Smolder (The Road to Rocktoberfest 2024)

27. Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-seven

Skyler

I stared at Sandy. His face looked as if he were mimicking a fish. He didn’t know what to call me, and honestly, I wasn’t sure what to call him. We hadn’t had a formal discussion yet.

The deputy was staring at him, which wasn’t helping anything, so I spoke up. “I’m Mr. Kensington’s houseguest, as are those young guys. They’re a band, and I’m the older brother of some of the members. Skyler Ashe.” I extended my hand, and he shook it.

“Anyway, I was having coffee on the pool deck and noticed the door looked odd. I went to get my shoes and came out to see the door was busted open and some of the band’s equipment had been destroyed. We were all here last night and didn’t hear anything.”

Deputy Sloane pulled a pad from the back pocket of his uniform pants and a pen from his shirt pocket and began making notes. Two hours later, he’d chatted with all of us—nobody had heard anything—and he’d taken pictures.

He turned to Sandy. “You can come by the sheriff’s office to pick up a copy of the report for your insurance. I’m sure sorry about this, Mr. Kensington. We don’t usually get vandalism calls out here. Do you have a security system?”

“Oh! Yeah. Let’s go inside, Deputy. I’ll get my laptop.” Sandy and the deputy went inside, with the rest of us following.

I was still trying to figure out what to do about my house. Obviously, I needed to go back to West Peoria to assess the damage. Sandy didn’t seem to think it was random, but who the hell would do something like this to me?

“I’ll be right back, Deputy. Sky, would you get the man something to drink?” I nodded as Sandy rushed upstairs. The bandmates all sat around the kitchen table like our own mini audience. I rolled my eyes at them.

“I just got a call that my house in West Peoria, Illinois, was broken into last night. My neighbor called the police since I’m here. I haven’t called them yet.”

The deputy wrote something down and looked at me. “What do you do, Mr. Ashe?”

“I’m a band and choir director for the West Peoria school district.” He wrote it down.

“Do any of your students know you’re gone?”

Shit! That stupid post!

“Yes. One of my colleagues happened to be at Mountain Fest outside Las Vegas, where we played, and she posted the video of our performance. I followed up and told my students about my summer plans to tour California. West Peoria is a small town. Everyone knows where everyone lives.”

The deputy chuckled. “I know the feeling. Is it possible that one of your students might be upset with you over a grade, and once they learned you weren’t at home, they broke in and vandalized your home? Sounds like a coincidence to me.”

With his logic, I tended to agree. “That’s probably right.” Sandy returned with his laptop, so I excused myself downstairs to call the West Peoria police department about my break-in. I’d need information to file a claim on my renter’s insurance if everything was as damaged as Mrs. Flannery had said.

Early the next morning, Sandy and I were on a flight from San Jose to Peoria International Airport. Thankfully, we were sitting in first class at Sandy’s insistence. I was coming to learn Sandy could be very persistent—like when he demanded to come with me to assess the damage.

“Why don’t you close your eyes? We change planes in Dallas, and we have about two hours, so we can get a decent meal there. Don’t eat whatever they serve. It’s just heartburn in quasi-fancy dishes.” I cracked up at his comment.

I hadn’t slept much, though lying next to Sandy had been a huge comfort. Marshall had left the previous evening after he returned to Sandy’s house and met the nice deputy. The guy asked him a lot of questions, many I wasn’t sure were necessary to help the case.

Marshall acted squirrelly, but I didn’t know if that was normal, so I didn’t bring it up. The footage Sandy’s security system caught was dark and grainy, which pissed him off. There was one person wearing a hoodie, and they’d used a pipe of some kind to bust the garage door. The garage camera wasn’t much better, but my heart broke as I watched the person smashing my drum set.

“I can’t sleep until I see how bad it is. I’ve gone over and over it in my head, and I can’t imagine any of my students doing something so stupid. I mean, grades are sort of subjective, but I’m an easy touch. I give grades based on participation, and most of my kids are great students. I used to give them all A s, but I got yelled at by the other teachers, so I started letting the students grade each other and then averaged it, and that was the grade assigned. None of the grades were lower than a B-minus.”

