InnocenceForSale.com/Amy (Innocence For Sale Book 1)

by Ada Scott

  “Alright, start loading it up,” he said.

  “No.”

  “What the fuck do you mean “no”? Pick up the fuckin’ money and load it into my car. You wanna die here?”

  “A spineless little sack of shit like you doesn’t have the balls to do anything to somebody like me. I’m not some old man in a wheelchair or some girl you outweigh by over a hundred pounds. You fucked with the wrong one here, I’m telling you that for free.”

  “Well, I’m the one with the gun, tough guy, so get to work.”

  “I don’t work for you, motherfucker. Never have, never will. You’ve never had a good idea in your life, and this has got to be the worst. What was that shit you were talking about me riding on your fuckin’ coattails? You delusional little fuck.”

  I could tell that every word that came out of my mouth that wasn’t “yes sir” was pushing his fucking buttons. In fact, I was counting on it.

  Yet, I’d have been lying if I said the world didn’t slip into slow motion for me when his face contorted in rage and the gun in his hand started rising towards my head again. I swore I could see the glint of a bullet down the barrel and the way his teeth were biting his bottom lip as he was about to say “fuck you” to me for the last time.

  Bang!

  The shot made me flinch and brace myself for pain or death, and also brought the world back to regular speed. Daniel crumpled to the ground, blood pouring from his head.

  The sharpshooter from the police had obviously judged the threat-level to be high enough to warrant it. I wondered if I’d cop any shit for pushing him over the edge instead of trying to talk him down. Still, like Daniel said, he was the one with the gun.

  A scream came from inside the house, a scream like somebody’s world was ending. I was on the move before the gun had even finished clattering out of Daniel’s dead hand.

  Racing inside, I burst through the screen door so fast I almost ripped it off its hinges. A moment later, I was at Amy’s side, working on the ropes as she stared at me in astonishment.

  Once untied, I pulled her on to my lap and she half fell into my arms, hugging me back as if trying to feel out whether I was real or not. I buried my face in her neck and hair.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  “I think he killed my mom,” she sobbed.

  “Did you see?”

  “No.”

  “OK. We don’t know that. We’ll find her, I promise. Are you OK?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Broken finger, maybe broken ribs. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know”

  I put my arms around her shoulders and waist, away from potentially broken ribs, and held her even tighter. “Shhhh, it’s OK. It’s going to be OK. I love you, and everything’s going to be OK.”

  “Love… you… too.” Amy’s words were staggered by sobs and winces of pain.

  “Can you stand? Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  By the time we made it to the door, the area in front of the farmhouse was bathed in red and blue flashing lights, and beginning to swarm with police officers. I led Amy in the direction of the approaching ambulance.

  Before the closest police officer could reach us, Amy shook herself loose from my arms with a grunt of pain and ran back into the house. She ignored the officer’s instructions to stop and, after a second of hesitation, so did I.

  “Mom!” she screamed, bursting through the door again.

  Amy darted from one room to the other, yelling and pausing to listen, until she opened the door to the closet in what must have been her mother’s bedroom. She dropped to her knees and when I followed her into the room and saw around the door, I saw her mother on the floor in there.

  Tied up, with a gag and a black eye but groggily moving and, most importantly, alive. Amy was desperately trying to untie her, but couldn’t get a grip on the ropes through the blur of her tears and with her broken finger.

  The police officer pulled out a knife and soon had her free, then ran off to call in the paramedics. Amy pulled her mother’s upper body into her lap and rocked her, sobbing and stammering comforting words. I got down on the floor and did the same for Amy.

  Minute by minute, as she calmed down, Amy’s strength seemed to return. I could only marvel at her resilience. She was the love of my life, I was sure of it. Maybe from now on we could go for more than one week at a time without a disaster befalling us. Just a lifetime of peace wrapped in passion.

  Amy

  Daniel had punched my mother hard enough to knock her out, but she was a tough cookie and came out of hospital the following evening. The police had questioned us all separately, and on the car ride home, she’d been asking some uncomfortable questions of her own.

  She knew that Kris wasn’t just some dessert vendor who had met me serendipitously and swept me off my feet. She knew there was some kind of history that entangled Daniel, Kris and me.

  I staved off her questions while we were driving, but now that we were home again, she was sitting in her chair expectantly, waiting. How could I explain all this?

  This home of ours had been under siege. First by the bank, then by Daniel and last by the forensics team that had picked over everything while we were away.

