“Double Wow,” Toby added as they stepped out on a twenty-foot-wide porch. “Somebody likes you, Anna. This place has to cost almost as much as you did.”
“Toby…” Tom cast him a scolding glare. Hopefully, food would put the boy in a better mood. “Let me go find the cook and let her know we are ready to eat.”
It took him several tries to locate the kitchen. His first attempt landed him in a game room, the second in a sauna. Third time being the charm, he found the kitchen. Inside, a middle-aged, plump, Spanish woman stirred a large skillet of meat.
“Excuse me. We are ready to eat whenever it’s ready.”
The woman jumped, pressing her free hand to her chest as she turned. “You scare me half to death! Why did you not ring the bell?”
“Sorry, I didn’t know there was a bell to ring. Perhaps you could show my daughter later.”
“I will show you all after I serve this very late lunch.”
“Thank you, but the only one staying here is my daughter, and she’s in a very fragile state, so even if you are having the worst day in your life, I need you to be cheerful for her.”
The cook turned off the burners and faced him. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She was kidnapped and lost people she loved. However, please don’t raise the topic. If she wants to talk about it, then let her talk, but otherwise, just be kind.”
Brown compassionate eyes stared back at him. “I had a cousin who was once kidnapped. They did horrible things to her. Then they throw her in a ditch, like she was garbage. She was never the same again.”
“Definitely, do not share that story with my daughter. I believe with time, she will recover completely.”
The woman crossed herself. “I have a cousin who is a nun. I will have her ask all the nuns in her convent to pray for the girl.”
“Anna. Her name is Anna.”
“I have a cousin named Anna. She is a wild thing.”
Tom grimaced. This woman and her many cousins might very well drive his daughter crazy. “We’ll be out on the wraparound porch.”
“Would you like your lunch served there?”
“If it wouldn’t be a problem.”
She seemed confused by his response. “No problem.”
Tom returned to his daughter and son. They were squabbling again. God, he had two of the best kids imaginable, both delightful to be around, unless the other one was in proximity. Then they regressed into petulant children.
He blamed their behavior on Sadie. She overtly favored Toby over Anna, giving his daughter just cause for resentment. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Sadie would tell Toby that his father only loved Anna and not him. Had he known his wife was feeding the boy such bullshit back then, he would have divorced her at once and filed for full custody of his kids.
He sighed. Given the hours he worked to pay for Sadie’s shopping sprees, the judge might have awarded both kids to the non-working Sadie. No, it was probably best he didn’t know just how bad a mother his wife had been.
Suddenly loving arms wrapped around his waist. “We’ll get through this. It’s just going to take time,” Anna assured him.
He kissed the top of his sweet girl’s head. She mistook his unhappiness as grief for the loss of Angel and Tommy. God, he hated this lie. But he couldn’t tell her. If he did, there would be men here to snatch them all up in a second. Both his kids had a full life in front of them. He didn’t want them locked away in the facility for the rest of their lives. So, he swallowed the truth and focused her on a new topic.
“Lunch should be ready soon. The cook is going to serve it out here.”
Anna released him and smiled. “Good. I find the ocean soothing.”
“It’s not the ocean,” Toby grumbled.
She glared at her brother and then smiled at him. “I find the so-large-I-can’t-see-land-when-I-look-east-across-the-bay very soothing.”
Tom chuckled and nodded in agreement.
The cook, carrying a gigantic tray balanced on one upturned hand, entered the magnificent porch. Toby offered to assist, which caused her to stare at him in outrage. “I can do my job!”
Toby held up his hands in surrender and stepped away.
In a short while, she had lunch ready.
“It looks wonderful. Thank you so much,” Anna said as she sat down.
“You are most welcome, Miss Anna. If there is anything you want, you only need to pull the bell and I’ll come at once.” She pointed to the object in question, then left the room.
All three of them stared at the four-inch band of silk extending from the ceiling an inch from the exterior wall of the porch. Toby moved toward it.
“Do not pull that,” Tom warned.
“What do you think will happen if I do?” Toby asked as he studied the back side.
“I believe the cook will return and expect a good reason why she was summoned.”
“Wow, I thought bell pulls went out with the Victorian age.” Anna chuckled and piled two tacos plus half the cheese dip on her plate.
“Hey! Leave some for me, Miss Piggy,” Toby yelled and hurried to take the rest of the cheese dip.
“I’ll want some,” Tom warned.
Toby ignored him and poured the remainder on his plate.
Just then the cook returned with small saucers and a huge basket of chips. Her eyes rounded with horror to see the kid’s tacos swimming in cheese dip.
“I forgot the saucers only a moment.” She reached for Anna’s plate. “I bring you clean plate.”
Anna held firm to her plate. “No, I like it this way.”
“But the tacos are ruined.”
“No, they taste very good with cheese dip.
The cook sighed and looked at Tom. He sensed she was disappointed in him for raising such clueless kids.
He had no intention of telling Anna she couldn’t eat her taco in a sea of cheese dip. “If there is more cheese dip inside, I would greatly appreciate a saucer.”
