Saints and Sinners Read online

  Saints and Sinners

  Jessie St. James Adventures Book 1

  Mark Stone

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  The End

  Prologue

  Twenty-One Years Ago

  “Rabbit, Rabbit.” The words pulled Jessie from a blissful, dreamless sleep. Even though she had been so comfortable, the sound of his voice made the idea of waking up seem enjoyable. Her eyes flew open to the sight of Nate. He was really here. He was really home. After what felt like forever, her big brother was back from overseas.

  He was a strange sight to behold in his Army fatigues with that close-cropped hair. Still, Jessie would have recognized that smile anywhere. It was the only thing she had wanted to see for seven months, the thing she had prayed for, and now it was here. Now he was here.

  “Nate!” Jessie said, lunging up and throwing her arms around her brother’s shoulders. People often thought it must have made them distant, the ten-year age gap between them. In truth, Jessie wouldn’t have had it any other way. At nine, she couldn’t think of a cooler older brother to have. While all of her friends’ brothers were either snot-nosed brats or middle school jerks who wouldn’t give them the time of day, hers was a bonafide hero. And more than that, they actually liked each other.

  “That’s not what we say, Jess,” Nate said, using a pet name that only he could have gotten away with. “Look at the clock.” Nate pointed to the glowing red numbers. It was a minute after midnight. “Twelve o’clock on June first. So, what do we say, kid? What are the first words out of our mouths?”

  Jessie smiled. She had forgotten all about this. It was one of her brother’s silly superstitions. Something about the English in wartime. Jessie really had no idea what it meant. All she knew was that her brother insisted on beginning every new month by uttering the phrase. It was supposed to be good luck, and though Jessie hadn’t really thought too much about good luck during her nine years on the planet, it certainly seemed better than the alternative. Besides, she’d have done anything her brother asked of her.

  “Rabbit, rabbit,” she said softly into his shoulder. He squeezed her tightly, and she could smell cologne on his clothes, just like their dad’s, just like Nate was a real grownup.

  “I’ve got an idea, Jess. It’s a really good one, too,” he said, pulling away from her and flashing that smile of his again. “I just got in two hours ago, and I was supposed to wait until the morning to see you, but I think we both know I couldn’t do that. What do you say we go downstairs and eat ice cream until our stomachs start to rumble?”

  Jessie’s eyes lit up. Of course, she would do that. Of course, she would want to gorge herself on sweets in the middle of the night with her favorite person in the world, but even at nine, she knew that plan had a serious flaw in it.

  “Mom and Dad would never let me do that,” Jessie answered, her bottom lip jutting outward. “I have to be in bed at nine o’clock, and it’s way past that.”

  Nate shrugged. “There’s no school tomorrow, and Mom and Dad don’t need to know. Dad’s out working on some case and Mom is over at Aunt Paula’s. She broke up with another guy and she’s all devastated about it.” He nudged Jessie’s shoulder. “It’s just you and me, kid. Tonight, we get to make our own rules.”

  Jessie’s heart lit up. Sure, she didn’t like the idea of her dad having to work so late or her aunt’s heart being broken yet again, but her dad was a detective. He knew the drill, and Aunt Paula was used to failed relationships as well. It was going to happen, anyway. So what harm was there if Jessie got some ice cream out of the deal?

  “So, what do our rules say about nighttime dessert parties, Jess?” Nate asked, winking at his sister.

  “They say let’s do it!” Jessie yelled, grinning widely.

  As Jessie spoke, a loud crash sounded from downstairs. Nate’s hands tightened on his sister’s shoulders. Jessie watched as his eyes tightened.

  “What was that?” Jessie asked, a spike of fear jumping up into her chest.

  “I’m sure it was nothing,” Nate said. “There’s a storm outside tonight. You know how the wind gets coming off the water. I’m sure it just knocked something over on the porch again.”

  Nate stood, and Jessie stood with him. She thought she remembered something about their father putting the patio furniture away. He always did during storm season. What did she know, though? She didn’t even know her brother was coming home. For all she knew, he was right about everything.

  “You stay here,” Nate said, nodding at his little sister. “I’m just gonna make sure everything’s okay down there, that no glass broke or anything. Then I’ll be right back up and we can have that ice cream.”

  “No,” Jessie said, grabbing her brother’s arm and tugging it hard. “Don’t go!”

  “I’ll be right back.” He sighed, kneeling and brushing a few strands of hair out of her face. “It’s fine, kid.”

  “I don’t want to be by myself,” Jessie said, unsure why she was feeling so fidgety, so uneasy.

  “It’s just the wind,” Nate answered.

  “Then you should let me come,” she replied.

  “Fine.” He sighed, rolling his eyes and smiling as he stood up. “But stay close to me and don’t touch anything. You hear me? I just got back from a warzone, and that’ll feel like nothing compared to what Mom will do to me if you get hurt on my watch.”

