Beautiful Girl

by Shiloh Walker

  Chapter One

  Coming home was both heaven and hell. Delilah Prescott pulled her beat up Corolla off the two lane highway, right in front of the welcome sign. Welcome to Prescott, Tennessee—Small Town, Big Heart. Located in the mostly rural county of Pike near the Tennessee/Kentucky border, the town’s main claim to fame was that Daniel Boone had spent some time in the general area.

  It was a nice little town, though. Just about everybody knew each other and even strangers were made to feel welcome. Lots of strangers, especially on weekends and in the summer. Just south of Lake Cumberland, Prescott was a stopping point, watering hole and overnight lodging for all the families that flocked to the lake that didn’t want to stay at the campground but didn’t have the money for the rental cabins.

  The lake was a popular vacation spot during the hot months of July and August. Over the past twenty years or so, Prescott had become something of an antique mecca. The result was tourism coming through the small town on a regular basis. Small shops lined Main Street and from what she could tell, some of the retail prosperity had spread out past the immediate area of downtown.

  She saw what looked like a for-real steakhouse. Not just the diner or Lula’s Café. A real restaurant, complete with neon sign. She wondered what else had changed in the past twelve years.

  Besides her, of course.

  “God.” Del closed her eyes and prayed she had the strength to do this. Divine intervention was the only thing that had given her the strength to come down here and judging from the watery state of her knees, she was going to need a lot more divine help to keep from jumping back in the car and leaving as fast as she could.

  But she couldn’t keep running. She was tired of it.

  Besides, she’d made herself a promise and she was going to keep it. She was going to kill the one person she’d kept in contact with. Not very frequent contact, but enough that the bastard knew where to find her. Vance Prescott was her cousin, and she loved him dearly, but she was going to kill him for passing her address on to Manda. If he hadn’t shared her address with her old school friend, then Del wouldn’t have been standing here dealing with this dilemma.

  For years, she hadn’t talked to anybody from her childhood home but then she’d run into Vance in Cincinnati. They’d spent a couple hours talking—not about what had sent Del running. The one friend that Del had told was dead, and Del wasn’t interested in sharing her miserable history with anybody else.

  But they’d talked. Just about things. Old friends. Life. Vance was a teacher at the county high school now. Sounded like he was good at it, too. He definitely seemed to enjoy his job.

  A pity, because she was still going to kill him. The only reason she’d given him any contact information was because Vance had deduced just why she didn’t want to give it to him. I won’t share it with anybody—definitely not your mom. I just want to keep in contact.

  So she had given it to him. Del wanted no contact, none, with the ice-cold woman that had given birth to her. There was no chance in hell that Louisa had changed and even if she had, the sense of betrayal, shame and outrage wouldn’t let Del forgive what the woman had done to her.

  “Stop dragging your feet,” she muttered. “This probably won’t be too bad.” Del had missed home. No matter that she had made a life for herself in Cincinnati, no matter that she was making a difference there, Prescott was home.

  She’d even enjoyed her short emails back and forth with Manda. Manda was one thing that definitely hadn’t changed, at least not much. Her best friend from childhood still didn’t know how to accept no for an answer. It was time for the 10 year reunion for the graduating class of Pike County High School, 1997. Manda headed up the reunion committee and she wanted Delilah there.

  Manda hadn’t listened to Del when she pointed out, “I didn’t graduate with you, Manda.”

  “Oh, since when did that matter? Come on, honey… I miss you.”

  Those simple words had put a knot in Del’s throat. She missed Manda. She missed home. And Blake… Del turned away from the welcome sign. She wasn’t going to think about Blake Mitchell. Wouldn’t do her any good. As she circled the car, she realized she was literally dragging her feet. Resolutely, she straightened her shoulders and forced down the dread sliding inside her.

  She wasn’t a kid anymore. Whatever came flying at her this time, she could handle.

