heard in Tennessee. It wasn’t merely Southern; it belonged to a special place, one that was a world unto itself.
“We’d like you to stay up here with us for a few weeks,” James said. “See if you can–”
“Hold up a sec,” Ghost said. His chair creaked as he rose from it; his boots thumped across the floor.
Ava gasped as she heard his hand on the cabinet door, but she had nowhere to go. She’d been caught. Her heart stuttered in her chest. All she could do now was pray the punishment wasn’t too severe.
The doors pulled wide, and there was her father, crouched down in front of her, his wallet chain dangling off one hip and coiling on the floor like a bright silver snake. His face, suntanned and lined around the eyes, was set off by his bright dancing eyes, the white glimmer of teeth as he flashed her a grin that told her she was in so much trouble, but she was his little girl, and he wouldn’t resort to blatant scolding.
She breathed the tiniest sigh of relief.
