Beard Up

by Lani Lynn Vale

  Mrs. Temperance was her friend Lindsay’s mother, and also a right bitch. I hated her, but I couldn’t really say that to my eight-year-old. She’d want to know why, and I would have to tell her that not every mom could make a home cooked meal every day from scratch and still look like she was stepping out of Penthouse.

  So I chose not to say anything at all, and I continued to endure the woman’s ugly words and childish attempts to make my child think I was the devil who cooked out of boxes.

  I walked to the counter where my roses—the roses from my dead husband—sat and inhaled deeply, basking in the scent.

  I also bit my lip as I tried not to cry my eyes out.

  The first birthday I’d received these after my husband had died hadn’t been a good night for me. I ended up going to the bar owned by the Dixie Wardens, Halligans and Handcuffs, and got rip-roaring drunk while one of the club ladies watched my daughter for me.

  Ever since, I’d managed to control my drinking until after she was in bed, but it was a close call sometimes as I remembered why my husband had started this tradition in the first place.

  We’d met when I was sixteen and Tunnel was seventeen.

  He’d been the teenage boy who lived at the house that my mother cleaned. He’d been the client’s son, and he was so handsome.

  After sitting in the car—the very hot car—for the fourth summer day in a row while my mother cleaned their house from top to bottom (even though it didn’t need it), Tunnel had spotted me and invited me inside.

  At first, I’d declined, but Tunnel had been good. And by good, I mean he guilt tripped me into doing exactly what he wanted me to do, and I fell for it like the besotted girl that I was. The same naïve girl who also had no clue that his family, the family that also employed my mother, would soon be my demise.

  He’d seduced me with his pretty words, and soon we became the best of friends.

  Then, as time had went on, we became more than friends.

  Two years to the day from when we’d met, we became lovers. Then, we’d become parents.

  Which had then started setting off a turn of events that neither one of us had ever seen coming.

  Fast forward nine months and we were happy, married, and in love.

  Though, neither set of our parents had approved. Both sets had disowned us, and even now, I never saw any of them, even all these years later. Sienna was eight years old, and not once had any of our parents met her, except in passing at the supermarket. Though that didn’t happen anymore since we’d moved out on our own.

  But I had my daughter. I had some great years with Tunnel before I’d lost him, and I had my dreams.

  My phone started to ring again, and I reluctantly picked it up.

  “Hi, Josh,” I said into the phone, not bothering to pretend that I didn’t know exactly who it was that was calling.

  “Hey, darlin’,” Josh said in his smooth, melted chocolate voice. “Are you cooking tonight?”

  Josh was so different from Tunnel. Where Tunnel had been hard, Josh was soft. Where Tunnel’s words were sometimes blunt and honest, Josh’s never failed to have the right amount of honey laced through them. Josh had brown hair where Tunnel had had dirty blonde. Josh was light, Tunnel was dark.

  Shit. There I went again, comparing apples to oranges.

  “Mina?” Josh’s tone was almost hopeful, and I wanted to smack him. I’d invited him for dinner once and once only, and now he thought that I would cook for him whenever he damn well pleased.

  Well, he’d be wrong. It was time to fix this before it got any worse than it already was.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized, scrounging up the courage to say what I had to say next. “But I’m not interested in you in a romantic way, and when I’m around you, it’s the vibe I get. I don’t want to lead you on or allow you to think that I’m searching for something like that from you.”

  His rumbling laughter was enough to cause me to breathe deeply, thankful that he wasn’t mad.

  “That’s fine, honey,” he said. “I wasn’t looking for that from you anyway. When my Melody died, I didn’t think I’d ever find someone who understood my pain. I just think it’s nice to be around someone who doesn’t look at me as if I am about to break every thirty seconds.”

  I knew exactly what he was talking about, unfortunately.

  “That’s good to know, Josh,” I whispered. “As long as you’re sure that you’re not interested in that, then we’re having sweet tea, hot dogs and macaroni and cheese.”

  I only wish that I’d known that by agreeing to that dinner, I was setting off a chain of events that would drag me so far into a black hole that I didn’t think I’d ever see light again.

  Chapter 4

  I see all these moms who can do everything, and I think, ‘they should do stuff for me.’

  - Mina’s secret thoughts

  Mina

  I arrived home to my house to find Josh standing on my front porch.

  Sienna was in the back seat, and I was wondering if it would be rude to turn around and leave while he was still watching.

  I knew it was, but I’d had a long ass day at work, and I just wanted to come home, slip into a pair of yoga pants and eat a shit-ton of potato chips.

  But, seeing the man on my front porch, I knew that wasn’t going to be possible.

  He’d probably ask for dinner, and most days, since I felt sorry for him, I would give in to him despite not wanting him there at all.

  When I tried to say no to him, he’d get this pitiful look on his face that reminded me of a small child not getting the sucker he asked for and then pouting until he got it.

  Most of the time I gave the man what he wanted, but today wasn’t going to be one of those days.

