ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5)

by Glenna Sinclair

  I swallowed, my mouth impossibly dry. “Catastrophic?”

  “There are some people who want to talk to you now…if you feel up to it,” the doctor said, standing up.

  Another twist of nerves in my gut. “Is it my parents?”

  “I think you’d better let them explain,” the doctor said, standing aside at the door to admit a pair of police officers.

  If I wasn’t already lying down, I would’ve swooned and fallen in response to my anxiety level. Yet, I still thought it was about me, still certain that I was getting in trouble for attending a house party and drinking beer underage and fleeing the cops and speeding down the road with Caro.

  I was so fucking selfish. So fucking stupid.

  “Amanda Beauty Hart?” one of them asked, both of them towering awkwardly over my bed.

  I was faint with dread, certain they were about to start reading me my rights as they dragged me from the bed and handcuffed me. “Yes?” I didn’t so much as flinch at my middle name.

  “The driver of the car, Carolina Salazar, lost control at high speed and went into a spin as she attempted to recover and overcorrected,” the same officer intoned, as if he were reciting the plot of a movie he didn’t find to be all that exciting. “She hit two cars stopped on the side of the road.”

  I swallowed hard. “Is she okay?”

  The other cop, a woman, picked up the narrative in only a slightly warmer tone of voice. “We regret to be the ones to inform you that Carolina Salazar died in the wreck.”

  My hand flew up to cover my mouth before my shoulders began to shudder with grief.

  This was my fault. All my fault. I’d been the one to suggest we go driving. I could’ve said anything else, but I’d wanted to go driving. Now, Caro was dead. It was all my fault. All of it.

  “Are you all right, Amanda?” the doctor asked from the doorway.

  “Can I please call my parents?” I sobbed. I needed them. I needed something. I needed to wake up and for all of this to be a bad dream brought on by too many beers the night before.

  “That’s the other thing we need to tell you,” the female police officer continued. “The cars that Carolina hit…one of them belonged to your parents.”

  Shock and disbelief numbed the worst of it as her words washed over me. A person could only take so much in a day, after all. And later—much later—when I’d pored over the police report, grappling with my new reality, scrambling to understand all that I’d done to ruin my life and so many lives around me, I finally got the complete story.

  Caro had taken a curve too fast. We would’ve had a breathless laugh about it, possible ending up in one of the fields bordering the road with a little minor damage to her car, if not for the two cars parked on the side, just after that curve.

  Caro had seen them and panicked, and the out-of-control car had spun into my parents, standing outside the second car, the owner of which had been blacked out of the police report.

  Most of the details about that second car had been blacked out, which frustrated me for a time, until I decided that I probably didn’t have a right to know the stranger my decision had killed. They would just be one of a quartet of ghosts I would have to carry around.

  What I did know was that, for whatever reason, the two cars had stopped on the side of the road.

  For whatever reason, my parents were standing outside the driver’s side window of the second car.

  For whatever reason, Caro’s side of our speeding, spinning car had struck them, pinning them between the vehicles, and hitting the other car with such force that the driver of the second car had also died.

  And, for whatever reason, my selfish, stupid, ungrateful, horrible ass was the sole survivor of one of the most terrible wrecks in the history of my community. Before I’d gone to college—and in the circles of people I avoided on campus that knew the story—I became something of an object of pity.

  I couldn’t go to the funeral; I couldn’t face the sympathetic tears and bewildered platitudes. I couldn’t look myself in the face in any mirror I happened to pass. All of it was my fault. All of it. Four lives cut short because of me.

  There were lawyers and more police officers and an extended stay at the hospital for the majority of the summer before everyone around me seemed to agree that the best thing for me to do would be to get my education, as my dead parents intended, and try to get on with my blighted life.

  The struggle lasted all of two and a half years. I tried to submerge myself in anything to distract myself from my overwhelming guilt, the crippling sorrow. I tried having loads of friends, always chatting or hanging out or partying, then exiled myself when I decided that, since I’d denied four human beings the chance at making and maintaining friendships, I didn’t deserve any.

