Settling Scores (Piper Anderson Series)

by Danielle Stewart

  “What I’m trying to do is kind of screwed up,” Willow said shrugging it off. “And you have your job, you can’t just be out here.”

  Josh was hearing Willow’s objections weaken. Even her body language was relaxing at the idea of him staying.

  “I have someone covering my patients for me. I’m my own boss. I can stay out here as long as I want to. As long as you want me to.”

  “I can do this by myself,” she asserted as she stepped by him and sat in the chair by the desk. She was now farther in the apartment then he was, and her sitting down told him she wasn’t likely to try to shove him out the door.

  “I don’t doubt that at all. But since you don’t really have to do it alone, wouldn’t it make sense to let me give you a hand?”

  “I guess,” she shrugged again as she started stacking the loose papers on the desk, clearly trying to look distracted.

  “So are you going to tell me what exactly all of that is?” Josh asked, pointing up toward the wall littered with notes and pictures.

  “Not yet. First, we need to go buy more rum. Otherwise I don’t think I’ll make it through this conversation.”

  “So drunk Willow likes talking to me, but sober Willow doesn’t?”

  “Will it hurt your feelings if I say yes?”

  “The only thing that would have hurt my feelings is if you kicked me out. I can deal with you needing to be half in the bag. Judging by your voicemail, you’re very poetic when you have a buzz.”

  “That wasn’t a buzz that was practically a coma.” She threw her bag over her shoulder and headed for the door. “Lock this on your way out, God knows what kind of crazies will just let themselves in.”

  Chapter Four

  With a bottle of rum in one hand and a bag of takeout in the other, Willow led Josh back up to her apartment. She kept telling her brain to shut up. She begged it to stop feeling relieved to have Josh with her. But she was.

  “How much of that do you need to drink before I find out what’s going on?” Josh asked as she swigged back another long drag of the spicy booze.

  “About this much more,” she said drawing an imaginary line on the bottle. “But I can start by telling you why I came to California.” She plopped down on her bed and he on the chair by the desk. “I know what you think of me. You think I’m a thief and I run from my problems. You think I stole those drugs for Brad, but that isn’t really true. And you think I just bailed on Jedda. You must think I’m scum.” Her voice slurred a bit and she knew she was fading into the protective cloud of being drunk.

  Though she was sounding miserable, the truth was, when she rounded the corner of her apartment steps and smelled Josh’s cologne she hesitated outside the door for a moment and thanked God he was there. The darkness she was falling into frightened even her soul, which had spent its share of days without much light. She thought that eventually someone would come for her. Her adoptive parents or maybe Bobby but the only person she really wanted to see was Josh. And now though she wasn’t sure why, she felt obligated to remind him of all the reasons he shouldn’t care about her. As though she should wear a warning label.

  “You don’t get to decide what people think of you. They decide. I know you took money from your parents, but I also believe you probably didn’t feel like you had much of a choice. And the thing with Brad, I would have listened to the truth if you would have told me,” Josh asserted, ignoring her attempt to bait him or get him to rehash her mistakes.

  “I’m telling you about it now,” she snapped, shooting up to a sitting position and throwing him a look. Though she was relieved he didn’t agree with her assessment of herself. “I did take my father’s prescription pad and give it to Brad. Not because I knew he was going to make drugs. He told me he had a buddy who had gotten hurt really bad skiing when he was supposed to be going to class. He didn’t want to tell his parents but he needed something for the pain. He gave me this sob story and stupid ole Willow was so desperate to be liked that I fell for it.” She took another sip of the rum and thought back to that day. “He used it to fax in prescriptions for medications that could be used to create these boutique drugs he was selling. They’re pretty much chemicals all mixed together and packaged all pretty for rich people to buy. But they aren’t safe. Obviously, since they put a kid in the hospital and he’ll never be the same.” She shook her head and looked up at the ceiling as she thought about the boy who is suffering because of these drugs.

  “You screwed up, bad judgment, but it’s not like you were out mixing up drugs and selling it with him.”

  “Don’t give me that kind of out. I don’t deserve it.”

  “Fine. So what, you came out here, stole the money from your folks and you got Brad arrested. How in the world did you pull that off?”

  “How could someone like me, someone so helpless pull it off? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “No, I just don’t know anyone who could do something like that? I’m not asking because I think you’re weak, I’m wondering because if it were me I wouldn’t have known where to start. I’m curious.”