She smiled tensely. “I bring more cheese dip now.”
Anna scooted closer to him and handed him a chip. “I’ll share with you.”
Her generosity filled him with pride, and relief. After all the hell she’d just been through, she was still his sweet girl. He took the chip and scooped it into the sea of cheese.
“I said I bring you more!” the distressed cook chided. She set down the new bowl of cheese dip, pulled Anna’s plate further away, and helped…more like coerced…his daughter to move to her food’s new location.
Before Tom could reach for his saucer, the cook had confiscated it and poured him a half serving.
Once the woman left, Anna scooted back next to him and stared at the tiny serving of dip. “Do you think she’s punishing you for breaking all her secret rules?”
“I have no clue. But before I go back to work, I will try to find a book on how rich people eat, just in case you want to know.”
“When are you going back to work?” Anna asked.
“Tonight.”
“Daddy, you need time to heal,” she softly scolded.
“Work helps me heal.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. “Then you should go back to work, and I should stare at this ocean.”
Toby raised his head. Tom knew he was about to object to her use of the word ocean again. He shook his head at his son. The boy sighed heavily and resumed eating his taco. “I should get back to Princeton too. I’ve got a lot of studying to do.” He glanced at Anna. “I’m in the top quartile of my class.”
She smiled. “I’m not surprised in the least.”
“Nor I,” Tom added and winked at his son.
Toby focused on his food, so he missed the wink of approval.
“Think you can give me a ride to Princeton?”
Tom knew that question was directed at him. He did the math in his head. That would mean almost fifteen hours of travel, which meant he should have left four hours ago. “No, but I can give you a ride to the train station.”
“Figures,” he muttered.
“Toby, that’s not fare,” Anna stated. “Dad just said he had to be back tonight, not tomorrow night. Even if you guys left now, he couldn’t drive you to Princeton and drive back to Virginia in time to return to work tonight. That’s a two-day drive! As it is, he’s probably got seven hours of driving tonight to get back.”
Toby held up both hands in surrender. “Okay, I’m wrong. I’m just being a jerk, thinking only of myself.”
Tom frowned at the sarcasm he heard in that comment.
***
After lunch, Anna refused to let them stay and visit any longer. Had she not seemed her old bossy stubborn self, Tom would have refused, but truth was, his son seemed to be in need of TLC more than his daughter, and he had no idea why that was.
Once he and Toby were headed back to Wilmington, Delaware where he could drop the boy off at the Amtrak train station, he broached the problem.
“Son, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” the boy grumbled.
“Well, you seemed fine this morning when I picked you up at the train station, but now you seem hurt.”
Toby sighed heavily, not denying the truth of his words.
“Can you tell me why this day has been so hard on you?”
He stared out his window. “I know you think you love us the same, but the facts prove otherwise.”
“What facts.”
“You paid for Anna’s college education, whereas I had to get a scholarship. You put Anna up in a freakin’ mansion, while I’m stuck with four roomies in a pigsty. Anna comes home, and you manage to get time off, whereas when I asked you to attend my graduation later this year, you told me getting time off was impossible.”
Tom pulled the car into a parking lot and stopped the SUV before replying to this absurd list of abuse.
After that last comparison he was angry as hell, but he needed to remain calm.
“Let’s take these one at a time. While working as a cop, I managed to put away forty thousand, so you kids could go to college.”
Toby snorted. “Were you planning to send us to community college?”
He ignored the comment and continued. “When Anna was ready to go to college, I discovered prices had gone up astronomically since I paid my own way through college. It only cost me six hundred dollars a semester back then.”
“Where’d you go? Some place in Mexico?”
“The state university.”
“A single book costs that much now.”
“I became aware of that when helping Anna find a college she could afford. Knowing I’d need to save a great deal more for you, I went to work for the FBI. However, the more I made, the more your mother spent, but if you recall, I promised you I’d find a way to pay for your college wherever you went.”
“I recall that promise very well. But you didn’t. I’m at Princeton on a scholarship.
“I know all about that scholarship and how it came to be.”
“Max gave it to me. He felt I had great promise.”
“You do have great promise,” Tom replied, trying to decide how much his son should know. The boy still talked to his mother regularly.
“You just decided Anna had more?” Toby challenged.
“What does Anna have to do with how you came to be able to afford going to one of the most expensive colleges on earth? Anna was three years ahead of you.”
“Mother told me how that money you two saved was meant for me and that Anna didn’t even want to go to college until you convinced her otherwise.”
God, it was a good thing he wasn’t driving, because that outrageous lie would have sent him into a ditch.
“Toby, you have got to stop listening to your mother when it comes to the past, especially concerning Anna. She has treated your sister like an unwanted appendage since the day that precious girl was born. The only person saving money to send you kids to school was me. When Anna graduated high school, your mother told me she wanted to go to beauty school instead of college. I was disappointed, but I never tried to change Anna’s mind. What I didn’t realize was that your mother was lying to both of us. Anna wanted to go to college, but Sadie told her we didn’t have the money. Fortunately, Anna admitted her true feelings before it was too late to enroll her.”
