The Beautiful Daughters

by Nicole Baart

  Harper could hear the sound of a cupboard opening, and then Adri poked her head around the corner and caught Harper in the stairwell. “You want a cup of coffee?” she asked. Her eyes were tired, but as warm as Harper could hope for in the middle of the night.

  “I’d take a cup,” Harper shrugged. “I’m up now, too.”

  “Good morning, Harper,” Sam called from where he stood at the counter. He slid her a tired smile and nodded in greeting.

  “Morning.” Harper stifled a yawn. She tripped down the last few steps and pulled out a chair at the table, but before she could sink into it, the phone rang again. A chill went through the kitchen. Nobody called at such an ungodly hour—twice—unless something was wrong. Harper froze with her hand on the back of the chair.

  Adri was still holding the phone and she anxiously clicked it on and pressed it to her ear. “Hello? Hello, Caleb?” She waited for a moment before trying again. “Hello?” After a few more seconds, she held the phone out in front of her and studied it as if there was something wrong with it.

  “Nothing?” Sam asked. A fresh coffee filter was cradled in his palm.

  “I can hear somebody breathing,” Adri said. “But I don’t know if they can hear me. Maybe Caleb accidentally switched his phone to mute.”

  “What makes you so sure it’s Caleb?” Sam asked. “It could be Will.”

  “Will wouldn’t be out at three o’clock on a Wednesday morning,” Adri reasoned. “But if you had caller ID we wouldn’t have to guess. We’d know who was phoning.”

  “It’s not something I’ve ever needed.” Sam dropped the filter into the top of the machine and reached for the container of ground coffee. “I pick up the phone and say hello if I want to know who’s calling. Try the other phone.”

  “The rotary?”

  “It’s worked forever and a day,” Sam said. “I don’t know what makes you think the new one is better.”

  Adri tucked the cordless phone under her arm so that she could take the carafe from her father’s outstretched hand and fill it with water from the tap. But Harper wasn’t paying attention to them or their good-natured bickering.

  Sam’s and Adri’s backs were turned to the little desk that housed the two phones, and when they weren’t looking, Harper moved around the dining room table and reached for the phone jack. Popping the cord from the base of the handheld, she plugged the rotary into its place.

  When the phone rang a third time, she answered it. “Hello?” She forced herself to say the innocuous greeting, even though what she wanted to do was scream into the mouthpiece. Or unplug both phones and pretend that their middle-of-the-night wake-up call was nothing more than a bad dream. But she knew that it wasn’t. And she knew that the phone would only keep ringing and ringing and ringing. Unless she stopped it.

  Sam and Adri spun around at the sound of Harper’s voice, and she made herself shrug dispassionately. Then she rolled her eyes as if she was experiencing the same thing that Adri had: a weighted hush, nothing more.

  But it wasn’t nothing.

  Sawyer was on the other end of the line.

  They breathed together in silence for a few moments, and Harper hoped that maybe Sawyer hadn’t recognized her voice. She had said just one word. But just as she was about to hang up, he whispered through the line: “As if I wouldn’t find you.”

  The phone went dead.

  Harper didn’t stay in the kitchen for a cup of coffee, and the phone didn’t ring again. She feigned exhaustion and mounted the stairs for the spare bedroom, but the adrenaline flushing through her system was so potent that she felt like she could crawl right out of her skin. Fly away. It was exactly what she needed to do.

  Dressing in layers, Harper yanked on a pair of new socks and wished for a scarf and some gloves. It was cold outside. She could feel the icy air seeping through the warped frame of the window, and when she squinted at the yard below, she could see the grass glow white with frost. At least, she assumed it was frost. September snow wasn’t entirely unheard of.

  Though Harper wanted to leave immediately, she didn’t dare. Adri was likely still in the kitchen, and while Sam would be heading out to the barns soon enough, Harper wanted to be sure that he was installed in the milking parlor before she made her escape. Escape? Did she really feel like she needed to escape Maple Acres and the Vogt family and the reminders of the life she had once led? No, she wanted to wrap them all up, tuck them away where they would be protected always. But if she had learned anything in the last several days, it was that she couldn’t go back. No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t undo the things she had done.

