Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3 Read online

  CASSIE MCGRAW BOX SET: BOOKS 1-3

  Copyright © 2018 by David Archer

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  BOOK 1 – WHAT LIES BENEATH

  BOOK 2 – DON'T FIGHT FATE

  BOOK 3 – ONE LAST GAME

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  BOOK 1

  WHAT LIES BENEATH

  ONE

  “You really don’t want me to come up there,” Cassie heard her mother call up the stairs. She reflected that her mother was correct, but not because she was afraid of being dragged out of bed; she just didn’t want her mother to see the big lump of Scott under the covers beside her. Somehow, she didn’t think that would be a great way to start the morning.

  A glance at the clock beside the bed told her that it was only five thirty, which meant she’d probably only gotten about three hours of sleep. That had been Scott’s fault, of course, because he had insisted on climbing up the front porch and in through her window, but the result of his insistence still left a smile on her face.

  “Okay, okay,” she yelled back, “I’ll be right down. Gimme a couple minutes to get dressed, all right?”

  “Five minutes,” her mom answered. She heard footsteps moving away from the stairs and breathed a sigh of relief, then shoved Scott.

  “Wake up,” she said, but not too loudly. “You gotta get out of here before my dad leaves, or he’ll see your truck out by the woods. And I gotta get up and get my butt to work.”

  Scott rolled over and smiled at her. “Let him see it,” he said softly. “Doesn’t he know we’re in love? Bet he snuck into your mom’s room when they were in high school.”

  “Most likely, which is exactly why he’d come up here with a shotgun if he sees your truck this close to his baby girl’s bedroom. I’m serious—you gotta go out the window now!”

  She kissed him quickly and then rolled away before he could get his arms around her. He grunted but sat up and began fumbling for his underwear.

  Cassie dug in her dresser and found clean panties, then slid them on and found the bra she had worn the day before. A quick sniff told her it would get her through another day, so she put it on and then pulled a clean top on over it. A pair of socks—mismatched, of course—went on to her feet as she balanced on one leg and then the other. Her jeans were last to go on, and she was glad to see Scott wearing his own pants as he mouthed, “See you tonight,” and slipped out the window onto the porch roof. With her parents in the kitchen, it was safe enough for him to drop off to the ground, and then his bare feet made almost no sound as he cut across the cornfields to where they had parked his truck the night before.

  She watched out the window for a few more seconds, thinking about how good it had felt when he was making love to her just a few hours ago, but then it was time to get downstairs and pretend she was still the innocent little girl her parents wanted her to be. Sooner or later they’d have to realize that being eighteen meant she was an adult, right? Even parents figured that out eventually, didn’t they?

  She plodded down the stairs, making sure she hit every one of the boards that creaked, groaned, or popped so they’d know she was coming. She’d left the bedroom window open; she wanted the room to have plenty of time to air out before her mom came upstairs and entered it.

  “About time,” her mother said with a smile. “What time did you get in last night?”

  “Around one, I think,” Cassie said. “Scott took me to the fair at Mt. Vernon, and we had a blast. You guys oughta go—you’d have fun there.”

  “Some of us have to work,” her dad said. “And one in the morning is a little past when you’re supposed to be home, isn’t it?”

  “Leave her be, Jack,” her mother said. “She’s a grown-up, now, remember?”

  “Still living under our roof,” Jack McGraw grumbled, but Cassie knew it was just part of his act. She loved her parents but she knew that they both wished she would remain their little girl forever.

  “I can fix that, if you want,” she said, but without any rancor in her voice. “Mary Lewis got an apartment, and she’s asked me if I want to share it with her for the summer.”

  “You don’t want to do that,” her mother said quickly. “You’re off to college in August—you need to save your money until then. It’s not like you make enough to pay rent on top of saving for school expenses.”

  “That’s true,” Cassie said. “Besides, what would Daddy have to complain about in the mornings if I wasn’t here?”

  “The weather, politics, that new grain elevator they just put in that killed the corn prices,” Jack said. “Not like there isn’t plenty of other things to talk about.”

  Cassie stuck her tongue out at him and saw the grin he’d been trying to keep hidden away.

  Her mother, Annie, sat down beside her. “What are you doing today?”

  “I gotta work,” Cassie said. “Lane said yesterday he needs me to train the new girl. She just moved here from up in Vermont, and I guess she’s never worked in a restaurant before.”

  “I heard about her,” Annie said. “Janice Dougherty says she came here to get away from her ex. I guess it was pretty bad, so she needed a fresh start.”

  “That’s what I heard, too. Apparently, she told Lane he used to beat her and burn her with cigarettes, and she finally had to get a restraining order and move away.”

  “I can’t understand why the law lets a man like that run loose,” Jack said. “Seems to me he should be locked up the very first time he does something like that. That’s how you put a stop to it, lock the bastard up.”

