But as he sat across from William, who slumped now in a wheelchair, he could tell the man was barely hanging onto life. It didn’t look as if he had three months to live, but rather three days.
After he had undergone brain surgery in January and endured months of chemotherapy, the cancer had taken a toll on the man’s body. Frail and emaciated, his pallid skin hung loosely over his bones. His eyes were glossy. The man looked nothing like the photos Dylan had found on the internet.
William sat quietly, content to hold his granddaughter on his lap, even though it looked as if it took every ounce of strength he could muster to keep the wiggling infant in place. As he sat there cuddling Sarah, Dylan noticed the man had tears in his eyes.
“I’m so glad you came to see me, Baylee-girl. I was worried when Tanya said you had to leave.” He pointed a bony, accusing finger at Dylan. “Is he the reason?”
When a small, primly dressed woman in her early sixties with toffee skin, entered the room carrying a tray with tea and cookies, Baylee got up to help her set it down on the coffee table, if for no other reason than to delay getting into the reason she’d left.
Her father would never in a million years admit she was no longer living here because of his verbal abuse. And trying not to stare at his sorry state, she doubted the man was up to an argument about anything in his weakened condition.
Quietly, she answered, “No Daddy, he isn’t the reason.”
“He’s Sarah’s father though, isn’t he? I’m not stupid, I can see the resemblance.”
Baylee bit back the comment that almost slipped past her lips and sighed instead. She gave Dylan a slow smile. This was the test. The lie hung in her throat. The wishful girl inside wanted this blue-eyed man with the all-American-surfer-good-looks to be her baby’s father, not Connor Boyd. That same want, deep inside, had her choking out the words, “Yes, Daddy. He’s Sarah’s father.” The lie slid off her tongue as easily as ice on glass.
Dylan couldn’t help it. He sat up straighter in his chair. His chest swelled with some nameless pride. He was more than a little surprised that she’d actually stuck to the lie, especially with her family, even after they had agreed to do just that.
At the time, he had no idea he’d be sitting here furthering the fictional story along to her father. As he sat there he told himself she’d gone along with it simply because they were in Beverly Hills, virtually sitting in Connor Boyd’s backyard, and it was prudent they keep up the ruse. The Scott estate at 15202 Bel Green was five houses away from Alana’s, after all, and with Connor handling the woman’s probate he could easily stop in at any time, ostensibly to check on things.
Dylan told himself this was the reason she’d stuck to the plan even though, the more he thought about it, the more he realized he wished it were true. He wanted to be Sarah’s father not the monster who’d raped a defenseless woman and then threatened her into keeping quiet.
“Young man, do you plan to marry my daughter? I haven’t got much longer, you know. Don’t wait too long. Is there any chance for another grandchild any time soon? I’m convinced I’d make a better grandfather than I ever did a father. It takes cancer and old age to make a man see his mistakes, admit to so many regrets.”
“Dad! That’s none of your business. Dylan and I haven’t even discussed getting married let alone having more children. We have no plans to marry. He’ll be a part of Sarah’s life, have visitation, but…that’s it.” As the lie got more complicated, Baylee felt six again, as if Tanya were reminding her that good little girls do not lie. She glanced over and met Tanya’s stare. She was surprised when Tanya winked as if to say when little girls lie they can expect their noses to grow longer with each one. Baylee couldn’t help it. She smiled and winked back.
So far Dylan hadn’t said much, but now he spoke up with a twinkle in his eyes. “I’m working on that, sir. Can’t let the right woman slip through my fingers just because we sort of put the cart before the horse, so to speak. Your daughter is no pushover. She’s picky. I’m trying to measure up.”
William’s shoulder shook with laughter, pleased. He liked this young man. “And got your work cut out for you with this one. She’s a good girl, always was. I can tell you this she deserved a better father than she got with me.” But then suddenly, as if he’d just thought of something, William’s eyes misted over again. “You named her for your mother.”