  It was Sawyer she wanted to escape. And the sickening knowledge that he had found her. That he might come here.

  Harper had been stupid. Her knowledge of computers was limited, but she had been too careless—scrubbing the history after her forays onto the internet wasn’t enough. Of course there were other markers that pointed to her online activity, a veritable trail of bread crumbs that would lead Sawyer to her fake Facebook account. Her email. A message from one Adrienne Vogt, who could be easily traced to Blackhawk, Iowa, and the little farm at the end of a long gravel road. Information wasn’t a commodity these days, it was an inalienable right. Of course, Sawyer couldn’t have done it on his own, but his resources were virtually unlimited.

  Harper perched on the end of her bed, picking at the fabric of her jeans, bunching it in her hands as if she was holding on for dear life. She needed a plan.

  She’d have to steal Betty.

  It tore her up to know that she was going to hurt Adri again. And it killed her to think that Sam and Will and Jackson, and even Nora, would think less of her. That the loving welcome she had received from them less than a week ago would be tarnished by the knowledge that she was a thief. But it was better than letting them know what she had really become. It was her only real option when she considered that Sawyer could destroy the one pure thing she still held dear.

  Harper wondered if Adri would try to follow her.

  And then she was seized with another thought. How would Sawyer know that she had gone?

  If she stayed, Sawyer would come for her. If she left, he’d still come—he’d just find her gone, and use the people she cared for as leverage. Harper didn’t dare to guess at what Sawyer was capable of, but at best he’d expose her in front of the only real family she had ever known. At worst . . . Harper didn’t even want to think about that.

  Sawyer knew her. He knew who she was and who she had been and what she had done. Once, she had loved him, or thought she did, and when she admitted the things that lovers admit, he had tucked each confession like a weapon into an arsenal to use against her. Love and lies and jealousy and secrets, but nothing so damning as the truth of what happened that day with David Galloway.

  Sawyer knew that Harper was a murderer.

  Her only option, the only solution that her frozen mind could conjure, was to go back.

  Harper was shaking so hard that her teeth started to chatter. She wrapped her arms around herself and clenched her jaw, furious that he could affect her so much. That she let him. She was stronger than this. Harper Penny was made of tougher stuff, and she wasn’t about to let a man like Sawyer write the story of her life. But try as she might, she couldn’t see a way out. He was as vast as the sea, and she was drowning.

  It was still pitch black outside when the alarm clock on the nightstand read 5:00 a.m. The house was quiet. A couple of hours had passed since she’d thrown on her clothes and formulated a half-baked plan, but it felt like minutes. She must have fallen asleep.

  The light was still on in the kitchen, and there were two empty coffee cups beside the sink. But as far as Harper could tell, no one was around. She crept through the bright space, pausing at the door to grab her shoes and stuff her feet into them. Then she was on the porch, the morning stars glittering madly over
head. She had read once that stars shine the brightest in the moments before dawn, but it had always sounded like a myth to her. A bit of convenient fairy-tale fluff. But she could believe it now. The world was so resplendent with starlight, it seemed the air itself shimmered.

  Hurrying across the frosted lawn, Harper tried to keep her footfalls soft. The grass fractured beneath her rubber soles, leaving a trail so obvious that it was as if she was walking in sand. Sam and Adri wouldn’t have to puzzle over where she had gone.

  It was harder to heave open the garage door than Harper had thought it would be, and she struggled for a minute before she realized she had to lift back instead of up. But once she got the feel of it, the heavy door swung up quickly, almost lifting her off the ground. Harper righted herself and said a little prayer that the keys were in the ignition. That’s where Adri usually left them, and if they weren’t where Harper expected them to be, she had no idea what she would do. The truth was, she had no idea what she would do once she started Betty and drove away, but she figured one step at a time was forethought enough. She reached for the door.

