Deceiver

by Robin Lovett

  “Oh,” Mom gasps. She must know more than I think. I guess my father told her about the Vandershall scandal. “Are you sure that’s wise, Penny? Your father’s retirement pay at the university. All that publicity.” It was quite the scandal after he died, all over the papers.

  “There’s enough money in this town.” Penny lifts her chin. “My father’s retirement pay shouldn’t be the only donation keeping the hospital in business.” Penny smiles at me. “My main hope in coming here was to ask if you’d like to chair the board for the new charity? I’ll be in California a lot. Not here so it can’t be me.”

  “Really?” I’m nervous about such a responsibility but too excited to ever say no to such an offer.

  “Absolutely. And we’re going to use the estate. I’ve decided. We can start with using the main house—the one with some thirty rooms and no one living in it—for housing. Over time we could build new accommodations. There’s more than enough land to support it.”

  “And it’s such a peaceful place,” I add. “It would be a wonderful place for recovery.”

  Penny smiles. “Exactly.”

  “Hello?” Dad’s voice comes from the front hallway.

  “We’re in the kitchen,” Mom calls.

  Dad walks in with a bright smile and comes straight to give me a hug. “Daisy. I’m so happy to see you.”

  Mom introduces him to Penny. “She needs to speak with you about something.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.” He nods politely. “I’d like to speak with Daisy, though, first.” He waves me toward his office.

  I know why. We have to talk about Blake—what happened, get the truth straightened out between us over this whole mess. My stomach wrenches. “I’m sorry about not coming back to work. Have you been taking care of yourself?”

  “Ask your mom.” He winks at her in the kitchen. “I’ve left work before five every day this week.”

  “Good.” I follow him down the hallway, and my palms start to sweat. “Do we have to talk about him now?”

  “Best to get it out of the way,” he says, with all the fatherly compassion I so love from him. “Then we’ll be able to enjoy dinner with your friend.”

  If only the thought of talking about Blake didn’t make me heartsick.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I dock in the marina, and stepping back on land makes me wobble. Three days on the water, three days of stubble on my face, three days to accept the man I really am and the evil that lurks in me . . .

  It didn’t work.

  The only thing I’ve accepted is that I want her back. And I’ll do whatever I have to do to purge myself of this . . . these . . . things about me that resemble my father.

  I reach Aunt Maggie’s house and have a flash of guilt for how I behaved when I saw her last. I’m still certain I have more of my father in me than she realizes, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be doing everything in my power to change.

  I realized during my solo voyage that Daisy set me on track. I understand now what she gave me and what I learned from her. It would be poor respect to her for me not to take that seriously and continue building on it.

  Contrite, I ring the doorbell to the house, not feeling right about barging in uninvited. Aunt Maggie doesn’t answer, so I walk around to the back patio and wait for her.

  She comes home in her beachwear, and when she sees me, rather than the skeptical look I expect, she gives me a smile. “I’m glad you’re home.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth.” She sits at the foot of my chaise lounge. “It’s always been my hope you’d consider my house a home away from home, and you do.”

  “I do.” I brought Daisy here without Aunt Maggie at home, and she never once complained about it.

  “Let me make you some supper.” She pats my leg and moves into the kitchen.

  I lay outside, listening to the sounds and smells of her cooking. Then I hear the fryer—she’s making fried chicken. Comfort food. There is no better.

  I almost feel guilty, like I should go help her. But a lethargy takes over me, and a longing to let someone help me rather than always having to be the one in control.

  She brings me out a plate and we eat at the patio table.

  I dig in with gusto. After days of meager meals cooked in the sailboat’s galley, it’s heavenly food. When I come up for a breath, I ask, “When did Penny and Logan leave?”

  “Day after you did.”

  “Did they go back to California?”

  “To Nashville. Penny’s working on her charity.”

  My sister is entitled to go where she wants. Though I confess I’d rather be alone on the estate when I get back. I have a lot of demons to face there.

  I pull another biscuit from the basket. “I’m sorry about, you know, a few days ago.”

  “You’ll always welcome here, no matter how much of a recluse you become.” She watches me, searching my face for something. “I know you’re afraid you’re like him, but please don’t hide yourself away.”

  “I am like him. But I mean to change that.”

  “Blake, let me try to explain something.” She wipes her hands in her napkin and sits back in her chair. “There’s an energy about a man who lives a life of deception like your father did. It took me most of my life to learn to recognize it, but I know it now.”

  I pause in my eating, hanging on her words. I want proof. As much as I’m afraid I’m like him, I can’t deny my desperation for some hope it isn’t true.

  “Your father.” She takes a deep breath and looks at the sky. “He had a foulness to him.” She shivers. “The same foulness my father—your grandfather—and my first husband had.”

  I never met either of those men. “Did they . . .” I don’t want to say the words beat you out loud.

  She nods and looks at me from under her brows.

  “No one told me.” I sit forward, disbelieving. “You and Mom were . . . hurt . . . as kids?”

  “I never wanted to tell you, and your mother certainly wasn’t going to tell you until you were older.” She runs a hand through her hair. “You and I never talked much about your father. I always wanted to give you space as a child, not force you to talk about him. I figured when you came to visit the best thing I could do for you was give you a peaceful space where you didn’t have to think about him.

