My phone burps, alerting me to the fact I’ve gotten another text.
I glance at the phone, thankful for once that my father is demanding to make Allison a nice steaming cup of tea.
“You’re not going anywhere, missy,” he scolds her playfully. “You sit right here.”
The message above stops my heart cold. Hannigan is having a baby.
“Shit,” I hiss. My fingers fumble to delete the entire message thread as if I were deactivating a bomb.
“What’s that?” Allison pads her slippers in this direction, and I flip on the television and turn up the volume.
“Give me that.” She snaps up the remote before landing on the sofa adjacent to me.
My heart pounds erratically, a bite of heat erupts underneath my arms—my crotch the scene of the crime. Didn’t Hailey mention something about Faulk getting snipped years ago when he left his first wife? Faulk Oden had a pile of money when Hailey first dug her claws into his hairy back, but no sooner did they tie the knot than things went south for him in a series of bad real estate investments.
Shit. I can’t have a kid. I have a kid. One that I badly misplaced.
My fingers grip the hair at my temples before I can stop them.
“Can you believe this?” Allison turns up the volume, and I glance over to find the two of us miniaturized in a freeze frame between a panel of talking heads. “I hate this show. They routinely mock justice and—” before she can get another word out, a picture of a blonde, frumpy, beak-nosed woman pops up with the caption Heather Evans.
“A GoFundMe was set up by a close family friend who claims James and Allison Price need all the money they can get their hands on, but public real estate transactions show that the Price family had more than four hundred thousand dollars between the sale of their old house and that of their new.”
“People are talking,” the man in a bow tie next to her pipes up. “Some people wonder if this was a ploy for money.”
“What?” I lean in, momentarily distracted from the phone in my hand.
The redhead in the middle holds up a finger in an effort to interrupt the bickering between the other two. “People are talking, and it’s not just about that GoFundMe page that’s sucking in the hard-earned cash from innocent people. Allison Price’s sister is currently serving a sixty-five-year sentence at Welders Correctional Facility.”
Allison drops her head in her hand. “Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
But the redhead goes on. “And what about the information that’s surfaced about Mr. Price’s siblings? Three died before the age of twenty? One of which he shot to death himself in what was deemed as an accidental discharge.”
“Shit.” I gulp down my next breath.
The redhead tosses up a hand, exasperated. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. I’m telling you, none of this would have been unearthed—nor would this case have garnered half the public interest it has if it weren’t for the fact they claim there is a little girl who goes by the nickname Ota who disappeared along with their daughter. Who is this little girl, and why has nobody claimed her?” She holds up the police composite of the smiling little brat, the one I commissioned with my own bad thoughts, and I’d swear on my life it’s grimacing at me.
“My God.” Allison drops to her knees, her nose tipped to the screen. “They don’t believe us.”
“No, they don’t.” My father comes in with two steaming cups of tea and settles them on the coffee table, right over the bare wood, a crime in another lifetime. His chipper attitude stops up the room with its stench. “They’re convinced we are all a bunch of killers.” He clicks his tongue. “I’m not paying it no mind, and neither should you. This kind of social behavior is the norm for times like these. Our society is full of hate. Nothing good ever comes from it if you ask me.”
I get up and pull Allison off the floor. “Don’t worry about it. It will all blow over,” I say as I bypass the tea and help her upstairs.
“You don’t believe that.”
“No, but you should.”
No sooner do I get her settled in bed than my phone buzzes for my attention once again. My gut cinches until I spot Richard’s name.
“Who’s that?” Her voice is thick with grief and a week and a half’s worth of fatigue.
“Rich.” His name flies from my lips with a sigh of relief. “He wants me to give him a call—something about paperwork.”
Her affect goes from hopeful to hellish. That sums up this nightmare in a nutshell.
I head back downstairs and give him a call.
“What’s up?” I frown over at the television set with a blowup picture of myself on the screen. I look old, bedraggled, like a bona fide lunatic. If these are my fifteen minutes, I want every damn one of them back.
“You busy?”
“Nope.”
“Good. Because you’re going to want to get down here.”
* * *
The Concordia Police Department is stale, sized down from what you might expect in a county this big, cartoonish, something out of a black and white show from the sixties.
I find Rich standing by the front desk and he walks me wordlessly down the hall to his office. For some reason the chicken wire embedded in the glass of his window reminds me of my elementary school years.
“Take a seat.” He shuts the door behind me, sealing us in, and my ears fill up with a strange echoing silence as if we were in a fishbowl. “What’s going on? You need my help with anything?”
