Friction (Red Hot Private Eye, Novella, Vol. 2) (9 page)

THE CROSSROADS SERIES

Book One

Chapter One

“Welcome home!” Katie said sardonically to herself as she sat, eyes closed, in her rental car on the side of Highway 90. She had a paper bag pressed tightly against her mouth and a mantra running through her brain on repeat.

You can breathe. Just breathe. Breathe in and out slowly. You can breathe.

Katie had been back in Illinois for less than an hour and here she was, smack dab in the middle of her first panic attack in five years. She gripped the steering wheel hard, trying to soothe her racing heart to anchor herself to reality. She forced her movements to be slow and deliberate.

This seems to be working, albeit slowly,
she assured herself. When the overpriced therapist who taught her the breathing exercise and mantra had laid out his plan, Katie had wanted to roll her eyes. She had wanted to tell him that he clearly had no flipping idea what a panic attack really felt like if he thought that repeating a little magic spell in her mind about breathing was going to have any effect at all. She had wanted to tell him that panic attacks didn't feel like nervousness or butterflies you could just calm with the power of your mind. They felt like you were having a heart attack, like you were dying. Have you ever heard of someone having a heart attack curing themselves by simply telling themselves to
breathe
?

Of course, Katie
hadn't said any of those things. She had smiled politely, practiced with the bag, and kept her judgment of his professional aptitude (i.e., that he was a total quack!) entirely to herself.

Still
, since she hadn't
had
a panic attack in the past five years. She hadn't ever been able to test out the technique and prove his quackitude with rock-solid evidence. Now that she was in the middle of one and the exercise actually seemed to be working?

Well,
I'll move his status down to 'Jury's Still Out on the Level of His Quackosity' but I'm not nominating him for the Nobel Prize just yet,
Katie thought. Of course, this wasn’t even close to a
bad
attack. This one was fairly mild.

But
, that’s exactly how they had started ten years ago. They had begun as hyperventilating episodes and over time had developed into severe attacks resulting in her being rushed to the emergency room—
twice
—having truly believed she was having a heart attack. Which had not been the case.

Th
e E.R. docs were the reason she had ended up lying on the overpriced therapist couch (metaphorically speaking; in reality she had sat in a plush leather chair). Once the doctors at the hospital had ruled out the possibility that anything was physically wrong with her, they had strongly recommended that she delve into the possibility that it was her psyche, not her body, that needed medical attention.

Even now
, as the panic attack was subsiding, Katie was still feeling some of the physical symptoms. Her head felt as if it were floating away, her fingers were tingling as if they were being stabbed by a thousand tiny needles, and she was being bombarded by an obnoxiously loud ringing sound. She forced herself to anchor to the sensation of the paper bag digging into her lips to ground her in reality and repeated the mantra (which, she had to admit, was kind of growing on her.)

You can breathe. Just breathe. Breathe in and out slowly. You can breathe.

Slowly, bit by bit, she drifted back to the present and into her body. She closed her eyes to appreciate the little sensations she was now aware of—the leather of the seat pressed cold against her back, the icy breeze from the air conditioning blowing refreshingly on her face.

Leaning her head back against the headrest, she felt
the weight of her chest rising and falling. Her arms felt heavy. Lowering them to her sides, Katie was vaguely aware that the paper bag had slipped from her hand and landed on the console beside her.

After several minutes, her
breathing returned to normal and the ringing sound in her head grew sporadic. Katie searched her memory in an attempt to identify if ‘sporadic ringing in the head’ was a normal side effect post-panic attack. She hated that these horrible attacks used to occur with such frequency that she actually had a personal database of experiences to check her symptoms against.

Nope
, she concluded,
the sporadic ringing is new.

Turning her head to take in her surroundings, she saw cars whizzing by on the interstate. She squinted against the glare of the sun, which was shining brightly down on
the pavement and bouncing off the car windshields speeding by.

Katie retrieved the paper bag and folded it up, returning it to her purse.
She didn't
love
the thought that she might need to keep it handy for future use, but better safe than sorry.
I mean, let's be real,
she told herself.
You're less than an hour off the plane and barely starting down the highway toward Harper's Crossing and you had a panic attack. You really think you're getting through the rest of the weekend unscathed? Not likely.

As she placed the paper bag inside her gigantic 'in case of emergency' carry-on bag, she discovered the source of the ringing.

She felt like an idiot.
On the good side,
she thought to herself,
is the fact that I don't have to add tinnitus to the looooong list of symptoms that characterize my panic attacks. On the bad side? Apparently, I no longer recognize my cell phone's ring tone.

Picking up her iPhone, she swiped the screen to answer, saying warmly
, “Hey Sophiebell!”

“Katie, where are you? I thought you would be here by now. Was your flight delayed? I can’t wait to see you,” Sophie squealed, the words tumbling out of her mouth one over another. Katie smiled to herself. She had always thought that Sophie could paraphrase that old Army motto to adopt as her own. 'I say more before nine a.m. than most people say all day!'

“The flight was fine. I am on my way, and I will be there in less than an hour. I can’t wait to see you, too!”