  “Going for a drive?”

  Harper whirled and saw Adri framed in the rectangle of the open garage door. Her hands were stuffed in the pockets of a heavy coat, and her face was completely obscured by shadows. But there were stars in her hair, and the silhouette she cut against the blackness was strong and lovely. Harper almost burst into tears.

  Instead, she wrestled her emotions to the ground. “Yeah,” she said lightly. “I couldn’t go back to sleep. I would have asked you, but I didn’t want to wake you up. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Adri ignored the question. “I couldn’t sleep, either.”

  They stood there for a few heartbeats, studying each other in the darkness. It felt intense, almost calculating, through there was no way that Adri could see Harper any better than Harper could see her.

  “Can I go with you?” Adri finally asked. Harper was too surprised by the timidity of the request to worry that her friend was foiling her pathetic plan.

  “Sure.”

  “Keys are in the ignition,” Adri said. “You want to drive?”

  Harper tingled with the understanding that time was ticking away, that every moment she was out joyriding with Adri was a moment that should be spent making her way back to Sawyer so that he wouldn’t come looking for her. Minneapolis was only a five-hour drive, and if he had left the moment he hung up the phone, he could pull up at Maple Acres in a couple of hours. Would he do that? Harper didn’t think so. She had a sneaking suspicion that he was playing with her. A handful of creepy phone calls in the middle of the night were probably just the beginning of an elaborate scheme to unnerve her. Well, she was sufficiently unnerved. No need to torture her any further. And no need to plague Sam and Adri with whatever else Sawyer had in store.

  With Adri in her getaway car, Sawyer was just one of ­Harper’s many problems. She half expected Adri to bring up the conversation that they had abandoned the other day at Piperhall, especially since they were alone, and Harper had done everything in her power to avoid time alone with Adri in the last few days. But Adri didn’t mention David now or the estate. In fact, she didn’t say anything at all for a very long time. She just stared out the windshield and let Harper wander at will. When they skirted the city limits of Blackhawk, Adri finally pointed at an upcoming intersection and instructed Harper to turn.

  “Why?” Harper asked, but she had already turned on her blinker.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “The fire escape slide.”

  It had been ages since Harper had thought about the fire slide, but it didn’t fail to bring a faint smile to her lips. Blackhawk didn’t have much by way of parks, but the fire slide was legendary, an old, metal slide that was completely enclosed in a silo and nearly two stories tall. It had been around for decades, since long before people started worrying about safety hazards in playgrounds. Wicked fast, it boasted three sharp, steep turns before spitting breathless riders out onto the gravel. It had been a tradition for The Five, a necessary pit stop on the way back to ATU after weekends spent at Piperhall. For Harper, it was a way to leave everything behind, if only for the seconds that she was spinning, the centrifugal force pushing her shoulder blades against the cool metal of the slide, her hair whipped back from her face.

  “You want to go down the slide?” Harper asked, pulling into the small parking lot and putting the car in park. She was incredulous that as her life turned to ashes, Adri was ready to play.

  Adri shrugged. “I always thought you loved it.”

  More than the thrill, Harper had loved the attention. David once carried her up the three twisting flights of stairs to the platform at the top of the fire slide. And when she whooshed out at the bottom, someone was always ready to catch her, to pick her up from the gravel and dust her off.

  “I like the slide,” Harper said. “But it’s kind of cold outside, don’t you think?”

  “I didn’t exactly expect us to go down it.” Adri turned in her seat to face Harper. “I just wanted you to stop driving so I could look you in the face.”

  Harper stifled a sigh. “I don’t want to talk about it, Adri. I know you don’t want the estate, but Victoria left it to you and—”

  “I don’t care about the estate. You can have it.” It was a throwaway statement, Harper doubted that Adri meant it at all. But it was shocking all the same. “I’m serious,” Adri said, disregarding the look in Harper’s eyes. “It’s yours. Turn it into a bed-and-breakfast. Sell it and pocket the cash. Give ghost tours for all I care.”

