The Bust Read online

  The attorneys walked me outside the courthouse, surrounding me, just in case there were reporters there. A few had shown up when I was released on bail and at earlier hearings, since I was slightly famous. I was a former athlete, former professional football player, former star, and “Fall from Grace” was always a good story. My brother was somebody important in this part of the state, too, because he was on the coaching staff for the Woodsmen football team that everyone here worshiped like they were going to church. I hoped people weren’t bothering him too much about me and my problems.

  There was just one reporter standing on the sidewalk under an umbrella in the cold rain. “Kayden, anything to say about your plea agreement?” she asked, and held out her phone to record me. She sounded bored. “Are you happy that you avoided prison time? How do you respond to the criticisms that you’re getting off lightly due to your status as a professional athlete?”

  Former professional athlete. I shook my head.

  “Mr. Matthews thanks the court and looks forward to paying his debt to society. Beyond that, he has no comment,” one of my attorneys answered promptly, and we walked toward a car and got in.

  The lawyers didn’t have much to say to me either, besides a few more warnings about my behavior and about staying clean. I nodded and looked out the window at the overcast sky and at the rivulets of water running down the glass. I had forgotten how cold and grey it could get here in the fall before the landscape froze and the rain turned to snow. I’d been drafted out of college onto the Woodsmen football team and come to northern Michigan in the spring, when it was beautiful, and the winter had been a real shock.

  Everything that season had been a shock. I’d thought that I’d spend my rookie year sitting on the bench and waiting for a turn to play in the fourth quarter of some blowout, but my chance had come in the first game of the preseason, when the future hall of fame, starting quarterback got injured and I’d subbed in for him. It had given me the opportunity to really make it in the pros.

  And I’d blown it. I’d sucked as the Woodsmen quarterback, just like I’d sucked at mostly everything else in my life. That included the cocaine I’d sucked up my nose the nights before our games, which probably hadn’t helped me throw very well or make good decisions. Of course, my decision-making had always been—

  “Kayden? I mean, Mr. Matthews?”

  “Huh?” I turned to look at the junior attorney on my team of defenders, the guy who always had to bring coffees to the other two. Besides looking like he didn’t need to shave yet, he was also several inches shorter than his bosses, so he was junior in appearance as well as in experience. He hadn’t said much to me besides hello before now. But the other two were on their phones, yakking and bitching, so he slid a glance at each of them and kept talking quietly.

  “I’m a big fan of yours,” he told me. “My sister loves you, too.”

  I would have laughed, if I’d had any of that left in me. “Yeah, thanks.” He nodded and kept staring hard. “Do you want an autograph for her?” I finally asked.

  His eyes lit up and he got out a piece of paper and a pen he had ready in his briefcase. “Her name is Elaine,” he noted.

  I took his pen and scrawled my name and a “thanks for being a fan.” “There you go, man. Collector’s item.”

  “What? Why?”

  “That’s probably the final time anyone’s going to ask for my autograph. Until I have to sign myself into prison.”

  “If you stay clean, you won’t have to go,” the little guy said seriously.

  “What’s that?” His boss put down her phone. “What are you telling him?”

  “Nothing I haven’t heard before,” I assured her, and returned to looking out of the window. She kept talking but I tried, again, to remember the night that I’d broken into the house on Rosewood Trail. Not Rosemont Court, Rosewood Trail. I had strange memories of it all: shattered glass, furniture falling. An umbrella? And, for some reason, a big, black dog. That part must have been true, because I’d had dog hair on my shirt, along with vomit, when I’d woken up in the drunk tank the following morning.

  “Will you set up the meeting with the woman through Victim Services?” I broke in, interrupting the lawyer mid-sentence.

  “That’s not a good idea.” She proceeded to tell me why for several miles and I understood her arguments. I was paying her a shit-ton of money to protect me and my best interests, exactly what she was currently trying to do.

  Of course, I had never been one to act in my own best interests.

