The Babysitter. Nancy Bush

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      Chapter Three

      It took two weeks for Jamie to put things together, sell her already secondhand furniture, ship necessary items to River Glen, and generally wrap up her life in Los Angeles. When she was finished, she was surprised at how little there really was to do to effect the move. She’d thought Harley might object to being yanked out of school when the school year had barely begun, but she was completely sanguine and almost eager for the move, if you could even use the word “eager” when describing the teenager. Resistant, recalcitrant, suspicious, and reluctant were better adjectives.

      However, Jamie had overheard a snippet of conversation between Harley and a friend, and it appeared that a boy Harley had been interested in had been seen with one of Harley’s friends. “It doesn’t matter, I’m leaving,” Harley had told the person on the other end of the call. “They can do whatever the hell they want.”

      So maybe that was the reason Jamie hadn’t heard one word of flak. As soon as she’d announced that they were moving back to Oregon, Harley had started packing up, as if she’d just been waiting for her mother to make that decision.

      They stuffed the Camry to the gills and drove straight through, almost sixteen hours from Los Angeles to River Glen, taking a few bathroom stops and two turnoffs for fast food drive-throughs. Harley, who was flirting with vegetarianism, had fallen on her Big Mac like a ravenous wolf, and Jamie had hidden a faint smile and done the same. They were in crisis, of a sort. They could get back to being their better selves once they were home.

      Home.

      As the miles passed beneath the Camry’s balding tires, Jamie’s thoughts hovered around her mother and Emma and the events of eighteen years earlier. The guilt she’d felt upon leaving, which had been a constant companion, was magnified a thousand times. Though she knew none of it was her fault, like always, she couldn’t quite make herself believe it. If she hadn’t wanted to go to the Stillwell party so badly, if she hadn’t switched her babysitting job with Emma, if she hadn’t raced off to her new life with Paul so eagerly, almost maniacally, maybe all their lives would have been substantially better.

      Except now Mom was dead. She’d died on the very night Jamie—and Harley, apparently—had received those eerily creepy messages of her death. Irene Whelan was a victim of heart failure, according to Emma, who was very short on serious information. Jamie managed to connect with Theo Reskett, from the Thrift Shop, but she, too, had been kept in the dark about Mom’s deteriorating health.

      “Emma never said a word,” Theo revealed. “You’d think she would have told me, but she never said a word about your mother.”

      No one had told Jamie either that Mom was ailing from heart disease and had been for a while.

      But then, you didn’t ask, did you? You didn’t want to know.

      That wasn’t exactly true . . . she had wanted to know. She just hadn’t wanted to be sucked into a conversation with Mom, or even Emma, that would go round and round and only serve to exacerbate her guilt, which it invariably did.

      Theo owned and managed Theo’s Thrift Shop, Emma’s place of employment ever since she’d recovered from the attack that nearly killed her. Since Mom’s death, Theo had stepped in and stayed with Emma, though Emma had insisted that she was fully capable of taking care of herself, which was almost true, except it wasn’t. Emma left alone was a little like leaving a teenager in charge of a house while the parents were away. Most things might be taken care of, maybe all, but there was also the chance of serious problems erupting, bad choices being made. Emma, nearing forty, had the mind of a twelve-year-old . . . maybe. She’d regressed after the attack and had never fully moved forward developmentally since.

      “I see his eyes!” she still cried whenever she was stressed. Mom had told Jamie that much. When she was still living with her sister and mother, Jamie had tried and tried to learn what that meant, but pressing Emma had only increased her fear and distress, and Mom had angrily told Jamie to back off. Though Emma’s hysteria had diminished in the years after the attack, her attacks of fear almost gone by the time Jamie left with Paul, they’d never completely disappeared.

      Now, as she and Harley reached the outskirts of River Glen, Jamie drew a calming breath. She hadn’t seen Emma in nearly two years and was anxious about meeting her again and the living arrangements that would need to be made. Emma needed a caretaker, and that caretaker had been Mom. Now it was going to be Jamie, at least for the time being. It was hard to know what to expect next, impossible to plan. Jamie was going to have to take things day by day.

      But one thing was for certain, at least in Jamie’s mind, and that was that she was going to fulfill all requirements needed for her to get her teaching license in Oregon. She was duty bound to be in the state at least for a while, and though substituting was fine, Jamie really needed a full-time job. She’d made a point of lamming out all those years ago, but she felt almost glad to “come home” as her mother had requested in her dream . . . and Harley’s. . . .

      Jamie shook that off. She and Harley had left for Oregon in the early hours of the morning and now, as they reached the outskirts of River Glen, it was about six p.m. Harley, who’d been half-sleeping most of the trip, suddenly straightened in the passenger seat. Her long, dark hair was tangled and she brushed it away from her face. A soft smattering of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose and her blue eyes were intense, a gift from Paul as Jamie’s eyes were brown. Paul had called her his “Little Doe” or sometimes, “my brown-eyed girl,” other times “Raggedy Bitch,” or even more often, “What the fuck, Jamie?” which was how she most often remembered him and their relationship. A sad truth.

      “That’s the Stillwell place,” Jamie said as they drove past the entrance to the long drive that led to Race and Deon Stillwell’s home. She’d learned from her friend, Camryn, whose contact with Jamie was mostly through Christmas cards, that both of the Stillwell parents were gone and the two sons had apparently inherited Stillwell Seed and Feed and still lived in the family home.

      Harley peered down the long, passing drive that wound through the hedges and out of sight. Only the roof of the house could be glimpsed from the road. “That’s where you were the night Emma was stabbed.”

      “Yes,” Jamie said soberly. She always felt that same stab of guilt. Maybe she deserved it. Mom had never hidden her feelings about how she felt about Jamie’s switch with Emma, and she’d never been afraid to talk about that night in front of Harley, even when Jamie had protested.

      “It’s really too bad,” said Harley.

      Jamie silently agreed.

      “But if things hadn’t happened that way, I wouldn’t be here. You would have never run off with Dad.”

      Jamie wasn’t sure whether that was an olive branch or a jab of some kind. Or maybe it was neither. Just Harley relating what was on her mind. “Hard to say.”

      They drove into River Glen proper. The downtown area was made up of restored storefronts and a central square. It looked better now, Jamie decided. Fresh paint on the buildings and crosswalks. A new set of traffic lights. Modern city meters that allowed for credit card payments. A row of Kelly-green motorbikes, which she saw were rentals, the kind you could take around town and exchange for another.

      “Wow,” Harley said in surprise, staring at the bikes.

      “I know, right? I thought those were only in large cities, like Portland.”