  Harper didn’t know what to say.

  “I want to talk about you. About why you’re here and what you’re running from.”

  “Nothing,” Harper protested. But the word was weak and ineffectual.

  “Okay, who you’re running from.” Adri threw up her hands. “How stupid do you think we are? You showed up in the backseat of a strange vehicle, half-naked and without a penny on you.”

  “I was not half-naked.”

  “You were half-naked. You didn’t have shoes, Harper. Shoes.”

  “I gave them away.”

  Adri was breathing hard. She sounded angry, but in the flickering light of the streetlamp, Harper could see desperation in her eyes. “No money, no purse, no clothes. Seriously, Harper, you don’t even have a phone. You haven’t called anyone since you got here, and the only person who’s called for you did so in the middle of the night.”

  Harper blanched. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  The look Adri gave her was cynical and searching, but she seemed to decide not to press the issue. “You can’t even give me a straight answer when I ask you where you work.”

  “I’m a waitress.” But Harper’s mind was foggy. She couldn’t remember if she had claimed to be a waitress.

  Adri ignored her. “What have you done, Harper?”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Then what happened to you?”

  Harper didn’t know where to begin. But maybe the question was rhetorical. Maybe Adri didn’t want an answer at all.

  They sat for a few minutes in relative silence, the car engine idling and Adri’s ragged breathing the only sound in the early-morning stillness. Then she reached past Harper, turned off the car, and yanked the keys out of the ignition.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going down the slide, and I want to make sure that you don’t drive away while I’m gone.”

  Harper made a sound of indignation, but Adri wasn’t buying it. “You weren’t going for a joyride, were you? You were leaving.” She swung out of the car without waiting for a response.

  It was still dark, but there was a smudge of light on the horizon, and the stars were beginning to fade. Harper watched as Adri made her way acro
ss the park, her footprints cutting a perfectly straight path from the car to the base of the slide. Harper didn’t know what to do. Adri was right to take the keys—if she had left them, Harper might very well have driven away. She didn’t know if she could just leave Adri in the dark, but Blackhawk was small and it would be easy enough for Adri to find her way home. A quick phone call to Sam or Will, even Jackson and Nora, and her world would be set right. No Harper in it.

  Harper wrenched the car door open and followed in Adri’s footprints. It was cold, and she hugged herself, grateful for the long-sleeved T-shirt she had tucked under her sweater.

  Adri was already at the top of the slide, and as Harper stepped on the first stair, she could hear Adri pitch herself over the edge and into the tunnel. Harper went up as Adri went down, and by the time she peered into the gaping mouth of the tall slide, the park had been shrouded in silence. She didn’t know if Adri was waiting for her, or if she had already headed back to the car. It was a ridiculous hope, but Harper prayed that Adri had stayed. She didn’t want to be alone.

  There was a thick bar at the entrance to the slide, and sometimes Harper used to hold it and whip herself into the darkness. The cold metal was fast enough on its own, but with a little extra force, she could send herself twining through the tunnel like madness itself. Often, when she crashed to the bottom, the world had been tipped sideways, and the off-kilter tilt was enough to make everything seem fresh again.

  It was stupid to be afraid, but Harper was. She sat shivering at the top of the slide, and when the coldness seeped into her jeans she forced herself to scoot forward the single inch that would send her down. Sometimes it felt like her life was decided by an inch. A detail. A secret told.

  When Adri came back to their apartment the day after David hit her, Harper knew that something was wrong. They had breathed the same air for over three and a half years, and it was almost impossible for them to keep secrets from each other. Even when they wanted to. And the second Adri stepped into the apartment and shot Harper a flimsy smile as she sat curled in the shabby La-Z-Boy, Harper could tell that something monumental had happened. Maybe it was the tightness in Adri’s eyes, the way she held herself so carefully it seemed she was clinging to composure like a threadbare blanket. Maybe it was just that Harper loved her more than she had ever loved another person, and she could feel the pain radiate off her friend in waves.