As I started to bring the umbrellas out, the construction crew began showing up. I watched for Braxton, hoping he might know what was up with his sister’s no-show. But when it became clear that he too was late, I really started to wonder.
“Hey,” I called to one of the younger guys on the crew. “Is Braxton off today?” He leered at me for a moment before answering, clearly having come to the wrong conclusion about my curiosity.
“No. He ain’t off. But he is late. Gonna get himself fired if he doesn’t come in today.”
“Thanks.” My voice sounded distant when I replied. I turned and hurried toward the concession area. I grabbed the receiver off the phone and dialed his home number. It rang repeatedly with no answer.
“Something’s not right,” I said to myself, hanging up.
At that moment, Tess was walking past the concession window. I grabbed my bag off of the back desk and ran toward her. “Here. Take these. Finish opening up. I’ll be right back.”
“That’s not my—”
“Just do it!” I yelled at her as I ran to my car. My stomach was in a knot as I did. If only one of them hadn’t shown up for work, I wouldn’t have thought much of it. But both of them gone combined with Braxton’s strange behavior the previous night made me nervous. He hadn’t mentioned anything about Wendy going to the bank with him, and knowing her, she would have told me that there was a possibility of her being late if she had been part of the meeting with Mr. Coyen.
Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe the thing at the bank had just run late. Maybe they’d just had car trouble. Or maybe something was really and truly wrong. Any way I sliced it, I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on anything until I knew the answer.
I made my way into town and past the bank where Braxton had said he would be. Neither his nor Wendy’s car was anywhere to be seen. I turned back around to double back past the pool, and still no sign of Wendy or Braxton’s vehicles there either. With my curiosity and anxiety rising, I made my way toward their house on the outskirts of town, while I tried to calm myself.
When I reached their driveway, surrounded by overgrown trees and shrubs, I pulled in and drove up the hill to the old farm house. There sat his truck and her car, parked outside.
“Maybe their alarms didn’t go off?” I muttered to myself, starting to feel embarrassed by my initial reaction to their tardiness. With my luck, my overactive imagination had gotten the best of me, and I was about to make an ass of myself. Braxton would probably let me live it down eventually. Maybe. If I were lucky.
After getting out of my car, I walked up the cracked concrete walkway to the slanted porch, careful not to step on the sagging board in the middle that had needed to be replaced three years ago. It was amazing nobody had put their foot through it.
I knocked on the door and called for both Wendy and Braxton. When neither answered, I tried the door. It was unlocked so I pushed it open slowly. I didn’t know if their dog, Dozer, was still alive or not, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way. He was sneaky like Braxton. He’d have let me walk right in before ever making a sound. I called for him as well, but heard nothing in response. He’d been old when I’d last seen him. I figured that he must have died too.
“Braxton? Where are you?” I called, walking into the living room on my way to the stairs. But I didn’t make it that far.
I’d only just stepped into the room when I found both of the siblings huddled on the couch next to one another. A strung out looking man with a gun had it trained on them. The fear in their eyes stopped me cold.
Then a blow to the back of my head knocked me to the floor. I tried to sit up but couldn’t. My vision faded in and out, and the sound of Braxton calling for me was so distant that my brain couldn’t quite make sense of it. He’d been sitting only feet away from me, hadn’t he?
“She’s a sweet little thing,” a man said, though I couldn’t tell from where. I was still struggling to push myself off the ground when someone snatched me up by my hair and dragged me to my feet.
“Don’t touch her!” Braxton shouted. I’d been turned around to face him, my vision now clear enough to see the panic on his face. Whatever I’d stumbled upon was clearly far worse than anything I’d imagined. And Braxton’s odd behavior started to make a whole lot more sense.
“Give me what I came here for and I won’t.”
“We don’t have it!” Wendy cried. “Dad probably sold it or gambled it or snorted it. Who knows? All I know is that he’s dead and it’s gone.”
“Then we have ourselves a real problem here, girly, because that shit amounts to about twenty-thousand dollars on the street, and I can’t very well tell my employer that he’s out that kinda money. So, either you find it or you get me twenty large. If you don’t…” He tightened his grip on me, pulling me up onto my tiptoes. “Bodies will start dropping.”
“Twenty thousand?” I asked, my voice shaky and full of fear. “That’s what you need?” He shoved me forward, sending me stumbling toward Braxton, who caught me and pulled me in tight to him. “Twenty thousand dollars will make you go away?”
For the first time, I got a look at the other man holding us hostage. His greasy black hair was slicked back, his disheveled clothes dirty. He was a lowlife drug dealer for sure. I’d seen enough of them in my lifetime to know one when I saw one.
“Don’t play games with me, little girl. You gonna try to tell me that you have that kind of change in your handbag?”
“I can get it.” My words were rushed and frantic, but they were true nonetheless. “I need some time—maybe a day—but I can get it.”
“You think I’m stupid?” he asked, lunging toward me with the butt of his gun raised to strike me again. Braxton shot off the couch to put himself in between me and my would-be assailant.
That gesture earned him a bullet in the leg.
