And Then There Was You Read online

  AND THEN THERE WAS YOU

  by Octavia Zane and Reed Ranger

  Copyright 2019 by Reed Ranger

  Cover image courtesy Depositphotos and feedough

  Cover by Warren Dare

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Riley

  “Not it!” Riley and Rivers Carder said at the same time.

  Two pairs of honey-brown eyes glared across the flour-splashed counter, Riley shaking his head at his twin sister. The pink delivery tag for Peppy Marden hung condemningly from the clothesline between them.

  “I delivered them last time,” Rivers said.

  “Big whoop,” Riley retorted. “You took the order. It’s your problem.”

  “But I’m busy back here,” Rivers lied.

  “I’m busy up front.” That was also a lie.

  “Her perfume gives me a headache,” Rivers complained.

  “Then hold your breath,” Riley said mercilessly.

  “Oh my God, you two, you sound like my kids,” Koala grumbled, the overhead light reflecting on his bald head as he iced a batch of jack-o’-lantern cookies. Riley had dumped the guy’s application in the trash last year, refusing to take a middle-aged man named Koala Sunrise seriously; Rivers had fished it out of the trash and hired him. And she was right in the end. Even Riley admitted it, though only to himself. Koala was the best employee that Mad Batter Bakery had ever had. He just sported a bizarre name thanks to his hippie parents, who danced and doped up at Woodstock, swapped out Jones and Macdonald for Sunrise when they married in a hand-fast ceremony, and lumbered all seven of their children with utterly bizarre monikers.

  “It’s not even my day to do deliveries,” Riley protested.

  “It’s not my day either,” Rivers said. It was Suzanne’s day, but she was sick at home. “I’ll make you dinner tonight.”

  “No.”

  “And I’ll clean up afterwards.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll knock a hundred bucks off your rent.”

  Riley hesitated, his resolve weakening. Then an image of Peppy Marden lodged in his brain. “No.”

  Rivers tried a different tactic. “Deliver those cupcakes or I’ll raise your rent a hundred bucks.”

  “I’ll find a new place to live.”

  She pushed out her lower lip. “Please?”

  He was unmoved. “Nope.”

  The lip snapped back in. “I’m older. You have to do what I say.”

  That made Riley laugh. “You can’t hold sixty seconds over my head.”

  “Just flip a coin!” Koala said in exasperation. Ripping off his plastic glove, he swiped a penny out of his pocket. “Riley, call it.”

  “Tails,” Riley said as the coin flipped up into the air.

  It slapped down into Koala’s palm. “Heads.”

  “Hah!” Rivers blurted.

  A coin-toss wasn’t binding, but Riley gave in rather than continue this stupid battle. “Only if I get dinner and don’t have to clean up. That dinner had better not be hot dogs and beans or one of your mystery soups either.”

  “Deal,” Rivers said quickly.

  “And minus the rent.”

  “No problem.”

  He groaned dramatically. “Fine.”

  Rivers loaded up the van while Riley checked on the front. All of the tables inside were empty, and no one was waiting at the register. By two-thirty in the afternoon, the place was usually pretty dead. Their sole customer was seated on the bench outside, latte in one hand and brownie in the other hand as he waited for the bus.

  Sweeping crumpled napkins off the glass cases into the trashcan, Riley returned to the back and swiped half of Rivers’s ham sandwich from her desk in the side office. He took a big bite from it before slipping the rest into a wax paper bag.

  As he settled the bag in his pocket, Koala threw him a look. “You know, the other day my wife said that she couldn’t wait for our boys to grow up and stop arguing, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that you and Rivers are thirty-one years old and still going strong.”

  “Hey, if we don’t give each other hell, who will?” Riley said.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Koala slipped the tray of completed jack-o’-lantern cookies into the pan rack and whisked out the ghost-shaped cookies to be decorated. Halloween was a few days away. They were selling out their stock of holiday cookies almost daily, second only to Christmas when the shelves were often bare by noon.

