by Evie Claire
“Oh darling,” Heather coos, standing to greet Devon. “I’ve invited them to Angel’s birthday party this weekend.” Something in her tone taps at my eardrum in a way I can’t ignore. Slowly, I turn to look at her. She’s staring me down, certain she’s won. Only, it goes deeper than a sore-winner’s gloating glare. She’s sizing me up, deciding if she should destroy me or let me be. It turns my already boiling blood into liquid magma. Rage ignites in my depths, crawling out of me in a low, feral hiss only she hears. She’s used to people cowering at her veiled threats. Not me.
It’s an overly intense moment, one that makes the room electric and manages to pinprick my confidence in Mr. Moretti. Her look reveals all her latent crazy, and I’m no longer sure she’ll walk away quietly even if he’s unearthed gold. Devon silently watches our standoff, eyes ping-ponging between us. I more than match Heather’s stare, unflinching, peeling her flesh off with my eyes as best I can.
She’s going down, even if I have to do it myself.
“Yeah, right, um...early morning tomorrow,” Spence says from somewhere far away. Our contest comes to an end when he leans in to give her the required air kisses. Fuck it, I think, and turn to Devon to do the same. I whisper kisses on each cheek, squeeze his hand, then turn to Heather with a smile that more than meets her challenge. This bitch isn’t going to back me down.
He’s not hers. He’s mine.
Chapter Twenty-Four
By midnight last night, every major news outlet ran a headline about HeaVon’s impending nuptials and pictures of Heather’s rock. Devon spent all night texting and talking me off the ledge, but still. A bullet to the brain seems way too humane for a rabid beast like Heather Troy.
I’m sitting at the kitchen counter of my fabulous new WeHo rental in my pj’s eating leftover dessert and drinking coffee when Maria stumbles in. She was supposed to be home twelve hours ago.
“Sorry,” she says before I can speak. “I got too wasted to make it home.”
“It’s fine.” I wave a forkful of chocolate bread pudding at her. “My world derailed last night, anyway.”
“I saw that.” She grimaces and brushes the hair off my forehead. “What’s going on?”
“Further proof of Heather’s insanity.” I shrug.
“So what about the baby?” She cuts to the point like it’s nothing, leaning over my shoulder to snag a piece of apple crisp. I flinch at the word and fix her with a cold glare. Then remember a time years ago when she was in my shoes. She knows exactly what I’m feeling right now.
“There is no baby.” My anger deflates. She nods, but looks confused. “Not after I see Dr. Goldberg this afternoon,” I clarify. She nods again.
“I’ll go with you.” She doesn’t even miss a beat, ever the shoulder of solidarity. No questions. No opinions. Just support. Exactly what I need.
“Thanks.” I manage a weak smile, one she returns with a sigh that tells me she understands this isn’t something I want to do...it’s something I have to do. I turn to my phone, obsessively searching for texts from Devon. He’s at the meeting with Moretti right now. In an hour’s time, we’ll finally have what we need to get rid of her.
The doorbell rings.
“I’ll get it,” Maria offers. Fine by me. I’ll just sit here stuffing my empty soul with dessert and black coffee.
“Hey, Jane!” Maria says when she opens the door. “Come in. Carly’s in the kitchen.”
Wait, what is Jane doing here? I swivel my stool in the direction of the door. When she appears, she’s dressed for work, the huge bag that contains the contents of my life slung over her shoulder.
“Did I forget something?” I ask when she enters the kitchen.
“How convenient,” she says, tucking her head down to look over her sunglasses at me. “You have your meeting with the DA in an hour.”
“Oh fuck!” I exclaim, and smack my head in my palms. “Do I have to do that? Today?”
“Yes. If you put it off any longer, they may issue a warrant for your arrest.”
“Can they do that?”
“I don’t think they would, but if you’re interfering with an investigation they could.”
“It has to be today?” I plead with her because I will do anything to postpone this.
“Yeah, we’re going to the doctor today,” Maria says as if this is nothing more than a checkup. She reaches for a coffee cup.