  ∞

  Kylie

  “It’s really delicious,” I told Emma, and leaned over her dish like I was taking a bite. “Mmmm! Wow, I wish someone had made this for my dinner!”

  She looked at me and didn’t make a move toward the bowl, totally not falling for it.

  “Well, this is all you’re having, so get used to it!” I threatened, but she knew those were empty words. In fact, she swiveled to stand with her butt facing me, to show her true feelings.

  “Em—” I started to bargain, but broke off when we both heard the knock on the front door. I sat up on the floor from my position over the dog bowl. “No matter who’s here or how nice they are, I’m not buying anything and wasting our money, and I’m not signing up for more classes,” I assured her. “Remember last time I did that?” I bet she did. Those classes had led to us living in Montana in a yurt with no heat in the winter…a long story. Anyway, there was another knock, and with the hopeful thought that it was my neighbor bringing more pot brownies, I went to answer it.

  I tugged open the door, which had never worked very well since I’d moved in, and froze. Then words tumbled out of my mouth before my brain fully processed what was happening. “This isn’t your house!” I exclaimed, and my arms acted too: I held up my palms, as if I could stop him from barging in again.

  “I know it isn’t,” the man on my doorstep said. He looked a lot thinner than the last time I’d seen him over the summer when the police had pulled him out through this same door. His face looked kind of older, definitely more tired. The way he was standing, slumped some, made me think he felt that tired through his whole body. “Can I talk to you for a moment?” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving up and down with a jerk. “I’m not going to do anything to you. I swear.” When I hesitated, he repeated it. “I won’t hurt you, I swear.”

  I opened the door further. “I didn’t think you were going to hurt me that night, either, not after we talked. You can come in.”

  “Really?” He hesitated, tensed like he might run. “You really want to let me into your house?”

  “Well, last time you were here, you found your way in without my permission!” I waved my hand at him. “Yeah, come on. It’s too cold to stand outside.”

  He moved very cautiously and carefully, planting each foot and hesitating for a split second before he took another step. He froze when he got fully into the living room. “Holy shit,” he breathed. “I can’t believe that I caused so much damage.”

  “What? I cleaned up the mess you made months ago, last summer,” I said.

  “Then…” He looked around again, and I could understand his confusion. There were boxes stacked almost to the ceiling, piles of papers, trash bags, and a whole lot of furniture. I was doing my best.

  “This is how it always is,” I explained. “Maybe that’s why you acted so crazy the last time you were here, why you started moving the tables and chairs around, tipping stuff and breaking it. Maybe when you came in, you got a little discompopulated.”

  “I got what?”

  “You know, confused! I’m trying to improve my vocabulary with an app. It could be that I didn’t use that word correctly,” I told him, and he looked very discompopulated again, if that meant what I thought it did.

  “I wasn’t…whatever you just said. I was drunk. And high,” he added. He cleared his throat. “I’m Kayden Matthews.”

  “Oh, I know! I recognized you right away last summer, right when
I came out with my umbrella.”

  “The umbrella.” His face cleared a little. “I remember that. I wondered about it.”

  “I was using it as a weapon,” I explained. “I walked out of the bedroom and around the corner and, surprise! There you were.” Kayden Matthews, the professional football player, the burglar.

  He frowned and exhaustion seemed to sweep back over him. “You needed a weapon against me.”

  “No, it turned out that I didn’t, because I didn’t need to be afraid of you. But I thought for a moment that it was an intruder coming to kill me, so I got the umbrella.”

  Kayden rubbed his eyes. “Can we sit down?”

  “Um, sure.” I moved several piles off the couch and made a space for him and another for myself. Then I made one for Emma, if she cared to join us.

  He sat, and either didn’t see or was too polite to mention the cloud of dust that threw up from the cushion when his butt met the fabric. I really was doing my best.

  Kayden hunched over his knees, compressing his long, broad body. “You’re Kylie Martell,” he announced, and I nodded. I was. “You’re new to the area.” I nodded again, because it had only been a few months since I’d arrived in northern Michigan. “And I broke into your house in the middle of the night and destroyed it,” he said, and sighed.

