by Brenda Novak
Then something about the second woman made him look closer. And he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“I’M NOT GOING TO DO THIS,” Lauren insisted, hanging back. She’d never scaled a fire escape before in her life, let alone one that rose out of the garbage and stench of a back alley that probably wasn’t safe after dark. And she refused to start now.
“Come on. Don’t be a poor sport,” Kimberly said. “This is fun. It certainly beats the heck out of applying for jobs. It’s like…it’s like we’re detectives.”
“Detectives! We’re acting more like criminals, if you ask me.”
“We’ll just take a quick peek. We’re not hurting anyone. I mean, it’s not like we’re doing anything really bad, like breaking and entering.”
Lauren squinted up at the small covered patio at the back of Tank’s apartment. “The metal rungs on that fire escape are going to be hot,” she said. “We’ll burn our hands.”
“It’s not that hot yet.” Kimberly felt the first rung. “Anyway, it’s only ten steps.”
“What if we get caught?” Lauren asked, catching Kimberly by the shirt before she could move up the ladder.
“We’re not going to get caught, not if we’re quiet.”
“And if we’re not quiet enough? How much jail time can a Peeping Tom get?”
“You’re so negative,” Kimberly complained, yanking out of her grasp. “I come up with this great idea, and all you can do is find fault with it.”
“I’m not climbing up there,” Lauren said in a loud whisper. “What if he’s in the buff?”
“Oh, give me a break. He wouldn’t parade in front of the window in the buff. We only want to know what kind of lifestyle he leads. We’re not going to get five to ten for that.”
“Do you really think he’s a drug dealer? Very few junkies look as healthy as Harley does,” Lauren said, but Kimberly couldn’t hear her anymore. She’d already dashed up the steps and stood on the landing, giving Lauren a thumbs up.
Lauren searched one side of the alley, then the other as Kimberly edged closer to Tank’s glass slider. “I don’t want to be doing this, I don’t want to be doing this,” she whispered over and over to herself, her heart pounding so loud she felt like a walking time bomb. She wanted to run back to the car, get in and drive away—fast. If only Kimberly would come down…
“Hurry,” she croaked when the minutes stretched on. “Let’s get out of here!”
Kimberly must have heard because she waved a hand over the railing as if to say, “Not yet.”
Was she seeing more than Harley’s bare chest?
“Come on, Kimberly!”
Again, the little wave that said, “Just a minute.”
“Kimberly!”
Nothing.
Biting her lip in frustration, Lauren eyed the ladder. She could stand and wait, and possibly have a heart attack in the meantime, or she could go up after her. Neither option seemed very appealing. But going after Kimberly had the advantage of bringing their adventure at Springfield Apartments to a close, which was motivation enough to start Lauren climbing.
“You girls get bored at the club or something?”
Harley! Missing the next rung, Lauren fell flat on her behind, but was too embarrassed to feel the pain of her landing. She immediately scrambled to her feet and found him standing at the edge of the building. He had on a T-shirt with his blue jeans now, but he was leaning against the brick corner as if he’d been there all along, watching their every move.
Oh, boy. This isn’t good…This is really, really bad….
Kimberly came to the edge of the balcony and offered him a fake but very bright smile. “There you are! Would you believe I couldn’t rouse anyone at the door, so I came around back?”
“No, I wouldn’t believe that,” he said, then turned his attention to Lauren. “You want to tell me what the hell you and your little friend are doing here?”
Lauren threw Kimberly an accusing glare, wanting to throttle her on the spot, then brushed off her shorts to buy some time. What did she say now? “Actually, uh, I came over because I have something I need to discuss with you.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I thought we said all there was to say last night.”
“I’ve come up with a third alternative, one I hope we can both live with.”
“And that would be…?”
“Whoa, hold on a minute,” Kimberly said, climbing down the ladder. “I don’t think I want to be here for this part.”
“What part?” Harley asked.
