She shook her head. “No, it’s good.”
When he finished wrapping her right foot, he sat back, keeping her feet in his lap. Ash scooted forward so he could see her better, resting his elbows on his knees. Caleb palmed the side of her head and pulled her gently against his chest, tucking her head under his chin. “Okay, sweet thing. Tell us about yourself. Any brothers or sisters?”
“Nope. I was an only child. My father was a preacher, an extreme fundamentalist, who was a strict believer in corporal punishment. He spanked me every night, no matter what I had done or didn’t do. And if I really did something to rile him, he’d beat me with his belt, then lock me in a dark closet.” A shudder ran through her entire body, from her shoulders to her feet, remembering how hard she’d struggled against the darkness, fighting the terrified thoughts swooping at her from all directions, like demons from Hell. She had curled up in a little ball on the floor, never knowing when he would come back. Or even if he’d come back. “I was terrified of him,” she admitted.
Silence draped over them like a pall as Kylie soaked up the warmth and comfort from Caleb’s hand shaped around her head, Simon’s and Ash’s strokes against her legs.
“Where was your mother durin’ all this?” Caleb finally asked in a shocked voice. “Didn’t she even try to help you?”
“She couldn’t.” Kylie’s voice was barely audible. “Every time she tried to intervene, he would beat her even worse.”
The Raffertys sat, grim-faced, as Kylie lapsed into another silence, one that stretched into nearly ten minutes.
“Do you think you can continue, baby?” Ash finally asked.
“I-I think so. I need to.” She gave a tiny, self-deprecating little laugh. “You’d think after talking about this for so many years with my psychiatrists, it would be easy. But for some reason, with you guys, it’s…not.” And all of a sudden she was crying again. Damn it! “I thought I was over this, but for some reason I’m feeling all those horrible, awful feelings again, like I’m dirty, sinful, helpless—”
“Christ, sugar.” Caleb lowered his head to press his lips against the top of her head. “You are not dirty, sinful, helpless, or any of those other things your father made you feel. You are a sweet, thoughtful, carin’ woman who is beautiful both inside and out. You can tell us anything, you know, your secrets are safe with us. We would never reveal anything you tell us in confidence. And we would never judge you or think any less of you for things that happened to you, especially things that happened to you as a child.”
“Okay.” Kylie sniffled and wiped her cheeks with her fingertips, rubbing them together before dropping them back in your lap. “Where was I?”
Caleb smiled. “Have you always lived in Philly?”
“No.” She drew a quick, deep breath. “We started out in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, surrounded mostly by Amish families. We did have electricity, but no TV, no phones, no computers, not even any books, except for the Bible. Those were all instruments of Satan, according to my father. My mother schooled me at home, using only books approved by my father and the deacons of our church.”
“I cannot imagine how awful that must have been,” Ash said.
“Yeah. But it was all I knew, so it never occurred to me how much I was missing out on. Besides, there was no one to turn to. All of the people I grew up with were fellow church members, so they were as brainwashed as I was. We moved to Philly when I was seven. One day, two years later, a family with a girl around my age moved into a house across the street from us. When she spotted me sitting under the tree in our front yard, she came over and sat down with me. Her name was Janelle Goodman.
“God, what a contrast she was to everything I’d ever known. She wore a bright pink T-shirt and purple shorts. I was wearing an olive drab rayon dress that had once been my mother’s and was much too big and too long for me. She wore her curly blonde hair in a ponytail. My hair was drab and lifeless and hung down around my shoulders. I was forbidden to associate with those outside our little cult. But she was so bright and bubbly and full of life, I was fascinated by her. The next day, when she got home from school, she invited me to come over to her house to watch TV.