  “It was already pretty bad. You made it worse, but it wasn’t great to start with,” I consoled him, but then thought about what he’d said. “Wait, how did you know that I just moved here?”

  “I heard that you were from California originally and you came about six months ago.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed, feeling my eyes get big. “But how did you hear that? Who have you been talking to, Roy?”

  “Roy?” He shook his head. “No, my attorneys looked you up. They thought you might sue me and they wanted to have your background information...just in case.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, exactly, except maybe that they were looking for dirt to throw back on me to make me look bad. That made sense, even if it didn’t feel very good.

  “They said that there were a lot of gaps in your history between when you left California and now,” he went on.

  “A lot can happen in four years,” I remarked, and it had. A lot of miles, too. It felt like I was a different person from the girl who’d hitched out of San Francisco at age eighteen. “I’m not going to sue you, though,” I told Kayden. “That thought never crossed my mind. You already paid me restitution, more than any of the stuff you broke was worth.” He shrugged. “I did wonder why you rampaged around, and dropped the dishes and turned over the cabinets and chairs and everything. Maybe you really were discom…confused?”

  Kayden rubbed his eyes again. “I don’t remember much about that night. I thought I was in the house I grew up in, on Rosemont Court. Ninety-three Rosemont Court. I must have slurred out the address and the driver brought me here to Rosemont Trail.”

  “Oh! That’s why you kept saying that you came home,” I said. “I’m so glad to know that. It was such a mystery! Don’t you enjoy that feeling when something clicks and you get it? It’s exactly like when a cloud clears away, or you know when you drive up in the mountains and your ears get all clogged and then you yawn and you can hear again? I feel just like that right now.”

  He stared at me. Maybe he didn’t feel like that. Maybe he’d never been in the mountains.

  “I do have the idea that I was trying to fix the house,” he said, looking around the crowded living room. “Maybe I was trying to make it like the place where I grew up. Or maybe clean it.”

  Well, it had needed it. It still did, to a large extent. “It sounded like a herd of wildebeests or something,” I said. “They run in herds.”

  He shrugged slightly, not interested in wildebeests.

  “You asked me where Ben was,” I mentioned.

  “My brother,” he told me, and blew out a long sigh.

  I already knew that, because I had looked up Kayden just like he’d done to me. His brother was a coach for the Woodsmen football team that played right here in northern Michigan, and Kayden had been on that team himself. “And you called me ‘Gaby,’” I continued, and he slouched over more.

  “A woman I know,” he explained, and it looked like the words actually pained him to say. Oh! Maybe he was in love with that Gaby woman, like in the book The Viscount’s Impossible Longing. In the end, Viscount von Leicestershire had married the girl and they’d had steamy sex, but it had been a long two-hundred fifty pages to get there.

  “I’m sorry,” I said sympathetically.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Kayden said, and looked me straight in the eyes. “I’m really sorry, Kylie. I’m sorry I broke in here and scared you and caused damage to your house.”

  “I accept your apology.”

  “You do?” He sat up straight, surprised. “Just like that?”

  “Well, I had already pretty much forgiven you that night. You were so confused and sad, although I didn’t really pick up on the sad part until later, when I thought it all through. At the time, yes, I was pretty scared. But you were sweet to Emma, which always puts you ahead in my book. And then, I got that big check…so we’re all good.”

  “Really?’

  “Really,” I assured him. “I’m not a person who holds a grudge.”

  He sat back suddenly against the couch cushion, just like someone had popped the balloon that had been holding him up.

  “Do you feel better now?” I asked.

  “I do,” he said, and sounded surprised. “I came here to make you feel better, though. I wanted you to know that you’re safe from me.”

  “I know that. I knew it that night, when you and Emma slept together.”

  “Me and…what? I slept with someone that night, here?” The surprise had turned to horror.