  Something felt off, as if they were treading over the memories my own family had laid down here over the course of generations. Yet, their presence had been relatively fleeting. Their shadows would fade.

  I was thankful that, if Daniel had to die here, he didn’t die inside our house. Even Kris’ arm around me couldn’t stop me from shaking when I thought of that.

  “So,” my mom prompted, “I guess you’ve got something to say?”

  Kris held me tighter. What would we do if my mom took exception to my relationship with Kris if she knew the full story? Would she make me choose between her and the home I fought so hard to save and the man I loved?

  “Kris and I have known each other longer than just a few weeks. Since before he turned up selling creampies.” I could hear my voice shaking.

  “I gathered that,” she said.

  I cleared my throat, glanced at Kris, and continued. “You remember… um… a few months ago, when I said I was visiting Emily because she had chickenpox?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was really going to meet Kris.”

  My mom’s eyes twitched from me to Kris and back again. “OK… but how did you even… know about each other?”

  I put one hand on the couch and the other hand on Kris’ knee as if to steady myself. Kris put his hand on top of mine, and my eyes sank as if they were too heavy to hold up.

  “Well… um…” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, putting off the inevitable by a couple seconds. “Remember how I made that crowdfunding thing on the internet and I said some anonymous Good Samaritan donated what we needed?”

  “I remember.”

  “That wasn’t the truth.”

  “Well… what was the truth, dear?” she asked.

  “I sold… something… for all that money. And Kris bought it.”

  “What on Earth could-”

  “My virginity.”

  Even the crickets outside stopped chirping. The words hung in the air with an almost physical presence, drawing the most attention to themselves as was possible. My mom’s eyebrows had gone from furrowed, to one raised and finally both seemed to be trying to make a sneaky retreat from her eyes as they headed for her hairline.

  “Amy stayed with me for a week in New Eastport. That was the arrangement, but we fell in love. Things got… complicated at the end of that week, with Daniel. I’d known him for a long time, but never realized he was flat out crazy. Amy left, but I knew I had to find her or spend the rest of my life trying. I don’t fall in love easily, Mrs. Evans, but I love your daughter with everything I’ve got,” said Kris.

  My mom’s eyes focused on a point a hundred yards behind us for a moment, then flicked up as if searching for the words in her own head, and f
inally came to rest on the two of us again.

  “OK. Does anybody want some tea?” She started rolling towards the kitchen.

  “Tea?” I spluttered. “That’s it?”

  My mom halted her chair. “What more do you want?”

  “Aren’t you angry? Disappointed? Embarrassed?”

  Mom sighed. “Haven’t I earned a little bit more faith than that?”

  “Of course, but…”

  “But nothing, dear. I’m your mother. You can’t stop me from loving you, from being proud of you, even if you tried. You could get arrested for grand theft auto and I’d put the newspaper clipping about you up on the fridge. You’re a good kid, you always have been. I’ve waited almost eighteen years to see somebody look at you the way Kris does. I don’t care how you met.”

  I looked at Kris, almost in shock. “Really?”

  “Yes, really. I remember what it was like to be looked at like that. I wasn’t always just an old lady stuck in this chair, you know, I used to dance in this very room with your father. He looked at me like…” she trailed off.

  “You’re not just-” I started, but she continued anyway.

  “I know you were desperate, Amy, but what you had was yours to give, not mine or anybody else’s. It wasn’t my decision to make. I would have advised against it, though, just by the way. Now… tea?”

  The crushing weight of a mountain lifted off my shoulders and I almost sighed in relief. I hadn’t realized just how much guilt I was carrying.

  “I’ll take one,” I said.

  “I’m OK, thanks,” said Kris.

  My mom rolled to the kitchen to make some tea as casually as if we’d just been talking about the weather. I turned to Kris and rested my forehead on his shoulder, desperately willing my heartrate to come back down out of the red-zone.

  Kris kissed the top of my head and reached over to rub my back. Earlier today, while we were waiting to see my mom in hospital, he’d told me that the Robertsons, the family in the farm that backed on to ours, were open to negotiations on Kris buying their property.

  We were so close to realizing all our dreams. If that worked out, then Kris and I could live together. It would be only a short skip through the fields to visit my mom, to grow my aloe vera, and there was more than enough space if Kris wanted to build a house somewhere for his own parents, assuming they hadn’t grown too attached to the place they’d lived in for the past few years.