“I knew I should have said no. I knew that if my father found out, I would be soundly punished and locked in the closet. I knew that if I had asked him, he would have flatly refused to let me go and given me a lecture on the perils of Satan’s world. And I would still have been beaten and locked in the closet. But he wasn’t there. He was at church, where he spent all his time when he wasn’t out railing against gays or blacks or Muslims or some other group that, in his eyes, had earned God’s wrath and condemnation. So, of course I said yes, deciding that what my father didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt me. It was my first act of outright defiance. And I was terrified of being found out. So terrified, I almost backed out. But once I stepped foot into Janelle’s house, I knew I had done the right thing.
“She opened up a whole new world to me. A world filled with sunlight and love and bright, beautiful things. Vases filled with fresh flowers, photos, pictures on the walls, stuff that seemed to have no purpose other than to just sit there and be beautiful. By comparison, our house was dark and drab, with no personal or decorative touches anywhere because, according to my father, those things did not glorify the Lord.”
Caleb’s arms tightened around her. “I’m so sorry, sugar. Your father sounds like a real asshole.”
“I remember Mrs. Goodman giving us glasses of ice-cold lemonade and I was bowled over by how delicious it was. The first time I stepped into Janelle’s bedroom, I felt like I had landed on an alien planet. It was pink and white and lacy and frilly and feminine. It was like this magical fairy realm filled with beautiful and wondrous and forbidden things. I couldn’t believe people actually lived like that.
“She was seriously into ballet, so that day we watched a DVD of Swan Lake with Natalya Makarova and Antony Dowell of England’s Royal Ballet. I was enthralled. It was the first time I had ever heard music that wasn’t atonal, unaccompanied church music and it just echoed inside me, so achingly beautiful I couldn’t stop crying. The dancing blew me away. I was hooked. I couldn’t understand how anything so beautiful could possibly be the evil my father insisted that it was. I couldn’t contain my excitement. The minute I got home, my mother knew by the look of sheer and utter joy on my face that I had been, as she phrased it, ‘dancing in Satan’s garden.’ I wound up telling her everything about it, and she said something that shocked the living daylights out of me. She confessed that she had taken ballet lessons as a child and had absolutely loved them. So, every day for the next two weeks, I begged her to let me take them. We talked about it and she told me that she would do whatever it took to see to it that I got ballet lessons. She talked to Janelle’s mother and all of a sudden, I was going to dance lessons with Janelle. And my mother was making dresses for Mrs. Goodman and her friends to earn enough money to pay for them.
“To this day, I don’t know how we kept my father from finding out. We were just fortunate that he was so rigid, he never allowed anything to alter his daily schedule. All I had to do was make sure I got home before he did. I kept my ballet things hidden in the back of my closet, Mom kept her sewing things in a box in the basement. For the first time in my life, I was happy.
“And ballet wasn’t the only thing Janelle introduced me to. She had books. The most wonderful books. After I read all of her Nancy Drews and Judy Blumes, she would ride her bike to the library and check out more for me. I couldn’t risk being seen going there by any of the church members, so I had to sneak them that way. My life revolved around books, ballet and Janelle.”
She paused. “And then my mom got sick. Cancer. My father did a laying-on of hands and invited the congregation to come and pray over her.”
“He didn’t take her to a doctor?” Simon asked incredulously.
“He didn’t believe in doctors.”
“What the fuck was wrong with him?”
“He didn’t believe in health insurance, either. He kept telling her his prayers would be answered, but of course she got progressively worse, so he accused her of having committed some heinous, secret sin. He harangued her for hours every day, exhorting her to confess her sin so God could forgive her and heal her. But she never said a word. She kept both our secrets and when she died, she looked so serene…almost…happy.”
“How old were you, sugar?” Caleb asked.
“Fifteen. I rarely saw my dad after that, which was a blessing. It was like he forgot I existed. Every Sunday, after church, he turned over the offering money to me and I took over paying the bills and preparing the meals, which mainly consisted of peeling potatoes and opening cans. We even used canned meat, mostly Spam. It didn’t matter, though. He rarely ate. He just kind of…disappeared into himself. He died eight months later.”