“You’ll see,” she said. “Lauren, I’ll be in the car. Harley, it was, um, good to see you again.”
“Wait a second!” Lauren said. “You’re not going to run out on me like that.” But by the time she got the words out of her mouth Kimberly had already cleared the corner and wasn’t turning back.
“Wasn’t that the girl you used to hang out with in high school?” Harley asked.
Lauren nodded. “Her name’s Kim.”
“She hasn’t changed much.”
“She might look different tomorrow,” Lauren suggested from between clenched teeth, but Harley wasn’t in the mood to be distracted.
“So, what is it you have to say to me?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets, which flexed the muscles in his arms—something Lauren was determined to ignore. A hormone spike like the ones he so easily inspired did little to help her thought processes. “Because if you haven’t changed your mind about letting me see Brandon,” he went on, “I don’t want to hear it.”
That sure didn’t sound as though he was after money….
Taking a deep breath, Lauren straightened her spine. Her father would have barreled through this somehow. He’d done it once, hadn’t he? And she was twenty-seven years old. Certainly she could manage without Quentin by now. “I was thinking that the cost of living is probably pretty high in California.”
“The cost of living?” he repeated skeptically.
“You know—” she licked her lips “—it takes a lot to get by these days, and, well, I was thinking that if you wanted to make some sort of deal, I could help you out…with that.”
He scowled at her. “With what?”
“With the cost of living.”
Her words hung suspended in the air like smog and seemed to have the same stifling, distasteful effect.
“You’re offering me money to go away?” he said at last.
She swallowed hard and nodded. “But more than ten years ago. Five times as much.”
His expression didn’t improve.
“Ten times as much,” she said, even though Damien had cautioned her to start low. So much for negotiating. She was already five thousand dollars past her limit, which meant she’d have to cash Nana’s CD, and Harley hadn’t given her an answer yet.
“That’s a lot of money—twenty thousand dollars,” she said to fill the uncomfortable void. “It could buy you a new car, depending on what kind you wanted, or a boat or…or whatever.”
“A car? Or a boat? That’s disgusting,” he said. “You’re disgusting if you think twenty thousand dollars is worth what I would lose.”
Lauren felt as disgusting as he said she was, but she’d committed herself and couldn’t back down now. “What about more?”
He shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? Spoiled little Lauren who always gets her way. If she wants something, Daddy just buys it for her. Well, it won’t work this time. There are some things in life money can’t buy, and I think you’d damned well better learn that Brandon is one of them.”
“I’m not buying Brandon,” she cried. “I’m only trying to ensure his—”
He raised a hand to stop her, and she shrank from the scorn on his face. “Go home and explain it to a good lawyer, Lauren, because you’re going to need one,” he said, then he turned and stalked away, leaving her standing in the alley feeling lower than an ant.
CHAPTER NINE
“THANKS A LOT for your help back there. I real
ly appreciate it,” Lauren said sarcastically to Kim. She was behind the wheel and they were, thankfully, several blocks from Tank Thompson’s apartment and chugging successfully toward the Southwest, despite the car’s initial reluctance to start.
Kim kept her face averted, as though suddenly fascinated by the rundown apartments and government housing projects flying past them on the right side of the road. “I thought you might like a little privacy,” she said, but there was a sheepish quality to her voice that told Lauren she knew exactly what she’d done when she bailed out.
“Right. Privacy,” Lauren echoed. “It’s always best to humiliate oneself in private.”
Kim sent her a fleeting glance. “You humiliated yourself?”
“No, actually you got me halfway there before you left. I wasn’t exactly coming from a position of strength, considering that we’d just been caught pressing our noses to his back window. But I certainly finished up with a flourish.” Not that I didn’t have a little help from “Now I Know He’s After Money,” Damien, she added mentally.
“I take it that’s a ‘no’ to the fifteen thousand,” she said with a wince.
“That’s a ‘no’ to the twenty thousand.”
