I Mean You No Harm Read online

  Also by Beth Castrodale

  In This Ground

  Marion Hatley

  IMBRIFEX BOOKS

  8275 S. Eastern Avenue, Suite 200

  Las Vegas, NV 89123

  Imbrifex.com

  I Mean You No Harm: A Novel

  Copyright © 2021 by Beth Castrodale. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  IMBRIFEX® is registered trademark of Flattop Productions, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Castrodale, Beth, 1964- author.

  Title: I mean you no harm : a novel / Beth Castrodale.

  Description: First edition. | Las Vegas, NV : Imbrifex Books, 2021. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020050885 (print) | LCCN 2020050886 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781945501692 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781945501708 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781945501722 (audiobook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.A889 I46 2021 (print) | LCC PS3603.A889

  (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050885

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050886

  Jacket design: Jason Heuer

  Book design: Sue Campbell

  Author photo: Greg M. Cooper

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  First Edition: August 2021

  For Grant and Neil,

  beloved brothers and friends

  “The wolves in the woods have sharp teeth and long claws, but it’s the wolf inside who will tear you apart.”

  —Jennifer Donnelly

  Chapter 1

  The Wake

  Reedstown, Ohio, 2019

  Layla never imagined she’d see her father again. But here she was, staring into his lily-draped casket.

  The movie-star looks that had hooked her mother were long gone.

  So was the figure from the courtroom sketches, expressionless except for the dark eyes brimming with what one reporter described as “menace.” That same reporter nicknamed him “Thundercloud.”

  So was the man Layla had last seen during that ill-fated road trip twenty years ago, when those same dark eyes seemed edged with regret.

  Heart disease, years of it, had killed him at the age of sixty-five. Not a bullet from a rival or a cop, the type of ending that part of her had always expected. The disease had bloated his features beyond familiarity to her, and the rose-colored lights trained on him, surely intended to suggest the flush of life, did nothing but broadcast that this was the location of a dead body, the one she and fifty-some other guests had filed into Parlor A of Hanlon Funeral Home to see.

  Someone tapped her shoulder.

  “Layla?”

  She turned and saw a hollow-cheeked figure in a pale green dress and white cowboy boots, her gray hair bottle-brush short.

  “Layla, it’s Bette.”

  Layla would have guessed the woman standing before her to be in her late forties at the youngest. But if she was remembering correctly, Bette was thirty-seven, just five years older than herself.

  “Of course. Good to see you.”

  The awkward question arose, unspoken: hug or not? Bette answered it by extending her hand. Layla shook it firmly, “but without breaking bones,” her grandpa’s old instructions.

  “You too,” Bette said.

  Bette barely resembled the teenager from the road trip. Back then, she’d had weight to her, and thick, shoulder-length brown hair. The only familiar feature was the half-smirk of a smile, as if she were about to say, You’re full of shit.

  Bette nodded toward the casket. “He’d be glad you made it.”

  Would he? Based on her last encounter with her father, Layla wouldn’t have assumed as much. Nor would she have assumed that Bette would ever want to see her again, half-sister or not. And given how things had gone on the road trip, Layla came to believe that Bette had caused every single bit of the trouble her grandparents used to discuss in low voices. But things were different now, or so it seemed. If Layla’s recent phone conversation with Bette was to be believed, she was now a responsible single mother with an associate’s degree and a steady job as a security guard.

  Even Bette’s smile looked slightly different, the half-smirk now suggesting some mutual understanding, as if she and Layla were in on the same ongoing joke. Age, maybe, was the only thing that could explain this.

  “Ready to meet Marla? And Jake?”

  “Sure,” Layla said.

  She followed Bette away from their father’s body, away from the cloying smell of lilies, toward a far corner of the room.

  On her drive to the funeral home, Layla envisioned an assemblage of stereotypical mobsters: thick-bodied thugs in cheap-looking suits or athletic wear, all of them flashing some type of gold: chains, rings, or watches. As it turned out, a few attendees matched this description, but they were far outnumbered by ordinary-looking men and women mostly middle aged or older, with a few young adults and toddlers sprinkled here and there, presumably children or grandchildren of the mourners. Most guests looked like the ones who’d attended her grandparents’ funerals.

  Still, as she and Bette made their way around and through the clusters of guests, Layla took in as many male faces as she could, just as she’d done on the way up to the coffin. She searched for anyone resembling the picture her mother had drawn, years ago, during one of her waitressing shifts. Any man with dark, down-turned eyes and a widow’s peak. Any man with a blank yet devouring stare.

  Once again, no luck.

  Once again, Layla told herself that it had been thirty years since her mother had made that drawing on the back of an order sheet. By now, maybe, the man she’d sketched was dead. Just like her.

  As she and Bette neared a lamp-lit nook, a sixty-ish woman in a navy blue dress rose from a sofa and smiled. The boy who’d been sitting next to her did the same.