  I tried to give myself over to my studies, tried to bury my past in new information, facts, interpretations, and mounds of homework. Yet, it wasn’t enough. I lost interest too quickly, gave up too readily, didn’t care about the consequences of not completing homework or attending class or studying for tests. Who was going to hold me accountable? I’d been responsible for my parents’ deaths. I didn’t deserve to learn new things, to be a lifelong learner, as one of the professors urged the class, because I’d cut four lives short in one act of stupidity. I didn’t want to learn new things to support some distant professional future because I didn’t want a future. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I didn’t want to be alive, and yet here I was, continuing to trudge to class.

  I immersed myself in alcohol, attending every party I caught wind of, getting a reputation for being “that girl”—the one who drank like a fish but always ended up puking and weeping for reasons she wouldn’t disclose.

  I drowned myself in sex, seeking the nothingness after it was over, the relief to be blinded by intensity and then ushered back down, the sweet pain of meshing my body with another person and punishing myself after by pushing them away, refusing to see or talk to them again, giving myself an even worse reputation than before.

  When there was nothing else I could find to lose myself in, no liquor that remained a mystery, nobody else I was willing to give my body to, I decided to literally lose myself. In one night, I packed up my clothes and what few belongings I cared for, shoved it all into my trunk, and just drove. I rolled along highways I’d never seen, past cities I’d never see again until my car started sputtering. Then, I put more gas in it and kept driving. I repeated this pattern until I was in a state I’d never been in and thoroughly out of money. I’d inherited something from my parents’ deaths, but I’d left it in the care of estate lawyers, sick at the thought of spending money linked to their demise by my idiocy.

  I found a parking spot in a semi-darkened lot and went to sleep, not waking up until someone knocked on my window and asked if I was all right.

  That’s how I worked my way across the country; traveling when I had money, staying still and restless when I didn’t. I did anything and everything to earn money. There wasn’t a job I didn’t try in my pursuit to flee from myself.

  I thought often of just ending it all, ending my suffering with a knife or a rope or an acceleration into a wall in the car that had become my home. I wallowed in misery, unable to escape, unwilling to try to get over the tragedy my life had inspired.

  In the end, though, I decided that death was too good for me. I didn’t deserve any kind of relief from my sadness and regret. I’d ended four lives—three of whom were the most important people in my own—and I’d survived with just a bump on my head. Some part of me wished I’d been maimed, disfigured in some way, just so the world around me could appreciate the irony.

  My name might have been Beauty, but there wasn’t one goddamn beautiful thing about me. I was a monster.

  Chapter 4

  “Are you going in, dear, or are you lost?”

  I whirled around from staring at my reflection in the door at Shepard Shipments, flung my mind away from my torturous past, and was faced with a tiny, old
woman with the very beginnings of a hump at the top of her back.

  “Lost?” I repeated helplessly. If only. I wanted to be lost from myself, to be lost from all of this. What was I doing here? I didn’t have any right to be doing this. My punishment wasn’t over with. I should’ve taken all of the money Dan had given me and given it to a homeless person or something. I should never have spent it on myself.

  “Are you supposed to be at Shepard Shipments?” the woman asked, adjusting her glasses over her milky blue eyes as she peered at my face and then gasped. “Oh! You’re Beauty Hart.”

  I was stunned again, in my odyssey for anonymous suffering, that yet another person knew more about me than I knew about them. First Dan, and now this wizened old woman. Half of me fully expected to be greeted by name by the walking commuters passing us on the sidewalk.

  “I am,” I confirmed, distinctly uncomfortable, wondering if I was vacillating between an anxiety attack, or if I just couldn’t get a good breath because of the tight pantyhose.

  “You’re expected, Beauty,” the woman said, nodding decisively. “May I call you Beauty?”