  “Not like that. Emma!” I called. “Em! Come here.”

  For once, she listened to me. I heard a grunt and groan, and then a jingle as she shook her collar. Slowly, my dog padded into the room. She headed straight for Kayden, put her head on his knee, and huffed.

  “That’s Emma,” I explained. “You guys fell asleep on the floor together. She liked you right away, and look! She still does.”

  Kayden stared down at my dog, and very, very slowly, a small smile turned up the corners of his lips. “Hey,” he said, and her tail thumped. “Who’s a good girl?”

  Thump, thump. She started to try to scramble onto the couch and got her front legs up before getting stuck. I stood to lift her the rest of the way and she curled up next to Kayden, partway on him, actually, and immediately fell back asleep. He kept petting her, scratching behind her ears. His face still looked relaxed and happy, which was what a good dog would do for you.

  “She’s my best friend,” I remarked. “We grew up together.”

  “I remember her,” he told me. “I had her hair on me in jail.” And with that, his frown returned.

  “Jail sucks,” I agreed. “There’s good HVAC, which is nice, but they don’t let you have a dog with you. So, now that you’re out, what are you going to do? Keep playing football?”

  It was like I’d slapped him. He flinched—he literally jerked away from me when I said those words. “No, football is done,” he told me, and swallowed. “I don’t know what the future’s going to bring.”

  “Yeah, me neither. I mean, I’m busy right now. I have a job and everything but I never stay too long. And I have all this,” I added, gesturing to the house.

  Kayden also looked around. “Yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot of shit in here.”

  That was really the best way to describe it. “I know, right? My great-aunt Maude had a little pack rat in her.”

  “A little,” he agreed slowly.

  Maybe more than a little. “If you can believe it, I’ve already gone through about a quarter of her stuff. When I first got here, you couldn’t actually walk through the front door and I heard that when she died, they had to take her out through the ba
throom window. She was dead for a while before someone noticed.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” His face crinkled in disgust.

  “I know. But it didn’t bother her because she was already dead, which we can all be glad about. Not that she was dead, but that it didn’t bother her. Can you imagine that no one even noticed for all those weeks while she just rotted? I think she had a little snow leopard in her, too. They like to be alone,” I explained when he seemed confused by that remark.

  “This is your aunt’s house, not yours?”

  “Don’t worry, you sent the restitution to the right person! It’s mine now. When she died, it went to her closest relative and that’s me. But first everything went through probate, and then they had to find me, and I had to get here, so it took a while. And things in this house didn’t improve in the meantime. For example, an animal or two had gotten in, and there were a lot of mushrooms growing. I’m not positive about that identification, but it was certainly some kind of spore,” I clarified. “That’s all cleaned up now. Pretty much,” I had to add, because I wouldn’t have called anything in the house exactly “clean.”

  “When you moved in, the house had animals and mushrooms in it?” Kayden’s lip curled up. His face seemed to show exactly what was in his thoughts, which made it good that he had chosen football for a career instead of something that depended on hiding your feelings. Gambling would definitely have been out for him, and also high-end prostitution.

  “Now the only animals are me and Emma. Pretty much,” I added again. “And no mushrooms except once when I had them on pizza. It’s going to be a nice house for someone.”

  “I thought you just said that it belongs to you.”

  “Oh, it does, for now. But you really never know about things, do you? Life can change pretty fast on you.” His eyebrows drew down like he was angry. “That’s ok by me, even though this is a great place. I’ve moved around a lot over the last few years, which is why your attorneys had trouble tracking me. It’s why it took a while to find me to give me this house! I’ve lived all over,” I said, and ran through some of the places in my mind. Sparks, Nevada, had been my first stop out of SF, but I hadn’t stayed there for long. I’d camped in Arizona, been stuck in that yurt in Montana, survived the rainiest, saddest winter I’d ever seen in Portland, enjoyed the beach in Texas, gotten arrested in Arkansas…the list went on and on. “But now I’m here,” I concluded.