  “I promise,” Jessie said, wrapping her hand around her brother’s and following him out the door of her bedroom and down the stairs. Once she started to descend them, Jessie could hear the beating of the rain. In Florida, it rained like floodgates overhead were being opened pretty routinely. Still, it scared the girl every time.

  “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry,” Nate said, squeezing her hand again. “It’s just a storm. They pass through in no time. Always have, always will.”

  It wasn’t the first time her big brother had told her that exact phrase. In fact, she couldn’t think of a time he wasn’t there for her in one way or another. She never had to feel afraid when he was around, and even at nine, she had a feeling that something like that was very rare.

  Jessie nodded firmly, deciding to believe her brother. After all, as he would tell you, he was always right.

  As they neared the bottom of the staircase, though, Nate pulled his hand away from his sister’s. “Stay right here,” he muttered, and he rushed off toward the front door before the girl had a chance to protest. Settling in front of the door, he looked at the security system their father had put in last year. “Why isn’t this armed?” he asked, mostly to himself. “He armed it. I remember him tapping the . . .”

  Nate’s words fell off to nothing as he took a few steps forward, looking off into what would have been the kitchen if Jessie could have seen it. Slowly, he turned back to his sister.

  “What kind of case is Dad working on?” he asked, his voice suddenly tight and worried.


  Jessie wracked her nine-year-old brain. Her dad was a detective. That was all she knew and all she wanted to know. Besides, everyone knew detectives worked on bad, scary stuff. Why would she want to know anything about that?

  Jessie started to step forward, but her brother’s hand shot up, stopping her in her tracks.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “Not another step.” He swallowed hard, and looking off into the kitchen, he asked, “What do you want? Why are you here?”

  Jessie knew her brother wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to someone else, someone who had no business being inside the house.

  “My father is a police officer,” Nate said. “There’s always someone watching this house. So if I were you, I wouldn’t stick around here too long unless you wanted to end up waiting out this storm in a jail cell.”

  “There are different kinds of storms,” a voice, deep and menacing, replied from somewhere in the kitchen. Jessie couldn’t see where it was coming from, and she was too afraid to go any closer. “And I know exactly who your father is. I know exactly who you are, Nate, you and that little sister of yours.”

  Nate’s face went white and then it steeled up like he was turning into stone. “If you know who I am, then you know exactly what I’m capable of. I’m a soldier in the US Army. I’ve been to combat zones, and I’ve been trained by better people than you to do whatever it takes to keep innocent people safe.”

  “Is that what you think?” the voice asked. “You think you’re innocent? You think that your father is innocent or even that your sister is? Your father has been looking for me. He’s closer than I’d like. But I’m betting that finding the bodies of his children will stop him right in his tracks.”

  “You leave my sister alone, or so help me God, I’ll make you wish you’d never crawled out from under whatever rock you call home,” Nate said.

  “You think God is going to help you tonight?” the voice asked. “I guess we’ll see.”

  Nate’s head whipped over to his sister. “Do you remember the time we played hide and seek?” he asked frantically. “The time you hid for hours and I couldn’t find you? The time even Dad couldn’t find you, no matter how much he looked?”

  Jessie nodded as fearful tears started to fill her eyes.

  “Go there and stay there! Don’t come out until I get you!” Nate said. “Now!”

  Jessie spun quickly, turning back up the stairs and rushing toward the special hiding place. She heard a ruckus as she did, grunting, screaming, and things crashing to the floor.

  She wanted to turn around, to try and help her brother in whatever way she could, but Jessie knew better than that. She was small. She was weak. There was nothing she could do, nothing except get herself killed or her brother killed while trying to protect her.

  She swung into the laundry room and ducked into the small crevice that had existed ever since her mom upgraded to a more expensive (but smaller) washing machine. It was just a sliver, and you couldn’t even see into it from the doorway, but it was big enough for her to sit.

  Jessie breathed heavily, her chest rising and falling frantically as she listened to the sounds of struggle downstairs. She said a prayer, the sincerest of her short life, praying that Nate was right and that this was a storm that would just pass over like all the rest of them. All she wanted was for the sounds of struggling to stop, the sounds of the rain to subside, and for her brother to come back to her.

  In the end, only two of those three things happened. The struggling stopped and the rain passed, but Nate never came back to her. The next face she saw was hours later. It belonged to her father, and it cracked wide open, unleashing a torrent of grief and tears as he told her the worst news of her life.

  1

  Present Day

  “I can’t believe she’s just giving this thing away,” Katie said, looking at Jessie with wide eyes as the pair carried a pristine flat screen TV out of Jessie’s Aunt Paula’s house and into the backseat of her best friend’s car. “And you’re sure you don’t want it? I mean, look at it. It’s in flawless condition.”