They’d been over this again and again at least once a week or so since she’d surfaced back in December. After all, she’d lived in this man’s house from January to her recent move-out in May. But she knew that since the brain surgery, and with the cancer eating away at him more and more by the day, William’s mind sometimes came and went, hence the verbal tantrums.
Because of Dylan’s presence, she indulged her father once again, smiling ruefully, telling him, “After hours of labor, as soon as I knew I had a healthy little girl, I tried to come up with the perfect name. I thought of her then, my mother, and it seemed like naming my little girl Sarah, I had a second chance at something.”
Dylan wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but there was a sudden, tense undercurrent going on between father and daughter. He tried to recall whether or not Baylee had mentioned her mother that day at the bookstore and decided she hadn’t.
He glanced around the room, noting all the pictures of Baylee the man had sitting on his desk, lining the mantel over the fireplace. Nosy by nature, Dylan got up to take a look. He saw photos of a little curly-headed, blonde girl beaming back at him, some with gap-tooth smiles, and others with teenage braces from eleven to fourteen. There were various pictures of Baylee with Kit and Quinn, even pictures of Baylee with Tanya, but there were none of her with anyone that looked like she might be her mother. He made a mental note to ask her about that when he got her alone in the car.
William nodded absently, and then without warning, started to ramble. “If it’s possible, I love you more for that. Sarah Moreland was a beautiful woman. And a damn fine actress. You were always the spitting image of her, look just like her, in fact. Did I ever tell you that? You do. Maybe that’s why… that’s why I’d get so upset whenever I’d think about my lovely Sarah. I loved that woman with all my heart.” But look what he’d done; he thought now, he’d ruined everything. He couldn’t change the past. He couldn’t go back. The past was too painful to think about, and too sad; it made his head hurt. He started to shake. “And now I have a beautiful granddaughter. I’m so sorry, Baylee, so very sorry. All those years of drinking, all those years wasted, without my Sarah.”
Tanya passed Baylee a knowing look. “William, you look tired. I think it’s time you rested now. Why don’t you give Sarah back to her mother?”
Just as William’s body began to give in to any more tremors, the tears fell in earnest. Baylee took one look at her father and snatched Sarah up out of his lap. The baby looked as if she was ready to pucker up and cry.
Tanya made her way around the back of the wheelchair. But before she could push him from the room, confusion rained down on William Scott like hail from a haunted past.
Years of verbally and physically abusing his daughter for some phantom infraction had his voice rising in fear as he looked into Baylee’s eyes. He began to rant, “I’m sorry, Baylee. I’m sorry I took Sarah from you at such a young age. I’m sorry Sarah, my love. So sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I didn’t mean it. Please, Sarah, say you forgive me. You must forgive me. I have to know you forgive me before I die.”
Baylee didn’t know what to think. The man was getting worse by the day, rambling on and on without making much sense. She glanced over at Dylan, who was watching her with wide eyes.
By the time William’s wheelchair had reached the hallway, Baylee’s eyes were misting over. Noting she was visibly shaken, Dylan walked over and put his arms around both her and Sarah. She let him comfort her because it felt good to have someone hold her for a change. She blotted her damp eyes. “You see why I needed to come. He’s going downh
ill a little more every day. He’s worse today than he was a week ago.” At least Tanya had somehow managed to keep him sober for the visit.
“You want to talk now?”
She sunk down into a wingback chair, adjusting Sarah on her lap. “Oh, Dylan, it’s hard to talk about.” And something she hadn’t done since spending three years in group therapy right along with Kit and Quinn, recalling the awful incidents from their childhood with twice weekly sessions at Dr. Strasburg’s office in humiliating detail. “Where do I start?”
He gave her a quizzical look and then shot her one of his charming smiles. He put his hands in his pockets to keep from wrapping her up. “How about at the beginning?”