  I didn’t feel well, I’d started my period a few hours into my shift, and I was wearing stained underwear that needed to be removed from my body hours ago. Unfortunately, as a nurse, you didn’t get the option of going home in the middle of your shift to change because you got period blood all over your panties.

  Hence the reason I was in such a bad mood.

  Resigned that I was going to have to pull out the bitch card, I pulled into my garage, and quickly shut the door before Josh could round the house.

  Then I shut the car off, ordered Sienna to her room to finish her homework and headed to the front door.

  Josh was waiting for me the minute I got there.

  “Hey, how are you?” Josh caught the screen door as I pushed it open, but I blocked his entrance with my body.

  “I’m not feeling well today, Josh,” I informed him. “I’m going to need a rain check.”

  He frowned. “Time for me to cook then?”

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “Honestly, Sienna and I want some time to ourselves. We’re going to eat on the couch and watch a movie.”

  His lips thinned.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow!”

  I closed the door on his frowning face and felt my heart slamming in my chest at ninety to nothing.

  “Mom, my homework was in my backpack, but I think I might’ve left it at the tutor’s because I can’t find it.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “We’ll run by there tomorrow before school, and we’ll work on it in the car in the drop off line…”

  “But I have a spelling test tomorrow, and that’s in there with them, too.”

  I growled in annoyance.

  “Fine,” I sighed. “Let me go change my clothes, and we’ll go.”

  So after changing clothes, I drove the twenty minutes across town to the tutoring center, then all the way back home.

  Only, this time, when I got home, there was no Josh standing outside my door.

  Most people would’ve thought that he’d gone to his own house. Hell, that’s what I thought he’d done, too.

  But ohhh, no. Of course, he wouldn’t do that.

  Instead, he’d gon
e into my house and started using my kitchen to make dinner.

  “Josh, what are you doing in my house?” I snapped loudly.

  Josh didn’t even bother turning around.

  “Cooking you dinner, darlin’,” I could tell he was grinning. “What does it look like?”

  My hands clenched and I stared at his back as he continued to move about my kitchen as if it were his.

  “Josh, I’d like you to leave,” I said. “Baby, head to your room and get your homework finished.”

  “But Mom…”

  “Listen to your mother,” Josh ordered.

  I turned a glare on him.

  “You can’t tell me what to do,” Sienna said. “You’re not my daddy.”

  I closed my eyes. This was definitely what we didn’t need right now.

  “Listen to me, little girl,” Josh stepped out of the kitchen and headed toward Sienna. “You’ll listen to me, or I’ll take you over my knee.”

  I stepped in front of Sienna. “I think not.”

  Josh stopped. “I’ll leave,” he told me. “But I just want you to realize that I’m not stopping. This is only the beginning. I’ll have you, even if I have to lie, cheat and steal to get you. And tell your brat to get ready for a new daddy.”

  With that he left, and I stared after him as if he’d just grown a second head.

  Then I heard Sienna’s door slam, and I whirled to see her gone as well.

  “Oh, my God,” I whispered hoarsely. “Tunnel, what the hell did I just do?”

  Chapter 5

  Tell me not to do something, and I’ll do it twice and take pictures.

  -Ghost’s secret thoughts

  Ghost

  I’d heard through the grapevine that Mina was seeing somebody, and like always, I came right out and did something about it because I couldn’t not do it.

  I had to make sure that whomever she was seeing was a decent person—but this guy wasn’t any good. Not even a little bit. I knew after my inside man who handled my rentals for all the houses I owned in that area had given me the information on the guy. He filled out the rental agreement for him, so finding the information out was really quite easy to come by. And I didn’t like the guy. At all.

  So I’d driven all the way to where my wife lived, a long six-hour drive away from where I now lived.

  It wasn’t the man’s rental agreement that had me scared, though. It was the fact that he didn’t have a history. Not a parking ticket or credit cards. There was nothing about him at all for me to find, and that wasn’t a good thing. Everyone had some sort of paper trail of their life – a warning ticket for speeding or a bank balance that fell into the negative at least once or twice.

  “I hate you!”

  My head turned back to the scene before me.

  I was staring into my daughter’s window, about ten feet away from the house, and I had a listening device pointing at the two of them behind the glass.

  I stared at the crying little girl, with the tears pouring down her cheeks as she glared at her mother like she’d just betrayed her. The little girl with the two French braids that started at the top of her head and fell to nearly mid-back…hair that was the exact same color as mine. Her eyes were the same color, too. Deep green, almost the color of an olive, with whiskey colored striations that broke that green up beautifully.

  “I hate you!” the little girl screamed again when my wife still didn’t move away from her.

  My wife was beautiful. She had brown hair that fell just between her shoulder blades, and the most soulful brown eyes that looked like they’d literally been poured from melted chocolate. She was skinny—too skinny. Much skinnier than the last time I’d seen her, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on here.

  She wasn’t eating, and that was because something was bothering her enough that she couldn’t.

  “Sweetheart,” my wife whispered to our daughter. “Please.”