“You offered him that much? And he still refused?”
He’d done more than refuse. He’d regarded her with such disdain she’d never forget it if she lived to be a hundred years old. It had to be the first time she’d ever encountered such a look. It had to be the first time she’d ever deserved one. “The amount didn’t seem to matter.”
“Jeez, what a guy,” Kimberly said, her voice dreamy.
Lauren nearly ran up on the curb. “What a guy? He’s determined to fight for Brandon, which means I’m in real trouble, and you say, ‘what a guy?’”
“Well, you have to admit he’s pretty cute.” She folded and unfolded the pleats on her skirt as she talked. “And the fact that he won’t take twenty thousand dollars to walk away from his son is admirable, considering he’s always been so poor. I mean, he can’t be all bad, right? Look at this neighborhood. I’d do anything to get out of here.”
“He’s only staying here!” Lauren snapped. “How many times do I have to tell you that? We don’t know anything about where he lives.”
“We know where he came from.”
That, at least, was true. He’d grown up just a block or so from the Springfield Apartments in a government-subsidized duplex. Kimberly and Lauren had occasionally driven past it when they were in high school, but they hadn’t made a habit of traveling to the other side of town. They didn’t typically cruise Broadway, like the popular kids, or hang out at Harley’s house afterward, where, according to Audra, the music was always blasting and the beer flowed.
“I can’t believe I let you drag me over here,” Lauren complained. “If we’d stayed home, this would never have happened.”
“You would’ve offered him the money, anyway. I’m not taking the blame for that.”
“The bribe should’ve worked,” Lauren retorted. “It worked ten years ago, for my father. And he only gave him a couple grand, just enough to pay rent for a few months.”
“Evidently Harley’s grown up,” Kimberly said.
They’d certainly seen evidence of that through the binoculars. As hard as Lauren tried, she couldn’t erase the vision of his bare torso from her mind. Nor could she convince herself that his wasn’t the most gorgeous body she’d ever seen.
“What do I do now?” she asked.
“Call your father?” Kimberly suggested.
“I don’t want to do that.”
Her friend raised her brows in obvious surprise. “What’s going on? You and your father have always been close.”
Lauren shrugged because she couldn’t explain. She knew what Quentin would say, and she didn’t want to hear it. Probably because she wasn’t sure she agreed with him anymore.
“What do you want to do?” Kimberly asked.
Deep down, Lauren wanted to let Harley see Brandon. She’d wanted it ever since that night in the restaurant, ever since Brandon had responded with such eagerness when she mentioned his father, ever since Harley had shown up in a suit with that silly stuffed snake. She’d ended up giving the snake to Brandon, telling him Grandpa Worthington had sent it from England. But she wasn’t going to admit any of that to Kimberly. At least not yet. Their visit to the Springfield Apartments might have been a complete disaster, but there was, possibly, another way to gain a few insights into Harley Nelson.
“I’m just going to sit tight for now,” she lied. She couldn’t say what she was about to do or Kimberly would never let her do it alone.
THE DOOR TO THE ATTIC creaked as Lauren opened it and stared apprehensively at the narrow stairs that led up, then turned and went up farther still, to a large room with sloping ceilings and a single double-paned window. Because of the deep eaves on the house, she could see only a few slivers of sunlight. They filtered through the gloom overhead, casting everything in shadow and creating, if not an eerie place, a room that felt pregnant with closely guarded secrets and old memories.
Or maybe it wasn’t the strange color of light or the musty smell or anything physical at all. Maybe this place made Lauren uncomfortable because, as children, she and Audra loved to play with the antique cradle that had once belonged to their great-grandmother, and the trunk of dress-up clothes that had come from her, too. As the years passed, and she and her sister lost interest in playing “house” and grew apart, they rarely came back here. Occasionally, Audra had tried to punish or scare Lauren by locking her in the attic and claiming it was haunted. But Lauren hadn’t spent any time here in the past ten or fifteen years, except for the hour it had taken her and her father to carry up the boxes of Audra’s belongings a few days after the funeral. The holiday decorations and sewing and craft supplies were stored in well-labeled cupboards in the garage, along with anything else that needed to be accessible, so there generally wasn’t any need to go rooting around in the attic. Only things that could be put away and forgotten for years at a time were ever stored here.