She was too tired to put up much of a resistance. “My mother, Sarah Moreland, was an actress, a good twelve years younger than Dad. He directed some of her early pictures beginning with one when she was only seventeen. But they didn’t marry until she was twenty-one. I came along when she was twenty-two. According to what little I know from Dad, I guess she had a restless spirit. Their marriage was rocky from the start maybe because of the age difference; I just don’t know. He’s never talked about the specifics.” Only ranted like a raving lunatic at times when he drank, Baylee thought.
“When I was three, she was only twenty-five. The same age I am now.” Baylee stopped talking. An image popped into her head. The same one from the same recurrent dream she’d had often since she was a small child.
The grainy scene always played the same. She’d been in bed. She’d heard an argument. When she’d gotten out of bed to see what the commotion was all about outside her bedroom door, she thought she had seen her mother fall down the stairs, no not fall, but rather being pushed after a violent struggle with two women, one who had light hair, the other dark.
In a child’s mind, she’d always pictured the woman with dark hair dressed like an evil witch. Her therapist had said the evil witch represented a very common manifestation in the mind of a small child. According to Strasburg, she had the recurring dream because it was better to see her mother die like that than to accept Sarah Moreland had so easily abandoned her. The dream with the “mean people,” as she so often thought of the two women, was simply that, something she had learned to deal with and accept over the years.
But even now, Baylee shuddered just remembering the images that frequently played out in her head from time to time. Then suddenly, she realized Dylan was waiting patiently for the rest.
“Anyway, one day my mother walked out on my father, ran off to Europe with a tennis pro. After that, my father started drinking heavily. Whenever he drank, he got mean, verbally abusive, sometimes physically. To this day the man is a mean drunk. You don’t want to serve him a little wine at dinner. No, Dad can’t stop with just one glass of wine, or anything with alcohol in it for that matter. During the times he was sober he could be animated, funny, charming even, and absolutely wonderful. We’d do things together; maybe go to the amusement park or to the beach, normal father-daughter outings. He was fine as long as he didn’t drink. But the moment he opened the bottle, the moment he took that first drink, he changed into someone else. During the times he drank, he could get violent at the drop of a hat. Anything might set him off. I never knew what it would be. But the older I got, I got pretty good at avoiding him. I’d go down to Kit’s or over to Quinn’s house. We’d ride bikes or drift down to the beach, anything to get out of the house.”
She rubbed a hand over her face. “We’d go anywhere just so we wouldn’t be here.” Of course she didn’t mention that sometimes she’d have to sneak out of her own house, sneak around their various parents to get to spend time together because so often they were grounded or punished for some small infraction.
“Then there were all the times he’d be in a drunken rage and Tanya would hide me, tell him she didn’t know where I was. Sometimes she knew where I was, sometimes she didn’t. But Tanya saved me more times than I could count.”
Dylan winced thinking how many rotten memories she must associate with living in this house. And then suddenly it struck him how much she and Kit had in common. Hadn’t Jake told him virtually the same thing about the house five doors down? Hadn’t he told him about Kit’s childhood filled with abuse? Lamely he said, “I’m sorry, Baylee.”
Baylee nodded and clutched Sarah tighter. The baby squirmed in her arms. “My mother abandoned me, Dylan, left me without so much as a backward glance. I never saw her again, never heard from her over the years. Not once did I get a birthday card, or a Christmas card, no presents from a mother who was just too busy partying in Europe with her boyfriend to take time out to buy a graduation present. I don’t even remember her very well, just images really from some early photos I found buried in Dad’s bedroom closet and confiscated.”
She didn’t mention the scenes she relived over and over again ever so often from the dream. “Tanya basically raised me.”
Alarm bells went off inside Dylan’s brain. “Let me understand this. In all those years, your mother never bothered to write? No letters, no phone calls?” For some reason that didn’t sound right.
“Not one letter or phone call in twenty-two years. One night she put me to bed.” At least Baylee thought she had. “Then she was gone, just disappeared from my life.”