  Riley had thought his sister was crazy when she suggested opening up a bakery together. It sounded like a great way to break your back while simultaneously setting fire to all of your money, but business was booming from the first week they opened the doors. The city of Weathership already had a bakery, but that place was dark and grim and run poorly. Few people had anything nice to say about the food, so there was a definite void locally that Mad Batter Bakery could fill.

  Just like always, Rivers was right. Not that Riley was going to tell her that. It was annoying how often his sister was right, going all the way back to when they were kids and she loftily informed him that it was a bad idea to jump off the roof of the backyard shed. Instead of signing his cast with a get-better wish or a drawing to cheer him up, she wrote I TOLD YOU SO in red ink.

  He headed out back to the parking lot, where Rivers was climbing out of the van. “Her perfume is awful,” he admitted. “I don’t even know what it is. Cinnamon, cloves, fruit, lavender, jasmine. I can’t ever name it.”

  Rivers closed up the trunk. “It’s more than one. That’s why you can’t name it.”

  “What?”

  “She layers her fragrances, she bragged to me last time. Some professionals do that. They combine a few simple, linear scents, but she’s not a professional. And then you add in the scent of her lotion and the scent of her shampoo and the scents of her essential oils, and then the old scents caught in her clothes, and it’s a solid wall of stink.”

  She slipped the clip out of her hair, ran her fingers through her locks, and pinned it back more neatly. “Thanks, Riley. Will you pick up the kids on the way back?”

  “Jesse hates when I pick him up in the van.”

  Rivers rolled her eyes and headed for the bakery’s back door. “If that’s the biggest problem in my son’s life, something tells me that he will live.”

  Riley got into the van and pulled away. The drop-off point for the cupcakes was the high school, and that was all the way across the city. Not that Weathership, Oregon was that big of a place. Tree-lined streets of aging Victorians and darling bungalows, a downtown bursting with bookstores and clothing shops and eateries, it was a lovely, middle-class community framed on two sides by family-owned cattle and produce farms.

  When he needed a shot of excitement, it was just a short drive to the live music and dance clubs of Portland’s gay nightlife. When he longed for the quiet, as he always did after a day or two in Portland, his home in Weathership was just a hop, skip, and moo away.

  It was time for another visit to Portland, he thought on the drive. To dance and drink and pick up some cute guy at a club. October had been crazy in the bakery so far, and December would be crazier still. The last two weeks of November would be nearly as nuts due to Thanksgiving. He needed to take advantage of the first few weeks of the month, where the only thing on the calendar was the Autumn Festival
.

  But it was hard to think about Thanksgiving when the city was getting ready for Halloween. Pumpkins rested upon porches; ghosts hung up in trees trailed their wispy white tatters in the breeze. Deflated puddles of blow-up decorations speckled front lawns, and no less than ten witches had had grisly flight accidents that left them flattened against the sides of houses. Back in September, his six-year-old niece Gigi said she wanted to dress up as a witch, but then October rolled around and she changed her mind. Rivers and Riley asked her a hundred times if a black cat was her final decision, because once the costume was purchased, done was done.

  Several minutes later, he pulled in at Weathership High School. The staff lot was full but the student lot largely empty, the majority of the kids having already fled for home. Parking in the first row, he looked around for that gigantic bubble of blonde hair and the bright red SUV. Neither was anywhere in sight.

  Typical. If you were a minute or two late for a delivery, Peppy hinted that she was owed a partial refund for the time she was kept waiting. If you were early, she asked if business was light in a way that implied she was owed a discount for her loyalty. She always picked over every detail of her order, making the delivery person stand there while she searched for nicked frosting and counted up the cookies or cupcakes or brownies. It disappointed her when she never found anything wrong. Riley and Rivers made sure of that, triple-checking her orders. They also made her pay in advance so she couldn’t award herself a refund or discount, which she’d tried to do many times before.

