Such a Rush(19)
Author: Jennifer Echols

As the engine noise faded, the pit bull’s barking filled the empty space. The dog had reason this time. Someone knocked on the door of the pit bull’s trailer. And then Grayson was yelling over the barks, asking the owner where Leah Jones lived.

I waited for the fight-or-flight adrenaline spike to pass. Better to sit tight than to attempt an escape into the trailer. If Grayson turned, he might see my movement through the palm fronds and catch me more quickly. Even if I did make it through the door unseen, he would find me eventually. And when I opened the door, he would see inside. Outside was bad enough.

So I eased my sunglasses from my hair back down to cover my eyes, held my breath, and felt thankful Grayson had missed Mark and his crew by several minutes. Grayson hadn’t even located me yet, but I squirmed in his sights.

Maybe he wouldn’t find me after all, I began to think as he gave up on the pit bull owner and knocked on the door of another trailer. Good luck with that. The trailer park wasn’t known for its block parties or ice cream socials. As residents of three and a half years, my mom and I were some of the longer-term neighbors, yet I doubted a single person here knew my name, except the boys I was acquainted with through long years of hoping they would leave me alone on the bus. It was spring break, so they would be at the beach. If I sat here quietly, maybe Grayson would knock on a few more doors, give up, and go away.

But from our talk a few hours before, I knew Grayson wanted me to work for him. He wanted it badly for some reason. He wouldn’t go away until I talked him out of it. In the past year, I’d had a run-in with Ben Reynolds when he got off the bus with me, followed me home, and wouldn’t go away. I hadn’t let him in the door, so he’d found a heavy branch in the woods and walked around the trailer, banging the club against the metal walls as he went, around and around until I thought I would go insane. I’d had no way to call for help. My mom had let the bill go unpaid way too many times for us to have a phone.

“Leah Jones,” Grayson said to a man across the road.

“Is her mother’s name Patsy?” the man asked.

“No,” Grayson said. “It’s Sheryl.”

The fact that Grayson knew my mother’s name set off tornado sirens in my head, but I didn’t know what they meant. I just listened through the trees as Grayson made his way down the row of trailers. Nobody had heard of me. On his fourth or fifth try he got wise. Now I was not just Leah Jones. I was Leah Jones, walks down this path to the airport every day, tiny eighteen-year-old girl, “dark hair like this.” I pictured the motion he made with his hands as he pantomimed the explosion of my curls in the coastal humidity.

“Oh, I know what girl you mean,” said a woman. “She lives right there.”

For thirty seconds I expected Grayson to walk past the palm fronds that framed the road, into my yard. I still jumped when he did appear because he was so shockingly out of context. He crossed the dirt to my chair, kicking up hardly any dust with his flip-flops, and stood right in front of me.

I looked up at him. He was a lot taller than I remembered.

He stared down at me like a stern state trooper, eyes inscrutable behind his sunglasses. His straw cowboy hat mashed his blond curls against his head, and a drop of sweat trickled from his hairline down his cheek. “Can we talk?”

Politely I inclined my head, inviting him to sit in the other plastic chair. Behind my own sunglasses, out of the corner of my eye, I caught another glimpse of the makeshift ashtray and wished for a cigarette, any distraction to fumble with.

He sat down and slapped a mosquito on his arm. “Does your mom know you fly?”

It seemed like an innocent question, a friendly conversation starter. I knew better. After three and a half years of basically pretending I didn’t exist, Grayson had not come through the fence and searched for me just to have a casual chat.

“Of course she knows,” I lied, staring now where he was pointing. He’d taken a sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it on his thigh. My mother’s ironically neat and upstanding signature, underlined with a flourish, was at the bottom of the form Mr. Hall had wanted her to sign when he started giving me flying lessons.

Grayson’s broad fingertip tapped the paper, denting the signature, which seemed more delicate with every strike, as if every tap were a hammer blow, until it dawned on me what he meant. I had forged my mother’s signature on that form, and somehow he knew.

I grabbed for the form.

Before I could touch it, he snatched it away and held it above his head. “I have copies,” he said. “In fact, I mailed one home to Wilmington, so don’t bother.”

Slowly I sat back in my plastic chair and tried to wipe the emotion off my face, whatever it was—surprise, fear, horror, blind panic.

He relaxed too. He brought the form back down to his thigh and smoothed the wrinkled paper with his palm as if it were the original Declaration of Independence. “I’m sure this signature looks exactly like your mother’s. You signed it carefully. I have a lot of experience forging my mother’s name on report cards, and even I wouldn’t have noticed this if my dad hadn’t marked it with a sticky note.” With his thumb and middle finger he thumped the yellow square hanging off one side of the form. An arrow drawn on the note pointed to the forgery. “Like he suspected what you’d done, and then decided to let it go.”

“There’s no way you could prove that,” I said quickly. “You’d have to pay for a handwriting expert or something, and the FAA doesn’t care. Nobody cares that much about me.”

“I care about you, Leah,” he said sarcastically. “But luckily, I don’t have to hire a handwriting expert or report you to the FAA. All I have to do is show this to your mother.”

five

I sucked in a breath. Then realized that sucking in my breath had revealed to Grayson just how right he was, and how much I did not want him to involve my mother. “She’s out of town,” I said as evenly as I could. “Good luck finding her.”

“She’ll be back,” he predicted. “But if not… My dad just died. For the moment, I’m loaded. I’ll hire a private detective to find her.”

I blinked at Grayson. He was so handsome, and sitting so close in his chair, that my heart went into overdrive. I blinked again and he was the devil, sent here to seek out my every hope and crush it, my every fear and make it come true. I had never found my mother when she went missing, but I had never tried. I imagined it would be easy for a professional. A private detective would be friendly with the police, and my mother’s boyfriends were usually on parole.