When Lauren walked up the stairs, they complained as loudly as the door had. Before she reached the top, she heard the phone ringing downstairs and wished she’d brought the cordless with her, but she didn’t turn back. She couldn’t get stuck on the phone, anyway. Brandon was only in school for another two hours. She needed to make good use of the time.
Lauren and her father had stacked Audra’s things against the far wall, beyond the draped furniture and paintings that crowded most of the attic. She made her way through the clutter and pulled the chain on the bulb overhead. Then, taking a deep breath, she started digging.
Sweaters, yearbooks, pictures, the wrist corsage Audra’s first prom date had given her, the star lamp that had sat on her dresser…Each item brought her sister back more poignantly than the one before, until Lauren half expected to see Audra coming up the stairs behind her. She found the card she’d made for Audra when she was only eight and for the first time since Audra’s death, Lauren felt something more than sadness. She missed Audra, truly missed her, and mourned the little girl she used to play dolls with.
“Audra, why did you sell yourself so short?” Lauren asked, burying her face in her hands and finally letting the tears come. Audra’s accident had put a stop to her constant unhappiness and ended her painful decline. That alone had brought some relief to Lauren and her father. But Lauren felt guilty for feeling that relief, guilty for not being able to help her sister find some glimmer of happiness, especially in the later years, and guilty for being okay when Audra never was. What had made the difference between them? Why had Lauren been able to cope with life while Audra retreated into drugs and alcohol? Even for Brandon, her sister hadn’t been able to stay clean.
Audra’s death was a tragedy Lauren would always regret. But the way her sister had lived was the greater tragedy by far.
Time was getting away from her. Lauren checked her watch, realized she had to pick
up Brandon in just thirty minutes and tried to distance herself from her emotions so she could search the boxes more quickly. But her heart was heavy, and the close, still room seemed too full of memories.
Probably this was a waste of time. She was opening old wounds for nothing, she decided, and was about to pile everything back into the boxes so she could leave when she found what she’d been looking for all along—Audra’s journals. Every rehab her sister had ever attended told her to record her feelings, and Audra had definitely done that. She mostly wrote when she was in recovery, but she’d kept journals since she was in her early teens. There were at least a dozen notebooks here, neatly packed away. Lauren had never read them before—she’d respected her sister’s privacy, even in death—but Brandon was Audra’s son. It was time Lauren found out exactly how her sister had felt about his father.
If she’d ever mentioned Harley…
Sitting cross-legged in the warm, dusty attic, she thumbed through each notebook, trying to put them in chronological order. She might never learn anything more about Harley, but maybe she’d gain something that would prove even more valuable. Maybe she’d get to know the sister who had become a stranger to her.
LAUREN WORTHINGTON WAS just like her father, Harley thought with distaste. His desire to tread lightly, to work peaceably with the Worthingtons, had slowly faded away. They didn’t want peace, not unless it came on their terms. Neither did they want to share. Nothing, really, had changed in the past ten years. They still thought they could flick him away like some kind of insect and keep Brandon to themselves, but now that Lauren had shown her true colors and united with her family, Harley felt perfectly justified in doing everything in his power to gain custody. The move to California might be difficult on Brandon at first. Harley understood that. But he could no longer allow the boy to grow up in the Worthington household. There were more important issues at stake than providing food and clothing. His son needed to be taught that a real man didn’t rely on money or status, that he didn’t bribe or intimidate his way out of difficult situations, that he acted upon the convictions held in his heart and stood behind those convictions no matter what.
