Bellamy and the Brute

by Alicia Michaels

  Nothing I did made me feel better about what had happened in front of Charlene’s, and I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t stop replaying the encounter in my mind again and again, reliving the horror I’d felt as Tate’s face was exposed to be made fun of, or the fear I’d experienced wondering if he and Lincoln would kill each other… not to mention the revulsion of having to suffer through Lincoln’s unwanted touch. I still felt dirty, even after a hot shower. The whole thing left a bitter taste in my mouth, and there was only one way to get rid of it.

  Once I arrived at Baldwin House the next morning, I stopped by the kitchen briefly to find the kids still eating. It looked as if they’d gotten a late start to their day—they had just sat down for breakfast and weren’t even dressed yet. Perfect. I wanted the kids distracted while I handled some business. Hands balled into fists, I marched up all three flights of stairs, ignoring the rose petals as I came to the landing of the third floor. The ghosts were going to have to wait, because right then, I had another problem that needed to be set right.

  Pausing in front of the door, I knocked, the sound reverberating with the force of my annoyance. No answer. I counted to ten, and then tried again, being met with silence once more.

  “Open the door, Tate,” I yelled to be heard through the thick wood. “You weren’t in the library, so I know you’re in there!”

  A few seconds later, he hollered in response. “Go away!”

  “Not until you open this door,” I fired back. “I have some things to say to you, and I want to look you in the eye when I do.”

  “I’m not in the mood today, Bellamy,” he replied, his voice lower this time. “Just leave me alone.”

  “Like hell I will,” I muttered, grabbing the doorknob and throwing the door open.

  I charged through the opening, prepared to give him a piece of my mind, but I faltered when I realized he was practically naked, standing in the doorway of the bathroom connecting to his bedroom, a towel wrapped around his hips. Wet hair clung to his forehead and neck, a few drops running down his chest.

  I gasped, turning my back to him, but not before I got an eyeful of Tate’s naked upper body. Much thinner than he used to be, he still had lines of definition etching through his abs and chest.

  “Put some clothes on, because I’m not leaving,” I grumbled, keeping my back turned and folding my arms across my chest. “I’m turning around in thirty seconds.”

  “What part of ‘leave me alone’ didn’t you understand,” he retorted, even though I could hear him moving around behind me.

  “Twenty-five seconds,” I warned.

  He didn’t answer, but a few seconds later, the sounds of movement stopped. “You can turn around now.”

  I spun to find him covered in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt—sans hoodie for a change. The bruise spreading from his nose toward his eyes caused me to experience pity for a split second, before I remembered my reason for coming up here. Pushing aside the sympathy, I reached for the rage. Hands on my hips, I came closer, pausing just in front of him, glancing up to meet his gaze.

  “I came to talk to you about last night,” I began.

  “For what?” he interrupted, his neck and shoulders tensing as he fisted his hands at his sides. “Everything that needed to be said was said… it’s over.”

  “No,” I spat. “You did all the talking last night, so now it’s my turn. And you are going to stand here and listen to me until I’m done.”

  Folding his arms over his chest, he inclined his head and pursed his lips. “Well?”

  “What happened last night sucked,” I continued, refusing to back down now that we were face to face. “But that does not excuse your behavior. You had no right to talk to me like that, when I didn’t do anything to deserve it, and leaving me alone in that parking lot was a jackass move.”

  Tate’s nostrils flared and his mouth grew tight at the corners as he replied from between clenched teeth. “If we hadn’t been there in the first place—”

  “But we were there,” I interjected. “Get over it! I know you’ve been holed up in this room for a long time, but in case you’ve forgotten, interacting with stupid people is a part of life. Being made fun of and called names is something I’ve dealt with much longer than you have. It happens when idiots like Lincoln, who know they’re never going to amount to anything, take it out on the people they know probably will.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like—”

  “To have a disfiguring disease?” I challenged. “No, I don’t. But you know what I have experienced? Being called names and laughed at by rooms full of people. You think it sucked to have three people laugh at you in a parking lot? Try being the laughingstock of the entire junior class—or hell, the entire town! Why don’t you ask my dad what it’s like to be different and have people treat him like a leper because of it? Or better yet, why don’t you give Lindsay a call and ask her how it feels to be humiliated on the freaking Internet by a bunch of immature assholes?”

