Walk Between the Raindrops [Suncoast Society] (Siren Publishing Sensations) Read online

  More silence.

  “Maren?”

  “I was hoping you’d back me up.”

  “There is no super-secret moms’ guide to folding towels, honey. Is that all you needed me for today?”

  “Yeah.” She let out a frustrated sigh. “She’ll do my laundry wrong just to piss me off.”

  “And risk you doing hers wrong and ruining it? Doubtful. I’m sure you two can settle this. Compromise. Do the damn dishes or something. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  June hung up and let out an aggravated groan.

  Not that she minded talking to her daughters. Except now that they’d been a kid-free household for a couple of years, it was nice not being interrupted all the time. Especially during sexy time.

  Doubly especially over bullshit sibling rivalry like this. Sonya and Maren had ended up rooming together in the same apartment to save Mark and June money. Sonya had—past-tense—a tennis scholarship to UF. But when she’d finally admitted to them how much she was struggling, both academically and with her tennis, they’d dug into their retirement savings to pay for her to go to USF for her final year and then grad school.

  And she’d have to pay them back. Mark had even drawn up official loan paperwork and everything. She had to work a minimum of twenty hours a week part-time to help pay their bills for the apartment, and to make a monthly payment to them. Once she graduated from grad school, she still had to make the minimum payment for a year. After that, it rose to a higher amount.

  They would hold her to it, or they’d withdraw their support and force her to handle it on her own.

  Maren, on the other hand, had June’s drive, her fire. She not only didn’t need to be told what to do, she frequently grabbed the tiger by the balls all on her own and exceeded expectations.

  Sonya, not so much.

  But as Mark had finally convinced June, there was no way to force Sonya to be…as intense as her mother and younger sister. They had to let her be herself and try to help her in healthy ways and hope for the best.

  Upon starting USF her last year, she’d pulled her grade average up to a 4.0 and had nabbed a paid internship.

  A win June would gladly take, considering Sonya had not had any contact with her ex-boyfriend, another good reason to support her transfer from Gainesville to Tampa.

  June didn’t have a yoga class to teach that morning, so she’d been sitting on the couch, sipping hot tea and watching the local cable news channel, which she’d muted when the phone rang. A crack of thunder sounded close by, making her jump. Staring out the window, she saw the downpour had started.

  Grabbing the remote, she turned the volume up and nearly choked on her tea at their next headline.

  “Partial human remains have been located in a small branch off the eastern section of the Manatee River, near Parrish. A skull, and several other bones, were uncovered by divers doing an underwater survey of the area. Authorities don’t yet know how long the remains have been there, but they have been sent to an FDLE forensics lab for possible DNA testing…”

  She had to set her mug down because she was shaking so hard when they helpfully displayed a map graphic showing exactly where they’d been found.

  Well, at least he drifted farther downstream than I thought he would.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t him. It could be someone else.

  I hope.

  Whatever happened, she knew she couldn’t say anything, couldn’t mention it, couldn’t bring it up unless someone else did first.

  Not without risking her carefully constructed alibi falling apart around her and Mark.

  Especially not Mark.

  * * * *

  “What’s wrong?”

  In the middle of struggling to get her umbrella closed just inside the doorway, June turned at May’s question. “Huh?”

  May rested her fists on her hips. “What’s wrong? Why do you look so horrible?”

  “Fighting a migraine.” At that point, it wasn’t even a lie. “And had to help settle a laundry dispute this morning.”

  May smiled. “Trouble in Tampa?”

  “Towels.”

  “Towels?”

  “Towels.” At least telling May about the conversation she’d had with Maren helped take her mind off her painfully tight gut. She finally got the stupid umbrella closed and dunked it in the holder next to the door.

  “You sure you feeling up to teaching? I can take the class, if you want me to. This is the gentle yoga class, right?”

  “I’ll be okay. I rubbed peppermint oil on my forehead and took something for it.” She held up the Starbuck’s cup in her hand. “And caffeine always helps knock them out, too.”

  May laughed. “Just remember to keep it slooow. You on caffeine is a dangerous thing.”

  None of her students, most of them retirees, had arrived yet. After setting her bag down and kicking off her shoes, June hooked her iPod to the classroom sound system and pulled up one of her own personal playlists to start stretching and loosening her muscles ahead of them arriving.

  Not even ten seconds in, she knew that wasn’t going to help.

  She needed to recenter herself.

  Opening and stepping through the door between the yoga studio room and the main gymnastics area, she took a deep breath. Many days, she struggled not to think back to those years in high school, to Mark looking adorably out of place sitting on the sidelines with other kids’ parents for the morning practices while he waited for her and July to finish so he could drive them to school before he headed to his college classes. Sometimes he studied while he waited, sometimes he watched them.

  Sometimes he napped, depending on how late he’d gotten to bed the night before.

  Never complaining. Not once.

  Always glad to pick them up at home and drive them to practice before school that last year, despite the obscenely early hour.

  She walked over to the beam. So much had changed in the past couple of decades since she’d last competed. Not just to the rules and scoring system, but to the sport itself.

