She had to do something.
“In your car?”
“Yeah. I drive or we don’t go.”
“I have no problem with that.”
She did, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her. She lived life. She didn’t run from it.
CHAPTER SIX
JAY HAD NO IDEA WHAT, specifically, was going on. But he knew it was significant. In her jeans, Ellen looked about eighteen behind the wheel of her mini SUV as she drove beyond the city limits and approached the highway entrance ramp. He glanced at the steely set of her chin.
From there he watched the road. And waited.
Past the ramp, she turned into a parking lot full of potholes and in need of repair. He’d ridden by the seedy-looking motel turned studio apartment rentals any number of times. At least fifty years old, the place had clearly seen better days, and he had thought it closed before he’d seen a car parked outside one of the rooms earlier in the week.
Judging by the way she drove in without hesitation, Ellen had been there before. She pulled up in front of door fourteen, then put the Escape in Park.
Surely she didn’t live here?
Even if she did, she wouldn’t be taking him inside. The car was still running.
“How much time do you have to talk?”
The question wasn’t what he’d been anticipating. At the least, he’d expected an explanation of why they were here. The trashy place with its peeling paint and filthy windows wasn’t the setting he’d pictured for the intimate conversation he’d been hoping to have.
“A couple of hours. I’ve got a client at two.” In Phoenix. Because work would initially be slow in Shelter Valley, Shawna had asked if he would be willing to do a few sessions in Phoenix. He was using the space of another medical massage therapist who didn’t work weekends.
But right now, Ellen was all that mattered to him.
“I had the perfect life growing up,” she said. “Parents who loved me. A safe town where people care about each other. Enough responsibility to shape me into a contributing member of society, enough freedom to learn from my mistakes, enough material comfort to more than satisfy my needs and enough time for fun.”
Jay listened. He stared at the ugly door and didn’t kid himself that he and Ellen were simply getting to know each other. Something was coming.
The life Ellen described didn’t cause PTSD.
She was narrating her life with the detachment of a stranger. As though she had no connection to the woman about whom she spoke. She was speaking analytically, like a counselor discussing a client.
“All that changed when I was nineteen.”
That young. Damn.
The four was crooked, as though the nail had come loose.
She glanced at him. “I’m sure you’ve seen Montford.” She named the college around which Shelter Valley was built. Around which the town orbited. He nodded.
“My father was a professor there.”
“What field?”
“Psychology.”
So it probably wasn’t her social work degree alone that had given her understanding about life. “Did he share his insights when you were growing up?”
“Yeah.” She smiled, and the warmth that flooded her gaze knocked him for a second. “He was the greatest, always explaining why things were the way they were. From rules they laid down to feelings we’d have in given situations.”
“My father made life bearable, not because he took care of our problems for us, but because he sought always to teach us to take care of them for ourselves.”
The softness disappeared as quickly as it had come.
She was suffering from PTSD. She was so locked up inside that the mere touch to her neck yesterday had unhinged her. This behavior from a woman with a degree and training in dealing with life.
“David says that Dad taught us to fish rather than giving us fish.” Derision dripped from her tone. And he knew it was directed at the man who was both stepfather and best friend to her.
“You don’t agree?”
“Oh, no, I agree,” she said, glancing at him briefly. Her hands were still on the wheel. She wasn’t really gripping it, but she didn’t let go, either.
“David thinks we need to focus on the good that Dad brought us and forgive the rest. I don’t agree.”
Holding on to the anger would bring bitterness. But bitterness served a purpose. Sometimes it was the key to survival—until one was strong enough to survive without it.
“Not about forgiving him,” Ellen added. “I can do that. My father is a weak man. He can’t help that. What I don’t care to do is build him up as some kind of great guy, either. Because he’s not.”
“Because he’s weak?”
“Because he walked out on his responsibilities. Because he lacks moral character.”
If the man had walked out on his family, Jay couldn’t agree more with her assessment. She’d summed up his own bottom line. A man who abandoned his responsibilities lacked moral character.
But he was not getting to know Ellen the way a man gets to know a woman. Even if, personally, he found her interesting.
He wasn’t here to discuss philosophy. Or his own views. He was here to understand what troubled Ellen so he could help her.
“I was at class the night my father told my mother he was leaving her. She tried to hide it from us kids at first. I guess she thought maybe they could fix things. They were high school sweethearts. He was the only guy she’d ever dated. And they’d been married more than twenty years.”
“Had they been having problems?”
“Not that she’d thought. They’d grown apart, but no more so than a lot of couples with four kids to raise.”
“Is he here in town?”
Maybe in room fourteen? Surely Ellen wasn’t rejecting touch because her father had deserted them. She was far too self-sustaining, confident, aware for that.
“No. When he told Mom he was leaving, he didn’t mean he was only leaving her. He was leaving all of us. Permanently. To move East and marry a woman who was a couple of years older than I am. She was his student at Montford. They have two kids now. I’ve never met either one of them. And he’s never been back.”