  “Sometimes the women don’t want that,” Annie said. “They keep thinking it’ll get better, and they want to try to make it work.”

  Jack growled. “And that’s how you see the news stories about women getting killed, even though everybody knew she was being hurt. Shouldn’t be up to the women; cops oughta lock them up the first time it happens.”

  “Cops don’t know,” Cassie said, “if the women aren’t talking. You ask me, any woman who stays with a guy after the first time is just asking for it. I guarantee you I wouldn’t stick around if a guy was hitting me or whatever. Uh-uh, no way.”

  Cassie had always liked having breakfast with her parents, because it was always calm and peaceful. Even with a topic like this one, it still felt good to just express herself and know that her parents were hearing what she had to say. A lot of her friends complained that their own parents never paid any attention to their feelings. Cassie considered herself ve
ry fortunate.

  But breakfast always came to an end, and finally she had to get up and go back upstairs. It took her only a few minutes to brush out her blonde hair and apply the minimal makeup she usually wore, and then she hurried down the stairs and out the front door with a quick wave to her mom. Her dad had already left to go start on repairs to his big tractor.

  Cassie, all five feet and two inches of her, had been living on this farm since the day she was born, and a large part of her was dreading the arrival of August. She’d be leaving it for the first time then, or at least the first time for anything longer than a trip to summer camp. She wasn’t all that sure about living in St. Louis, but at least it was only an hour or so away. She’d be able to come home on weekends, and even drop in once in a while during the week. That would make it a little easier.

  She hopped into her little Kia Sportage and started it up, then turned around in the circular driveway and headed into town. She’d been working at Lane’s Cafe for the past two years, switching to evenings while she’d been in school and then working the day shift during the summers. She was back on days, now, which only meant she had more time free in the evenings to spend with Scott.

  Scott, she knew, was the love of her life. The two of them made an almost perfect pair, and had long since accepted that they were destined for marriage. Scott would be going to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale to study agriculture, because he planned to be a farmer just like both of their fathers, but Cassie had a few dreams of her own. They had discussed it many times and decided to put off marriage until both of them had their educations out of the way.

  She parked behind the building like always and hurried inside. She was actually about three minutes late but Lane’s car wasn’t there, so she didn’t worry about it. He seemed to take the view that a waitress wasn’t required to be at work dead on time, as long as she kept the coffee cups full and the customers smiling. Cassie was good at both and knew just about everyone, so he didn’t scold her about a few minutes of tardiness.

  “Hey, Cass,” said Emily Stark, the cook. “Jackie’s here already. She’s back in the pantry, filling the salt and pepper shakers.”

  Jackie Chaney was the new girl Cassie had mentioned to her parents. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get the napkins and silver.”

  She took a quick look around the dining room and thought it looked clean enough, so she picked up a tray holding a dozen of the silver napkin dispensers and began setting them on the tables. When she ran out, she went back and refilled the tray, repeating this action twice more until all forty-five of the tables had one, then grabbed another tray that was loaded with silverware in little paper envelopes. She put one envelope in front of every chair and saw Jackie putting out the salt and pepper shakers as she finished.

  “Hey, girl,” she said, and Jackie looked up at her with a sheepish grin. It was the first time Cassie had actually met her, and she was surprised to see that Jackie was quite as beautiful as she’d been told. She was a few inches taller than Cassie, but her face was flawless and she had a figure to die for. Cassie was instantly jealous but shoved it down.

  “Hi,” Jackie said. “Is this okay? Emily said I should start on these when I got in.”

  “Yeah, it’s fine. You never waited tables before?”

  Jackie bit her bottom lip and looked down at the floor. “No,” she said softly. “This is my first real job. I worked at our church when I was in high school, just helping to clean up and stuff, but I got married when I was only sixteen and never worked after that.”

  Cassie nodded. “I know a girl here who got married at sixteen,” she said. “Marcie Wyant. She’s pretty happy, I guess, but I kinda heard you weren’t so lucky.”

  Jackie shrugged. “I don’t like to talk about it a lot,” she said, “but it was okay at first. It wasn’t till after we had our second baby that Scott started to get mean, but it went kinda downhill after that.”

  Cassie started to ask how bad it had gotten, but the look on the woman’s face was enough to stop her. “Well, that’s all behind you now, though. Did you get time to study the menu?”

  The two of them talked about the menu items for a while, with Cassie explaining about the verbal shorthand they used. “Other than omelets,” she said, “we only do eggs four ways: sunny side up, over easy, over hard or scrambled. If somebody orders two eggs over easy with bacon, hash browns, and toast, for example, you’ll hear me yell out, ‘two down, flat, with spuds and a shingle.’ Means the same thing. If they want over hard with sausage, it’s ‘two down, round,’ and if they want sunny side up with ham it’s ‘two up, slab.’ A steak with scrambled eggs would be ‘two crazy and a cow.’ Can you remember all that?”

