The Innkeeper. Keeper.
God, I want those names to be a coincidence.
Except it’s not just my mom. Everyone knows the story about my dad. It’s something they call him when they’re drunk on eggnog and brandy. Pour me another one, Innkeeper. Do they ever shorten that to Keeper?
My father fits the other parts of the story, too—Stone’s looking for somebody who owns a lot of real estate. My father doesn’t own a lot, but as a developer, he certainly has access to a lot of real estate, someone who knows which places are abandoned. Someone with connections in both law enforcement and city hall.
Not just one man. Five. Ten. Twenty? Stone had said. Is it so far-fetched that my father could be one of them?
Mom gazes at me from across the table. She sits up a little straighter, which tells me she wants me to fix my posture. There are probably a hundred things about me she wants to fix.
I sit up nice and straight and glance at Chelsea. She gives me a sympathetic smile. She knows the drill of these birthday parties. She pulls out her phone and texts me. I sneak my phone under the table. A flower and a smiley.
I return her sweet smile. I text back a heart.
In the days and weeks that follow my birthday ride, I replay everything Stone said about Keeper. Somebody who’d found the abandoned houses. Somebody looking the other way.
…the only reason I made it out of the basement alive was the knowledge that I would make them suffer.
My dad would never knowingly let young boys be hurt the way Stone was hurt. But would he look the other way?
Stone got those boys out of the basement when he was fifteen, he said. He’s around ten years older than me, so I would’ve been about five. And Madsen, one of the men who preyed on those trapped boys, was at my sweet-sixteen party. Which means my parents knew him. Granted, there were hundreds of people there, but still.
If somebody had gone to my father when he was first starting out and asked to rent a place off the books, no questions asked, would he have agreed?
Sometimes I think maybe yes. But I know in my heart he would never have said yes if he knew children were being hurt. I know that for sure.
But what if he’d thought it was for something less awful? Maybe illegal card games, a mistress, sports betting, things like that. Dad loves to bet on college football with his buddies.
What if he didn’t know?
That wouldn’t matter to Stone, though. Why should it? Children are hurt every day by people looking the other way. People not noticing, not caring. When you’re a boy in a basement, looking away is its own kind of crime. He made it clear that he wants them all to pay.
I can never let Stone find out.
Not that I’ll ever see him again. There was something final about that trip to the basement. He wanted to ward me off. Like the Mr. Yuck sticker on the bottles and jugs of detergents under the sink. A sign that I should probably listen to.
Poison. Stay away.
The worst part of it is that, after he told me about Keeper, he could tell something was wrong. He could tell I pulled away, and I know what he thought. That I’d decided he was too damaged after all.
Too much a monster.
I hate that he’d think that. But what can I do? Explain to him that it was really a suspicion that he’s talking about my father? Tell him how the shock of it nearly made me throw up?
“Tell me about the Innkeeper,” I finally blurt out to my mother.
She pauses with her teacup in midair, her other hand holding her phone where she scrolls through the newspaper’s society page website. “What?”
“For Christmas. The story you tell every Christmas.”
She looks at me oddly, a little worried. That worry has been there ever since the last time Stone took me, like one of these days I’ll finally splinter into a million pieces. Sometimes it feels like that would be a relief.
“Oh, that.” She gives me a small smile. “You’ve heard it enough times to tell it yourself. That’s always been your father. A good man. Good to the bone.”
Hope rises inside me, because a good man couldn’t do what Stone said. He couldn’t be involved in any of that. “But how did you know? When you met him, how did you know?”
“I didn’t, really. I mostly liked the way he looked. The way he smiled at me. The knowing part only came later. He rode a motorcycle; did you know that?”
That startles me out of my worry, because I have never heard Mom talk like this. “Really?”
“He was dashing.” She laughs. “And sexy.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Eww.”
“Well, your grandfather was furious. He thought your daddy wasn’t good enough. He didn’t have much money. Neither did we, but we had our name and standing.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“The heart loves who it loves, and my heart loved your daddy. But he worked so hard. Impossibly hard.” There’s a small line between her eyes; she puts cream on it every night because she thinks it makes her look old. It deepens now, and she doesn’t seem old, only troubled. “Maybe too hard. He wanted me to have everything he thought I should have.”
“And Grandpa came around?”
She shakes her head, but it’s more like agreement. “He didn’t have a choice. The old factory would have gone under if your father hadn’t bailed him out.”
I gasp, knowing how proud my grandfather is. We aren’t close, but I see him once a year. He’s a stern man. Cold but loving, somehow. “He did that?”
“Most men would have lorded it over him, the way my father had been so rude to him and then was brought low. But not your father. He is always kind, even when he doesn’t have to be.”
The doubt feels lighter now, like it’s floating away. It can’t be my daddy who’s connected to crime and pain. There’s a whole city out there. It must be someone else.
Anyway, Stone said Keeper, not Innkeeper. Those are two completely different words. It’s a coincidence—it has to be.
I got worked up over nothing. Mom’s always saying I do that. “I’m glad you told me.”
“You probably know that the charities and foundations I’m on…some of them do good work, but most of them are just for show. Opportunities for society women to get together. Your daddy doesn’t mind me doing them, but he donates as much as he can to charity. And unlike the story I tell at Christmas, no one knows about that.”
Chapter 16
Brooke
Weeks pass. Then months.
I don’t know how I make it through the holidays, but I do.
I throw myself back into school once January hits. It’s my junior year, and I need to keep up my grade-point average if I’m going to land any kind of scholarship to the local university.
Most of my friends will attend Ivy League schools, but no way can we swing it. Mom is already talking about how I don’t want to go out of state for college, how I can’t bear to be apart from my family. Making it sound like they’d send me to Harvard or Princeton if only I desired it.
I fixed the hummingbird Stone carved for me.
You can see where I glued its little wing, but I don’t care. It’s beautiful to me. I keep it on my bedside table next to a tiny replica of the Eiffel Tower I got the first time we visited Paris and a turtle made of sapphire, my birthstone, and some coins from trips we took. Stone’s bird is my favorite of all my treasures.