  “It’s my name, after all,” I said. “That’s just fine.”

  “I’m Myra Tuttle,” she said, sticking a small hand out. When I shook it, however, its strength took me by surprise. “You’re here to replace me.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised yet again. How many times was I going to be surprised by something in the span of a minute? “I’m sorry…I don’t think anyone’s replaceable.”

  She studied me for a moment before throwing her head back and guffawing at me.

  “Too true,” she said. “I suppose we’re all, more or less, irreplaceable. What I meant to say was that you’re going to be doing the work I used to be doing here at Shepard Shipments. I’m retiring.”

  “Oh!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know that. Dan…I was told the job wasn’t very glamorous. That’s all I knew.”

  Myra gave that same big laugh. “Well, that’s for sure,” she said. “Not glamorous at all. But rewarding, in its own way. Now. Let’s get ourselves inside so I can show you myself. Not glamorous. Ha!”

  I felt more comfortable than I had in ages as I followed this little old lady into the building and across the gleaming lobby. It was a long way away from the dank, dark bar where I’d been previously employed. It was so well lit that I hoped I’d done my makeup correctly in my car’s rearview mirror, and I resolved to scoot into a restroom to check at my earliest convenience.

  “Shepard Shipments owns the entire building, but the company rents the lower portions to other businesses it does dealings with,” Myra was explaining as we clicked our way across the smooth floors. “The company itself occupies a couple floors higher up in the building. These elevators here are fine. Don’t use the elevator at the back of the lobby.”

  I followed the direction of her pointed finger to see a single elevator secluded by a darkened alcove, its gold doors dim. It looked foreboding, unlike the shiny bright bank of elevators we were standing in front of.

  “Is that the elevator the other companies have to use to get to their floors?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” Myra said quickly. “That’s the elevator that Mr. Shepard uses to get to the penthouse at the top of the building.”

  “Mr. Shepard,” I repeated as we stepped into an open elevator. “You mean Dan?”

  She made a noise of disapproval in the back of her throat. “No. Mr. Daniel doesn’t live in the penthouse. He greatly enjoys his time outside of the company. The Mr. Shepard I’m referring to is, of course. Mr. Roland.”

  “Is that Dan’s—Mr. Daniel’s—brother?”

  “That’s right,” Myra confirmed, as we glided upward. “He lives at the top of the building. Quite convenient, if you ask me. But you’re never to use that elevator, do you hear me?”

  Never use creepy elevator standing all alone to go to a strange man’s living quarters. I nodded. That was a rule I could definitely live with.

  The elevator doors rolled open, and I followed Myra out into the reception area of the office. I was grateful to have run into her as I brooded outside. She seemed to be something cross between a fairy godmother and a grandmother figure. My only regret was that I was to, apparently, replace her. I wished she could be here to save me from all the ways I could screw up.

  “This is the floor where you will be spending the vast majority of your time,” Myra said, bustling along. For a woman so advanced in her years, she was certainly sprightly. I had to almost trot to keep up with her quick little steps, ducking my head self-consciously as people at the desks we passed by looked up, curious at a new face.

  The office space was nice enough—full of broad, open desks that weren’t separated by cubicle walls. The computers everyone clicked away on were the latest models, and everyone seemed busy, but happy. I’d never been in a professional office setting, but this one was much nicer than the mazes of cubicles I’d imagined for it.

  “Are you familiar with what Shepard Shipments is?” Myra asked, drawing to a halt so suddenly I almost crashed into her. I had to pay attention. There would probably be time to ogle my surroundings later.

  “Kind of,” I admitted. I’d visited the library on my shopping day and had taken the opportunity to do a little research. “It’s like a shopping website.”

  “That’s one part of it,” she allowed, nodding encouragingly. “And that’s how the Shepards got their start. But today, Shepard Shipments is a retail and media force. The company launches its own products, everything from electronics to Internet services. And it just keeps growing.”

