Page 73 of This is Why We Lied

“You married a Camp Fire Girl? Does she still got the uniform?” He snorted a laugh. “Jesus Christ, how is it fucking Trashcan’s living in a porn movie while I’m lucky if I find poon that ain’t stretched out like a gummy bear?”

Will steered the conversation back to Mercy. “Your ex gave you a son. That’s something.”

Dave opened another beer.

Will said, “Jon seems like a nice kid. Mercy did a good job with him.”

“Wasn’t all her doing.” Dave slurped foam off the top of the can. He hadn’t downed it like the previous one. He was pacing himself now. “Jon always knows where to find me. He’s gonna make a fine man one day. Good lookin’ too. Probably catching OPP like his daddy at that age.”

Will ignored the dig, which was clearly meant to invoke Angie. “You ever think you’d end up married?”

“Shit no.” Dave’s laugh was filled with a tinge of bitterness. “Being honest, I thought I’d be dead by now. It’s dumb luck I made it up here from Atlanta without some pervert picking me up on the side of the road and trafficking me to Florida.”

Will knew he was trying to brag about running away. “You hitched?”

“Sure did.”

“It’s not a bad place to hide out.” Will made a show of looking around the campsite. “When you disappeared, I told them this was where you’d go.”

“Yeah, well.” Dave cocked back his elbow on the log.

Will tried not to react. Dave had managed to position his hand closer to the knife. Whether this was intentional or not remained to be seen.

Dave said, “I knew who I was the first time I came up here on that church bus, you know? Like, I could fish and hunt and feed myself. Didn’t need nobody looking after me. I wasn’t built for living in a city. I was a rat down there. I’m a mountain lion up here. Do what I want. Say what I want. Smoke what I want. Drink what I want. Nobody can fuck with me.”

It sounded great until you understood his freedom came at a price that Mercy had paid. “You were lucky the McAlpines took you in.”

“There were good days and bad days,” Dave said, always teasing out a bad story. “Bitty, she’s an angel. But Papa? Shit, he’s a mean motherfucker. Used to beat the hell outta me with his leather belt.”

Will was not surprised to hear that Cecil McAlpine had been physically abusive.

“He didn’t care if the belt slipped and I got whacked with the buckle. I used to get these big welts all over my ass and down my legs. Couldn’t wear shorts cause I didn’t want the teachers to see. All I needed was them dragging me back to Atlanta.”

“They could’ve placed you up here.”

“Didn’t want it,” he said. “Bitty needed the money from the state just to put food on the table. I couldn’t abandon her, especially to him.”

Will was familiar with an abused child’s need to help everyone but themselves.

“Anyways.” Dave gave a practiced shrug. “What about you, Trash? What happened when I left your pathetic ass?”

“I aged out of the system. Turned eighteen, got a hundred dollars and a bus ticket. Ended up at the Salvation Army.”

Dave hissed air between his teeth. He probably thought he knew how bad things could get for an unaccompanied teenager sleeping in a homeless shelter.

He did not know.

Dave asked, “Then what?”

Will skirted the truth, which was that he’d ended up sleeping on the street, then sleeping in a jail cell. “I managed to figure it out. Put myself through college. Got a job.”

“College?” He huffed a laugh. “How’d you manage that with barely being able to read?”

“Hard work,” Will said. “Sink or swim, right?”

“You’re damn right about that. All that bad shit we went through when we was little, it made us survivors.”

Will didn’t like his tone of shared camaraderie, but Dave was a murder suspect. He could use whatever tone he wanted so long as he ended up confessing. Will asked, “The McAlpines didn’t have a problem with you hooking up with Mercy?”