  Del took a deep, steadying breath. “Let’s get this over with,” she muttered. With an automatic, absent gesture, she flipped her braids back over her shoulders before putting the car back into drive. She checked the rearview mirror and pulled back onto the highway.

  A glance at the clock on the dashboard told her she still had a good hour to kill before she was supposed to meet Manda at the diner. Manda had wanted to meet at Lula’s but it was Wednesday. The entire time Del was growing up, her mother had afternoon tea with the Ladies’ Group at Lula’s, every Wednesday, like clockwork.

  There was no way in hell that Del was ready to see her mother. Matter of fact, she’d be happy to go the entire time without that particular event taking place.

  Instead of heading toward the diner, she drove up High Street until she reached Main. A left turn took her into the small heart of Prescott and she couldn’t help but smile a little as she saw the old courthouse. The town square looked the same. The big statue of Daniel Boone was still surrounded by a riot of color, flowers that the Ladies maintained. Well, money from the Ladies. The Ladies were the well-to-do women of Pike County and most of them wouldn’t dare soil their hands, even if it was to plant flowers.

  The ice cream parlor was still there, the pink and white striped awning fluttering in the hot afternoon breeze. It was busy, young and old gathering inside and taking up the little bitty tables in front of the windows. Across the street, on the courthouse grounds, were more tables, larger picnic tables that had teenaged kids sitting on the benches or the table surface itself.

  A faint smile curved her lips. She could remember hot summer nights spent cruising around the square, holding Blake Mitchell’s hand in one of hers, and the other hand holding an ice cream cone. Double Chocolate Swirl, her favorite, from Macy’s Dairy Barn. Afternoons spent down at the lake.

  Late one hot summer night, she had spent some very hot and heavy minutes with Blake on a table in the square, on one of those very tables. They’d made out, gotten themselves so worked up, they just might have gone all the way, right there in the open, if Blake’s older brother hadn’t come driving up. She wondered if Travis was still the sheriff.

  Travis was fifteen years older than Blake. Del had adored him. He was funny, kind and he always treated her like a kid sister. She’d asked herself a million times what would have happened if she’d gone to him. Instead of running. He would have believed her. Looking back now, she knew that. He would have believed her and her entire life might have been different.

  “Don’t go there, Del,” she whispered. Propping her elbow on the car door, she rested her cheek against her palm. The light in front of her changed, but she didn’t notice until the old guy in the pickup behind her honked his horn. She waved in apology and pulled over. Driving around probably wasn’t the best idea. At least not until she could get all the memories crowding her head under control.

  “I should have waited until Friday. Or not come at all,” she mumbled as a heavy ball of nausea started to churn inside her gut. She climbed out of the car and stared across the street at Lula’s. Two o’clock. Right on time to see that the Ladies did indeed still meet for afternoon tea. She could see them all filing inside, laughing and talking to one another, wearing pretty pastels and soft whites, their hair fixed to perfection. Although she wasn’t close enough to see, she’d knew they’d all be wearing their make up perfect
ly and their clothes would be accented with just the right amount of jewelry.

  The Ladies took themselves quite seriously.

  Del turned away from the café. She hadn’t seen her mother and she didn’t want to.

  Behind her was Bess’s Bookstore. Faintly, she smiled and then the smile grew until it was a full-out, happy grin. Before high school, before Blake, Bess’s had been her favorite place in the whole world. She wondered if Bess was still around. Ducking her head through the driver’s window, Del snagged the strap of her small messenger-bag purse. She pulled the strap over her head and settled the purse against her hip, automatically covering it with her hand. Nobody was going to try and lift her purse here, but old habits died hard.

  The scent of books, cinnamon and coffee flooded her senses. And when the old woman behind the counter lifted her head and smiled in her direction, Del decided the idea hadn’t been a total disaster.

  “I still can’t get over how different you look,” Manda mused. She was quiet for a minute, a rare occurrence, as she sipped her coffee and studied Del. The pretty, freckle-faced redhead looked around. Over the past hour and a half, the diner had emptied out and even the guy at the counter had quit paying so much attention to them and gone out front for a smoke break.

