My Twin Stole My Fiancée and Life novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Forty-One Cents

Calvin's savings are gone and he is out on the street at 2 a.m. when Officer Lark Carmody ices his wrists and offers her couch on two rules. Outside her window, Natasha's car is idling.

They let me out at two in the morning with a trespass citation and a paper that said I could not go within five hundred feet of my own family.

The sergeant handed me my belt, my wallet and my phone.

The phone was dead.

I walked a mile in the cold to the all-night pharmacy, because it had the only ATM on that side of Marlow Falls.

I put in my card and my PIN.

The screen thought about it for a while.

Then it said: Available balance, $0.41.

I tried again. I tried the savings account.

It showed the same number with a different name above it.

I had eleven years of savings in that account. I had put thirty-eight thousand dollars there for a down payment on a house for Monique and me.

The ATM spat my card back out.

I sat on the curb outside the pharmacy and put my face in my hands.

I wasn't crying. I was counting.

I had no keys, no car, no phone, no money, and no home within five hundred feet.

A patrol car rolled into the lot and stopped a few feet from me.

The window came down.

"Ellingwood," Lark Carmody said. She was in a gray sweatshirt now and her braid was half undone. "I figured."

"You figured what?"

"That your family would clean you out as well." She got out of the car with a small white box. "Hold out your wrists."

"Why?"

"Because I put those on too tight."

It was the first thing she had said to me that sounded like an apology, and she hadn't said sorry.

I held out my wrists.

Both of them were scraped red, and one had a dark bruise coming up across the bone.

She cracked a cold pack in her fist and laid it against the bad one.

Her fingers wrapped under my wrist to hold it there, warm and dry, and she kept them there longer than she needed.

I looked at her hand on my arm.

She looked at the cold pack.

"I should have checked your license," she said. "You told me twice."

"You did say I could tell it to the desk."

"I did." Her mouth moved at one corner. "I'm trying to apologize. Don't help."

I almost smiled, for the first time since the front door.

"My account is empty," I said. "I had thirty-eight thousand dollars in it."

"Joint account?"

"With Monique."

She nodded slowly.

"Okay. So there's a motel on Route 9, forty-nine dollars a night. I'll lend you sixty. Or you can sleep on my couch and save the forty-nine."

I stared at her.

"Is that allowed?"

"No," she said. "Rules. One, no case talk after eleven at night. Two, nothing happens. You sleep, I sleep, we both get up at seven."

"Nothing happens," I said.

"Not a thing."

"That's a lot of rules for a couch."

"It's a good couch."

She drove me to a brick building on Mill Street with a laundromat on the first floor and an apartment on the second.

It had one lamp, a bookshelf full of paperbacks and a fireman's helmet on a hook.

"My dad's," she said, before I could ask. "Thirty years on the ladder truck. He lives in Florida now and tells me the weather every Sunday."

She threw me a blanket and a clean T-shirt that said MARLOW FALLS FIRE DEPT. It would have been loose on her and was tight on me.

She turned off the overhead light.

"Carmody," I said, from the couch.

"What?"

"Why are you helping me?"

She stood in the dark hallway with one hand on the doorframe.

"Because I've worked that house's address twice before," she said. "Both times it was your sister calling, and both times she said the same word. Intruder."

The hall went quiet.

"Who was the intruder before?" I said.

"A delivery guy. A nephew's friend. Nobody who had ever hurt anybody." She shifted. "I wrote it up both times and nobody read it."

"Lark."

"Go to sleep, Ellingwood."

She went into her bedroom and shut the door.

I lay on her couch in her father's fire department T-shirt and stared at the ceiling.

I could hear her moving around behind the wall.

I could hear exactly when she stopped.

Around three I got up for a glass of water and went to the front window.

The street was empty except for one car parked under the lamp across the road with its engine running.

A silver Subaru. A woman at the wheel with her face turned toward the building.

Natasha had followed me here.

She lifted one gloved hand off the wheel and waved.

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