Darkness at the Edge of Town (Iris Ballard #2)(6)
“Oh, Iris, I…” She began to weep softly. “I’m so glad you called. I can’t, I—” She started really sobbing. I sat straight up as if someone had just stuck a rod up my ass. She hadn’t cried like that since she sat by my bedside and told me my husband was dead.
“Mom, what is it?” I practically shouted. “What’s the matter?” She couldn’t stop crying long enough to form words. My anxiety grew with each sob. “Mommy, what is it?” I asked desperately. “What’s the matter?”
“It-It’s your brother. Billy,” she finally managed to say after a few deep breaths. “You need to come home. Come home, baby. Right now.”
Chapter 2
Things I’d rather have been doing than returning to Grey Mills: being spread-eagle in the stirrups at the gynecologist. Standing in line at the DMV behind a farting man for eight hours. Running through a minefield swarmed by bees. Any of those would have been better than having to spend even one hour in Grey Mills, Pennsylvania. You can’t go home? Goddamn, how I wished that were true as I drove to my hometown hellhole.
And the weather agreed it was hell. Even in the Northeast the humidity and almost 90-degree temperatures were unbearable. Below freezing cold in the winter, hellish in the summer. God, I hated Grey Mills.
I should have been getting ready for my not-a-date with Luke, not driving to America’s armpit. I had a book to write. A dog to make up for weeks of neglect with. I wanted to go home. I wanted to listen to Handel with a gorgeous man by my side. If Billy wasn’t in trouble, he sure as hell would be when I got there.
After I got Mom calmed down enough to form complete sentences, she filled me in on what fresh hell my twin brother had gotten himself into. According to my mother, my brother had joined a cult—although with her as the messenger that could have meant he’d really just joined a book club or went on a golf retreat. My mom was always overprotective when it came to Billy. She’d learned her lesson about worrying about me when I was twelve and single-handedly fought off some pervert, breaking his nose and one of his testicles. That and anytime she tried to coddle me, I’d roll my eyes or physically brush her off. I’d always been the independent type. My twin brother, not so much.
I loved my brother, I truly did, but we were as different as salt and pepper. Where I was driven, he was lackadaisical. I wouldn’t trust a nun, but Billy would let people he’d known for a month move into his apartment. The little blips in life knocked him for a loop, where only death and taxes fully demolished my reserve. He was sensitive and loving, and I was proud of my ice-queen reputation. It was almost as if we didn’t come from the same gene pool, forget being twins. Or I just took after our sperm donor. God, perish the thought. I’d killed two men and even I wasn’t as big an asshole as he was.
The sign to Grey Mills welcomed me, or it would have if the town council had ever bothered to paint it since 1917. Apparently Grey Mills hadn’t always been a shithole. The Grey family settled the town in 1809 and immediately began leveling thousands of acres of forest at their lumber mill. The family owned fifty square miles of land, and when the trees were cleared, they made a second profit selling off parcels of land. Without the Greys there wouldn’t have been the surrounding towns of Dunlop, Petersen, or Niagaraville, with Grey Mills being the epicenter of the county.
The Greys weren’t done after becoming land barons. When the lumber and land ran out, they had the wherewithal to venture into the steel business. The Civil War broke out and the Greys became the modern equivalent of billionaires. But those were the halcyon days. Donald Grey lost most of the family fortune in the 1929 crash and had to sell his interest in the mill to the Keyes family of Pittsburgh. The mill and the town barely survived until World War II, and then came the seventies and eighties and the steel crash. The Greys cashed out their greater share and the mill soon shut down, taking all the jobs with it. That was the Grey Mills I grew up in. It went from twenty thousand to two thousand residents, with most of the commercial downtown area nothing but empty storefronts. Only the liquor store and Starbucks made any profit. If not for the Walmart and Target in neighboring towns, everyone would have starved.
Yet the Grey family hadn’t been touched. They invested in real estate in Philadelphia and I heard weathered the 2008 recession well enough. They managed to keep Grey Manor, their ten-room mansion on a small hill, the very house Billy and I were conceived in. It was a story as old as time. The naive seventeen-year-old virgin maid catches the eye of the thirty-year-old married cad. Girl gets herself pregnant to trap him, but instead finds herself jobless and called a slut by just about everyone in town. Billy cried when we found out bastard wasn’t a term of endearment.
Yes, I was so looking forward to spending a few days there. The basement with Shepherd was preferable.
When I pulled into Meadowland Lane I was shocked by how much it, like the rest of the town, had deteriorated since I’d last been there. The recession hit the town hard, and it was already an eighty-pound weakling before. A handful of houses were boarded up or crumbling from years of abandonment and neglect. Not even foreclosure hunters wanted them. Only one or two had For Sale signs and looked empty, but there were pockets of life here and there. One such pocket belonged to Jay and Edie Ballard, my grandparents, and Faye and Khairo Lange, my mother and stepfather. Mom and Khairo bought the house next door to my childhood home in a foreclosure sale. She had a decent living as a maid in a hotel and he as an orderly at a local retirement home, I guess making enough to scrape by.