  They were completely alone and Del felt her stomach knot as Manda lowered the coffee cup and pinned her with a hard look. “So are you going to tell me what happened? Why you left? Where you went?”

  Del shifted around in the padded booth and tried to figure out what to say. She’d known that Manda would ask. As would others. And she had no idea what to say. “Does it really matter? After twelve years?”

  Manda looked down at her hands. She had a big, shiny rock on her left hand. She’d ended up marrying somebody from outside of Pike County, a doctor. He’d set up a family practice just off of Main Street, so Prescott actually had two doctors now. Talk about metropolitan, Del thought with a smirk.

  “Your mom said she sent you off to a private school up north,” Manda said. Although her voice didn’t change, there was a flicker of doubt in her eyes. “Is that where you went?”

  Del licked her lips, uncertain what to say. She’d wondered what story Louisa Prescott Sanders had concocted to explain away her daughter’s sudden disappearance.

  Manda reached over and covered Del’s hand, squeezing gently. “You weren’t at some ritzy private school, were you?”

  Del turned her hand over and linked her fingers with Manda’s. “Hard to believe that people thought you were the airhead of our bunch,” she said, forcing herself to smile.

  “What happened, Dee? What happened with you? I mean, I expected you would look a little different. Shoot, I was even prepared to be mad at you, or not like you, taking off like that. You never wrote. You never called. Never came home for holidays. Part of me didn’t want to like you. But I know you.” Manda smiled, but it was a sad one. “We’ve been friends practically since we were in diapers. Something happened and I want to know what.”

  The pampered princess of Pike County was back. Delilah Prescott, junior homecoming queen, had been the most beautiful girl in town and she came from one of the richest families in the county, if not the richest. Her family owned half the land in the area and had for going back more than a century.

  She’d also been the love of his teenage years, the subject of more wet dreams than he could remember—and the first and only woman to break his heart.

  Blake hadn’t seen Delilah yet, but everybody seemed to be humming about her return. He’d heard at least ten different times that his old girlfriend was back in town, and had seriously changed over the past twelve years.

  Blake glanced in the mirror and smirked a little. Had she changed as much as he had? He smoothed a hand over the gleaming surface of his bald head before grabbing the black bandana and covering his scalp with it. It had been five years since he’d finished chemo and radiation treatments and the doctors had diagnosed a complete recovery from the Hodgkin’s disease. Blake had more or less accepted his hair wasn’t coming back.

  As long as the cancer didn’t come back, then Blake could deal with the lack of hair just fine. Pretty damn easy, too, considering he was alive and he felt good. There was no more weakness and nagging exhaustion he’d written off as a bad flu bug, hangover, a hundred other insignificant things. Blake had been in a car wreck and his trip to the ER had saved his life. Something weird showed up in his blood count and instead of being checked out for a concussion and broken ribs, he was admitted for what seemed like two thousand tests.

  Weird, all it took was one second to change a man forever. He went from being young and living hard to a full and complete stop. He could have died. He’d ignored the little nagging symptoms for too long and by the time the doctors caught it, he was in Stage III.

  Blake was lucky, though. He’d had an entire town praying for him, hoping he’d come through and his own stubbornness. He hadn’t been ready to die, not at twenty-one. Even through the years of treatment that followed and he was so sick from the chemo, his desperation hadn’t ever gotten to the point that he had been ready to quit fighting.

  If it wasn’t for the bald head, he could almost pretend those few years hadn’t happened. Well, if he wanted to. He didn’t want to forget. Nothing will change your life quite like the words, It’s cancer. A man hears those words and it will do some serious things to him. The years spent in hospitals, all the treatments and all the tests, made a guy reevaluate everything.

  It also made him grow up—real fast.

