ALL THAT GLITTERS, chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 2

Lucky clutched her smart-phone and reviewed who to call next. Her brother Jake, driving with barely controlled mania at seven miles per hour above the speed limit (the Massachusetts state police wouldn’t stop you at 72 m.p.h. or below), kept swerving from lane to lane, muttering accusations of sexual perversion at any driver who hesitated to give way to him. Every few minutes he shot some comment to her. But mostly she’d been too focused on the phone calls to answer him.

“Uncle Mike says the lawyer’s on her way to Mom. He’s already at the police station, waiting for the captain to see him. And I just got a text from Michelle – she says Dad came out of surgery six hours ago but they won’t let her into the intensive care unit because there’s a police guard and she’s not family.”

“Frigging cops,” Jake murmurred, easing the Toyota Tercel back into the right-hand lane without changing speed. Slush spattered the side windows.

Lucky brushed a hand against her seatbelt and forced a deep breath, in, out. For Jake, driving at 72 was slow and restrained; he’d get them there safely. She added out loud, “We’re not going to get back to school before Thanksgiving break, are we? I’d better text Shannon and tell her. Then I’ve got to do my professors. There should be some shortcut, some way to tell them all at once, but I can’t think of how.”

“Bastards. So just copy and save your text each time,” her brother advised her. “Can you do mine, too?” He gave her one of his famous “do my homework for me babes?” looks that had taken him through eight grades in Vermont, before their parents caught on and pushed him into an all-boys prep school outside Boston.

Lucky gritted her teeth. “Probably not.” She decided, “I’ll call the intensive care unit again when we get closer. Maybe I can get a supervisor, now that it’s past nine o’clock. There has to be someone who’ll tell us what’s going on.” She eyed the green-and-white mileage sign sticking up from a bank of grayed, grainy snow. “We’ll be in Vermont in twenty minutes. So, almost two hours until we get there. What do you think, hospital first, or jail?”

“Hospital,” Jake said firmly. “Mom’s going to live through this just fine. Dad’s the one I’m worried about.” He turned up the volume on the radio and finessed the tuning. “Should be able to get a Vermont station any time now. There, that’s it.”

The familiar news-show music for Vermont Public Radio led into a recap of news headlines, but none of the stories said anything about a bookseller shot and wounded in the state’s capital city of Montpelier. Lucky worked her way through texting her professors and as they crossed into Vermont, she noticed Jake adjusting the cruise control to a higher number.

“They won’t stop us at 74 here,” her brother explained tersely. “Might as well save as much time as we can.” He switched back to his “begging” voice. “Come on, Lucky, at least you could take my phone and call the headmaster. Tell him you’re my older sister and that I have to go home with you. They’ll call out the cops on me, too, if I’m gone from campus without explaining to somebody.”

“You couldn’t do it before you left?”

“Nope.”

Lucky caught the look on Jake’s face and guessed there was something going on at his school that he wasn’t talking about. She’d push him later. For now, priorities were Dad in the hospital, Mom in jail – she stuffed a fist in her mouth to keep from squealing as a tractor-trailer truck loaded with logs passed them, throwing so much slush onto the windshield that the road vanished from site. But it only lasted a moment.

Another text message arrived with a buzz of her phone. Lucky bit her lip, then said to Jake, “You’re right, Dad comes first. Michelle says they took out his spleen and she thinks he had a mild heart attack, too.” She keyed in the ICU number again and got a recording, as Jake pushed the Toyota toward a higher speed. “Don’t do that,” she snapped at him. “If we go off the road, it’ll take forever to get a towtruck.”

The mileage sign indicated forty-five miles to the turn for the other interstate, the one that led to Montpelier. The radio recapped the weather forecast, and Jake adjusted the car’s speed once again.

Lucky twisted the red string around her wrist as she reviewed the fragments she’d found out so far. Michelle’s text messages helped a lot; so did the ones from Sandy, her other best friend at home, who was sitting at the Coffee Cup Diner counter, prying details out of anyone she knew stopping in for their coffee and mid-morning “designer omelet.”

So far, it looked like this: Her parents, never shy about disagreeing at top volume, had a fight at the local Italian restaurant two nights before, with her mom walking out after tipping a bowl of spaghetti over her dad’s head. According to Sandy, the waitress, a friend of Sandy’s, thought it was all pretty funny and the mess got cleaned up, the bill paid. But the reason for the fight was supposedly all business: Dad’s “gently used” bookshop, Rivendell, got a Chamber of Commerce award that was being given at a banquet the first weekend of December and he wanted Mom to be there – and she said she couldn’t because her own bookstore, with two floors of new books, children’s games, and so on, had scheduled a famous children’s author for the same date.

Sandy said there might also have been something involved about who Dad was going to take to the banquet instead of Mom. But she couldn’t be sure. Lucky thought that part probably didn’t matter – Mom wasn’t jealous of who worked for Dad or anything like that.

But if there was money involved … Lucky sighed. Her mother took the business bottom line seriously. You could even say, dead seriously.

Still, the idea of her mother shooting her father over some business fight? Ridiculous. “Besides,” she said out loud, “where would Mom get a gun, anyway?”

Jake hissed another set of curse words before adding, “I gave her one.”

Lucky stared at her brother, who refused to meet her gaze. “You gave Mom a gun? How? Why? What the –”

“She didn’t want Dad to know. She had these hang-up calls at the shop, and she thought somebody was stalking her. She said he had enough on his mind, and she just wanted me to get her some pepper spray, so I did, but I got her the pistol, too, just in case. Stop staring at me in that tone of voice,” Jake snapped at her. “She wasn’t supposed to carry it, just have it at home in case. And to make her feel better.”

Jake’s gaze lifted abruptly to the rear-view mirror and he feathered the brakes, easing out of the passing lane. A state police car with flashing blue lights propelled past them, followed by a second one. Lucky held her breath until the cars were out of sight.

“I don’t get it,” she persisted. “Why didn’t she just report it to the police? Or tell Dad? Why did she tell you instead?”

“Because of who was stalking her. She couldn’t go talking about it.”

“Who was it?” Lucky’s voice rose, in spite of her determination to stay calm. “Jake, who was stalking Mom?”

“It’s political,” her brother retorted. “Can’t tell you unless Mom says so.”

Another text arrived and by reflex, Lucky looked down at her phone’s screen, her thoughts spinning.

“Sandy says the cops are stringing crime-scene tape in front of Dad’s store,” she said. “And we’ve got to take the earlier exit. She says the emergency responders all just headed out of the diner, to a pile-up on the interstate by the regular turn-off. Jeez, Jake, what’s going on? I feel like I’m falling down a rabbit hole here. Why didn’t you tell me this stuff sooner?”

“Gonna get worse before it gets better,” her brother predicted, as a gust of wind pulled at the little car and a white wall of snow blew across the highway in front of them.