Without Mercy - Lisa Jackson [19]
“Poking around?”
“Making trouble.”
“There’s that word again: trouble. For whom?” Where the hell was this going? “You?”
“Analise told you that we didn’t leave the school on the best of terms, right? But it was our idea. No fault of anyone at Blue Rock Academy.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, leaning against the wall, feeling the hem of her coat dripping onto the rug near the door. Diablo stretched on the top of the couch, claws extended, back legs stiff. “What’re you getting at, Eli? Are you saying that someone from the academy might give you some kind of trouble? Is that it?” She couldn’t believe this. “And you’re afraid that you wouldn’t be invited to the class reunion?” The cat hopped off the couch and hurried over to greet her. Jules bent down and scratched his chin with her free hand.
“That’s not it!”
“Then what is it, Eli? Huh? Why the hell are you so rattled about me discussing the academy with your wife—”
“It’s not that,” he cut in. “I just don’t think you know Shay. That girl is trouble, Jules. She needs this kind of structure. She needs to learn respect.”
“I think I know my own sister, and don’t turn this around to Shay,” Jules argued. “What is it that you’re afraid of?”
“Nothing. We’re…I’m not afraid of anything.”
She didn’t buy it. The silence was thick. She straightened as Diablo did figure eights between her wet feet.
“Look, Jules. I was just concerned. Do whatever it is you have to do, okay? But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Of what, Eli?”
He hesitated, then his voice lowered to a whisper. “Of whatever it is you find, Jules. You might not like it.” With that, he hung up with a loud and final click.
“Bastard,” she hissed as she hung up. The cat was looking up at her expectantly. “Not you, okay?” She slid out of her coat and hung it on a peg near the door, allowing the water to drip onto the tile of the entryway. “Let’s get you some dinner, eh?” she said, heading into the kitchen.
What was it about Blue Rock Academy that made everyone so jumpy? For all their praises of the institution, Analise and Eli were scared. But of what? They were both well out of it.
“It gets stranger and stranger,” she said to the cat as she found a half-full can of cat food and forked some into his dish. Diablo ignored the bowl and trotted after her to the living area, where she switched on the gas fire and flopped onto the couch. She needed time to think. To figure out what to do.
Everyone was telling her to let Shay be, to leave her alone. The consensus was that her half sister was getting what she deserved and would come out of the experience all the better. But Jules, ever protective of Shay, just didn’t see it that way. Others, those who weren’t close to her, and even Edie, didn’t see the inner child within Shay. Sure, she was acting out, but she was scared of going to the academy. What seventeen-year-old wouldn’t be?
But then the world hadn’t had the glimpses into Shaylee’s life that Jules had. She remembered Edie returning from the hospital with the fussy, wide-eyed bundle. From the minute Shay had entered Jules’s life, she’d been fascinated by the cooing baby, then the curious toddler who had puppy-dogged after her. She and Shay had been together throughout the rocky marriages, rough divorces, and awkward reconciliations of their parents.
Jules had been close to her father. Rip had adored her. Not so with Max Stillman. Deep down, Jules had felt a little guilty that her dad had treated her like a princess and, really, done a poor job of taking Shaylee under his paternal wing as well. Not that Shay would allow him to.
While Jules had been in grade school, Shaylee had waited by the window, looking for her older sister to return home; then, chubby toddler legs flying, she’d run out the door when the bus’s squealing brakes had heralded Jules’s arrival.
“Sissy!” she’d cry happily, her little face aglow.
“Shh!” Jules had been embarrassed as she’d taken Shay’s little hand in hers. “Call me Jules.”
“Sissy!” Shay always had the last word, and she had happily run away, giggling