  Eventually, a very long eventually, this house would pass down to me and Kris and I would move back in and raise our family here. It all flashed in my mind’s eye as I rested on the shoulder of the love of my life.

  Home. It’s worth fighting for.

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  All characters and events are entirely fictional and any resemblances to persons living or dead and circumstances are purely coincidental.

  Kendall

  I didn’t dare move for fear of breaking something. If I did, I’d probably have to declare bankruptcy. It was only a waiting room, but I’d never seen such lavish attention to detail before.

  If I wasn’t mistaken, that was a real Van Achthoven painting on the wall. Even the receptionist’s desk looked like something the President might have to save up for.

  All glass, it seemed to be custom made to show off her long legs from all angles. She had them crossed, making her short skirt ride high as she tapped away on the keyboard in front of her, sometimes pressing the button on the wireless headset to answer calls.

  Back home in Woodville I felt small. When I moved to the city, I felt tiny. Now, especially under her occasional disdainful glance, I felt positively microscopic.

  I wrung my hands in my lap, second-guessing myself for the millionth time about the big move. I’d thought I’d show my family that I could be something, but I’d been here for months and I was still just an intern at The Weekly Enquirer.

  My funds were evaporating fast. If my boss, Mr. Kinsley, didn’t give me the actual job he’d promised me soon, I’d have to go home with my tail between my legs.

  So why did he send me to interview Jace Barlow, the mysterious man who took his one hundred and eighty million dollar lottery winnings and quickly turned it into an empire pushing at a billion dollar valuation?

  Was it because he liked my “moxie,” as he liked to say to the people he actually paid to work? Because he saw some untapped potential in me? No.

  As Mr. Kinsley said in the meeting room in front of everybody, as if I wasn’t even there, Jace Barlow had scheduled and cancelled meetings with every major publication you could think of dozens of times. It was like a joke to the new multi-millionaire to screw with the media.

  So send me to the appointment, and then when Barlow cancels again, at least nobody important will have wasted their time.

  The receptionist’s headset beeped and she pressed the button. “Yes sir? Of course, sir. Yes I’ll tell her. One moment.”

  This was it. I looked over at the tall blonde as she unhooked the headset from her ear and stood up, smoothing her skirt. Was she going to escort me all the way to the elevator?

  “Miss Brookes?” she asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Barlow will see you now.”

  I had to let that set in for a moment as my heart seemed to say “Right, I’m outta here” and tried to make good its escape via my throat. Swallowing hard, I managed to get it back down.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Barlow will see you. Now. You’ll have to hand over your phone, and do you have any recording devices?”

  I fumbled at my little handbag. “Uh… I’ve got a…” My mind went blank looking for the word. “Dictaphone!” I blurted out.

  You could almost see the concentration in the receptionist’s face as she tried not to roll her eyes at a so-called journalist who couldn’t remember what a Dictaphone was. With shaking hands, I opened my handbag and took out the offending items.

 
The receptionist walked around her desk with a supermodel sashay and reached out for them. “I’ll keep them in a secure container until your meeting is finished.”

  This couldn’t be happening. A nobody like me doesn’t interview the most elusive man in the city. Mr. Kinsley didn’t even give me a questionnaire, he was that sure this was going to be a bust. I had nothing prepared to ask him and I was about to walk into an interview that famous journalists would kill their own mothers to conduct.

  She confiscated the forbidden electronics and put them in a drawer before beckoning me through the door behind her desk. Once on the other side, I could see that the horizontal strips of mirror on the wall of frosted glass were actually one-way, so you could see into the waiting room like you were peeking out from a bunker without being seen.

  There was no time to contemplate that though, as I was led at a brisk pace down a long hallway. At the end was a door, flanked by two men wearing suits and looking for all the world like Secret Service agents. One of them told me to hold my arms out to my sides as he waved a metal detector over me, while the other inspected my handbag for contraband.

  I felt like it was a pretty thorough inspection before walking the plank. What would they do to me back at work when they heard I actually made it into Jace Barlow’s office? I racked my brain trying to think of everything I’d heard about him, trying to come up with something halfway relevant to ask.

  About a year before I would have been ready, the security men were apparently satisfied that I wasn’t an assassin, and gave me the all clear. The receptionist knocked on the door and opened it, ushering me through before standing at my side.

  If I thought the waiting room was expensively decorated, it had nothing on Jace Barlow’s office. Everywhere I looked were sleek, sophisticated lines, fine furniture and tasteful art.