He cried out and fell back down to the couch.
“Jesus!” I screamed, clamping my hands down on the wound to staunch the bleeding. “Braxton?”
“I’ll be okay,” he ground out through gritted teeth. He looked up to pin murderous eyes on our captors. If the fight had been fair, Braxton would have torn the two of them to pieces. But firearms had a way of tipping the scales, and unfortunately for us, we didn’t have any.
“I said I could get you the money!” I snarled. “But I need to go to the bank. I can’t pull it out of my ass.”
“You can really get the money?”
“Yes. I have an account I can pull if from. One of you can take me there. It’s open now.”
“If you make one move—say one wrong thing—your friends are dead, understand?” I nodded. “Let’s go then, moneybags.” He hauled me off the couch by my shirt and marched me to the door. I looked back over my shoulder to find Braxton staring at me. There was fear in his eyes, but not for himself. It was as if he didn’t even remember the bleeding wound on his leg. He looked scared for me and me alone.
“I love you, Izzy Lancaster,” he called to me. I opened my mouth to reply, but it was cut short.
“What did you say, boy?” The man dragging me out to my car had stopped dead in my tracks. When Braxton didn’t repeat himself, the man spun me around and pulled my face to his. “What’s your name?”
“Izzy.”
“Your last name.”
“Lancaster…”
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath. The look of fear was deeply etched into the hard lines of his face. He’d heard of my father, that much was clear. Apparently Braxton was banking on that when he’d called out after me. He always was such a clever boy.
“Yeah, Lancaster,” I repeated, straightening my spine. “As in Dominic Lancaster’s daughter.” I feigned bravery while I squeezed my legs together to keep them from shaking. The man stared down at me for a moment until he saw something in my expression that made his grip on me loosen. Recognition of just how screwed he was flashed through his eyes. He knew exactly who my father was and, with that, his affiliatio
ns. He knew that hurting me was as good as a death sentence for him. The problem was, that didn’t keep them from going after Braxton and Wendy again. That situation wouldn’t be cleared up so easily. “Let me explain to you what’s about to happen. You’re going to leave here and never come back, understand? You’re going to tell your employer that if he doesn’t like that, he can take it up with my father and his people. My guess is that he’d rather eat his twenty thousand dollar loss than do that. These two here are like family to me, and if you have a brain at all in that head of yours, you’ll know that means they’re like family to my father. Is the picture getting clearer for you?” The man nodded at me, his eyes wide and fearful. “Then why are you still here?”
He shot a look over to his buddy, who lowered his gun and started toward the front door, picking up his pace as he went. Within seconds the two of them bolted out of the house, running on foot to a nearby property. The adrenaline surge that had just helped me bluster my way through the whole ordeal was fading fast. My balance waned for a moment and I crashed to the ground.
“Call the police, Wendy,” I said, my speech slightly slurred.
I could hear her in the background on the phone, crying while she gave the dispatcher all the pertinent information. While she did, I crawled my way over to Braxton, who lay bleeding on the couch. He was barely conscious when I reached him.
“I need you to stay awake,” I said, stroking his face. When he wouldn’t open his eyes, I smacked him hard enough to startle him. “Sorry. I had to. You can’t go to sleep. Promise me you won’t.”
“So brave,” he mumbled. “My brave little Izzy…”
“And I’ll be your brave little Izzy forever if you stay awake for me now, okay?” I squeezed his hand and tried to force back the tears stinging the backs of my eyes. Wendy returned to us and tied something around Braxton’s leg—a tourniquet. If I’d been thinking clearly enough, I’d have thought to do that, but my head was pounding so hard that I could barely function. “I love you,” I whispered to him as darkness overtook my mind. I clung to his hand as my body gave out, slumping to the floor as I passed out.
The last thing I remembered were Wendy’s screams.
I woke up in an unfamiliar place, my head ringing like a church bell had taken up residence within it. It didn’t take long to realize that I was at the hospital. With some effort, I was able to ease myself up in my bed and look around. I couldn’t find a call button, so I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and slid down until my feet reached the floor. The room spun for a minute, but once that stopped, I made my way to the door, opening it slowly.
The nurse’s station was right across from my room, so I gathered my gown closed behind my back and walked over to it.
“Can you help me? I’m looking for a friend of mine. I was with him when I was injured.”
The fifty-something-year-old woman looked up at me with kind eyes.
“The name?”
“Braxton Bryant.”
“He’s just down the hall dear. Room 315.” She pointed to my left, indicating which way to go, and I smiled at her and said thanks. I had started to make my way there when I heard someone shouting my name from behind me.
“Isadora!”
My father had come for me.
“Daddy?” I called back, tears running down my face. He ran until he reached me, gently folding me into his arms.
“Sgt. Dameron at the station tracked me down. He said you’d been attacked and sent to Mount Mercy. I made some calls and got on a jet as soon as I could.”
“I was so scared, Dad!” I cried, burying my face in his chest.
“It’s okay now.” He pulled away from me to rest his hands on my shoulders, leveling his gaze with mine. “I’ll make sure it is.” I nodded, wiping the tears from my face. “Now, I need you to tell me what happened.”