  Tate stared at me in silence, his eyes wide as if unable to believe what he was hearing. My voice had risen with every sentence, and I felt as if I were about to start crying. Despite not wanting to embarrass myself that way, I couldn’t stop.

  “You hide yourself up here because you’re afraid someone will look at you and think you’re ugly,” I continued, my tone softening. “But all the hype built up about you around town is because of your decision to hide. If you weren’t so protective of your weakness—your insecurity—people wouldn’t be able to use it against you. And maybe, Tate, if you stopped being surly, irritable, and downright mean all the time, people could come to see you for who you really are—the person I thought I was starting to like. You think your face is ugly, and maybe it isn’t perfect, but it’s not the part of you that’s jacked up.”

  Turning on my heels to leave before I could lose control of my emotions, I stalked toward the door with swift steps. Pausing in the doorway, I turned back to find him still standing where I’d left him, staring at his feet.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” I added. “If you ever leave me alone in a dark parking lot again, I will kick your ass.”

  Without waiting for a reply, I slammed the door and left, not bothering to turn back. The anger that had stolen hours of sleep from me the night before had eased a bit, and my hands had stopped shaking. Ready to get to work, I made my way back downstairs, putting all thoughts of Tate aside for now.

  I wasn’t able to forget Tate for long. I had only been home from work for an hour when the doorbell rang. I’d just been about to order a pizza, and Dad was on his way out to inspect someone’s broken refrigerator. We exchanged bewildered glances at the sound, confused since no one ever visited. My aunt and her family lived hours away in Atlanta and would have called if they were coming. Neither of us had many friends who would just pop over to say hello.

  “I’ll get it,” he said. “You finish that pizza order.”

  Going back to the app on my phone, I turned my attention back to picking pizza toppings while he left me in the kitchen to answer the door.

  Just as I was submitting the order, he appeared again, his expression now more confused than ever.

  “You have a visitor,” he said, indicating the person appearing from behind him.

  I glanced up and choked on a gasp when my gaze collided with Tate’s. He was wearing shorts and the same T-shirt from earlier—no sweatshirt. There was a hat, but it was in his hands instead of on his head, his hair a bit mussed from him wearing it. There was a file folder beneath one of his arms.

  “Hey,” he said, almost appearing to be nervous. “Hope you don’t mind I stopped by.”

  Forcing a smile, I tried not to cringe at the thought of how horrible I must look. I’d changed into my pajamas as soon as I’d come home and piled my hair on top of my head in a messy topknot. My pajama bottoms had tiny depictions of Yoda all over them, and the T-shirt I wore was one of my favorites—a worn black tee with Storm from X-Men on the fron
t; lightning crackled from her hands, and the words ‘make it rain’ were beneath her.

  “No,” I said, quickly finding my voice. “It’s cool.”

  “Bellamy, I’m going to run that errand,” Dad said, glancing back and forth between Tate and me with open curiosity. “Tate, you should stay. Bellamy ordered pizza.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he replied, avoiding my dad’s gaze and blushing.

  I found myself strangely amused by the fact that he blushed when he was nervous.

  “It was a pleasure to meet you,” Dad said, extending a hand to Tate.

  I smiled as they shook hands, and Tate glanced up to find that my dad was looking him in the eye and not cringing away because of his appearance. A bit of smugness struck me as I realized I’d been right. Maybe not everyone would try to see past his disease, but there were many who would. My father had just proved it.

  “Be back in a bit,” Dad said before kissing the top of my head and disappearing through the living room and out the front door.