  “And since you’ve grown, the pressure I’ve seen you under has seemed to grow and grow and talking about it seemed like a worse idea. But now . . .” A relieved sadness enters her eyes. “He’s gone now. You don’t have to be afraid of him anymore.”

  I stiffen, offended. “I never was afraid of him.” It was a luxury I didn’t have time for. I was too busy keeping him away from my sister.

  “You grew up so used to living in terror you forgot how to even recognize it.”

  “How do you know that?” I never told her, but it doesn’t mean . . .

  “Your mother told me.” The grief, the sadness of missing her, takes over Aunt Maggie’s expression. “She wanted to leave him. But she knew if she left, she’d never be able to take you with her.”

  “He would’ve kept me.”

  She nods. “Getting pregnant with your sister was an accident she regretted with her life. She cried to me on the phone for hours the day she found out.”

  I stare at my food. My mother . . . so trapped. A prisoner in her own home, jailed by her husband.

  “Blake.” Aunt Maggie lays a hand on my arm. “How did she die?” The misery and pain in her eyes stabs at me.

  I never told her. All this time she’s never known what happened. Never asked me, because she wanted to save me from having to relive it.

  She deserves to know.

  I look off at the garden, not really seeing it. “I was hiding in my favorite spot under the piano behind the curtains. You know, at the bottom of the stairs?”

  She gulps and nods.

  “He’d thrown me against the wall once that day already. I jus
t needed a break.” I wrench fingers in my hair. “So stupid. It was my fault. If I hadn’t been hiding, he probably would’ve been at me instead of her.”

  “None of it was your fault, darling,” she soothes. “Him killing you instead of her would not have been any better.”

  “For you, maybe. For me, it would have.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud, that it would’ve been better for my mother and Penny if he’d killed me that day instead of her. “He was shouting at her. I should’ve gone out to help her, but I was frozen. Like my bones had seized.”

  “It was survival, Blake. Your body was doing what it needed to survive. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Like hell it wasn’t!” I kick my chair out from until me and it lands with a crash against the concrete. I fist my hands and pace away from her. “I can’t talk about this.” The rage it awakens in me is more than I can bear and more than Aunt Maggie wants to see.

  “You were a child. It wasn’t your job to save her.”

  “Yes, it was! She had no one else to help her! It was me or no one!”

  Tears pool in her eyes, and she covers her mouth. I’m making her cry, I can’t keep going. She may say she wants to hear this, but she doesn’t.

  The anger and the pain, they duel inside me like knives stabbing me over and over, never landing in the same place twice, uncontrollable and unpredictable. I have to get out of here before I break something.

  I stride off toward the car.

  “Blake, please.” The sadness that cracks her voice stops me. “I want to know.”

  The ache in her eyes, I don’t want to make it worse. I want to save her from this pain. “No, you don’t.”

  She comes to me and grabs me by the hand. “Yes, I do. I need to hear it from you as much as you need to tell me.” The knowing look she gives me—it awakens something in me I’d forgotten and lost, even to my memory.

  The marrow-deep, soul-destroying need to tell someone. In the days after she died, the need to tell someone anyone what I’d seen was like a bomb living in my throat. I wanted it out, but I knew if I gave it to the wrong person it would explode. It could hurt them—they might die too. It was a child’s fear. But it felt real to me.

  But then he stuck my face in the lake, held me down under the water until I thought I’d die, and then pulled me up again. Muttering in my ear that if I told anyone he’d kill my sister.

  After that the urge to talk went quiet. I buried it so deep I forgot I even had it.

  But the bomb is back. It started to resurface with Daisy. Now I remember it. With Aunt Maggie looking at me with those quiet, sage-like eyes of hers, I’m tempted to hand it to her.

  I hadn’t thought about what a big deal it was for me to tell Daisy, to show her where my mom cracked her head on the staircase. But it was. I think last week may have been the first time I told anyone. Ever.

  Aunt Maggie strokes my face and I realize my cheeks are wet.

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  She kisses my cheek. “Come sit and tell me.”

  I let her lead me like a child back to sit at the table. I suppose I am one. Too small, too powerless. I hate it.

  Images still so clear, like crystal panes in a sun-filled window, like things that happened yesterday, not twenty years ago. “I heard them at the top of the stairs, and I crawled out to see. I was planning to go up there. I was. I would’ve but . . .

  “He pushed her. She screamed. The sound of her body hitting the stairs . . .” I force a swallow. “She curled around herself. She protected her belly instead of her head.” I didn’t know what it meant until years later, after replaying it in my head thousands of times. “Her head smacked the banister on the way down. She died saving Penny.”

  She covers her mouth and whispers, “Penny.”

  I should’ve resented my sister for taking my mother from me, but every time I looked at her—I loved her more, not less. Still do. “Penny looks just like her.”

  “I know.” Her lower lip wobbles and she bites it to make it stop.