“Thank God!” was Simon’s heart-felt reaction.
“Hear, hear,” Ash agreed. “Good riddance.”
“Yeah,” Kylie agreed. “I felt like I’d been let out of prison.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“What did you do after he died?”
“Well, Children’s Services picked me up and were about to send me to a foster home, when the Goodmans stepped up, offering to be my foster family. I was thrilled to be living with them. They really wanted me. I even had my own room, which they let me decorate any way I wanted to. Mom—she asked me to call her Mom—and Janelle and I had so many good times shopping for stuff. And clothes! Oh, my God, they helped me pick out the cutest clothes! The food they served was so delicious. They actually had meat for dinner every night and not just once a week. And it wasn’t canned! I never knew food was supposed to taste like that. I ate like I was starving. Gained twenty pounds almost overnight.
“They were very loving and supportive and not the least bit judgmental, which was a completely different experience for me. They encouraged me to come to them with any question I had about anything. And they took me to a psychologist, a guy who specialized in de-programming people who had been rescued from religious cults. They did a lot to make me realize how twisted and ugly and hate-filled my father and his beliefs had been. They weren’t church-going people, but they did their best to give me a solid foundation in good morals, tolerance of others, and high values.
“School was a nightmare at first. I was abysmally ignorant in so many areas—I didn’t even know who the President was. They had no idea where to place me. So they kept me with my age group, but I was on an accelerated curriculum. I had nearly ten years of education to catch up on. After being stunted by my father’s extremely narrow world view for so long, I soaked it all up like a sponge, and by the time we graduated, I was third in our class.”
“Baby, that’s amazing!” Ash’s warm praise filled her heart nearly to the bursting point.
“After graduation, Janelle got a scholarship to study at the School of Pennsylvania Ballet. Mrs. Goodman suggested that I audition, too. They accepted me, even gave me a partial scholarship. I studied with them for a year and a half. Janelle was their star, though. I was good, but not on her level. She got picked for the lead in nearly every student production. I was always in the chorus, or not chosen at all. They kept saying…” her voice trailed off and her face fell.
Simon rubbed his calloused hand up and down her leg in a soothing gesture. “What did they say, darlin’?”
“Nothin’ good, from the looks of it,” Ash murmured sympathetically.
“They said I’d never be a dancer. No boy would ever want to partner me because I was such a cow. And my breasts were way too big. They kept after me to lose weight, making me weigh in, in front of everybody, before each class.”
“Jesus,” Simon muttered. “No wonder you have issues with your body image.”
“I tried to lose the weight. Breakfast was an unbuttered English muffin or a rice cake. I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those, but, believe me, Styrofoam would be tastier. Lunch was a salad and a hard-boiled egg. Dinner, another salad, no dressing, and either poached fish or a broiled chicken breast, no skin. I lost the twenty pounds, but I was unhealthy. My periods stopped and I barely had the strength to get through the day. But even then they weren’t satisfied. They finally told me that I had to have breast reduction surgery in order to have any hope of being asked to join the company.
“Jesus Christ, Kylie that was downright cruel.”
She shrugged. “That’s the world of ballet. Dad was so incensed, he drove down there, marched into the Administrator’s office and gave him a scathing lecture. Then he pulled me out of class, helped me pack up all my stuff, and brought me home. That was eight years ago. They enrolled me in the local community college where I exhibited a talent for numbers. So I studied bookkeeping. I worked for a really nice woman named Norma, until she retired and moved to Costa Rica with her husband.”
“How long did you work for Moretti?” Caleb asked.
“Four months, two days, and eleven hours,” she answered. “Long enough to know I didn’t want to work for him one minute longer, even if it meant running through the entire rest of my savings looking for another job. I was on my way to tell him so, too, when I found him murdered.”
“You ran through your savings?” Caleb asked.
“I—After my former boss retired, it took a lot longer to find a job than I had anticipated.”
“Didn’t your parents offer to help you?” Simon wanted to know.