  “It’s not okay. It’ll never be okay. He’s not my father. I’m not ever going to call him daddy. I only ever had one and he’s gone. You don’t get to decide that for me!”

  My heart shredded into a million pieces, and murderous rage started to fill my veins at hearing those words come from her mouth.

  “He didn’t ask you to call him …”

  Bullshit.

  “Let’s go.”

  My soft command had Sean at my side turning and following in my direction, but that didn’t stop him from looking over his shoulders periodically to get one last glimpse of the nightmare going on inside.

  I stalked around the house and headed next door, stopping at the home that was only a mere house length away from my family’s, and knocked on the door.

  The man who we’d seen leaving my house just five minutes before opened his own door and stared at me. “Who’re you?”

  “You’re going to move.”

  The man’s eyebrows rose. He was tall, just under six feet, with dishwater blonde hair and blue eyes that looked way too light to be real. His teeth were perfectly straight and so fucking white, it was obvious that they were fake. To top it all off, his voice was too high, and he sounded like a woman.

  “Yeah?”

  His smile was slick and oily, though, and I wanted to knock the grin right off of his pretty-boy face.

  “Yeah,” I confirmed. “I don’t care where you go or what you do, but you’re no longer going to be doing it here.”

  “Oh yeah? What makes you think so?” the man crossed his arms over his chest.

  I pulled out some papers from my pocket.

  “You’re being evicted.”

  I handed the papers to the man, and the man took them.

  “You can’t kick me out. You’re not my landlord.”

  My smile was scary.

  “Yes, I am,” I interjected. “And you have exactly twenty-four hours, per your rental agreement, to pack your shit and get the fuck out before I seize the property. Whatever is still left inside will be burned.”

  The man’s smile looked a little brittle.

  “There’s a house across the street,” the man countered. “I’ll just move in there.”

  My smile likely got even scarier.

  “I own every goddamn house on this block, and trust me, you won’t be renting any of them.”

  The man stiffened.

  “You have no right.”

  I took a step forward, pressed my face forward until only a few inches were between us, and I said something so softly that Sean likely didn’t hear it. “You did the wrong thing tonight. I’ll let you figure out what that was.”

  Then we were leaving, walking back down the street to where we’d left the bikes.

  “Ghost, what the hell is going on?”

  I took one final look at the house where my whole heart resided and turned my back.

  I made a gesture for him to follow, and he did. He got on his bike and rode with me. We rode for about fifteen minutes, but the moment we arrived at our destination, I knew he was finally catching on.

  “I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to promise me that it’ll never, ever get out. If you tell anyone, even your woman, it could mean their death.”

  He stayed silent and waited as I told him everything.

  And I did.

  “When I was a young kid, barely out of high school, I met my wife,” I started. “The first day I saw her, her mother was cleaning our house.”

  He didn’t say anything, and I gestured for him to follow me.

  I stopped in front of the familiar grave, and wasn’t surprised to find my partner in crime there waiting for me.

  “When she was eighteen, I knocked her up, and we got married.” I nodded to the man that was leaning on my empty grave. “We lived happily for almost two years. Then my mother and father decided that I was needed, and I wasn’t allowed to leave the family until they said so.”

  “And
what did they do?” Sean asked.

  “They threatened my family,” I told him bluntly.

  “Tunnel’s parents kidnapped their child, took pictures of her with her clothes off, and then sold them to the highest bidder…as a warning for what they could do. The baby had no clue that anything was wrong. They delivered her back safely to her home with no one the wiser—at least until he got the pictures,” Silas butted in.

  Silas. My old president. The man I’d tried to murder because it would’ve helped keep my parents off my back, and give Mina and Sienna a little more time.

  My stomach churned.

  “My parents run one of the biggest distribution rings in the whole goddamn state.”

  “And what do they distribute?”

  That was Sean, again.

  I swallowed thickly.

  “Children.”

  Sean stiffened.

  He knew what I was saying.

  “They what? Kidnap the kids? Sell them?”

  I nodded.

  “Those are the good cases.”

  “And why haven’t they been caught yet?” Sean asked forcefully.

  He looked pissed.

  Hell, he had no clue. He had nothing on me.

  My kid had been stolen. There were still pictures of her out there on the hard drives of filthy men who got off on child porn.

  Sure, we thought that most of them had been found and destroyed, but there was no guarantee that Jack and his wife—a couple who did illegal computer hacking—had gotten everything. They’d tried, yes, but some bastards were sneaky, and there was one man in particular that I knew of who still had access to the photos. Not that he had accessed them, though. But the second he did, I would be on him. If he ever gets on the Internet with those pictures of my baby, I will know. I monitored everything that my father did, and had been since the fucking second he decided to play a game that I wasn’t initially willing to participate in.

  But once he decided to use my daughter in his disgusting games, I became a willing participant.

  One day, my father would go down. He’d ruined my life by forcing me to do things that I didn’t want to do, and above all else, he used my child in his sick games.