Dylan put his hands in his pockets and walked over to stand at the terrace doors, looking out into a perfectly manicured garden setting. These houses, he thought, mansions really, had to go for millions. Who said growing up in Beverly Hills was a walk in the park?
But something about the story didn’t seem right to him. Maybe he’d watched too many CSI shows, or read too many crime novels, but how many women, especially mothers, disappeared off the face of the earth without even saying goodbye to their children?
He thought about all those mysteries he had watched and remembered how many spotlighted women who’d vanished without a trace, only to be the focus of an intense search. It always ended the same. The police couldn’t find any activity from their credit cards or cell phones after they’d gone missing. They just vanished into thin air. The whole thing with the tennis pro sounded strikingly familiar, like one of those phony stories a husband might come up with to explain why his “cheating wife” mysteriously disappeared, a convenient story to cover up something much more sinister.
Without putting much more thought to it, Dylan made up his mind to find out whatever he could about Baylee’s mother.
The actress Sarah Moreland could be Googled.
Once in his room, after Tanya had left him alone, William Scott calmed down. Today was a lucid day, one in which his memories were vivid as glass—and therefore his memories haunted him.
He remembered being on a soundstage in Burbank, probably inside Studio D, in charge of every actor, every stage hand. He recalled how the place hummed with activity as he watched two set designers go about the business of turning three blank walls into a very believable, attractive living space that when they were done resembled an actual living room.
Gaffers adjusted rows of lighting, testing equipment, while a cameraman got ready to shoot the next scene.
William loved everything about directing, loved being in charge of a film, the action scenes, everyone and everything revolved around him.
At the break, William took in the noise of a busy soundstage as he moved several yards away on the same lot, past rows of trailers that housed the actors biding their time between takes.
Then the memory shifted, the scene was inside one of the trailers. It flashed quickly, brilliantly in color. The sexual scene unfolded as if he were watching his image appear on the big screen like one of his finished products.
Alana Stevens lay back on the bed in her trailer with her arms and legs entangled around the director of her latest film, Growing up Dead. For the past four weeks, she and William had ended up between the sheets more times than not as a way to relieve the stress that came with making a movie. Alana ran her hand up and down the length of his chest
and purred, “William that was wonderful. How’d you get to be so creative both in bed and out?”
William laughed, brushing his hand in a circular motion on one of Alana’s breasts, tweaking her nipple. “Baby, you inspire a man to take all manner of creative license.”
She smiled. Men were so predictable. But she had to admit this one was rather special. They’d been together on and off for the past three years, mostly on, whenever they were doing a picture. “As long as you’re aware that I’m the one you take creative license with and not that little marshmallow tart Sarah Moreland. She wants you.”
And Alana was so jealous she couldn’t spit.
William grimaced and sat up in bed, suddenly losing all interest in Alana’s ample assets, and more in tune to her acerbic tongue.
Most of the time he could concentrate on her body and the sex and forget about her mouth, especially when she used it for annihilation—like now. He looked around for his clothes, scoping out his escape route.
“Sarah’s a child, barely seventeen and playing your little sister in this film. I’ve hardly had time to notice her. Although, when she’s in front of the camera, she does have that natural sparkle on screen.”
It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it the moment the words shot past his lips.
Alana bolted up like she’d been burned. “William, that child has been after you from the moment she stepped foot on the lot. And I won’t allow it, do you hear me?”
She made a last grab at William’s thighs just as he moved out of reach. “Why is it men are absolutely oblivious to the obvious? Sarah wants you. She’s told everyone on the set that will listen. And she’s stealing all my good scenes. And you’re letting her.”
Ah, there it was, he thought, as he retrieved his shirt and started working the buttons. He’d expected jealousy from Alana because that was who she was, but when it came to her career, the woman was usually more subtle about manipulating him into giving her more lines, more scenes.
Deeper Evil (The Evil Secrets Trilogy Book 2) Page 8