Sins & Needles (The Artists Trilogy #1) (33 page)

I peered at the screen, heart in my throat. It was Uncle Jim.

“Hello?” I asked, trying to hide the worry in my voice.

“Ellie!” he exclaimed. “Oh, Ellie thank God you answered. Are you all right?”

I eyed Camden nervously. He was sitting up, taking off his tuxedo jacket, now all wrinkled from our nap.

“Yeah, I’m fine Uncle Jim. Why, what’s going on?”

“Where are you?” he asked.

I had to remember what the last lie I told him was.

“Santa Barbara.”

A pause. “Ellie, I don’t want you to freak out, but I…I need your help.”

My heartbeat got louder. “What? Why?”

“I’m in a lot of trouble,” he said in barely a whisper. “Some men came to my house while I was in town. They…they roughed up one of the workers and lit fire to some of the trees.”

“Holy shit!” Now Camden was at my side, trying to listen, his solid grip on my shoulder steadying me. “Did you call the cops?”

“I did,” he said. “They got a description of the men from the workers and said they’d look for them, but that’s all they could do. Ellie, I’m scared. These men…I think they were after you.”

I felt like bricks were being shoved on my chest. “Oh, I…I’m sorry, Uncle Jim, I…”

“It doesn’t matter. I just don’t know what to do. I left, I got out of there. I packed up some stuff, told the workers to stay away for the week until I figured
things out.”

“Good, good,” I told him, feeling relieved. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the Shady Acres Hotel. It’s just outside of Hemet. Do you remember Hemet?”

Of course I remembered Hemet. It’s nothing but a town in the green mountains between the Coachella Valley and San Diego. But it had an amazing music store where I used to drag Uncle Jim when I was
a teenager just so I could get some bootleg CDs.

“Okay, stay there. I’m coming to you. What room are you in?”

“Room eight,” he said. “Thank you, Ellie.”

His voice cracked, bordering on tears. There was a pause, then a click as he hung up the line.

Guilt. I used to wear it like a badge, now I wore it like a ball and chain. I couldn’t believe this was happening to him, my only family left, the only one who I could depend on. I was ruining his life with all my past mistakes.

I looked at Camden, his face shadowed in the dark of the room. “We have to go to him. We have to help him.”

He didn’t nod like I thought he would. His lips were pressed together in a firm line.

“Camden?”

His jerked his head as if saying no.

I frowned. “Look
, I know it’s out of the way and not part of our plans, but I can’t let my uncle hide out on his own. They’re after him, Camden.”

He licked his lips quickly. “Are they?”

I looked at him askew. “I don’t follow.”

“Yes, you do.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He strolled over to the window then drew the blinds shut and flicked on the light. “But you don’t want to think about it.”

I crossed my arms. “Think about what?”

“That he’s lying to you,” he said. He flinched a little as he said it, as if I’d hit him. I almost did, too. Smart boy.

“How dare you say that,” I seethed at him. “He’s my uncle.”

He raised his palms in defense. “I know he is. And I know it’s a terrible thing to even think, but I’m just being cautious. Your life is more important than his.”

“Maybe to you! Not to me. He’s been there for me when no one else has. My parents left me with him. They basically screwed him over! They left me and ran and they never came back. Sure, they talk on the phone now, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t sacrifice a lot of his life to raise me. And through high school, of all places. He was there during my deepest, darkest hours. There’s no way I can’t repay that.”

He nodded. “Okay. I just wanted to make sure we’re on the same page, that’s all.”

“Well I’m not on your page. Shit, Camden. I’m tired of fucking people over! I need to make amends and do things right for a change. If I endanger myself trying to help him, then so be it. He deserves my help and everything else he can get from me.” I flopped down on the bed, trying to calm myself, trying to pretend the next words wouldn’t hurt. “You don’t have to come with me, you know. Go rent a car, go to your Gualala. You don’t need to be dragged deeper into this sorry mess.”

He sat down beside me and grabbed my hand, giving it a squeeze. “I’m not letting you go on your own. We’re in this together, until the ocean waves crash on our feet.”

I squeezed back, giving him a shy smile. “You really paint this Gualala as a paradise,” I told him.

“If you’re there with me,” he said, “it will be.”

He kissed me softly, his hand getting lost in my hair. I started to fall back onto the bed but he caught me and kept me up. “We can do this later,” he murmured into my neck. “We’ve got your uncle to save.”

We got changed into normal clothes and threw our stuff in
to the car. We hadn’t even had the chance to unpack.

***

It felt completely wrong to be driving south to Hemet when we should have been driving north to Gualala, but my concern for Uncle Jim was too overpowering. Thankfully the drive was just under six hours, even with the rush hour traffic, and it wasn’t long before we were passing Lake Perris and winding through the mountains. With darkness enveloping us, the roads seemed extra treacherous, and Camden was tense as he drove. I’d decided Jose was probably safest with him—they’d been through a lot together.

The atmosphere inside the car was tense too. I could tell Camden was worried and for different reasons than I was. I was busy planning what to do with Uncle Jim. Telling him we were on the run from Javier wouldn’t come as a surprise, but I wanted to leave the whole “by the way I tried to rob Camden” thing out of it. It would only hurt him that I tried to do
it in his hometown, and looking back now, I felt ashamed for even trying it.

Camden, on the other hand, was cagey and silent because he was expecting the worst. He was expecting Uncle Jim to be compromised, but I just couldn’t think that way.  I wouldn’t. I had to trust someone in my life
, and after mistrusting everyone and finally taking a chance on Camden, my uncle deserved the same opportunity.

We reached the sign marker stating it was ten miles to Hemet when I asked Camden a question I’d been thinking of for a while.

“What had happened to your wife?” I asked gently. I knew it was a loaded question, but he and I were balls deep in loaded questions these days, drowning in our answers.