  To the kids competing.

  Now, many parents assumed their little precious princess or prince was perfect and would automatically make the Olympic team with only two hours of practice per week after school, instead of getting them there at the ass-crack of dawn to practice a minimum of two hours every morning before school, with afternoon practices following, and their entire weekends consumed by it.

  Not a sport for the weak or lazy.

  June executed a simple press handstand mount instead of risking the springboard.

  She felt unsettled, not stupid.

  Closing her eyes, she breathed in and blew out, no longer in her sister’s gymnastics studio in Sarasota, but over twenty years in the past, when she and July were still trying to imitate Liu Xuan and Shannon Miller, and Russia was still a part of the USSR and produced their greatest competition.

  She raised her arms, then started a routine she knew by heart, one she’d performed many times herself in addition to teaching it to kids there at May’s school.

  Front walkover…front handspring…double turn on one leg. Back layout step-out salto…half illusion turn…wolf jump—

  “You don’t think you’re a little old to be on the beam?”

  June ignored May’s voice from the yoga studio doorway, and instead chose to cut the routine short. She did a Gainer stretched back salto with a full twist, neatly landing next to the beam, back arched, feet together, arms up, both middle fingers extended.

  Nailed it.

  May rolled her eyes. “The Russian judge deducts 0.1 for the nonstandard hand salute. Your first student’s here.”

  * * * *

  At the end of the hour, June rolled her yoga mat and put it away as her students slowly filed out. She kept a mat here and one at the house, rather than toting it back and forth.

  May stood in the yoga studio doorway, arms crossed. “Ready to talk?”

  “What?”


  “Your neck muscles are so tight you could be carved out of rock like one of those dang Renaissance sculptures.” She walked in, stopping in front of June. “Talk to me, sis.”

  She couldn’t.

  That was the problem. There was only one person she could talk to, and she really shouldn’t.

  She’d already talked to him more than she should have as it was.

  “I’m still fighting the headache.” Outside, thunder cracked. “And I think this weather is getting to me. You know storms sometimes give me headaches.”

  May stared out the window at the rain. “This is weird weather we’re having. They said it’s a good thing it hit land when it did, or it might have had more time to strengthen and develop into a tropical storm. Go on home. I have plenty of help for the rest of the night. Seriously.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. It’s okay. Hug Mark for me. When you guys coming for dinner?”

  June smiled at the familiar banter. “When you invite us.”

  “I’d invite you Saturday, but I’m sure you’re busy.”

  Yeah, they were. They were meeting over at Sigalo’s. Tilly was back in town for a brief time, and June wanted Tilly time.

  Needed it.

  “Sorry. Friday?”

  May nodded. “Seven. Jim will fire up the grill.”

  June grabbed her iPod and bag and keys and headed out, almost forgetting the stupid umbrella in the process.

  Rather than open it, she opted to run for her car and get rained on, hitting the key fob to unlock the driver’s door so she could dive right in.

  This sucks.

  But, it could be worse.

  She thought about the three graves in Sarasota Memorial Park, all of them put there far too early.

  Much worse.

  Chapter Four

  Then

  “Sure you don’t want to go with us, July?” their father asked after he made a final tour through the living room to make sure they hadn’t forgotten to pack anything. “You’ve never been hunting before.”

  July let out a derisive snort. “Maybe when the apocalypse hits, sure.”

  “You never know,” June chided her. “Might need to know this stuff one day.”

  “I will hunt my food in the meat aisle of Publix, thank you very much.” She flopped down onto the sofa with a couple of schoolbooks. “And I want to study for my French test on Tuesday.”

  June shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She’d already known July wouldn’t want to come with them, but had to ask.

  That meant time alone with her dad and Mark.

  It was a late Thursday afternoon in early December, and they wouldn’t return until late Sunday night. She was getting to skip a day of classes since she didn’t have any tests tomorrow.

  Mark, now in college, didn’t have a class tomorrow. It also meant June was missing training, but she’d had a bad landing on a beam dismount earlier in the week and tweaked her right knee a little. Nothing serious, nothing torn, but the doctor told her to take a few days off from training, just to be on the safe side.

  Hence the hunting trip. Yes, some walking, but lots of sitting and waiting for a deer. They’d arrive in the hunt camp late that evening and be able to get started first thing tomorrow morning.

  June loved camping, loved the outdoors. She rarely got to do it anymore with all her training and school. She’d get even less time as she and July advanced to a world-class level and started competing internationally.

  Even though that wasn’t guaranteed, June wouldn’t let herself think any other way.

  Meanwhile, this weekend would be a good mental reset for her. She loved shooting, and was really good at that, even though she wasn’t fond of the actual killing part of hunting. It was very satisfying to eat something she knew she had taken by her own hand. Plus, her father was adamantly against trophy hunting and had nothing but bad things to say about people who killed sheerly for fun. Fishing she was fine with. For some reason, it made a difference to her, where hunting was difficult for her in some ways.

  It did make her respect the process more, made her less wasteful of her food in general.