  “I remembered Brad talking about a guy out here. Marcario. He wanted to get in with the guy so badly. Brad had said Marcario had means and access to the border but that he needed what Brad had so it would be perfect. I didn’t know what he was talking about but it all made sense once I knew what Brad was involved in. So I found the guy.” Willow let her body fall back onto the bed and tossed one of her heavy arms down over her eyes as she continued. “The rest is complicated, but I met with him. Offered him a deal that was mutually beneficial, and just held my breath and hoped he’d take it.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Josh said half laughing, leaning forward and running his hand through his hair. Looking like she was blowing his mind.

  Peeking out from under her arm Willow watched Josh’s eyes scanning her. “Don’t look at me like−like I’m some kind of freak.” She shot back up to a sitting position as she tried to control her defensive tone. “Marcario isn’t a bad guy. I mean, he isn’t a great guy, but when I met him I realized he wouldn’t be easily tricked into being what I needed, which was a fall guy. He was too smart for that.” Willow took note of the change in Josh’s posture, a jealous bolt seeming to shoot through him. The urge to calm his reaction was something she tried to ignore. If he were jealous, that wasn’t up to her to fix. He wanted the truth and she was giving it to him. “But he’s still a drug dealer. He cares about money. So I pitched him an option that got rid of his competition and took Brad down in the process. All made possible by greed.”

  “Wait,” Josh interjected, getting to his feet as though moving around might help her words make sense in his head. “You walked up to a drug dealer with twenty thousand dollars and made a deal with him, and he just took it? Just like that?”

  The question was leading, and Willow was smart enough to read between the lines. Josh was asking: Did you have to do anything else to strike this deal? Why was this man so accommodating to you?

  “Just like that,” Willow shrugged, not wanting to dive into the multifaceted relationship she had with Marcario. Josh, a man from a privileged life and a normal family wouldn’t understand what connection she had with Marcario. Damaged people gravitated toward each other. He’d never understand why a man chose a life like Marcario’s, no more than he’d understand why Willow would risk her life the way she had. “Like I said, it’s complicated. But it’s done. Brad’s in jail, Marcario’s competition is out of the way.”

  “Yet you aren’t finished?” he asked, leaning against the bare, pictureless wall and folding his arms. “When you left me that voicemail, you implied there was more to be done. You’d started something you couldn’t stop?”

  “How’s Jedda doing?” she deflected, biting nervously at her fingernails. “Me leaving, did it make him worse?”

  Josh looked as though he wanted to force her back on topic but then talked himself out of it. “He’s doing well under the circumst
ances. I’m impressed with how hard he’s working to get his anxiety and PTSD under control. He goes to counseling twice a week and he’s managing with meds. The restaurant’s done wonders for him too. I can tell he’s learning a lot from Clay and Betty. But he’s still very worried about you. It took a lot of convincing for him not come out here.”

  “Is Crystal still there? Did they work their stuff out? I know she lied to him but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that. He has to understand how desperate she was to find her sister. I can’t imagine going that long without knowing what had really happened to someone I loved. It’s devastating and it just clouded her judgment.”

  “She’s still there, living in an apartment above the restaurant. They seemed to have come to an understanding about it. I think Jedda can relate to the fact that Crystal lost her bearings while looking for answers.”

  “Crystal is kind of how the wall started,” Willow mumbled, not feeling confident in her own words. She rose to her feet and crossed the small cluttered room, stepping up to the twisted collage she’d created. It reminded her of an eighth grade art project where she had to cut pictures out of magazines to show a pattern, but this was much darker than that had turned out.

  “How so?” Josh asked, speaking as though he were trying to negotiate with a wild animal, not wanting to spook her, but also pulling her back to him and this moment.

  “Seeing Crystal’s face that day as she held up her sister’s picture and begged me to try to remember, it was powerful. It really rocked me.” Willow ran her hand across one of the notes pinned up against the wall as she continued. “I spent a really long time telling my therapists and my adoptive parents and myself that I didn’t remember anything from that time in my life. Bobby showing up on Block Island to talk to me about Jedda last year was like a sledgehammer against the glass wall I’d built. The cracks just kept coming. I started letting little memories back in.”

  “That had to be scary,” Josh offered, taking a couple steps toward her.

  “That’s where all of this came from. I did nothing to help these girls. They were in my parents’ house, I knew they didn’t want to be there, yet I never told anyone.”

  “What do you mean? Your real parents were keeping them against their will?” Josh asked, and the horror in his eyes made Willow want to stop speaking. Josh hadn’t had this type of awfulness in his life before and she would be the one opening his eyes to it.