  “Marla, this is Layla,” Bette said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” the woman said, taking Layla’s hand. “And sorry for your loss.”

  “Likewise,” Layla said. She’d meant this as a response to the Pleased to meet you, doubting that the death of Vic Doloro, in Marla’s reckoning, could in any way be considered a loss.

  Marla was the sister of Bette’s late mother, Vic’s ex-wife. And apparently, she’d had a ringside seat to the disintegration of her sister’s marriage. As Bette had put it to Layla over the phone, “Dad was never any saint in Marla’s book. But she loves my kid, and I’m pretty sure she’s fond of me.” Bette mentioned how Marla was helping to look after her son, Jake, whose father had bolted not long after he was born.

  Layla wondered whether Marla had ever harbored any ill will toward her own mother, and by extension toward herself. Bette once had, and maybe still did.

  As far as Layla knew, her mom had gotten involved with Vic shortly after his divorce, but maybe Marla and Bette suspected an affair, and maybe they were right. In any case, the relationship between Vic and her mom en
ded inside of two years and never resulted in marriage. The only lasting consequence of it was Layla herself.

  “You must be Jake,” Layla said, turning to the curly-headed kid in the purple dress shirt.

  “Yep.” He accepted her hand and gave it an energetic shake, not quite a bone-cruncher. It made her smile, just as he was doing now.

  “Glad to meet you, Jake.”

  “You too!”

  When Layla first learned of Jake’s Down syndrome, she imagined a boy with flattened features, and an upward slant to his eyes. Those were there, but so was his mother’s smile-smirk.

  Looking toward a group of exiting guests, Marla shouldered her purse, as if she were ready to follow them. Then she turned to Layla. “I hope you’re still gonna stay with us tonight.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, Layla would have kept her visit as short as politely possible. She would have stayed long enough for dinner with Bette, Marla, and Jake and driven home later this evening, giving some reasonable-sounding excuse for skipping tomorrow’s funeral. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances. During the same phone call in which Bette told Layla of Vic’s death, in which they caught up on as much other news as they could for the time being, Bette said, “I have something for you. Something from Dad.”

  Layla’s first thought: Dad? I’ve never had anything that could be described as a Dad. Her next thought, which she expressed in words: “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Bette said. “Not over the phone.”

  Because you’re worried your phone is being tapped, Layla thought. Because the “something” is criminal, just like our father was.

  When Layla expressed her reservations, Bette said, “I promised him I would do this, Layla. Just hear me out, in person. Then you can decide for yourself if you want this, this gift.”

  Layla had instantly pictured a gold-plated revolver, in a Tiffany-style box with a bow. That picture came back to her now.

  But it wasn’t just the gift that had brought Layla here. There was also her mother’s drawing, tucked in Layla’s back right pocket.

  “Let’s get you some dinner,” Bette said. “You must be hungry. And tired.”

  The truth was, Bette seemed far more tired than Layla felt; in fact, she didn’t look well. Maybe she was fighting a case of the flu? As Bette followed Marla toward the exit, as she threw an arm across Jake’s shoulders, she seemed to sway in her boots.

  When Bette reached the doorway, a man materialized from the crowd by the guestbook stand: a tall, lawyerly-looking sort in a tailored blue suit. Layla guessed he was one of the Hanlon staffers, until he took Bette’s arm and leaned in close, whispered something in her ear.

  Layla stayed back, sensing this was something private, if not intimate.

  Then he let go of Bette’s arm, and she moved ahead, not waiting to introduce Layla to him. With Jake on her arm, Bette followed Marla into the hall, not looking back.

  As Layla approached the doorway, she glanced toward the man and caught his eye. He nodded back, as if Bette might have told him who she was. Then again, the nod might have been simple politeness.

  No down-turned eyes, she observed. No widow’s peak.

  Disappointment over finding no matches between the drawing and any of the men in this room wouldn’t surface until the wake was hours in the past. Right now, Layla just felt relief.

  When she reached the door to the parking lot, Bette was holding it open for her.

  It wasn’t until this moment that it occurred to her: This was it. She would never see her father’s face again, in anything other than photographs. Tomorrow, he’d be a closed casket on a stand, by a hole in a graveyard.

  Thank God I look almost nothing like him, Layla thought, stepping into the night. Thank God I look like Mom.

  Chapter 2

  A Meal, A Gift,

  A Proposition

  Reedstown, Ohio

  Bette’s house was as ordinary as Layla had expected. A fifties-era ranch on a freshly mowed corner lot, it was decently maintained inside and out but not fussed over. The dining room wallpaper—roses climbing a yellowed background, a viny border repeating “Home Sweet Home”—surely reflected the taste of an earlier occupant. With the exception of Jake’s art on the refrigerator, and the collection of family photographs on one wall of the living room, everything else Layla could see seemed businesslike—from the furniture unadorned by knick-knacks or throw pillows to the stack of pressed security shirts on the dining room hutch, topped with a walkie-talkie.