  “He left her lying there. He didn’t even come down to see if she was okay. She was unconscious and the . . . blood . . .” The pool of the crimson stuff spreading like sickness across the floor. “I watched her get paler and paler.” I squint trying to remember, because here’s the part that gets hazy—where feelings overcome the images. The memories of what I felt stronger than any visual. “I must have been screaming. But I don’t remember. I remember someone pulling me away. Mrs. Tanner, maybe? I’m not sure. But I didn’t want them to touch me. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. They took her away.”

  It ends there. There’s nothing. The words stop. The images stop.

  “Was it—bad—after that? Was he . . .” She asks, but she already knows the answer.

  I nod, not having the energy for more words.

  “Oh Blake, I’m so sorry.” She pulls me to her, resting my head against her shoulder and wrapping me in a hug that I would’ve wanted twenty years ago. But I’ll take it now too.

  I guess I cry. It more feels like a relief than a cry. A release of the things I’ve pent up inside, a weakening of the defenses I’ve spent my life building. The ones Daisy first started poking holes in days ago.

  Daisy.

  I sit up away from Aunt Maggie. “I need serious therapy if I’m ever going to get her back.” Not that I ever really had her in the first place.

  “You mean Daisy?” She smiles and chuckles. “I recommend therapy. I’ve done it for years.”

  “Yeah.” It’s delusional to think that even therapy could make a difference, though. “My level of fucked up may not be treatable.”

  “Don’t think that!” she scolds. “You are healable. You will heal. It may be a while, it may take some serious care and time, but you will heal. You’re not so wounded that you’re beyond that.”

  “Maybe.”

  She stands away from me. “I’m getting you a flight to Nashville. Are you leaving tomorrow? Or do you want one more day?”

  “Tomorrow. I owe her father an apology.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I arrive on the Vandershall estate and the sense of unease that runs through me isn’t something I can breathe through. My fingers are numb and my heart thuds against my ribs, ringing like a base drum in my ears.

  The fountain rushes with the same fervor. The grounds are groomed with the meticulousness of a fashion runway. It’s the people who are different . . . and who I know is not here.

  Penny swore up and down and sideways that her brother would not be here. She has such a tender face—I can’t imagine she’s ever successfully told a lie in her life.

  The person I don’t expect to see is Layla.

  She comes up to me in a wraparound sundress that’s of no brand name and is likely thrift store material, but she makes it look like a million-dollar gown for how it falls over her. “Glad you’re here. This place could use some livening up.”

  I close my car door. “And I’m so lively?”

  “Compared to Penny and all her ultra-focused fundraiser schmoozing? Yeah, you are.” She walks with me over the gravel drive to the slate front steps. “Everyone’s out in the back garden.”

  “Okay.” I stop and look backward, I can’t help it. The view out over the lake captures my eyes, and then there’s the little island with the breakfast table and the step stone bridge.

  The same lake where Blake’s father tried to murder him.

  How he must loathe this place. No wonder he moved to California.

  “Do you want to go for a walk first?” Layla asks. “I’ve been dying to explore this place but haven’t been allowed to. It’s full of secret hideouts. Murders could’ve been committed in these woods and no one would know.”

  I raise a brow at her. Penny must have told her the truth of how their mother died.

  She gives a small chuckle. “Oops. Bad joke.”

  I laugh a little too. My gaze travels over the acres and acres of forests
on the far side of the lake. “This place is so eerie. I’m glad Penny has plans to use it for good. It needs to be replaced with something better.”

  “I’d still rather her stay in California near me than spend time in this shit town.”

  I take offense. “There’s lots of good decent people here. Don’t let the Vandershall family story convince you otherwise.”

  “It’s quite a story. Penny’s hiring me to write it.”

  “As in publish it?”

  Layla sweeps her springy auburn curls over her shoulder. “It’ll make one hell of a family drama bio.”

  “You’re a writer?”

  “I’m nosy and love to tell people about it. Sometimes they pay me. It’s fun.”

  “And you’ve given the Vandershalls information. That’s how they realized my father was innocent.”

  “That’s how Blake realized your father was innocent.” The quirk to her mouth is one of near malicious intent.

  Hearing his name has the effect she wants. It wrenches my insides and has me turning away from her, forcing out the feelings I’ve been trying to overcome since I left him.

  Layla takes my arm in hers. “He blackmailed you. I don’t get it. I mean, he’s hot and all, but really, how can it be worth a mess like him?”

  “He’s not so irredeemable.”

  She gives me a look like I’ve lost some marbles. “You got it bad. You’re better than that, you know.”

  I shake off her arm. “I’m well aware of what I’m better than. What I’m not aware of is another man who can make me feel like he does. I’ve been around. I’ve met lots of those ‘perfect guys’ who were all a waste of my time.”

  She stops walking. “Really? Can I use that in my book?”

  I groan and keep walking. “No.”

  “Wait, Daisy.” She grasps my hand to stop me. “You think he’s forgivable? You think he’ll move past this?”

  It’s not a high probability, and I know what she thinks of me. Because she doesn’t know me, she thinks I’m desperate and will settle for any man who likes me. “I’m not stupid. I know the likelihood of him getting over his past enough to be in a healthy relationship is small.”