Sandy squeezed my hand. “Kids are unpredictable, based on the shit I used to do when I was growing up. Everything was done on a whim when some other asshole came up with a stupid idea. Try to relax, teach. I wish you’d let me charter a plane like I wanted. We could be fucking in a bed right now.”

I chuckled. “You’re great in bed, but that would have been a very expensive fuck. I can’t believe I let you talk me into first class.”

Sandy kissed my cheek. “My dad taught Marsh and me to watch our money, which I do for the most part, but that would have been worth every penny.”

He closed his eyes and was out like a light before the hot towels came.

When we landed at Peoria International Airport—no idea what international flights left from Peoria—Christine and her police officer fiancé, Rich, were there to pick us up. Sandy had wanted to rent a car, but I had my Escape parked in the garage at my house. We didn’t need a rental.

I hugged Christine when we came out of security. “Thank you for picking us up, but I told you we could get a taxi or an Uber.”

Rich stuck out his hand to Sandy. “Rich Sohn, Christine’s fiancé. It’s great to meet you. You were a hell of a tackle.” Ah, the bonding over sports has begun!

“Sandy Kensington, Skyler’s personal valet.” They laughed at that because Sandy had taken my bag from me as we walked off the plane.

“Have you gone by the house?” I asked Christine as we headed toward the parking lot.

“Rich went by. It’s more of a mess than damaged. The couch was trashed, for some reason, but your clothes and things in your bedroom weren’t really. It’s almost like they just took the things out of the drawers and put them on the floor.”

Behind us, Rich and Sandy were discussing a game when Sandy played for another team before he was traded to the Breeze. They were talking over each other, so I wasn’t sure how they heard what the other said, but when they high-fived, I figured they must have caught enough of it to understand.

“Do you have any thoughts on who might have done this?” Maybe I was too close to the kids to have any objectivity. I just couldn’t see any of them capable of doing something so mean.

“Rich asked me the same thing, and honestly, I couldn’t see any of our music students doing this. Some of the football players? You bet, but that would mean they had to even think about you, and we both know out of sight, out of mind with that crew. Oh, but Coach Sutter got fired. I forgot to send you that little morsel. Seems he got pulled over with an underaged girl in the car. She doesn’t go to our school. The story is they met online, and the girl lied about her age. Anyway, he’s out, and they’re frantically looking for a new football coach and athletic director. Coach Adams said he’ll double for preseason training, but he also teaches science and calculus, so he can’t really do much more.”

We got into Rich’s double-cab pickup, and he drove us to my little house in West Peoria. “We’re reviewing footage of the doorbell cameras in the area to see if we can find anything, but it’s summer, and a lot of kids live on your street. Brett Aames is a good cop. If there’s anything to find, he’ll find it. He’ll be coming by later. I’ll let him know you’re here so he can talk to you about this. Chris and I tried to pick up a little after Brett released the scene, and I fixed the backdoor where they broke in.”

“Thanks, Rich.”

He pulled his truck into my driveway, and from the outside, my house looked as it had when I left it. I pulled the keys from my pocket and let us all in through the front door. The couch was completely trashed, but then again, that wasn’t a great loss.

I walked into my bedroom to see some clothes stacked on my bed while other things had been returned to the hangers. “Thank you both for cleaning up.”

“Like I said, it was more like they just took stuff out of the drawers and put it on the floor. Same thing with the kitchen. No broken dishes, just stacked on the counters. The flatware and utensils had been dumped on the counters and floor, but none of it was wrecked.”

Christine stepped closer to me and patted my shoulder. "Maybe one of the kids has cousins in town and thought it would be fun to cause a little chaos? They might not be in band or choir, and I think when it came time to actually do the damage, one of them felt guilty.”

“Chris, let Brett talk to him about it, honey. Let’s get going if we’re driving to Chicago for the registry crap.”