  Once the door closed behind him, we stood on opposite sides of the kitchen, staring at each other in silence. Without the hood and baseball cap casting shadows over his face, it really wasn’t so bad. Or maybe I’d just grown used to it, having learned how to see beyond his deformity. His eyes seemed more striking now, accentuated by the dark color of his hair.

  I cleared my throat and gestured toward the living room. “Wanna sit? Pizza shouldn’t be long.”

  This was ridiculous. I saw him all the time—had spent weeks in his house. Why was this so awkward?

  “Yeah, okay,” he said, letting me lead the way from the kitchen. Once I’d sat on the couch, he sat beside me, leaving a bit of space between us. He held up the folder. “I gathered some info—records of my dad’s personal and business finances from the year East Valley construction began. I thought we could go through it together to look for clues.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” I said, trying to force the tension out of my back and relax. “Where’d you get access to all that?”

  “Ezra’s office,” he replied. “He locks it when he leaves every day, but Mom has a set of keys to every door in the house in her office. It didn’t take long for me to find what I was looking for.”

  I laughed drily. “Something tells me Ezra wouldn’t take too kindly to you poking around his office.”

  Tate laughed. “He would not, so let’s keep this between us.”

  Accepting the folder from him, I opened it, revealing a thick stack of documents. “Well, let’s get started.”

  Placing a hand over mine, he took a deep breath. “Before we get into that, I want to tell you something.”

  I set the folder aside, and then turned a bit on the couch to face him. “Okay?”

  “I won’t try to apologize… again,” he said. “I regret what happened last night, and the fault isn’t completely with Lincoln. I lost control, and I went too far. I just want you to know…” He lowered his head. “Part of the reason I lost control was because of the way he treated you. I didn’t like it—the way he grabbed you, the things he said. What happened to me is my fault, and I brought it on myself. I treated people badly before, and now karma is biting me in the ass. But you… you’re one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, Bell. You’re sweet, you’re smart, and I know you don’t deserve to be treated like that by someone like him.”

  “I’m okay, though,” I insisted. “He grossed me out, but I wasn’t hurt.”

  He nodded, turning his head to look at me again. “I know. I knew that then, too. It won’t happen again; I can promise you that. The violence, or the way I treated you. I wasn’t mad at you, I was angry with Linc, hurt, and embarrassed… Very few people have seen my face outside you, Ezra, my family, and the doctors. I wasn’t ready for it to happen, but what’s done is done. I’m sick, and I can’t change the way I look. What I can change is how I treat people. I’m going to do better, Bell. I’m going to try.”

  I lifted my eyebrows, feeling a lump rising in my throat as I found myself becoming emotional again. What was it about Tate that made me want to fix things—not him, per se, but the world around him? To be his friend when everyone else had abandoned him? To see the beauty in him when disease had rendered him deformed?

  “Wow,” I managed. “For a non-apology, that was well done. Thank you, Tate.”

  He shrugged. “You said a lot of things to me this morning that I needed to hear. No one has ever talked to me like that, and I think it’s because no one cared enough until you. Everyone else let me get away with my bullshit, but you won’t.”

  “Dang right I won’t,” I teased, leaning closer and nudging his shoulder with mine.

  “That’s why I like you,” he murmured, his face flushing again. “I like being around you.”

  His declaration made my stomach flip and a rush of blood in my veins I wasn’t sure I liked. Still, I did the one thing that would only make it worse. I reached out to take his hand.

  As he glanced up at me, I smiled. “I like being around you, too… you know, when you’re nice to me.”

  Tate laughed, still hanging on to my hand. “Fair enough.”

  After another few seconds, I took my hand back and stood. “You want a soda or something? We can start going through those papers while we wait for the pizza.”

  His voice followed me to the kitchen. “Sure, whatever you have is fine!”