  Jackie looked like she was about to panic. “What about the pork chops?” she asked. “It says they can get pork chops and eggs.”

  “Then,” Cassie said, “it’s ‘two down, squealing,’ et cetera. If they want hash browns we say spuds, if they want home fries we say fries. If they want pancakes we say cakes, and waffles are just waffles.”

  Jackie looked like she was about to cry, but Cassie put an arm around her shoulders. “You’ll pick it up. For today, if you can’t remember the shorthand, Em can understand plain old English, too. Just say whatever the order is, and you’ll pick up the rest over the next few days. Don’t worry, you’re gonna do fine.”

  “I hope so,” the girl said forlornly. “I don’t know how we’re gonna make it on waitress pay, but it was the only job I could find that didn’t require special skills.”

  “You’ve got your kids, right?” Cassie asked, and Jackie nodded.

  “Yeah. I got sole custody, because Scott ended up going to prison for six years—he beat up a guy who asked me out and almost killed him—but some of his buddies weren’t very nice to me about it all, so we moved away.”

  “Tell me about your kids,” Cassie said, trying to cheer the girl a bit. “Boys or girls, or both?”

  “One of each,” Jackie said, and she finally smiled properly. “Mickey’s the boy—he’s almost seven now—and Heather’s five.”

  “What do you do with them while you’re at work?”

  “My neighbor took me to her church, the big Baptist church on the highway outside of town, and they have a free daycare. Well, they don’t charge a certain price—you just pay what you can, or you come and help out on your days off. If I make enough, I’d like to give them something, but if I don’t get tips I won’t even be able to pay my rent and buy groceries.”

  Cassie grinned. “Are you kidding? Jackie, you’re gorgeous! First thing I thought when I saw you this morning was, ‘Well, dang, there goes my tips for today!’ You’ll make plenty in that department, don’t worry, and that’s all yours.” She leaned close and lowered her voice. “The tiny little paycheck we get is just so the IRS thinks we’re paying our taxes, and to keep Lane outta trouble.”

  Jackie tried to smile, but it was weak. “Mr. Lane seems nice,” she said.

  Cassie snickered. “Lane is his first name,” she said, “so there’s no Mister to it. And most girls think he’s nice, ’cause he’s gay. That’s not really talked about, but it isn’t a big secret in this town, either. At least you don’t have to worry about him hitting on you. The customers will do plenty of that, and if you can take it with a grin and a grain of salt, they’ll leave some pretty good tips. Just don’t agree to go out with any of them without checking with me or Em or Lane. We know which ones are assholes.”

  Jackie shuddered. “I’m not gonna be interested in dating for a while,” she said. “Maybe not ever.”

  “That’s cool,” Cassie said, looking at Jackie in a new light. What had the poor woman actually been through? “Just smile a lot and say you’re just too busy to go out with anyone, and most of the guys will take that and keep tipping. Anyone tries to push, you tell Lane, and he’ll take care of it.” She let another snicker slip out. “He’s gay as they come, but he was also in the Marines. Nobody around here wants to tan
gle with him, trust me.”

  “Okay, you two,” Lane called out as he came in through the back. “Hasn’t anyone noticed it’s only three minutes to seven? Time to open.”

  “Sorry, Lane,” Cassie said as she went to unlock the front door and flip the Open sign on. “I was trying to tell Jackie how to maximize her tips and control the weirdos.”

  “She’ll get the tips, hon,” Lane said, “and all you gotta do is let me know about the weirdos. I’ll handle them.”

  “See?” Cassie said, smiling at Jackie. “Lane’s a great guy to work for—and here come the regulars.”

  Jackie looked out to see several men getting out of cars parked along the front of the building, and for a second Cassie thought she was going to bolt out the back. “Just smile,” she said quickly, “and call me if you run into a problem.”

  Jackie sent her a grateful grin, and then the door opened.

  TWO

  The summer passed slowly. Cassie spent most of her days working at Lane’s, and after that first week she was glad to see Jackie switched to the evening shift. The girl had mostly gotten over her nervousness by then, and the evening regulars were delighted to see a new face, especially that face, bringing them their coffee and orders. By the time July was approaching its end, Jackie had made enough in tips to buy an old but dependable car, and was contributing regularly to the daycare center at the church. Luckily, the daycare was open for all three shifts, due to the number of factories in the area. All Jackie had to do was drop them off on her way to work and pick them up on the way home.

  Cassie was making her preparations for college. She’d been accepted at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, and was ready to get started earning a degree in psychology. Getting to know Jackie had solidified her plans to become a social worker. She thought that, maybe someday, she might even like to work with battered women. Jackie had certainly had some issues to work through, and Cassie felt that some of her own advice might have helped the young woman in some small ways. Maybe she had a calling for it.