Christine turned on him like a honey badger. “I’m not the one who’s demanding we register for all this fancy stuff, Richard. It’s your mother—”

Sandy covered his mouth to hide a laugh, I was sure, before he looked at the crappy carpet in my bedroom. He bent down under the bed and came up with a guitar pick. “Always the musician.”

I chuckled as I stared at it. It wasn’t mine, but I did have some in my drawer at school. How long had it been since I’d vacuumed, anyway?

We walked Christine and Rich, who were still arguing, to the front door and thanked them for the ride again. When I closed the door, I stared at the trashed couch. “I guess I better see if I can hire someone to haul that to the dump. I probably need to go to the store too. I got rid of anything that might go bad in my fridge, but I was so busy before I left that I hadn’t picked up groceries in a while. Let me call Officer Aames to see when he wants to come by, and then we can go get something to eat since we didn’t eat in Dallas.”

The restaurant near our gate had been too crowded to wait for a table, so we’d grabbed some granola bars from the news stand and toughed it out. I was starving, and I was sure Sandy was too.

Sandy and I went to a local brewery to grab some lunch. We each ordered a beer and some brisket sandwiches. “You eat here often?” Sandy was taking in the sights, and I was taking in Sandy.

“Not much. It’s a little pricey for my teacher’s salary, though we have come here for our Christmas party. They gave us a deal, and we had that private room over there.” I pointed to the closed barn door near the entrance.

“I hate to ask this, but how much does a band teacher make in the middle of Illinois?”

I laughed. “A little more than forty-six. I live in a relatively cheap part of the country, so it’s doable, but there are things I do for students that make money tight.” I didn’t go into detail. He didn’t need to hear the woes of a band teacher.

“Forty-six an hour?”

I’d picked up my beer to take a sip, and I nearly spit it out at his question. “No. A year.”

Sandy did spit out his beer, making me laugh. I grabbed napkins from the table next to us that needed to be bused and wiped up the mess.

“How— Jeez, how do people survive on that?” I could see he was being serious.

“It’s not easy, and there’s just me. I’m not sure how families make it. I’ve taken bags of groceries to colleagues’ homes and left them anonymously when I hear someone’s ill or having a hard time. We try to help each other when we can. That’s the best part of living in a small town.” It was something I loved about living in West Peoria.

“How about other LGBTQ folks? Many in town?”

“A couple of my kids have same-sex parents, but the families seem to stay to themselves. I’m not out because I don’t want to become a target for those who aren’t tolerant of our rainbow family. I seriously don’t step outside my social circle in town, which is very small. I go to Chicago sometimes and hang out in Andersonville. There are clubs there, though I’m not really a club guy outside of Pride.”

Sandy chuckled. “My former teammate has a club in Andersonville, or rather, one of his partners does. Jackson runs a gym, I believe. Anyway, do you miss having stuff nearby like in San Jose?”

“Not really. I grew up in Cupertino. It’s bigger than here, but I went to college in Carbondale, and I loved it. That’s part of the reason why I took the job here. I like small-town life.” Sandy started to touch my shoulder but glanced around and put his hand down. It made me sad, though I knew he was doing it for my benefit, not because public affection bothered him at all.

Our food came, and I gave him the update Christine had given me about Coach Sutter being fired.

“Jesus. That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.”

I finished my brisket sandwich and wiped my mouth. “Yeah, not the best judgment call he could have made.”

We finished our beers, and Sandy reached for the check.

“Nope. My treat. Consider it another date,” I said.

We went to the grocery store to pick up enough food for the couple of days we were planning to stay, and then we went back to my place. We put the groceries away, and I was exhausted.

After closing the refrigerator door, I turned to Sandy, who was folding my cloth grocery bags to put in the pantry. “Wanna take a nap?” I gave a wink for effect.

Sandy stepped closer and wrapped me in his arms. “I could take a nap.” He leaned forward and flipped me over his shoulder, smacking my ass as he carried me to the bedroom.

How was I ever going to live without Sandy when my magical summer was finished?