  “And so what role do I play in all of this?” I asked, realizing that Dan had neglected to let me know exactly what the job I was agreeing to do would entail. “What do you do?” Dan had said it wasn’t glamorous, and Myra had laughed and agreed. To me, this entire office was glamorous, with its enormous windows, soft carpet, and workers dressed in all the latest fashions. The least glamorous position I could imagine was working as one of the warehouse stock employees, scurrying around, finding the items people ordered from the website to prepare them for shipping.

  Somehow, though, I couldn’t imagine Myra doing the same.

  “A very important one,” she began, and my stomach knotted in anxiety. I hadn’t finished college. I had limited skills. I certainly didn’t know anything about coding or working on websites.

  “I’ll be training you this week to replace me as Mr. Shepard’s assistant,” she finished. “Mr. Roland Shepard, the president of this company. For clarity’s sake.”

  My nerves crept up my spine and made my head swim. Assistant to the president of this enormous and important company? I had no idea what even the first thing expected out of me would be. All I knew was that I was to be the assistant to a vaguely threatening presence who lived at the top of this building and had a private, ominous elevator in the lobby I wasn’t allowed to use. None of this did a damn thing to inspire any confidence in me.

  “Okay,” I said faintly. “You should probably start telling me everything you know right now. Because I don’t have a clue…”

  Myra laughed again, but it wasn’t the same free guffaw she’d given outside of the building. It was more restrained, more careful.

  “That’s what the training is for, silly girl,” she said. “You’ll do just fine. Now. Over here is where we’ll be. There’s plenty of space for the both of us, but you’ll eventually inherit all of it when I leave.”

  We’d arrived at a large desk, set somewhat apart from the rest of the furniture in the room, near a large, heavy-looking door. Something in me felt uneasy, like something wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I chalked it up to anxiety and tried to focus on gleaning every drop of knowledge that Myra was willing to give me. She wouldn’t be here forever, after all, and I’d be expected to assist the leader of this company as best I could.

  “Beyond that door is Mr. Shepard’s office,” Myra said, nodding to the
door on the far wall. From her slightly hushed tone, I didn’t have to ask her to clarify which Shepard brother she was talking about. I already recognized that Myra used reverence to talk about Roland and exasperation to discuss Dan.

  “He’ll call or email you if he needs anything,” she continued. “And when you know what he needs, you’ll be prompt in getting it to him.”

  “What does that usually entail?” I asked, confused. Would I be a glorified errand girl? I didn’t really imagine Myra as that, but I could’ve been wrong.

  “Digitizing, mostly,” she said. “Even if Shepard Shipments started as an Internet retailer, it kept loads of paper data on hand prior to the advent of cloud computing.”

  It was cute to see a little old lady up on her knowledge of technology—until I remembered that I only had a cursory understanding of these kinds of things. A lot could happen in a year off the grid, not paying attention to news and advancements and the like. A person could get completely consumed by, say, figuring out how to put food in her mouth and gas in her tank.

  “When you’re not scanning and filing online, you’re getting Mr. Shepard whatever he needs, doing whatever he says, and being his eyes, ears, hands, and brains out here,” Myra continued.

  “His brains?” I repeated, confused. “I don’t understand. Isn’t he the president of this company?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How am I supposed to think like that?” I asked, feeling faint. I needed to change out of these pantyhose—and maybe just escape this entire situation. I wasn’t cut out for this. There had been some kind of mistake. There was no way on God’s green earth that I was qualified to think like the president of a successful global business.

  “Mr. Shepard doesn’t come out here,” she said, nodding meaningfully at the closed door. “When that door opens, it’s because you’re going through it, taking him something he’s asked you for, or you’re coming out of it, having delivered whatever he asked. He doesn’t come out here. He doesn’t interact with anyone in person. You’re the physical extension of him when you’re out here. You might find yourself delivering folders or messages to other people. Once, several years ago, I fired somebody for him.”