Saved by the Outlaw(12)

He simply loved me, so deeply and unconditionally, that I could not bear the thought of disappointing or hurting him. It was the way I wanted to raise my own children someday. A very distant someday, I think sadly, as I have never even had a serious relationship that lasted more than six or seven months. I was a serial dater, not a serious dater.

Every man I meet seems to want to tie me down and keep me from flying away, even if at first they pretend to be fine with my career ambitions. I suppose my image and reputation precedes me and damns me in this regard. Cherry LaBeau the puff-piece writer doesn’t have big dreams beyond attending New York Fashion Week and landing a Tiffany diamond someday. But the real Cherry LaBeau — the real me that nobody sees reflected in my flimsy, gossipy published pieces — wants something more meaningful, more real. When it comes down to it, when the ditzy pretty-girl image is ripped away, no man ever wants to stick around.

But I know my father would never want his only daughter to be anyone’s trophy wife. He wanted so much more for me, and he believed in me when nobody else did. I just need to find a guy who will have my back, who can keep up with me.

Someone strong and commanding, but mischievous and adventurous…

Instantly and inexplicably, Leon pops into my head. Sitting in the front seat of my car, idling in the driveway of my late father’s house, I snort out loud. What is wrong with me? Is there a “temporary insanity” step to the phases of grief I don’t know about? Why the hell am I fantasizing about a guy who chased me for miles and pinned me to a crooked cop’s car and threatened my life? I watched him torture a guy chained to a warehouse floor, for God’s sake! Obviously my father’s death is sending me into some kind of bizarre crazy-person spiral.

Morbidly, I hesitate over the ignition, almost afraid to cut the engine. As long as I’m idling, it’s like I’m not really here. Like this is all a bad dream, and I’m going to wake up any moment now. Biting my lip, I close my eyes and turn the key. The gentle vibrations of the engine cut out, leaving me in the still silence of a dead man’s driveway.

I don’t know why I’m here, but I tell myself that it’s to gather more information about how my dad might have died. I convince myself that there’s a good reason for me to get out of my car, climb the front steps to the screened-in porch, and fumble for the key in my pocket. The house was left to me, along with everything else my dad had to his name. Which wasn’t much.

I unlock the door and walk into the front foyer, glancing around. The electricity and air conditioning are still running, as his death is so recent. Everything looks pretty much the same way it always did. The house is only about 1,400 square feet, with two bedrooms and one cramped little bathroom. The living room coffee table is covered in papers. I cock my head at this odd sight; my father was always shockingly neat and organized. He never left documents just lying around, whether they were important or not. I wonder, with a pang of guilt, if maybe he just got a little messier over the years, without me around to help out. Not that he was even that old when he passed. He and my mother got together in their teens — they were highschool sweethearts. My parents were only in their early twenties when I was born, so my dad was just shy of his forty-eighth birthday when he died.

It hits me now, again, just how strange his death is. He wasn’t even fifty yet. What kind of physically active, religiously healthy forty-seven-year-old just drops dead out of nowhere? Sure, the police told me it was an industrial accident — that he was simply killed doing the same kind of thing he did every day of his life for over twenty years. A freak incident. A moment’s slip. A little mistake with a massive cost. Simply in the right place at the wrong time.

I knew, though, that something wasn’t right about it. That there’s no way this was an accident. And in school, they always told me to trust my gut. That it would lead to the truth.

“He was a hardworking, honest man right down to the very last,” one of his coworkers told me at the funeral, clasping my hand in both of his. There were tears shining in his eyes, a frown on his weathered face. I vaguely recalled him from my childhood as one of my dad’s friends — a man named Chuck, I think. His wife used to bring over casseroles on Sundays every once in awhile. I remember they tasted like salt and sawdust, but she was so sweet that we ate the whole thing every damn time anyway.

I sit down on the sunken-in, decades-old couch and tuck my curly red hair behind my ear to look over the papers on the coffee table. I can’t resist. And this makes me feel like I’m doing something, like I’ve got a reason to be here snooping around. It’s business.