  “Yoo-hoo!”

  He cringed internally and looked through the rearview mirror. There she was, waving frantically to the van as she came around the side of the auditorium. A knot of excited kids was with her, all of them dressed in athleticwear. Her hair was taller than ever, and her old letterman’s jacket was paired with a ghastly pair of blue leggings covered in nacho chips and avocado halves.

  Taking one last breath of clean oxygen, Riley got out and waved back. The kids beat Peppy up the steps and clustered around the back of the van. “What kind are they?” “We won the meet!” Seventeen-year-old Jackson Wills gave the rainbow triangle on the trunk a shy grin. He’d worked for the bakery last summer and asked Riley to ask Rivers if he could put one of those stickers up in the window. She said yes and put another on the van for good measure.

  It was such a little thing, but it mattered so much. Riley had struggled to explain to her how a simple sticker transformed something from unknowable and possibly hostile to a safe, welcoming space. That was upsetting and offensive to warm-hearted, live-and-let-live Rivers, someone needing a signal to feel safe. The stickers went up immediately and she kicked out the random tourist who complained that rainbows belonged to everyone, not just those goddamned queers. Kicked him out and responded to his bad review online that she wouldn’t tolerate hatred in her store. Her diatribe made the bakery even more popular after that.

  “Three dozen #1 cupcakes?” Peppy said cheerfully when she made it to the van.

  Riley was ready for her. Trying not to choke on the seething mass of scents that she exuded, he held out her order slip and said, “Two dozen #1 cupcakes.”

  Her smile faltered. “I’m sure I ordered three! Look at all of these hungry kids I’ve got here! Rivers must have heard me wrong.”

  He continued to hold out the slip until she took it. If this was the whole team of whatever sport they played, then even two dozen cupcakes were too much. His swift head count was fifteen, minus Peppy.

  She couldn’t argue with the slip, which she’d filled out herself with the feather-topped emerald green pen she carried around in her purse. He opened up the back and pulled the boxes over for her perusal.

  The kids went nuts at the sight of the cupcakes, asking what the flavors were and if Peppy could get cans of soda from the vending machine in the staff lounge. Losing count of the cupcakes in their chatter, she said in desperation, “Why are they all vanilla?”

  “This box has the chocolate cupcakes,” Riley said, opening the lid to reveal them.

  “Well, you should mix them up!” she cried. “They do that at Green’s Groceries, put half and half in each box! It looks so much prettier that way.”

  Riley just smiled blandly. She always gave him great practice at hiding how irritated he was becoming. If the cupcakes had been mixed up, she would have complained that they weren’t separate. What if someone had allergies to vanilla or chocolate and there was cross-contamination? And how was she supposed to tell the gluten-free cupcakes apart from the rest of them, despite never once ordering a single gluten-free cupcake? And hadn’t she ordered some cookies on the side? She was one hundred percent positive she had! So where were they?

  It was always something. Always. They enjoyed good, regular business from Peppy, but God, did she make them work for it.

  Her next complaint, whatever it was, got overridden by the kids’ hubbub. Their hands were already reaching out to claim cupcakes.

  “Hey, can I have an extra one for the dog?” a boy yelled.

  “No, cupcakes aren’t good for dogs!” another boy exclaimed.

  “No, chocolate isn’t good for dogs!” the first boy exclaimed back. “Nothing is wrong with giving them vanilla.”

  “Do you have a dog for a team mascot?” Riley asked, hoping to cut off Peppy’s next line of attack.

  The boys shook their heads. “There’s a stray dog hanging out over by the dumpsters,” one offered. “He was there a few minutes ago when I had to throw out some stuff for Coach Ellington.”

  “No, not yet!” Peppy scolded the kids. “All right, Benji, you carry that box, and Andre, you take the other one to the team room. Be careful! Chuck, you run into the restroom and rip off paper towels for napkins and . . .”

