Retread

 

“We have a warrant from a federal judge, Mrs. Teague. If I were you, I’d do my best to cooperate with the questions being asked and rest easy knowing you yourself weren’t suspected of any wrongdoing.”

A warrant from a federal judge.

She thought of Ava’s eerie expression minutes ago, her calm and levelheaded insistence that she’d do whatever it took to keep Mercy out of prison.

All of the boys had been questioned over the years. None had ever earned a federal arrest warrant.

She swallowed, and said, “I’m not sure how I can help you.”

His nod was short, and approving. And infuriating. “You can start by telling me about your son-in-law.”

“What about him?”

“Do you like him?”

“He’s my family. I love him. He makes my daughter very happy, and he’s a wonderful father to my grandchildren.” And I wish he could pull your smug teeth out of your head, asshole, she thought.

“You’ve known him a long time?”

“Yes.”

“How old was he when you first met him?”

She recalled him with aching clarity, the overgrown boy he’d been, still with baby fat clinging to his cheeks, and his brown eyes deep wells of sadness that softened when he spoke to Ava, who stared up at him in unselfconscious wonder. He’d been pretty and cute, not yet as devastating as he’d be at thirty, when everything went to shit. Still short-haired and innocent…as innocent as anyone could be after torturing and killing fifteen people.

“Twenty-one,” she said, careful to keep her voice neutral. She didn’t like this line of questioning, where it could be headed, but it was so far innocent enough.

“He was from New Orleans, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Why come here?” He tilted his head. “Was he running from something?”

“No. My husband requested his transfer. He wanted,” she continued, as his lips formed a why, “a dedicated bodyguard for my daughter and me. The city wasn’t all that safe in those days.” She offered a tight smile. “And he’s big. A visual deterrent, Kenny said.”

“Visual. Right.” A fast flare of amusement lit his eyes a second, and then was gone. “Okay, so, he was twenty-one. How old was your daughter?”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Maggie could feel tension steal along her jaw, but she kept her voice airy. “She was eight.”

“Eight and twenty-one.” His brows lifted. “That’s a big age difference. Did they get along?”

She wanted to crack open her head, and pour out her memories; wanted to rub this man’s nose in them until he understood that it hadn’t been like that. He hadn’t been twenty-one and lusting after a child.

But most of the club hadn’t understood it; Ava’s own father hadn’t. There was no way to explain it to an agent with a federal arrest warrant.

She said, “Famously.”

He smirked, a twitch of his upper lip quickly smoothed. “Obviously. They got married.”

“They got married when Ava was twenty-two.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Our records confirm that. But did any of that getting on ‘famously’ happen before she was twenty-two?”

“What are you really asking, Agent Fallon?”

His head tilted the other way, and the light from the window slanted over his eyes so they were flat, coin-like, and predatory. Eyes that had already weighed and judged her, so that her answers were superfluous; their only value was in furthering his case, or perhaps helping him establish a new one.

She hated him.

And deep, deep down, in the unacknowledged heart of her, she was a little afraid.

He said, “I’m asking if he ever did anything that made you uncomfortable. When your daughter was a child. Inappropriate touching? A lingering hug? Any staring? Gift-giving? Unnecessary compliments?”

She recalled a sunny summer afternoon, Ava with her green, heart-shaped sunglasses and shorts with little strawberries on them. Mercy plucking a wild daisy from the edge of the lawn, and bowing deeply as he handed it to her, so she’d laugh.

She recalled Ava falling asleep propped up against Mercy’s side, and the careful way he’d shifted his weight so as not to disturb her.

Ava thirteen, and starting to bloom, her crush full-throated and innocent and starting to be noticeable to Mercy, if the way his faint blush went all the way up to the tips of his ears was anything to go by.

“No,” she said. “Never.”

His look was doubtful. “I find it hard to believe that someone who marries a twenty-two-year-old, who knew her most of her life, didn’t cross the line a time or two in the past. And I find it even harder to believe the girl’s mother wouldn’t notice.”

An image filled her mind: Ava asleep and hollow-cheeked in a hospital bed, swaddled in white, arms trailing tubes. And Mercy at the bedside, his head bowed against her hip, his great shoulders bowed and trembling.

“Believe what you want,” she said. “Is there anything else?”

His gaze turned sly, secretly pleased – about what, she didn’t know. “For now.”

When she walked away from him, she felt his gaze burning through her back. 

Yesterday's throwback post about revisiting couples got me thinking about Lord Have Mercy - although, what doesn't make me think of it? Daily. Nightly. When I try to relax. The thing giving me acid reflux and chronic stress; oh book, kill me now - and the way it's nothing but revisiting established couples. And friendships. 

The beauty of this book - the cause of said acid reflux and chronic stress - is that the circumstances allow us to retread old ground from a different perspective. One of the novel's major themes is that you can't ever really bury the past. It comes back to you; its ghosts will always haunt you, though sometimes in ways unexpected. Everyone is doing well, now, but everyone from Ava and Mercy, to Tango, to Aidan, to Ian, to Ghost, is forced to re-examine their past actions and review them with new insight and perspective. 

In the scene I highlighted above, Maggie's having to look back at Mercy and Ava's coming together. Their meeting, and their past, and their falling in love. She and Ghost came to grips with all of this long ago, and Maggie came to grips with it early and easily because she got it. She'd been there, in her own way. They had to explain it to the club, and to each other, but it was a very private matter. The outside world - beyond people like Mason Stephens and school bullies - have no idea what sort of history lies buried beneath the veneer of married parents of three. But now, suddenly, the FBI is asking questions about it, and the past comes roaring back, bigger and scarier than ever, dressed in a Halloween mask. Potentially devastating in ways more than emotional. 

As a writer, I love retreading old ground with new perspective. Ava and Mercy's romance is Gothic and tragic at its roots, and I love getting to play with that again; getting to show it from outside POVs and force Ava, Mercy, and even Maggie and Ghost to justify their relationship all over again. 

Almost every character has scenes like this one in Lord Have Mercy Part II. It's a two-front war for everyone: present and past, and all of them are caught in the middle. It's delicious, and that's why it's been such a tightrope act to write, and why it's taking me four forevers. We will get there! I'm getting there. Almost 70k words at this point. And still coming soon, though I'm trying to give myself mini breaks here and there to help with the headaches. 

Happy Friday! Thanks for your continued patience! I am chomping at the bit to share this part of the book because there are so many really great reveals. *laughs evilly*