Reckoning and Ruin by Tina Whittle Page A

you?”
    â€œNobody.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, nobody?”
    â€œI mean, I found it on my car. Had your name on it. I took it over to your place, but you weren’t there, and I had this shindig to deal with, so—”
    â€œSo you left it.”
    He hesitated. “Yeah. Was that a bad thing? I swear, I didn’t know, I thought it was just one of your customers got the address wrong or something, I didn’t—”
    â€œIt’s okay.”
    I looked across the square at his ramshackle restaurant, bustling now. Lots of people coming and going, reenactors and spouses and parents and children, noise and commotion.
    â€œHey, you okay over there?” he said. “This ain’t some stalker, is it? I promised your uncle I’d look after you.”
    â€œI’m fine. Just let me know if you see anybody unusual over here, especially a woman. Short black hair, slim.”
    â€œPretty?”
    â€œI guess so.”
    He laughed. “I’ll keep an eye out then.”
    After he hung up, I stared out the window at his party for a while. Then I went upstairs to my bedroom and pulled a plastic storage bin from under the bed. The original photo was right where I’d left it. I shook it free from its matching envelope and held it side by side with the new image. The handwriting was a perfect match. First the New Testament and now poetry of some sort. Vaguely familiar poetry.
    I picked up my phone and typed the line into the search box. Bingo. “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning. It was a short poem, a monologue, and I had no idea what it meant. For the first time, I regretted skipping literature class in high school. But I knew how to fix that. I may have missed most of senior English, but my best friend Rico hadn’t.
    I sent him a quick text: Call me, poet man. ASAP.
    And then I waited. But no return texts came from any direction. I thought of going back to the car, getting the rest of the cigarettes from the glove compartment. Instead, I stuck both photographs in my tote bag. Then I went to the closet and got down a cardboard shoe box. I took off the lid, brushed aside the dried wrist corsage from prom and the tassel from my mortarboard.
    The photograph was on top, rubber-banded with others from the same afternoon. It was a shot of me on the beach at Tybee Island, denim short-shorts and a halter top barely containing my more illicit parts. I sat on the hood of my Camaro, the chrome glinting and gleaming. I grinned…but not for the camera. For the man beside me.
    John. With his stormy eyes and rock star hair and wicked grin. Even in the photo I could see myself preening in his gaze, happy to be looked upon with such ferocious desire. His eyes were like the sun, and when he turned them on me, I felt myself stretching and reaching and growing like a flower. But all suns eventually disappear below the horizon. Night always comes, one way or another.
    I thought of Trey, back in his black and white apartment. The man I loved, something I could say in my head even if it didn’t trip lightly off my tongue. He loved me too, with a love that was sturdy and deep-rooted. The girl in the photo would have been crushed by it.
    I put the photo in my bag next to the ones from my mysterious informant. It was the only picture I had of John, and I knew I’d need something to show people. Have you seen this man? When I got back downstairs, I saw the red lights behind the deer’s eyes flare to life. My phone vibrated almost simultaneously with an incoming call. I snatched it up.
    â€œTrey?”
    â€œI’m sorry too. Very much.”
    His voice was calm, but not flat. Back to himself again. I knew the other Treys were there, though, that one or the other was only a swing of the pendulum away.
    I hopped up cross-legged on the counter. “It seems like we’ve been saying sorry a lot recently. Like every day.”
    â€œI know. I’m sorry about that