  In a few seconds, Riley was alone at the van with the air clearing. That had been the quickest and least painful interaction with Peppy Marden ever, thanks to the presence of the hyped-up team, and Riley would get dinner and a cut on rent for it. Pleased, he closed up the trunk and went around the van to let himself in.

  The dog.

  It wasn’t his problem. The dog probably wasn’t there anymore, and Riley needed to get over to the elementary school to pick up Jesse and Gigi.

  Then he sighed.

  If he didn’t go over to the dumpsters to check, the guilt would eat him alive. Lost signs for cats and dogs tore him up, and he’d never fully gotten over his long-ago devastation when he found out his father and stepmother gave his dog away to a family friend. Rivers was just as distraught; they had had Hubble for ten years ever since he was a fat, floppy-eared puppy galloping around the house after them.

  After their parents’ divorce, the dog bounced back and forth with the twins between two homes. Then Mom got sick of having to take decongestants for her mild allergy to dogs and demanded that Hubble live permanently with Dad. Dad got sick of taking care of Hubble when the twins weren’t around to do it themselves, and boom, Hubble was gone. A lot of time had passed since then and much water under the bridge, but Riley was still furious about that decision. It was an impotent fury with no outlet or resolution. Dad refused to believe that he did anything wrong, and no amount of arguing ever convinced him.

  But Riley never looked at his father in the same way. His parents’ war had claimed another casualty in Hubble. That war would still be going on today if Rivers didn’t put her foot down. Mom and Dad had loved to fight over the twins’ time for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, even some of the lesser stars on the calendar like Valentine’s Day and the Fourth of July, and now they fought over who got the grandkids. The joke was that nobody did. Rivers, who felt enough holidays in her life had gotten ruined by hurt feelings and clock-watching, declared every holiday would from now on take place at her house, and they were both invited.

  They hated each other, so neither ever showed up. Their war was more important to them than spending time with their own grandchildren, which was incredibly sad to Riley. Jesse and Gigi bare
ly knew their maternal grandparents.

  He’d check for the dog, confirm it was gone, and haul ass over to the elementary school. It would only take a minute to assuage his conscience.

  Pocketing the keys, he headed through the high school quickly. He had delivered here enough times to know the general lay-out of the campus. Teachers were at work at their desks through a handful of open doors, and the detention room let out just as Riley walked by. He threaded through the departing students and turned into the alley between the cafeteria and the next block of classrooms.

  The dumpsters were behind it. They were overflowing. He gave the scene a cursory glance, seeing no dog, but a plastic garbage bag upon the ground was pawed at. “Hello?” he called, and whistled. “Here, boy! Here, girl!”

  There was a heartbeat of silence, followed by a rustle from the far side of the dumpsters. A head poked out to look at him.

  Riley didn’t know too much about dog breeds, cocker spaniel notwithstanding, but he was pretty sure this one was a mutt. A skinny, shaggy chocolate-colored mutt, who looked a bit like a Lab. He had been homeless for some time, his dirty fur filled with burrs and twigs. Or else he was untended in a backyard and escaped, or got dumped off somewhere on purpose.

  Remembering the sandwich, Riley took it out of his pocket and unwrapped it. “You like ham, big dude?”

  The dog regarded the wax paper, and the sandwich beneath. His tail wagged suddenly, happily, his long nails clipping over the concrete as he approached. Riley offered the sandwich. Taking it in a gentlemanly fashion, the dog wolfed it down and looked up for more.

  “That’s all I got,” Riley said, kneeling on the ground. The dog bore him no ill will for it, and let Riley pat his head and pull out burrs.

  What should he do? Call Animal Control? But then he would be stuck waiting here for them to arrive, and he didn’t have time for that.

  Straightening, he said, “Come on.”

  The dog padded along good-naturedly behind him all the way through the high school, and loaded up into the passenger side of the van as soon as Riley opened the door. “Sit,” Riley said, and the dog sat down at once. “Good boy!”