At the word doctor Jane goes rigid. She turns from Maria to me with a question mark drawn down her face.
“She knows.” I shrug.
“Well, okay,” Jane says. “So, I don’t need to make that appointment?”
“Dr. Goldberg can fit us in whenever we show up,” Maria explains to Jane, then turns to me. “We can stop by after your meeting. No big deal.” She pours some coffee and offers the pot to Jane. “I’ll be home around three. We’ll go then.”
I don’t know how much I like Maria’s nonchalant attitude about this. She more than understands what’s going on here, but acting like it’s nothing more than a Band-Aid removal is a little hard to stomach. Literally.
I nod weakly without taking my eyes off my bread pudding. Maria disappears down a hallway that I think leads to the den. I’m still not 100 percent sure.
“Let’s get you ready!” Jane beams like a mother trying to get her toddler excited about eating broccoli. No fucking way I’m getting excited about it. But I know I don’t have an option.
* * *
At exactly eleven o’clock Detective Jules Moriarty sits across from me in a stark downtown office high-rise. The odors of stale coffee and printer ink permeate decades-old carpet and furniture. It makes me want to vomit. Outside, traffic rumbles down Temple Street. I’m trying my damnedest not to think about why I’m here and especially not what it sounded like that day. Were there horns? Screeching tires? Yells? Could they hear it all the way up here? Or was it muffled by stacks of paper and ringing phones? I mean, really. It isn’t even a busy street. Fluorescent paint marks covered the pavement when we pulled in. The super-careful kind of mark cops draw at an accident scene when there’s a fatality. They were pink and yellow. I wondered if they were his.
“Miss Klein, I’m glad you finally found time for us in your busy schedule.” The degree of snark in her voice is high. I let it slide because Jane told me to play nice. “Do you know why you’re here?” she asks, reviewing a file on her desk.
“Nope. But I’m certain it has something to do with my idiot father.” I try not to sound as hostile as I feel right now. I was told to be as polite and accommodating as I can. This has nothing to do with me. Jane’s assured me that. They just need to ask me some questions.
“Indeed,” she says, and closes the file. She crosses her fingers on top and rests them gently over some writing so I can’t read it. “You father came to speak with me the day he died. He sat in my waiting room for hours because he didn’t have an appointment.”
“You must be special. I’ve only ever known him to wait for his next high.” I return her snark, hands clasped tightly in my lap.
“Hmm...that sounds logical given his rap sheet. I understand your relationship was strained?” Why she needs clarification on this is beyond me. If she’s worth that shiny gold badge hooked on her hip, she can look it up on public record.
“Yeah. You could say that.”
“Would he have any reason to want to cause you harm?”
“No,” I say, smacking my lips and crossing my arms. My father was a lot of awful things, but he never physically hurt me. He just did a shitty job of protecting me. “He was harmless as long as he was high.”
“When did you last see your father?”
“The week he died. He was waiting in my parking garage mumbling about how he’d messed up and wanted to fix things between us.”
“Wh
at’d you say?” She leans into me like she can’t hear well.
“I told him to fuck off.” I sit back in the chair to reclaim the space she took. She sits up, nodding with the thoughtful kind of frown smart people do.
“Your father shared some pretty damning information. The kind that sends people to jail for a very long time.” She turns back to her folder. “Let me ask this another way. Would your father have any reason to lie about the nature of your relationship?” Her words sit all sorts of wrong with me.
“I didn’t do a damn thing to cause his death. My father is an addict who was probably too stoned to see a fucking car in front of him. Don’t you dare try to pin his death on me!” I seethe with more rage than I should.
Jules raises her hands to calm me. “I wasn’t implying that.” Hearing the level of hurt and rage in my voice snaps her out of whatever good cop/bad cop role she’s playing. She drops the courtroom dramatics and looks at me like a person instead of a perp. “He swore out a statement that, by itself, is pretty damn inflammatory. We’ve been chasing a few leads, but nothing has really panned out yet. However, if you corroborate any of what he said, it gives us enough to make an arrest.”