“So, you spent all the money on her?”
“And got a better paying job. I had another forty thousand saved up for you, but you did so well, that you got into a college that was going to cost me over three hundred thousand. And I knew there was no way in hell I was going to earn that much money before you needed it, so I went to Angel and asked her for a loan.”
His eyes rounded in pain. “She said no?”
“She jumped on it at once. But she also knew your mother would go crazy if she discovered the source of the money. So, Angel asked Max to help her create a charity front, so you could have a scholarship.”
“My scholarship is from Angel?”
“No. Max refused to do it. Instead, he created a scholarship within the FBI and you competed fair and square for your scholarship.”
“So, Max did get me the scholarship.”
“He set it up, but you earned it, son.”
“What’d you do with the forty thousand dollars?
“I had both my kids set, so I took the money and paid bills with it. God knows, we had enough of those.”
“And you swear that beach house isn’t yours?”
“Son, I have no idea who owns that house. I couldn’t afford to buy the damn mailbox to that house. I’m still paying off your mother’s debts and will be for the rest of my life.”
“She does buy a lot of stuff,” he muttered.
“It’s a coping mechanism that started soon after we married. Shopping makes her happy…while she’s shopping.”
“That’s true. It doesn’t stick, but she’s really happy while she’s in the store.”
“So are we straight here. I do not love you less than Anna. I love you both with all my heart. I’m so damn proud of both of you.”
He snorted and shook his head. “Okay, I have an issue with that. I’m in the top quartile of one of the best schools in the world, so I can see why you’re proud of me. But what the hell has Anna done? Other than get kicked out of the FBI academy, kidnapped, and cost the country a billion dollars?”
“I am proud of her inner strength. What she incurred would have broken most people.”
Toby sighed. “That’s true. One of my roommates has become an alcoholic because his professor told him he wasn’t Princeton material. Anna wouldn’t have turned to the bottle. She would have seduced the fellow so he’d give her an A.”
“Toby…”
“Hey, that’s the truth. My sister is the biggest slut in America.”
“That is not true!”
“Wake up and smell the coffee, Dad! She’s even seduced Max Straun!”
Anger and disappointment roiled inside Tom. Sadie had poisoned their son against Anna. He started the SUV up and got back on the road. “We need to talk about something else.”
“Why, because I just proved to you how biased you are toward Anna?”
“Your sister almost lost her life when she was abducted. And had she not been so incredibly strong, she would have lost her mind. So, excuse me if I’m in no mood to listen to you acting like a spoiled three-year-old. Let’s talk about something else, or not say anything at all.”
They drove the rest of the trip in silence. When he pulled up at the beautiful Victorian brick Amtrak building in Wilmington, he gripped his son’s arm before the boy could escape.
“Toby, I don’t want us to part in anger. It could be a long while before I see you again. So, let’s end this on a good note.” He met the boy’s sullen eyes. “I love you and I’m very proud of your success at Princeton. I believe you will be very successful in whatever career you choose.”
The tension in the boy’s face softened. “Then you don’t care if I don’t follow in your foot
steps.”
Tom knew this was a double-edged question. He’d be damned whichever way he answered, so he spoke the truth. “Don’t worry about what I want when deciding your future career. I’ll support any decision you make.”
“So, you don’t care what I do.”
“I want you to be happy and feel good about what you do. I want you to feel pride when you go to work. And only you know what best fits your ambitions.”
“Bob says he can get me a job at his bank this summer. I’m thinking about doing that.”
“Your scholarship requires you to summer intern with the FBI. And who is Bob?”
Toby’s eyes narrowed in resentment. “That’s right you spent my college money on yourself, so I have to work summers for the FBI.” He snorted. “Nor do you know a damn thing about my life. Bob is my new step-dad. He will be at my graduation.”
“Bob who?” This was the first Tom had heard about Sadie even having a boyfriend, nevertheless a husband.
“Bob Anderson. I’m thinking about changing my name to his. Anna’s run the Culp name into the ground.”
“And how long has he been your step-dad?”
“Who cares? After the way you treated Mom, you’re never getting her back.”
“I don’t want her back.” Just the idea made him ill inside. “I’m just concerned you’re going to get hurt when this Bob realizes he’s made a huge mistake marrying Sadie and jumps ship.”
“It’s a little late to start worrying about me,” Toby muttered and tried to tug his arm from Tom’s grip.
“I’ve not spent much time worrying about you in the past. You always seemed to have your head screwed on tight. But rest assured, after today, I will worry a great deal about you.”
The boy rolled his eyes.
“Toby be careful. You aren’t thinking rationally right now. Maybe you should see the school’s therapist, talk this out with a third party who doesn’t have a secret agenda.”
“Great! And have it in my transcripts that I’m a mental case like my sister!”
He released his son’s arm. “Do whatever you need to do. But before you give up your scholarship you need to make damn sure this Bob fellow is going to step in and pay your remaining tuition. I seriously doubt he will.”
A Better Life Page 14