I opened my mouth to start rehashing the events of that night, but the nurse from the station came up to us, interrupting my attempt.
“Miss, I was just told that your friend, Braxton, was moved to room 327. He’s medicated, but he should be awake.”
As I thanked her, my father’s eyes narrowed. They looked murderous, and I had no idea why. Before I could ask him, he took off running down the hall, shouting Braxton’s name. I raced after him as best I could, stumbling several times along the way until I reached room 327. When I stepped into the doorway, I saw my father’s hands wrapped around Braxton’s throat. He was shaking him while sputtering angry expletives over and over again.
“Daddy!” I screamed, lunging at him. I managed to pry his hands off of Braxton, who gasped for breath the second they were removed.
“You!” my father roared, lunging for Braxton again. He didn’t look at me at all. It was like I wasn’t even there, even when I begged him to stop, pushing myself in between the two men. “I should have known you’d be involved in this somehow.”
“Sir, I—”
“I always knew you were nothing but trash, just like your father. That my daughter would be hurt if she hung around you long enough, and here she is in the hospital because of you. She could have died because of you!”
“Daddy, this isn’t his fault—”
“I warned you to stay away from her,” my father continued, unfazed by my presence or protests. “That was the deal, and because you couldn’t honor it, I get a call in the early morning in Paris that my daughter was assaulted and is in the hospital!” My father stood there, breathing hard. He looked over top of me to Braxton like I wasn’t in the room at all. And, judging by what he said next, he’d all but forgotten I was. “You think I won’t make good on my promise, boy? You think that because all this time has passed that it changes things?”
It was then that his angry words started to settle into my mind. “Warned you to stay away,” “the deal,” and “make good on my promise,” all came into focus, and the picture it painted made my blood run cold.
“Daddy,” I whispered, grabbing his face in my hands to force him to look at me. “Daddy, what did you do?” His wild eyes focused on me for a moment, then became far less feral. That was replaced with fear and regret. Regret that he’d all but admitted to something he’d hoped I’d never find out about. If Braxton and I hadn’t been attacked, I doubted I ever would have. “Daddy, what did you do?”
His mouth pressed into a grim line and he stood up, pulling away from my grasp.
“What I had to, Isadora.”
“It was you, wasn’t’ it? You’re the reason Braxton disappeared from my life in high school, weren’t you?”
He said nothing in his defense, which was all but an admission from my father. He knew to never say anything when it wouldn’t help your case. A defense attorney to the core was he.
I turned my attention to Braxton, who laid silent in his bed while he stared up at my father. There was anger in his eyes. It seemed as though it was rightly placed.
“Tell me what he did, Brax.”
“Don’t say a word,” my father warned, looming above us both.
“The day after we went out, he came to me. He tried to buy me off to keep me away from you. He knew that my father had just taken out a second mortgage on the house because of his gambling debts, and that mom was too sick at the time to work. He said it was a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
More tears sprang from my eyes.
“But you didn’t take it.” My words were a statement, not a question.
Still, he shook his head no.
“The next day, Tara called telling me she was knocked up.”
I put the pieces of the puzzle together and turned to my father, who still looked enraged. But there was a hint of concern in his eyes too. Concern that I now knew the truth.
“Tell me you didn’t,” I pleaded, hoping that even he wouldn’t have stooped so low. When he said nothing, I knew it was true. “Why, Dad? Why would you do that? Why would you take the one person who made living in this town bearable away from me? The only other person beside
s you and Mom that I loved?”
“Because I knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened,” he said, his voice cold and calculating. “I saw you two in his truck that night, and I knew I needed to put an end to it before it got any worse. And I did. I don’t regret it either.”
“How did you manage to keep him from coming to me after the pregnancy leverage disappeared, though?” I looked from my father to Braxton and back again. It was then that my father’s last words to Braxton revealed a sobering truth. “Oh my God, Daddy… You threatened to make him disappear, didn’t you?” Again, he said nothing. I turned my attention to the boy lying next to me. “Braxton? Is it true?”
He nodded.
“I did everything I did to protect you, Isadora. You are my only child. My little girl. I couldn’t let you tether yourself to a sinking ship. One day, when you’re a parent, you’ll understand.”
I stared at him silently before speaking.
“No, Daddy. I won’t. I’m not like you. I’m not like Mom either. I don’t care about the things you care about. She’s not even here is she? She stayed behind so she could shop for things to bring back and brag about, didn’t she?” Silence from my father. “All I’ve ever wanted was to be happy and loved, and you stole the person that gave me both, but not anymore, Dad. Not anymore. I’m going to be with him whether you like it or not, and if anything happens to him—even if it looks like an accident—I will turn you in myself, do you understand me? I will tell them everything I know. And I mean everything.”
“Izzy—”
“No!” I screamed at him, banging my fists on his chest. “Don’t you ‘Izzy’ me. I mean it. I want you to go. Now.”
“I will come back to see you later,” he said, using his business tone on me.
1983: Cruel Summer (Love in the 80s #4) Page 8