“What are you talking about?” I raise my hands from my lap and lean over the desk. My face is screwed in total confusion. “Arrest who? His death was an accident.”
“Would you like to read his statement or would you like for me to read it aloud?”
I pause, looking at the file folder in her hands. The tight frown on her face tells me this has nothing to do with my father’s death. What in the hell has he done to me now? Slowly, I hold out a shaking hand. She takes a stack of photocopied pages held together by a fat black clip and hands it over to me.
I hold her gaze, feeling a familiar emptiness creep into my bones. On autopilot, I take the pages. Holding them close, I still stare at her. Her demeanor has changed. She’s no longer a ballsy courtroom attorney out to get me. She’s softened. Cold dread washes over me. There’s only one thing in my life that would ever make anyone look at me like I’m the victim. God, please don’t let that be what’s on these pages. I finally manage to break eye contact. I sit back and try to focus on words I already know I don’t want to read.
Slowly, word by word, my past creeps from its dark hiding place to haunt me all over again. Numbness races through me, and I find myself drifting away from reality into a safe place where this memory doesn’t hurt so badly. My eyes fly over the page, and without any control over my mind I’m once again that scared little girl fighting away the bad things that hide in the darkness.
Melvin LaCroix... Molestation... Carly Klein... Maria Rhodes... Sexual abuse... Drugs...
Chills prick every pore of my body. Hair stands on end. My breath comes shallow and fast. My eyes glaze over, stuck open, unable to close. Unable to stop reading the horrors of my past. Tears spill over my lids and run down my cheeks. The paper shakes in my hand. Finally my eyes are too blurry to read. I can’t finish it.
I throw it on her desk and lean forward, elbows on my knees, wiping at tears and slowly rocking to try to calm myself. Jules puts a bottle of water and box of tissues in front of me.
“I’ll give you a minute,” she says, and steps from the room.
Give me a minute? She could give me an entire fucking lifetime and it would never be enough to face this shit. More than anything, I want Melvin and my dad to fry for what they did to me. But not like this. My revenge fantasies never had a snarky DA, or courtroom drama complete with witness-stand breakdowns. My life is not about to turn into the OJ Simpson trial.
A victim cannot successfully confront a situation she isn’t ready for. I learned that from the best shrinks money can buy. I’m not ready for this. Not mentally. Not emotionally. Not physically. Not any way. This is my goddamn secret. Not Dad’s. And I’ll be damned if he’s going to be the one telling my story before I’m ready.
“You fucking asshole,” I spit at the ceiling through clenched teeth. I quickly realize that’s not where my father went. “Fucking asshole,” I mouth at the floor, and plop my head in my palm.
Jules returns. A concerned but confused look on her face tells me she was expecting to find a wounded baby bird in her office, crying over the past wrongs of her life. Someone waiting for a nice strong authority figure like her to swoop in and make the bad men pay. Fuck that. I’m no baby bird. When she sees the tears have disappeared from my eyes, she straightens her suit and gives me a confused once-over. She retakes her seat and clears her throat.
“Did you read it?”
“I read enough,” I say, and clear my own throat.
“Would you like to make your own statement?” She reaches for a pen and paper, ready to capture my every word.
“You know how to tell when a junkie’s lying?” I ask, legs and arms crossed, everything as totally closed to her as it can be. She lifts her head and looks at me. “Their mouth is moving.” I pause to let my words sink in. “My father was a liar even before he was a junkie. You can’t trust a word that comes out of his mouth.”
“So you have no comment?”
“Nope.” I stare at the floor.
“Nothing?”
“Nada.”
“How well do you know Melvin LaCroix?” She says his name in a weird way like she’s trying to crack me. I’m not in the mood to break.
“Am I under arrest here?” I ask.
“No. You’re free to leave at any time,” she says. “But I thought you’d have something to say about your father’s dying words.”