  Jessie sighed a little as she pushed the television into the backseat and positioned it so that it would fit in the ’99 Civic her best friend had been driving since both of them were in high school.

  “Nah. I’m not much of a TV person. You know that,” Jessie said, wiping a sheen of sweat, earned not so much by the light exertion as by the heat of the day, and shrugged at her friend.

  “I know,” Jessie said. “But I figured you’d need something to distract you from the wiles of the ever-present parental units.” A sharp chuckle escaped Katie’s lips as though she’d amused herself with her own statement. “I still don’t know why you don’t just move in with me.”

  “Into your one-bedroom, one-bath apartment overlooking the fish market?” Jessie asked, her eyebrows shooting upward. “No, thanks. I think I’m better suited at home, even if it’ll snow ten inches in Florida before my mom speaks to me again.”

  Katie leaned against the car, resting her forearms onto the aged, cherry-red paint job. “She’s just upset. Give her some time. She’ll get over it.”

  “It’s been six months since I moved back, Katie. How much more time am I expected to give her?” Jessie asked.

  “As much as she needs, I guess?” Katie asked, sympathy in her voice. “I know it’s hard, and I’m not taking her side or anything, but you are asking her for a lot.”

  Jessie shook her head hard, doing her best to keep her temper in check. Since coming back home to Sanibel Island, she had found the eight years she’d spent in Chicago had changed her a bit. The big city, the North, the job she had there, stripped away the laid-back, slow-motion attitude she had developed by growing up in a sleepy, sun-soaked place like this. Maybe it was the cold winters, but Jessie just didn’t feel the same. Island folks were different, she had always heard. They stuck together and they protected themselves and each other from an outside world that none of them really wanted to deal with. And if there ever came a day when the outside world could no longer be held at bay, they clung to each other and helped the community get through it. She understood now that these people were slower to everything, including forgiveness. That didn’t mean Jessie had to like it, though, especially when she felt she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “And what are those things, Katie?” Jessie asked, her voice sharper than she intended it to be. “I should apologize for wanting to live my life the way I see fit, for wanting to follow in my father’s footsteps? I’m a grown woman, Katie. I get to do what I want.”

  “A grown woman with a Hanson poster on her bedroom wall,” Katie muttered.

  “Hanson is timeless,” Jessie said quickly. “Doesn’t mean I’m not right.”

  “Of course, you get to do what you want,” Katie answered, keeping her tone level, perhaps in an attempt to calm her friend’s anxiety a little. “But she’s your mom, and you know how parents are. They had certain expectations of us. I know my mom did.” Katie shook her head. “I thought she was going to slap me silly when she found out I wanted to be a hairdresser. I can hear her now, telling me that there’s no future in tending to some old lady’s curls.”

  “And look at you now,” Jessie said. “You own your own business.”

  “I own a two-chair shop in a rented strip building. It’s hardly the Taj Mahal,” Katie said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that you were somebody. You were a bigshot assistant district attorney in Chicago. You were doing well. You were independent. You had actually gotten out of this place.”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing,” Jessie said.

  “Maybe it is,” Katie answered.

  “Maybe,” Jessie replied. “Or maybe it’s not. There's a reason tourists come here in droves. There’s a reason they call it paradise. Maybe, you’d leave here, end up in some big city surrounded by strangers, and realize that the life you have isn’t the one you need. Maybe you’d realize that home was where you nee
ded to be all along.” She shook her head. “And if you realized that, I’d hope your best friend would have your back about it.”

  “You know I’ve always got your back,” Katie answered. “I am always on your side, and that’s why I’m telling you this. If you ever want to get along with your mom again, it might help to be able to see it from her side. I’m not saying she’s right, but in her way, maybe she’s not wrong, either. You were going to be District Attorney, Jess. You were engaged to the mayor’s son. She had your clippings from newspaper articles pinned up on her fridge, Jessie.”

  “It was a job that wasn’t right and a relationship that wasn’t right,” Jessie answered, thinking about the way she used to spend her days in courtrooms, pushing paper around. She also thought about Eddie, about his bright smile and the way he cared for her. He could have been the one, except that he wasn’t. She didn’t blame him, of course. She had been one person when she met and fell in love with him and turned into someone completely different by the time they broke it off. Still, that didn’t mean that leaving him wasn’t every bit as hard as anything she’d ever done in her life.

  “But they were still yours, and that means you had to mourn them,” Katie answered. “Your mom has to mourn them too, kind of. Especially seeing as how you followed it up by doing the one thing she’d always asked you not to. She thinks that old boyfriend of yours, the one who almost got you killed a few months ago, put you up to it.”

  A spike of something like hurt ran through Jessie’s eyes. She didn’t want to admit her best friend had a point, even if she did. Still, she had a couple of points of her own.