  They also didn’t hunt small game. Her father was partners with some friends of his in a hunt camp up in the Florida panhandle, and they went deer hunting a few times a year. She’d been coming on these trips with her dad for years, and even knew how to gut and completely field-dress a deer.

  Her father loved to brag to his buddies how his “little girl” was better at it and less squeamish than most men he knew.

  Mark had become really good at that part, too. Many times, her father would make the actual kill and then carefully oversee them doing the butchering. Which, ironically, she didn’t have a problem doing. She wasn’t squeamish at all. At least once a year he made her—or Mark, now that he was going on these trips, even when she didn’t go—do the shooting.

  “It keeps you respectful of the process and the animals,” he told them. “If you lose respect for life, any life, that’s when you lose part of your soul.”

  She was content to settle in the back seat of her dad’s SUV with one of her mystery books and read during the whole trip. She could have brought textbooks, sure, but she didn’t want to study. She was already holding a solid 4.0 GPA. Unlike July, she wasn’t trying for an academic scholarship when they had already secured gymnastic scholarships for both of them to USF. July believed in having contingency plans to the extreme. Just because July had not one but two scholarships lined up didn’t mean June needed to.

  Plus June knew once they were in college that weekends off like this would come few and far between. If they weren’t practicing or competing, they’d be studying.

  Unless, of course, they made the US team.

  She’d taken May’s advice a year ago to heart about how lucky they were right now. July might not have seen that, but June sure did.

  Then again, she’d also loved Girl Scouts while July…hadn’t. At least their parents had that method of telling them apart. Her mom had joked since they were little that all she had to do was send them outside and wait two minutes. Whoever started whining to come in first was obviously July.

  On the other hand, July was an expert in the kitchen, tackling complex recipes from some of their mother’s cookbooks like she was born with a whisk and a spatula in her hands. To an enviable degree. June could grill things, having learned that from her father, but baking anything other than a boxed cake mix usually ended in disappointment, sadness, and a growling stomach.

  June had tuned Mark and her dad out, trying to immerse herself deep in her paperback. At least she knew July wouldn’t be spending a lot of time with StupidMatt that weekend, as she was starting to think of him. His grades had been so bad, he’d barely graduated high school. His parents paid his rent for him to live in an apartment with a buddy of his while he worked full-time for one of his father’s friends. And he had to work most weekends.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t have the brains to study, but he was lazy and thought things should be handed to him, because his rich parents had basically done just that for him all his life.

  Like his parents helping him pay his bills and getting him a job. They’d also bought his truck for him, a brand-new one, not even a used one, after he’d wrecked his last one street-racing.

  And they paid for his insurance.

  When she thought about the differences between Matt and his family, and Mark and his, the contrast couldn’t be more striking. Mark’s family had pretty much adopted June and her sisters. Mark was an only child with reasonably well-off parents, but they were sweet people she adored. Both her parents and his frequently went out to dinner together, or went to each other’s houses for meals and cookouts.

  And her parents loved Mark, whereas they hated Matt, even though they knew if they forbade July from seeing him, that would likely be the fastest way to drive her into his arms.

  So, they waited, and hoped that July would see the truth about him in her own
time.

  Her father’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts. “I want to talk to you about that meet you and July want to go to next month.”

  She perked up and listened. “Yes?” Killing it at that regional meet would probably make them eligible to move on to Nationals, and get them noticed by the US coaches so they could advance to the elite international level.

  But it was in Atlanta. And while she and July were sixteen, their parents wouldn’t let them drive themselves that far.

  “That’s a lot of money. Your mother and I can’t take the time off to drive you. We both have to work. May can’t take the time off from school or work, either.”

  Her heart sank. If they couldn’t go, she and July had no chance of making Nationals, no matter how good they were.

  Lots of girls were good. She needed every chance possible to secure herself a slot at Nationals. And it was not only an overnight trip, but two nights, Friday and Saturday.

  “I talked to your coach today. She seems to think you guys have a good chance. But she doesn’t have room in her van for you, because she has other girls going, and another coach.”

  She’d also known that and wished her father would hurry up and get to the point.

  “Your mother and I talked to Mark’s parents and to your coach. Cara said she’ll have the other coach stay in the room with you three. Mark will have to sleep on a cot while you girls share a bed. But…he can drive you, and we’ll give you money for food, gas, and for the hotel. We trust him with both of you. He’s never given us a reason not to. Ed and Kelly said they feel comfortable with it since there will be a coach staying with you guys.”

  She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “Oh, my god, thank you, Dad!” She had to force herself not to rip off her seat belt and reach across the seat to hug him. “And thank you, Mark!”

  He smiled. “It was your dad’s idea.”

  “There is a catch,” her father said. “This is the last big meet your mother and I pay for. From now on, you and July need to earn the money to get you to Nationals and beyond. I’m talking hotel, transportation, food, entry fees, coaching—everything. You girls have college scholarships. That’s a sure thing. So your mother and I will let you and July start working for Cara part-time at the gym. As long as you keep your grades up.”