  Layla sat facing the shirts now, over the remnants of her dinner.

  She’d kept her mouth shut about being a vegetarian because that seemed like a rude thing to mention to near strangers who had cooked a meal for her. Instead, she’d accepted then picked at a small hunk of the roasted chicken, before burying it under what remained of her once-huge pile of mashed potatoes. But she’d eaten all of her candied carrots and buttered green beans.

  “That was delicious,” Layla said, laying her fork across her plate.

  Marla nodded toward the platter of chicken they all sat around. “There’s plenty left. Have some more.”

  “I can’t, but thanks.”

  Marla and Jake had cleared their plates of everything, and Jake was eyeing the bowl of potatoes like he was ready for round two.

  Bette had barely touched either the single drumstick she’d taken, or her meager scoop of potatoes. Probably, exhaustion was a factor, from the wake and everything else surrounding Vic’s death.

  Layla was exhausted, too, but for another reason: nights of insomnia over the recently discovered drawing by her mother, and over other worries that had nothing to do with Vic.

  Under the globe light of the dining room, Bette looked yellowish, worse than she had in the pink glow of the funeral home. Layla guessed she wanted to crawl into her bed as soon as possible, and let sleep do what it could against whatever illness had clearly taken hold.

  Jake glanced at Layla, then scooped the last of the potatoes onto his plate. “Mom told me you draw really good. Just like me.”

  Layla thought back on Jake’s art, magnet-pegged to the refrigerator: a series of drawings that told a story, like panels in a comic book. Jake had taken her by the arm and walked her to them the minute she entered the house.

  In the drawings, bug-eyed robots and dogs chased each other back and forth through hoops and over walls, their bodies radiating lines of colored ink. The lines suggested motion, eagerness, perhaps insanity. In the picture-story, the littlest dog with craziest eyes—huge spinning circles of orange and red—was overtaking the largest robot.

  “You do draw really good,” Layla said. “I’m impressed.”

  Jake swallowed a mouthful of potatoes and dug in for more. “Could I make money from drawing? I mean, do you?”

  “Jake!” Bette shot him a look. “You don’t ask personal questions about money. It’s rude, and people don’t like it.”

  “It’s okay,” Layla said to Bette. “I don’t mind talking about it.” Then she turned to Jake. “I make some money from art, but not enough to live on. And that’s typical. Most artists have to have other jobs.”

  Layla thought of the last painting she’d sold, a month ago, the day before she was laid off from her administrative assistant gig. The five hundred dollars she’d got for it had all but vanished from her echo chamber of a bank account. She could only hope that her first unemployment check would arrive by the end of next week, before her next round of bills rolled in.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said to Jake. “Why do you draw?”

  Jake smashed a hunk of butter into the last of his potatoes. “’Cause it’s fun. ’Cause I’m damn good at it.”

  “Language!” Marla said. But she was smiling. So was Bette.

  “Those are good reasons,” La
yla said. “Probably the best ones of all. Try to think of them, not the money part.” Maybe this was only wishful advice, more for herself than for Jake.

  “Hey, Mom!” Jake had turned his full attention on Bette. “You’re getting more art stuff from Phoenix, right? Like that thing with the knobs, where you draw on the screen?”

  “Yes, honey,” Bette said.

  “You’re getting it this week, right?”

  “I’m leaving for it this week. Day after tomorrow, after Grandpap’s funeral. But Phoenix is a bit of a drive. So, it’s gonna take some time for me to get there and back.”

  Grandpap. Clearly, Jake—and Bette—had had a far closer relationship with Vic than Layla ever did, which maybe wasn’t saying much. Still, Vic figured into at least three of the pictures on the living room wall. Slightly less bloated versions of him pushed an inner-tubed Jake in a swimming pool, threw an arm around a robed Bette at a graduation ceremony, tried to look more happy than annoyed in a group photograph that included Bette and Jake, and others unknown to Layla.

  Jake, who seemed undaunted by Bette’s disappointing news, finished his potatoes, laid his fork on his plate, and announced, “I decided I’m going with you, Mom.”

  “No,” Bette said, “you’re staying here and going to school. We’ll take a trip some other time.”

  During this exchange, Marla didn’t take her eyes off Bette, as if she wanted Bette to see the disapproving look that had settled onto her face. But Bette stayed focused on Jake, as if Marla weren’t there. Or Layla.

  At last, Marla spoke up: “Why can’t they just send you the darn stuff? Why do you have to drive all the way to Phoenix to get it?”

  “Because they want Dad’s golf clubs and his old landscaping tools. That’s all part of the deal.”

  Noticing Layla’s confusion, Bette explained the deal to her: in return for the golf clubs and tools, someone in Phoenix was going to hand over to Bette a bunch of learning aids for Jake, including the computer-assisted Etch A Sketch thing he was so excited about: an early gift for his twelfth birthday. This had all been made possible through Craigslist.