  Yeah, he’d changed. He was pretty damn sure that Delilah couldn’t have changed nearly as much as he had. The first two years after she’d left town, he’d run wild, getting into so much trouble it was a miracle his brother hadn’t killed him. Poor Travis had hauled him into jail a dozen times and threatened to throw away the key more than once.

  Almost flunking out of high school, barely eking through the first couple years of college, sometimes Blake wondered it was another miracle that he’d even lived long enough for the Hodgkin’s to start trying to kill him. Those first two years of college were just a haze of nonstop parties and last minute cram sessions so he could just scrape by with a passing grade. If he hadn’t cared about disappointing Mom, he wouldn’t have bothered with the cram sessions.

  Then he was in that wreck with Douglas Maynard. Doug had been driving, totally plastered. Blake hadn’t been too sober himself, but he had lived through the wreck. Doug hadn’t. Between watching a friend die right in front of him and surviving cancer, Blake figured he didn’t have too much in common with his ex-girlfriend.

  Even if he did still dream about her.

  As he left his room, he heard the maid talking with his mom’s personal nurse, Tammy. Two years ago, Evangeline Mitchell had suffered a series of minor strokes, culminating in a massive one that paralyzed her left side. Tammy Schultz had been with them since they’d brought Evangeline back to Bel Rive from the hospital.

  Although the doctors had argued Evangeline might do better in a rehab facility, Blake and his brother knew she needed to be at home. Bel Rive, the Mitchell family estate, had been her home for more than fifty years—it was where she belonged. Hiring the personal nurse had been a compromise, and Tammy had been with them ever since.

  Their voices were too low to hear everything, but he heard Delilah’s name…and more references about her lunch with Manda at the diner. Exactly how much had Dee changed, he wondered?

  Maybe put on fifty pounds and had two or three kids. Oddly enough, that thought didn’t really disturb Blake. One of the dreams that bothered him the most was the one where he’d ended up marrying Dee. The dream had them down at the lake in the cabin he’d inherited from his dad and they were making love in the bedroom. From time to time, the dream did change but what usually happened was the sound of a crying baby or a laughing kid interrupted them.

  The laughing kid or crying baby didn’t bother Blake at all. He wanted kids. As his friends all got
married, one by one, he wanted a family more and more, but there just wasn’t a woman he was interested in. Except Dee. Even after twelve years, she was the only one he dreamed about. The only woman who could put that ache in his chest when he thought about her too long. Blake hadn’t ever gotten over her and he knew it.

  So no, thinking about Dee and a couple of kids surrounding her didn’t bother him. What bothered him about that mental image was the imagined ring on her left hand. “Shit. You’ve got to get past this.” He finished buttoning his shirt and paused to look in the mirror.

  He’d been a deputy with the sheriff’s department the past three years. It had taken some time to convince everybody that he wasn’t the invalid people wanted to think he was. Not that he looked sick but the Town Council wasn’t exactly made up of the most open-minded people. Cancer meant a person was sick. Even after he’d been declared cancer-free and healthy. That was all there was to it, as far as they were concerned. Convincing them otherwise had taken Blake a while but it had been worth it.

  Last year when Travis was voted the town mayor, his deputy Louis Conrad stepped up as sheriff and Blake was now the deputy sheriff. The first few months, he continued wearing the deputy uniform, but eventually, he started wearing a plain white shirt and jeans or khakis, the same as Louis did, the same as Travis had done. He kept his badge on his belt and his weapon under a plain sports coat and that was as good a uniform as any, as far as Blake was concerned.

  Normally, he didn’t pay his reflection any more attention than necessary, but this time, he lingered. He eyed the black cloth he wore on his head and for the first time in a couple of years, it made him feel self-conscious.

  People lost their hair with chemo and radiation. Most of them grew it back. Blake never did. Of course, Travis had been bald by the time he was thirty, so there was a chance Blake would have ended up like this anyway. He figured going quick and clean was better than clinging to the illusion of a full head of hair and wasting money on crap that didn’t work.