“No.” The bags under his eyes look voluminous since the last time we spoke and those lines that swim across his forehead seem to have magnetized. There she is, my mother warbling in his features. As mesmerizing as it may be, I’m forced to look away. “I’ve been getting calls nonstop about your family.”
I glance up. He’s got my attention and he knows it. I know exactly which haunted branch he’s talking about. “They’re digging ’round the proverbial graveyard, picking apart those bones. You’re gonna have to break your silence on it sooner than later.”
“Aston.” I nod at the thought of my dead brother. The one I singlehandedly put in the ground. “I will. If it comes up, I’ll just tell them the truth. We were going hunting, cleaning rifles, I was being stupid and blew his head off.” It decorated the walls for weeks. Mom moved us into a hotel until a cleanup committee she hired could scrape every last bit of my brother off the walls. My father tore out the drywall and installed new sheeting, had a painter come in and paint the dining room my mother’s favorite shade of apricot, giving her some time to mull over wallpaper options. The wall-to-wall carpeting was eschewed for hardwood floors. My father joked my mother finally got that remodel she wanted. Sick fuck. Sick fuck, sick fuck.
“Dude.” Rich gives a quick knock over his desk. “They’re asking about Rachel and Wilson, too.” He winces. “What exactly happened to Rachel again?”
Rich and I are about the same age, but Rachel had six years on me at least.
“Female problems. I don’t know. She was sick. Something to do with her period. I was too embarrassed to get the details while my mother was still around to give them. Have been all my life. And Wilson—you know, OD’d.”
“Right, I remember that.” He stares off a moment as if reliving the event. Wilson OD’d in a park after a rock concert. He and a bunch of friends tried heroine. The next morning, he was found by an off-duty cop with his brain bleeding out of his nose, flies swarming around him as if he were a piece of rotted meat. “I’ll keep it clean if anyone asks. All you have to say is no comment. You might want to tell Allison the same. What the hell is her sister doing time for, anyway?”
“She knifed her husband to death.” We share a quick smile as if to say that’s a woman for you. That very well could have been Allison a few months ago. Still might be if she finds out Hailey Oden is about to hear the patter of little feet no thanks to the deposit my dick made into her vaginal account. I cringe at the thought.
“You okay?”
<
br /> “Yeah, everything’s just peachy. Anything else?”
Rich purses those lips until they turn white. “There is one more thing. There seems to be a growing interest in your father.”
“That’s to be expected. He was the man with the robe for decades around here.”
He gives a slight nod. “They’re not interested in the fact he’s a judge.”
“What now?”
“You don’t know?” His cheek depresses on one side and I’m wondering if I should be equally depressed by what this might mean.
My mouth opens but not a word comes out.
Rich shakes his head at me in dismay. “You don’t know your father at all, do you?”
“And what exactly do you know?”
“My mother claims there’s someone who’s had a long running affair with the old man.” He flicks a pencil my way and it rolls right off his desk. “Your mother found out about it, and poof she turns up dead.”
My stomach bottoms out. My mind swims with every insane thought Rich just planted in it.
“You’re right, Rich.” I get up and stagger for the door. “I don’t know my father.”
All that one-woman, one-man bullshit he’s been feeding me for the last few years was just that, bullshit. The wages of sin is death. Only he’s fucking made of Teflon.
I hit the street and let the balmy breeze pump me back to life.
For whatever reason, I believe Rich. Or at least I want to. As cringe-worthy as it sounds, news of my own father’s affair takes some of the heat off mine. A million valid excuses bounce through my mind. The proverbial apple didn’t roll far from the tree after all. I was genetically predisposed to cheat. My DNA is programed to wander. I had an affair.
As much as I have hated the man, and I have hated him deep down for many, many years—I was just like dear old Pops.
5
Allison
Days float by programed with icy grief. The numbness in my heart turns into an ocean big enough for the entire world to drown in—a sheet of frozen glass suppressing all of humanity from taking another breath. My mother says she’s making arrangements to fly out with my father, but I threatened her within an inch of her life, begging her for mercy to reconsider. I can’t have that right now. I cannot have my parents milling around, the unwanted guests—peering into my life with James, our shared hellish nightmare exposed and magnified before them. And they would insist on staying here at the house under the guise of compassion, but God knows they are too cheap to ever stay at a hotel. My mother doesn’t have a compassionate bone in her body. No. I cannot have that woman in my house. I might lose my mind and accidentally pay her back for all the misery she’s inflicted on me. She is the sole reason for so many of my indiscretions, so many of my seemly rational decisions, which in hindsight were all so very, very bad.