He agreed with Ellen. The man lacked moral character. In a big way. Jay had a few less acceptable words to describe the guy. But he kept those to himself.
“My father deserted me, too.” Sometimes you helped others by sharing a bit of yourself. College hadn’t taught him that.
Life had.
Telling other victims who had experienced the repercussions of criminal actions about his mother’s death had allowed them to trust him, to open up to him, and give him the information he’d needed to help bring them closure. And peace.
“He left right after I was born.”
She looked at him fully then and the compassion in her gaze struck him. In ways that he was rarely struck. Jay didn’t need her compassion. He didn’t need anyone. Never had.
She was a potential client. Someone he was trying to help. Business as usual.
“Have you ever had contact with him?”
“Nope.”
“Did you ever try?”
“No.”
“You didn’t want to?”
“No.”
“What about your mother?”
“She died when I was a baby.”
“Oh, my gosh, Jay, I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “I had an aunt, my mother’s older sister, who took me in. She loved me. It’s the only life I knew.” So he’d minimized the situation. His history wasn’t important here. Understanding of the effects of a father’s desertion was all that he’d meant to contribute.
JAY MIGHT LOOK DIFFERENT than anyone she’d ever known. He might turn his nose up at Shelter Valley convention, at the town that was as much a part of her as her arms and legs. He might reject the hospitality that had been offered to him. He might not be a churchgoer. But he had suffered. He knew what it was to feel pain.
To be alone.
He wasn’t just a professional anymore. He’d become a person. Ellen wasn’t sure if that made trusting him easier or harder.
“My father left my mother with four teenage children to raise. She had to find a job so that we could keep our house. She’d quit college to marry him and have us so she had no real training. But the new job he’d taken didn’t pay nearly as much as Montford and the child support just wasn’t enough.
“I had a job and helped out with my brother and sisters as much as I could, but I wasn’t him, you know?”
Jay’s nod, the way he looked at her, as though he understood completely, helped her to continue.
“One night, shortly after my father called to say that he and his new wife were expecting a baby, I ran out of gas on my way home from work. I’d been running the kids around a lot and hadn’t paid close enough attention to the gauge. I was pretty upset about my father and not thinking as well as I should have been. I knew I had to figure this out on my own. I’d gotten myself into the situation and had to get myself out. I was dating Aaron, Josh’s father, but he was busy. I couldn’t call Mom and add to her burdens. She hardly had time to eat and was getting only a few hours of sleep a night.”
“You’re being a little hard on yourself. You know that, right? You were nineteen. You’d been driving at most three years. Adults run out of gas. It happens. And when it does, they generally call someone.”
“Hindsight’s twenty-twenty. As it turned out, it would have taken Mom far less time to come and get me.”
The sequence was still so clear and, as she relayed it aloud, it unfolded in her mind as though it was happening for the first time…
SHE AND AARON HAD HAD a fight earlier. He’d accused her of not trusting him. She’d overreacted.
But she did trust Aaron. It was just men and life she was having a little trouble believing in. She hadn’t told him about her father’s last phone call, about the new baby on the way. Or about how frequently she heard her mother crying in her room when she thought they were all asleep. She didn’t know what to do, what she could possibly say that could ease her mother’s pain. In the end, she cried, too.
She didn’t care what Pastor Marks said. Sometimes life sucked.
And now her car wouldn’t start. Ellen turned the key a third time, pumping the gas pedal, but nothing happened. And she knew why. She’d used the last of her gas to flood the engine. The gauge had been below empty when she came into work but she’d decided to fuel up on the way home so she wouldn’t be late.
She should have gotten gas after she’d left college this afternoon, before picking up her sisters and brother from school. There was a station around the corner from Montford. She knew that.
Head on the steering wheel, she promised herself she wouldn’t cry. She’d never run out of gas before. Wasn’t sure what she should do.
Except not call her mother. There was no way she was going to add anything to her mom’s already overflowing plate. The gas station was too far to walk. Besides, there was no guarantee they’d even have a gas can to loan her. And she couldn’t call Aaron. Not after the way she’d stomped off.
This was her problem. She’d gotten herself into it. She could get herself out of it.
Filled with resolve, feeling better, stronger, by taking control of her life, she climbed out of the car and headed for the highway ramp at the front of the Walmart parking lot. She’d noticed girls hitchhiking there before and they always seemed to be picked up almost immediately. That didn’t surprise her. That’s the way things were in Shelter Valley—there was always someone nice willing to help out.
Purse in hand, she reached the road, stuck out her thumb with uncharacteristic boldness and waited. She’d ask to be dropped at Aaron’s dorm. First she’d beg for his forgiveness because that was all she really cared about at the moment. Then, if he accepted her apology, she’d tell him about her car. He’d know where to find a gas can. And he would drive her to her car without ever telling her how stupid she’d been to run out of gas in the first place. That was Aaron’s way.