“He wasn’t my father, Jules. Hasn’t been in a long time.” I stand, grab my purse and exit the room on borrowed bravado.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Funny thing. It didn’t make me puke this time. I needed something. Anything. And a cigarette was all I could find. I fired it up as fast as my fingers would fly and haven’t had the first wave of nausea. Maybe this situation is starting to realize who’s in charge around here.
I’m sitting at a custom-built stone table in my fabulous backyard. Before me sits an imitation silver pot—the cheap kind you’d find in a flea market. I can’t take my eyes off it. It looks like a hotel ice bucket. According to Mr. Brown, who happens to be my father’s attorney, who happened to be conveniently waiting outside Jules’s office, the gray stuff inside is my dad.
Last Christmas, I thought Mom divorcing him was the best thing I’d ever heard. Now I know how stupid I was. Without a wife, I became Dad’s next of kin. So I get all the fun things like the letters of debt and a bag of belongings from his dead man’s pockets. Hell, I even got him. Hoo-fucking-ray.
What am I going to do with this thing? It sure as hell isn’t going to sit around decorating my mantel or even a dusty bookcase shelf. But at the same time, giving it to Mom isn’t that appealing either. And I don’t know why, other than pure petty spite on my part.
I sweep the urn off the table and tuck in under my arm. Inside, I start opening cabinets. But, you can’t put a dead man in a kitchen cabinet even if he is a pile of dust. That’s gross.
I walk to the den, feeling proud of myself for finally knowing my way around my own house. There are plenty of cabinets in the built-ins in here. One contains the main control panel for the house speaker system. Music sounds good right now. I turn a few dials and Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games” emerges from ceiling speakers. It’s appropriately solemn. Another cabinet houses the control panel to a security system that is so complicated I can’t even work it. There must be fifteen mini screens all fixed on black-and-white views all over the house. The clarity is amazing and Maria says it’s top of the line. All Wi-Fi with an infinite range.
Dad’s still tucked under my arm. I opt for one of the empty cabinets beside where a TV should be mounted. I sit back on the lone couch and imagine what the room will look like once the decorators fin
ish. TV there, couches over here, maybe a reading nook by the fireplace. It’ll be awesome. Try as I may to distract myself, my eyes keep straying to the cabinet that hides my father. Nope. That won’t work. I’ll spend way too much time in this room and I’ll know he’s there whether I can see him or not. I retrieve him from the shelf, tuck him back under my arm and go looking for a better place.
The house is huge. It’ll cost a fortune to decorate it, and I’m not even sure how long I’ll live here. If Mr. Moretti delivers like I think he will, it’s only a matter of time before Heather is eighty-sixed and Devon and I come clean about our love and move in together. This house is great for a starlet on the rise, but nothing for a Hollywood mega star. I wander into a vast shell that’s probably the dining room. On the far wall sits a built-in bar and butler’s pantry.
I open the bar’s front door. It smells of oiled wood mixed with lingering liquor stench. God I love that smell. Know who else loved that smell? Yep. Dear old Dad. I slide him onto the shelf. It’s the perfect place. I’ll never come in here and even if I do, he looks like an ice bucket anyway. It’d be easy to forget what’s really inside. I’m pretty proud of myself, and decide to sit on the bare floor to admire my fancy, empty dining room.
There’s a knock on the door. Jane went to pick up an insane amount of Chinese food to feed my situation and quell this horrible mood. She must’ve forgotten her key. I pull myself off the floor and make my way to a distressed-brick walled foyer. I don’t even bother to look through the peep hole. I swing the door wide, and he’s standing there.
A hoodie pulled low over his face so no one can see. I almost don’t recognize him until I see a familiar black Tahoe parked in the driveway. Only, Tiny isn’t here. He must’ve driven himself. Devon Hayes driving? That’s insane.
“Hey, Sunshine,” he says from the shadows of his hoodie looking all Robin Hood Prince of Thieves hot. I bite at a smile, then grab his shirtfront and pull him safely inside before planting my lips all over his. He pulls away from me.