James seems to be sulking more than usual. The visceral hate the American public feels for us has hit an all-time high. At night, when sleep eludes me, I sit and peruse the comments’ sections of each exacerbated article that paints the two of us to be money-grubbing baby killers. The trolls have come out in force. Where is your daughter? Where are you hiding her? Have you killed her just like you killed your brother? That one in particular was geared toward James like so many of those hateful comments are. Who knew my handsome husband has equal power to charm as he does polarize an entire demographic of fang-bearing women. But he’s not the only Price they’ve decided to crucify. She looks like she’s got her nose stuck on a window! Oh, the comments about my pig nose—something I haven’t been insecure about since junior high. They wish they could rear the ugly monster of insecurity back to life. Sorry, but I’m too damn frightened at what might have become of my daughter to care about your cruelty toward my genetic makeup. My daughter shares what my father dubbed an adorable ski-jump. But they don’t give a damn about Reagan.
A knock bounces over the front door. James is upstairs and Charles is on one of his famous walks in which he herds the media around the block for hours like a faithful sheltie. It’s a sight to behold. Maybe he forgot his sunglasses.
I head over and find a plume of blonde parading in front of the window. A woman about my height, and I swing the door open without thinking twice. What could be the harm? The harm has already happened in my life. The shit has hit the fan and it is covering every square inch of me.
A cry strangles in my throat at the sight of her.
She bats those spider lashes at me. “Now is that any way to greet an old friend?”
Heather Evans stands taller than I remember with her feet strapped in three-inch heels. She’s put on a good forty pounds, but that obsessive gleam in her eye remains the same.
“What are you doing here?” Years ago, I wanted to take out a restraining order against her, but Jane said not to. My sister had other ways of taking care of my nuisance. Secretly, I hoped she would have someone point the working end of a pistol to her head but no such luck. Yes, I’m ashamed to say Heather Evans has always fostered a murderous side of me. Heather disappeared quietly—met a boy, had another baby, such a boring end to our unreasonable relationship—and here she is ready for round two.
“I’m here for you, missy.” Her finger stabs into my chest and a prickling jolt of electricity runs through me. “Is James here?” She cranes her neck past me. “I’ve got a bag in the car he can help me with. Drove all the way out with just two potty stops! My mother-in-law is watching the kids. I can’t wait to tell you all about that battleax. It’s been so long I can hardly wait to catch up.” Her rust-colored lips spread into that signature overgrown grimace I had grown to hate.
“You can’t be here, and you certainly can’t stay here. I’m sorry.” I try to slam the door on this new nightmare that’s entered my life, but her shoe wedges between us making it an impossible effort.
“Have you tried to call the baby’s father?”
The air around me stills. Can’t breathe. A small crowd of reporters camping at the foot of the lawn have halted their conversation to look this way. I don’t think they heard, but everything in me knows Heather will do her damn best to correct that.
Shit. I scratch at the sofa table, snatching up the keys before pulling her down to that beat-up minivan she rode in on.
“Follow me. I’m taking you to a hotel.” My heart pulsates a good three feet in front of my body. “You can’t stay here.”
If it’s one thing I’ve learned about Heather, after all these years, is that you cannot get rid of her. She is the cockroach in my nuclear detonated world. The sole survivor long after my beating heart has been ripped out of me. An incurable case of head lice. This is penance for what I had done. I lied to James—was still lying to James, and now I would have to pay the ironic price. Reagan is gone. It would have been a feasible explanation, a kidnapping by the disgruntled birth father. God knows Heather would have happily spilled the genetic beans from the beginning, but fate intervened and stopped her from doing so.
Heather follows me out to the distal end of town, a flea-infested Motel 7 where I make her a stale cup of coffee as we sit at the wobbly dinette built for two. In the past, the quickest way to get what I wanted from Hysterical Heather was to sacrifice a bit of my time. It’s her fuel. It’s true. My presence feeds her. Somewhere in that twisted mind of hers, I am the panacea to all of her troubles, a warped extension of her. I’m none of those things, but she’s too damaged to see it. Heather sees life through the broken mirror of her mind—her sanity shattered long before she ambled into my personal space. I felt sorry for her in the beginning, but by the time I realized what was happening it was too late.
“How is Allison?” It feels strange saying my own name, almost foreign.
“Fifteen and dangerous!” She lets out a whoop, exposing a brown-layered ridge over the tops of her teeth. It shouldn’t surprise me at all that her teeth are rotting right out of her skull. They match her rotting soul. “Damn brat got knocked up. Kid came last spring—boy. He’s dead now.”
She glowers at the green carpet. “What’s new with you?” She toasts me with her mug, and for a minute I envision taking my scalding cup and tossing it in her face. I could blind her. Gouge her eyes out for even thinking this was a good idea.