Page 77 of Things We Left Behind

“I think I can manage. Keep your things out of my life.”

“Yeah? Well, keep your life out of my work,” I shot back, crossing the room and gesturing toward the open door.

“Hey, Uncle Lucian,” Waylay called from behind the community desk where she was working on a laptop. The two teenage boys leaning against the desk looked at Lucian with wide eyes.

“Hey, Way,” Lucian said, stalking toward the stairs.

“Do you need us to escort him out, Ms. Walton?” Lonnie Potter offered, hooking his thumb in the direction of Lucian’s retreating back.

His friend’s eyeballs doubled in size behind his glasses.

I would have laughed if I hadn’t been too busy breathing flames.

“No. But thank you, Lonnie. That’s very gentlemanly of you.”

I stomped back to my desk and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes.

“What the hell does mercurial mean?” I heard Lonnie whisper to his friend.

“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered.

I needed a meditation class. Or hypnotherapy. Or some kind of drug that rendered me immune to Lucian Rollins. So what if he hated me? So what if he went out of his way to piss me off? Every time I reacted, I was giving him what he wanted. That alone should be enough to stop me.

“Knock knock?” The tentative greeting came from Naomi, who entered my office with my sister. “I was bringing Maeve up to you, and we ran into Lucian on the stairs,” Naomi said. “I think he actually snarled when I said hello.”

“Please don’t speak that name in my presence ever again,” I begged.

“Wow. You two really can’t stand each other, can you?” Maeve observed. “You guys used to be so tight.”

“They did? When?” Naomi pounced on the information like a cat with a catnip taco.

“I’m going to ask you both a huge favor that involves changing the subject immediately,” I interrupted.

“She doesn’t like to talk about whatever it is that happened with Lu—­that guy,” Naomi whispered to my sister.

“I just so happen to have the perfect subject change,” Maeve said, eyeing the visitors’ chairs that were buried under books and the remains of a children’s diorama of the first public library in Knockemout.

“Let’s take this to the conference room,” I suggested, wanting to get away from the Lucian-­y vibe of my office.

“I need to get back downstairs,” Naomi said. “Neecey’s coming in when she finishes her shift at Dino’s, and I’m helping her find some Medicare information for her dad.”

“Thanks for bringing me up,” Maeve called after her.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said belatedly. “Come on.” I led the way to the conference room and settled in at the table with my sister. “Okay. Lay it on me.”

“Mary Louise Upshaw,” Maeve said, removing a file from her slim, snazzy briefcase. “She was arrested for possession and transporting a controlled substance. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison. She’s eleven years into her sentence in Fraus Correctional Center about an hour south of here.”

“That seems unusually harsh,” I noted.

“It is,” my sister agreed. “The average sentence for similar charges is usually closer to three to five years.”

“Why would her case warrant such an excessive sentence? It was her first offense.”

“The judge hearing the case made a career out of being tough on drugs. He could have been making some kind of statement.”

I picked up the folder and looked at Mary Louise’s mug shot. She looked like a scared suburban mom who had no idea how she’d gotten herself into a predicament that involved a mug shot. “She doesn’t look like someone who would traffic a few pounds of weed and a couple tabs of ecstasy.”

“From what I could gather, Mary Louise claimed the drugs weren’t hers and initially pleaded not guilty. But a few weeks later, she changed her plea to no contest.”