“I-I didn’t tell them. I-I didn’t want to worry them.”
Caleb hooked his finger under her chin and lifted her face to his. “And how do you think they’re going to feel now, once they know about this?”
She didn’t answer. Didn’t look at him. Couldn’t. Just bit her lip and turned crimson with shame.
Ash reached for his laptop, which was sitting on the coffee table, and opened it up. “Okay, Kylie, I asked our friend Jason to look into your former boss. Here’s what he came up with. Moretti was one of the accountants employed by the Righetti family to launder their ill-gotten gains from drugs, prostitution, gambling, and other criminal enterprises through their so-called legitimate businesses, the businesses whose books you were hired to keep. Moretti kept a second, secret set of books. Evidently the Righettis discovered that he was embezzling money from them.” Ash clicked a few keys. “The day after he was found murdered, someone broke through the crime scene seal on the office door and ransacked the place again. Same with the guy’s house. They stole all the computers and your set of ledgers. Evidently they were looking for that second set of books.”
“Did they find them?” Caleb asked.
“The cops don’t think so.” Ash tapped a few more keys. “Kylie, did you do your accounts on a computer?”
“No. My boss insisted that I do the books the old fashioned way, in ledger books. He didn’t want any information in a place where some unscrupulous hacker could get at it.”
Ash just smiled and she gave him a sly smile of her own in return. “I’m sure your hacker is very scrupulous,” she said primly.
“Did he himself ever use a computer?”
“No. As far as I know he didn’t even own one, unless he had one at his house.”
“Did you ever see him with another set of books?”
“No.” Her face brightened. “But if they exist, I think I might know where he kept them hidden.”
They all looked at her.
“Where?” Ash could barely keep the urgency from his voice.
“Once, around a month after I started working for him, I entered his office without knocking first. He was just getting up from the floor beneath his desk. But backwards, you know? Almost like he had just crawled out from under it. He was a big man and out of shape and he was breathing so heavily I was afraid he’d fallen or was having a heart attack. I asked him if he was okay. He just screamed at me to get the fuck out of his office. He didn’t need to tell me twice.”
Ash’s face took on a thoughtfu
l expression. “Did the two cops who interrogated you ask about the second set of books?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t tell them what I just told you.”
“Do you remember their names?”
“I’ll never forget them. John Bullard and Tony Angelino.” She gave a delicate shudder. “It was awful. They kept twisting my words, trying to trip me up and get me to confess to murdering Mr. Moretti. Why? Why would they do that?”
“Well…” Ash paused. “Seems they are the lead investigators on a special, multi-agency task force looking into mob activity in Philadelphia. They’ve had their eye on your boss for several years now. When the Righettis discovered his enormous Cayman Islands bank account and realized that the only place so much money could have come from was them, they put a contract out on him.” As Kylie stared at him, aghast, he placed a comforting hand on her knee. “Unfortunately, you got caught in the crossfire, baby. There is now a contract out on you.”
She had often heard the expression, “It made my blood run cold.” But until this very moment, she had always thought it was just that, a colorful expression. Now she knew it was real. Very real. Her blood literally felt like ice flowing through her veins. A huge ball of it, heavy as an iceberg, settled in the pit of her stomach. All of a sudden she couldn’t breathe. Her entire body buzzed, as if she’d swallowed a hive of angry bees and they were now swarming just beneath her skin. “I—I—”She was shaking so hard, her teeth were chattering.
Caleb’s arms tightened around her and she curled into him like a frightened animal seeking safety. “Hush, sugar, it’s all right. You’re safe here with us. We’re not gonna let anything happen to you.”
She grabbed his shirt and turned her face against his broad, hard chest. Simon put his arm around her along with Caleb’s. Ash moved to kneel beside her legs, pressing his cheek against her thigh and draping his arm over her lap. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you, baby. We’ll take care of you.”
Passion's Fury (The Doms of Passion Lake Book 2) Page 7