Wait. What if Tess was in trouble again?
He groaned when he saw the displayed name—Mom—and even considered not answering. But, shit, they didn’t talk often, and he did love her even if he harbored a whole lot of anger toward her, too.
He wondered if he could get away with not telling her about his latest move and the reason for it.
“Hey,” he said. “Haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“You could call me, too,” his mother complained.
“I know, I know. I stay busy, that’s all. Uh, what’s up with you? Things going okay with—” he had to think to come up with his current stepfather’s name “—Henry?”
Mom’s last husband had been ten years younger than her. This one was ten years older.
“He’s driving me crazy,” she said fretfully. “He’s retired, you know. All he does is follow me around. I have to lie about where I’m going just to get away from him for an hour!”
What was new about that? Zach wondered cynically. Hadn’t she always lied to her husbands when she was running around on them? Although she’d get to an age where she’d lose interest in having multiple sexual partners, wouldn’t she?
“Maybe he needs some new hobbies,” Zach suggested diplomatically.
“The man doesn’t have any.” She paused. “He used to play golf but he herniated a disk in his back so that’s out. He’s like...like a new puppy! I don’t know if I can stand it.”
Husband number five was history. He just didn’t know it yet. Poor Henry, Zach thought.
“I just bought a new house,” he offered, to get off the subject of his soon-to-be-ex stepfather.
“I suppose it’s another one of your dumps,” his mother said with a sigh.
“Yep, and this is a good one.” He described the house at length and everything wrong with it, hoping he’d bore her and she wouldn’t ask for his new address. “I haven’t moved in yet,” he added hastily.
“I assume it’s in Portland?”
Zach hesitated, wanting to lie but knowing eventually he’d have to come clean with her. And then he thought about Bran. Her son. God. What would she say if he told her he and his brother had had dinner and beers together the other day? That Dad was dead? Would she care?
“Zach?”
“Just trying to think of how to tell you this,” he said finally.
“This?”
“I took a job in Clear Creek. With the county sheriff’s department, not the Clear Creek PD. The house I bought is here in town. It’s... I don’t know, ten blocks from where we lived.”
Where we lived. That was as euphemistic as saying, He passed on.
The silence extended so long he wondered if she’d hung up on him.
“Why would you do something like that?” she whispered.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “You know it’s coming up on twenty-five years.”
“Of course I know!” his mother cried. “Do you think I forget for one minute?”
Sometimes he wondered. Aside from dragging him along every time she’d ditched another husband, she hadn’t been a bad mother. But maybe that was because he’d made sure he was never any bother. That lesson had been hammered into him by seeing repeatedly what happened when boyfriends or husbands began to annoy her. Or bore her. Or become too preoccupied with work or anything else but her. It was a hard thing to think about your own mother, but he’d come to doubt she was able to feel emotion of any real depth.
“It eats at me,” he explained. “I want answers, Mom. I’m here to get them.” Zach knew he sounded implacable and didn’t care.
“How could you possibly find out anything after all this time?”
He frowned, bothered by something in her voice. Did she hope he wouldn’t find any answers?
“I need to try.” He closed his eyes. “Mom, Bran is here.”
Her “What?” was so soft he barely caught it.
“Turns out he and Dad never moved away. Bran is a cop, too. A detective with the sheriff’s department.”
“I never dreamed...”
“You knew they were still in the house at first.”