“Okay, hurry,” Sophie pleaded but then followed it up with the command, “but drive safe!”

“I will.
See you soon, bride-to-be!” Katie tried to cover the stress in her voice with ebullience as she said goodbye and hung up the phone.

It's
8:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, she thought, repeating the mental math to herself. My return flight to California is at 7:00 p.m. Sunday night. All I have to do is get through the next four days—preferably without having a nervous breakdown! —and then I can wing my way back to my lovely, safe, predictable life in San Francisco.

Let the countdown begin.

Katie breathed out a long sigh as she pulled back onto the highway. She needed get her head on straight and pull it together. Facts, that was what she needed to focus on. Facts had always comforted Katie.

Fact: s
he wasn’t a teenager anymore. Fact: she was an adult. Fact: she could handle this.

It had been ten long years since Katie Marie Lawson had set foot in Harper's Crossing, the town of her childhood and her youth. She had never meant to stay away this long.

When she originally left to California for school a decade ago, her plan had been to come back at Christmastime. Sitting at L.A.X., waiting for her flight that first holiday away from home had been her first experience with a bout of hyperventilation. She never got on the plane. The next episode occurred as she merely booked her flight that same year for spring break. That time she hadn’t even made it to the airport. It took several years to get the episodes under control, during which she refrained from making any travel plans.

Then
, after she graduated from law school at Pepperdine University, she immediately started working at Wilson, Martin, Gregory, and Assoc., a very prestigious law firm in San Francisco.

The first three years at the firm
flew by in a blur. Katie worked 80+ hours a week and even worked every holiday, including Christmas. She'd barely had time to breathe, let alone go out of town.

Last year, even though she was on the fast track to make Junior Partner, she
had taken a vacation. The plan had been to take a few days for herself—to decompress—and then head back to her hometown. She had booked her flight and the experience had been incident free.

That was progress at least.

Katie had then spent the first four days of her vacation in her apartment, so it was really more of a ‘staycation’—but still. She cleaned, cooked, slept, and had a Julia Roberts movie marathon.

At the end of the four days, the morning she
was scheduled to fly back to Illinois, she had been called into work because a fellow associate had come down with the flu. And well, if she was being honest, she had been
more
than happy to go back to work on Wednesday instead of being on a direct flight from SFO to O’Hare.

But
, she was here now. In Illinois. Headed back to Harper’s Crossing. She had done it. Because this weekend wasn’t about her—it was about Miss Sophie Hunter, who was getting married to Bobby Sloan, Jr., the youngest of the five Sloan boys. Sophie had called her,
ecstatic,
three months earlier to announce her engagement to Bobby and to ask Katie to be her maid of honor.

Sophie (or 'Sophiebell
,' which had been her nickname since Sophie was six and had decided that she was Tinker Bell) was the closest thing Katie had to a sister. And there was
nothing
Katie wouldn’t do for her. Other than a brief trip out to California after Sophie had graduated high school four years ago, Katie hadn’t seen her since she left home. But they always talked or e-mailed several times a week.

Katie was an only child. She and her mom, Pam, had gone to live with her Aunt Wendy in Harper’s Crossing when Katie was four, immediately after her parents
’ divorce.

Craig, Katie’s dad, had come to visit his daughter exactly one time since
she’d moved to Harper’s Crossing. It was one month after she and her mom had arrived that Craig had taken Katie to Tasty Treats for a double scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

He had talked about how much he loved her and assured her that the divorce and the move had nothing to do with her. He had also promised to
see her once a month. Suffice it to say, he didn’t keep that promise.

Katie had not seen her father since that cold October Saturday
twenty-four years ago.

Growing up,
she’d always just assumed that he had stayed away because he and Aunt Wendy “did not see eye to eye,” as Katie’s mom always said (although, now, as an adult, she was leaning toward the theory that it was because he was a shitheel).

Honestly, if Katie’s memory served, she
hadn’t really seen a lot of her dad even when he and her mom were still together. It seemed to Katie that ‘pre-divorce’ it was just Katie and her mom and then ‘post-divorce’ it was Katie, her mom, and Aunt Wendy.

She never really missed her dad. Sometimes she would miss her idea of what having a dad in her life would be like.
But never the man who had fathered her. She really never knew that man, and what she had known had been unpredictable. Promising to come visit her once a month and then her never seeing hide nor hair of him again really just seemed par for the course where he was concerned. It was just the last in a long line of broken promises that had characterized their father-daughter relationship, and—even at four years old—Katie didn't remember being terribly surprised when the months rolled around and he didn't.

She had always credited the fact that she
didn't miss him terribly to how full her life had been, how utterly surrounded she was by people who loved her. Although, she would sometimes get lonely in Aunt Wendy’s house. Aunt Wendy had a full-time job and Katie's mom usually held down two jobs just to make ends meet, so there was a lot of time that Katie had been alone with just her imagination and books to keep her occupied.

As she made her way down the highway, a smile crept across her face because, oh boy, how that changed the summer before Katie's seventh grade year!