It was only one of the hundreds of reasons she loved him so much.
So lost in thought about the boyfriend she couldn’t imagine living without, Ellen almost didn’t notice the brand-new Lexus that pulled up beside her. It took the open passenger door and the call to get in to garner her attention. She didn’t recognize the car—or the older man at the steering wheel—which was a surprise in Shelter Valley. But she certainly recognized that the suit he was wearing was expensive.
He must be a friend of the Parsons. As president of Montford University, Will was always entertaining rich and important men from Phoenix. And Becca, the new mayor, knew her share of rich folk, too.
Or maybe he was some friend of the Montfords—descendants of the town’s founder. They were richer than Becca and Will.
“You heading into town?” she asked, holding the edge of the door as she peered at him.
“I am.” He smiled. “If you’d like a ride, hop in.”
With a lift in spirits that had been plummeting all day, Ellen did as he bid, thanking him and giving him directions to Aaron’s dorm. “It’s this side of the main light in town,” she told him. “It’s not far out of the way.”
Finally something positive was happening. It was like Pastor Marks had said. If you can get through the challenges, and if you do all you can do to help yourself, there’s always good on the other side.
“Have you ever been to town before?” she asked the man who had a friendly look about him. “Nope.”
“It’s a great place. You’ll like it.”
“I’m counting on it,” he said, smiling at her again.
“The turn’s right ahead.” He nodded.
“After that next group of trees.”
He nodded again, tapping his thumb on the steering as he drove.
“There,” she said quickly when it looked as though he was going to miss the road.
He drove past.
“That was it,” Ellen said, sorry that he was going to have to turn around, that she was costing him more time than intended. She’d tried to be so clear.
He didn’t slow down. Didn’t turn around. Didn’t even appear to have heard her.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Did you hear what I said? You missed the turn.” Did he have Alzheimer’s or something? She’d heard Becca talking to her mother about one of the ladies at the new adult day care in town and how her family had had to take away her keys because she’d gotten in the car and forgotten not only where she was going, but most of the rules of driving, as well.
God, please don’t let him wreck. Her mom would die if she were to get a phone call that Ellen had been in an accident. It was a parent’s worst nightmare. Everyone knew that.
She tried a couple more times to get his attention.
He didn’t say anything, just smiled at her and nodded.
But on the other side of town he slowed and Ellen breathed her first sigh of relief. She would get out as soon as she could, find a phone and call Aaron. Even angry, he’d come to get her. And call for someone to help the old man, too.
Not that he really appeared old enough to have Alzheimer’s, but it did hit some people in their fifties. And no one she knew had ever acted this odd before.
“This isn’t anyplace you want to be,” she told him, knowing he was out of it for sure when he pulled into the parking lot of a run-down boardinghouse that used to be a motel during the early gold mining days.
The man was scaring her.
Especially when he pulled up to a door and grabbed a key from the console between them. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Was he crazy? She wasn’t going anywhere with him.
“Oh, so that’s the game you want?” he asked, not sounding crazy at all. He held her wrist as though being used to getting exactly what he wanted.
Which was what? The man was rich. Dressed nice. Driving an expensive car.
“
I don’t know what—”
“Let’s go, sweetie. I don’t have a lot of time before my wife expects me—” He frowned, as though he’d said too much, but he did let go of her wrist.
Ellen didn’t even think. She wrenched open the door, intending to run as fast as she could to the nearest sign of humanity. Wherever that was.
With one foot out of the car, she propelled herself forward, trying to figure out which direction would be the safest bet. She had the sick feeling she might only get one chance.
Her second foot got tangled up between the seat and her leg. She started to fall.
Except that the man was there, catching her. “So you like it rough, huh?” He sounded excited in a way she’d never heard before, but still recognized. “They didn’t tell me that.”
“No!” She pulled at his grasp, unable to feel anything but the urgent need to escape. His words made no sense to her.
His grip made no sense to her.
Aaron! Her heart screamed, even as her mind refused to work. Something terrible was happening and she didn’t know why.
She had to get away. For Aaron. For Mom. For herself. She had to do something.
The man had her body in an iron clutch, carrying her to the door a few feet away. She kicked him. Hard. On his shins. Over and over. She tried to reach higher, but he had his legs too close together.
“You little bitch,” he said, but he didn’t sound mad. Somehow she seemed to be pleasing him.
Oh, God.
Ellen screamed. So long and hard the sound ripped at her throat. There was no one around to hear. He covered her mouth with his own, eating up her sound, but not the burning in her tonsils.
She had to vomit. She bit him to make him release her.
He bit her back, sliding her along his body to hold her between his legs while, with one hand on her swollen mouth, he unlocked the door with the other.
Then, with his hands on her breasts, his body pressed against her backside, he pushed her ahead of him into the room and kicked the door shut behind them.
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