  I grabbed two canned sodas and joined him on the couch again. After I opened the folder, we split the papers, deciding to comb through them in search of anything that seemed out of place.

  At some point, the pizza arrived, and, eventually, we ended up seated on the floor with paper plates, the pizza box on the coffee table, and papers and forms spread out all around us.

  “I think I found something,” Tate said, polishing off his second slice.

  He’d replaced his hat on his head, but backward, causing a tuft of his dark brown hair to thrust up messily through the hole. I replaced the half-eaten slice of pizza on my paper plate and moved closer to him to see the handful of papers he held up.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A tax return from three years ago,” he replied, pointing to the IRS logo at the top of the first page. “These are the business taxes, not the family’s… look at these numbers. They’re far too low. There’s no way Baldwin & Co. could have afforded to launch East Valley.”

  Glancing over the paper, I saw a lot of big numbers, but I took Tate’s word for it. It made sense, because a company as large as Baldwin & Co. had salaries to pay, including the millions Douglas and Faith brought home every year.

  “That money had to come from somewhere,” I murmured, going back to my stack of papers. “Let’s keep looking.”

  Tate nodded and went back to his task. After a few more minutes of shuffling through papers while finishing my pizza, I struck gold.

  “Tate, look,” I said, lifting up the bank statement I’d just come across. “A bank statement from June of the same year. There’s a deposit here that caught my eye.”

  Tate accepted the stapled pages, his eyebrows shooting up toward his hairline. “That’s a lot of zeroes.”

  I nodded in agreement. “There are no deposits this big for the whole year—even your dad’s salary wasn’t this much. What changed?”

  Taking the papers back from him, I continued flipping through them. “Maybe there’s a deposit slip copy or something.” Pausing on a page, I gasped, showing it to Tate. “Bingo. A check for an insane amount of money made out to Douglas Baldwin from Canton Haines.”

  Glancing at the photocopy printout of the deposited check, he frowned. “Canton Haines, the mayor?”

  I met his gaze and shook my head. “Not anymore. His daughter ran for office a little over a year ago and won. It was a pretty big deal, since she’s the town’s first female mayor.”

  “Interesting,” Tate murmured. “Canton was the first black mayor back in 1980. How did he manage to stay in office so long
?”

  “Wellhollow Springs loved him,” I murmured, still looking at the check. “In the state of Georgia, there is no term limit. He kept running and winning, so he stayed mayor.”

  Tate set his papers aside and rested his chin in his palm. “This makes no sense. A mayor is a public servant. How does he have eight figures to just throw around?”

  “I seem to remember a book deal and a lot of news appearances,” I answered, searching my memory for anything that would fit in with what we’d found. “He’s pretty famous in Georgia—lots of charity work and accolades. Plus, he came from a well-off family, if I remember correctly.”

  “Millions of dollars to just give someone for no reason?” he mused aloud. “Something’s off about it. Even my dad would cringe at writing a check that big.”

  I nod. “You’re right, it’s weird. Is he friends with your dad or something? Maybe it was just a loan.”

  “A loan, maybe,” he said grudgingly. “But I wouldn’t call them friends. More like associates. I mean, they’ve both had a lot to do with making this town what it is, but they don’t play golf together or go to each other’s houses for dinner. Maybe it was just a loan and Dad is paying it back. Let’s keep looking for any indication that he did.”

  After another half hour of digging, we found nothing showing that Douglas ever paid Canton Haines back a single penny. The entire amount had, however, been transferred to the company, which we now knew had been used to get the East Valley development off the ground.

  “So,” I said as we gathered all the paperwork to place it neatly back in the folder. “We know that your dad took money from the former mayor to use for East Valley. Now we need to know why.”

  Standing, Tate tucked the folder under his arm. “I’ll do a little more digging to see if I can find more connections between my dad and Canton Haines. Maybe there’s some stuff I missed. Meanwhile, you keep up your search for murder victims. You might uncover the missing piece.”