He chewed on his silence for a few beats, looking romantically pensive in his reading glasses.  I looked out the window at the headlights as the
y illuminated the twisting road, giving him space.

“I hit her,” he said. I shrank back in my seat, a bit shocked at his admission, at his bluntness. I’d been in a shor
t but volatile relationship with a man in Nebraska. He hit me— only once, but I packed my bags and never looked back. Sure, I was trying to con him in the end but no con was ever worth abuse.

“Why?” I asked, my voice very small, not really understanding how the man next to me could be capable of that.

He breathed in deep and I shot a look at him. His brows were drawn, eyes held in some painful memory. “Because I was an angry fool. Our relationship was crumbling beneath my hands. She’d been out a lot. I was the one taking care of Ben more often than not. I never knew where she was or what she was doing, and it was never my business to know. One day I suspected she was cheating on me. I called her on it. She admitted it. Actually, she did more than admit it. She flaunted it. She told me she wanted a divorce, that she didn’t love me, that I wasn’t worth anything to her as a man. I was nothing more than a sperm donor. I think she was back on drugs again, if you ask me. It wasn’t the Sophia that I married.

I didn’t know how to handle it. She called me names. Spat in my face. Insulted me with everything she had. It wasn’t until later that I realized what she had been doing and I walked right into her trap. She punched me, called me a name I don’t even want to repeat, and I hit her back. It was just a slap, my fist wasn’t even closed. But it was enough to destroy me. It was enough for her get her divorce and custody of Ben. It was enough to put me in her family’s debt.”

“So you think she wanted you to hit her?”

He shrugged. “Does it matter? I hurt her, the one person I never wanted to hurt. She loved me at some point, I know that. I don’t know what she
must have felt at that moment, to doubt that I ever felt that way, that everything had been a lie. It wasn’t a lie though, Ellie. I loved Sophia. She could never replace you, but I still loved her as much as I could. And I love Ben. I’d give everything to go back to that moment and make things right.”

I stared at him, feeling his pain.

“Would you really? Would you go back in time and change that, if you could?”

He thought it over and looked at me. “No. No, maybe not. Because then I wouldn’t have this. I wouldn’t have you. I have to live with my mistakes
, but I don’t have to regret them. I regret my actions but I can’t regret the consequences. We all make our own paths in life. Everyone we meet, everything we do, it changes us. It makes us who we are. And, if we’re lucky, we’re given the chance to make things right again.”

I completely understood. I stuck my hand out the window and let it snake up and down with the wind. “It’s like an I.O.U. you didn’t know you’d written.”

He nodded. “That sounds about right. I have a feeling we’ve written a lot of those.”

“I think everyone does.”

We lapsed into a comfortable silence for the rest of the drive, understanding each other a bit better. Camden lived with his guilt, his guilt that had never let him be free. I wasn’t any different than he was. Each day I found myself relating more and more to the only other “freak” in town, the only one who really knew.

Once we passed through the small town center of Hemet, and after I whooped with delight at discovering the Hungry Heart music store still existed, we began our
search for the Shady Acres. It was further out of town than we had both thought and as the town lights disappeared behind us, I had to admit I was feeling a little bit nervous.

It was terrible to doubt my uncle, but for a split second I thought maybe, somehow, this was a set-up. Maybe something wasn’t right. I don’t know if it was my own instincts or Camden’s cynical influence, but it set alarm bells off in my stomach.

It took a lot of courage to say to Camden, “I have a funny feeling about this.”

He gave me a smile and kissed my hand. “I know you do. You’re a trained con artist, you can’t forget that. If you didn’t walk into every situation with suspicion, I’d question how you survived so long.”

“So what do you think?” I asked him, suddenly doubting everything.

“I think your uncle sounds like an honest man. And I know he took care of you when we were kids, like you were his own daughter. I think he needs our help
—that he deserves our help, and I believe that Javier has targeted him. But, I also think to be safe, we don’t park at the motel. Just around the corner. We sneak in.”

“Better paranoid than dead?”

“You know it.”

Once we located the hotel on my phone and spied the flickering signpost in the distance, we took the first side-street and parked down by an abandoned house on an overgrown lot. There was nothing but small farms in the area, a place that would probably seem very bucolic during the day but looked lifeless and deserted at night.

“Should we bring a gun?” I whispered as we climbed out of the car.

He eyed me over the roof. “I don’t think it could hurt. I’ll bring mine.”

I liked that idea. I didn’t want to have to use my gun in any situation that involved Uncle Jim. I was too close and it would get messy.

We quietly walked up the street, eyes peeled, ears scanning for anything unusual. A few cars puttered past on the main road up ahead
, and in the distance an owl hooted, but there was nothing else except the sound of our feet as we crunched through gravel on the shoulder.

When the hotel got closer, Camden gestured for us to head in through the back of the property and scale over the fence. My arms burned from the effort but I made it over okay. We landed on the ground with a soft thud and observed the scene.

It wasn’t a hotel at all but a rundown motel. From the back, it looked like only one of the rooms in the bungalow block was occupied. I did a quick count and the small bathroom window with the light on was probably Uncle Jim’s.

I gestured at it and Camden nodded. We crept closer and tried to look in through the frosted glass pane but couldn’t see anything. Camden tried to listen with his ear pressed against it. He heard nothing either. That could be good or that could be bad.

We went around the side of the block and came into the front. There was a rusted chain link fence surrounding a tiny swimming pool with heaps of leaves floating in it, a small house for the office, and the single row of rooms. There was only one car, my uncle’s old truck, and that was it. I scanned the dark street to see if there was anything out of the ordinary but there was nothing—so far—that made me suspicious. It looked like he’d been telling the truth, which made me feel bad for doubting him and bad for putting him in this position.