  “Yes, just like later on, I was chained to the wall, they were there first.”

  “You can’t take that on yourself Willow. You were a child, like six or seven years old. There is no way you could have intervened. You wouldn’t have even known what was happening. You couldn’t have grasped that.” His hand reached out and touched Willow’s shoulder, willing her to listen.

  “I knew something was wrong. I heard the girls cry and plead to go free. I heard them punished for it.” Willow lost her breath for a moment and felt the urge to fall forward into Josh’s waiting arms. Instead she steadied herself. The memories of how the girls were treated for crying out, was by far the most haunting.

  “You were a prisoner yourself. You were a little girl.” Josh insisted, lowering himself slightly to force Willow to meet his eyes.

  Willow shook him off and turned back towards the wall of information she’d built. “I wasn’t always chained to that wall Josh. That came after. After those girls were chained there first. I was free, walking around, talking to people. Going to school. I could have done something. I’m going to do something now.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you. I disagree about your level of guilt in the situation but I won’t waste my breath. You say you want to do something about it now, what exactly do you mean?” Josh folded his arms across his chest clearly finding it difficult to not reach out and hold Willow.

  “I remember three girls. Not everything about them but pieces. I’ve been writing it down. When I came out here, I just wanted to be open, just cracked open and let all of this out. But I can’t remember some things.”

  “It’s very common for someone to block out moments in their lives that were painful.”

  “But I’m working hard to get them back, all the memories. I know they are there. Like this girl,” Willow said, reaching up for a piece of paper covered in her notes. It was the one she’d gotten the furthest on. Her most promising lead. “She was Hispanic. It was Valentine’s Day when she showed up at my house. I remember her wearing a shirt that said so. I was six. She was maybe ten or eleven at the time. I wrote down which songs were popular on the radio at the time. What food my parents brought her to eat. I know it’s not pertinent but anything I could remember I wrote down here. I can’t remember her name, but I can still see her face,” Willow whispered as she closed her eyes. The way she uttered the words was as haunting as the memories themselves.

  “I’m sure her disappearance would have been thoroughly investigated already. Maybe they already know the link to your parents. You might be carrying this burden for no reason.”

  “When Jedda killed my parents he did what he thought was right by pleading guilty and not going to trial. He was trying to protect me and he did. He kept me out of the news and gave me a chance at a normal life. But because of that choice, they never discovered the horrors that were going on in my parents’ house. They never heard why Jedda killed them. I never told anyone, and no one ever dug deeper. They were just the people murdered by their kid. I have to do something with this information.”

  “I agree. But you need an emotionally safe place to try to remember and then you can turn over what you do to the authorities. There are professionals who specialize in helping victims of crimes recover repressed memories. It can be a really slow process, but it’s effective and safer than trying to do what you’re doing. I have a friend from medical school who went into psychiatry. I can contact her and --

  Willow interrupted angrily, “That’s not what I want. These girls could still be alive. That happens, they find these girls ten or fifteen years later, still prisoners but alive. That really happens.” Willow could see the solemnness spread across Josh’s face and she knew he didn’t share her hope.

  “Ok,” he said, nodding his head and biting slightly at his lip, clearly holding back words he’d like to say.

  “I want to go back to where I used to live. Back to the neighborhood. Talk to people, read articles and public information about cases and missing girls. That will help me remember. I’ll be able to piece this together.”

  “Don’t you think the police could do more with the information than you?” Josh asked, still looking like he was afraid to spook her, but trying to temper her misplaced hope.

  “No. I think they’ll think I’m crazy. Or they won’t take it seriously enough and everything I say will end up in a drawer somewhere collecting dust. I need to put it all together and hand them something they can’t ignore.”

  “Ok,” Josh relented, nodding the same way as he had last time he said the word that was starting to infuriate Willow.

  “That’s it? Just ok? You aren’t going to try to talk me out of it? You aren’t going to tell me I should go back to Edenville or Block Island?”

  “I’m not stupid enough to think there is anything I can say to convince you. And I’m hopeful enough to think you’ll let me come with you.”

  “Why would you do that? You have to go back to work. You can’t just run off and help me chase this down.”

  “Don’t worry about my work. It’s covered. I have time.”

  “But you don’t think this is a good idea, I can tell.”

  “Who cares what I think? If you feel like this is what you need to do then I’ll help you.”

  “But you must have an opinion.” Willow dug her heels in, needing to hear Josh say the words. She wanted him to admit he thought she was wrong, though she didn’t know why it was so important to her.

  “I’ll be whatever you want me to be right now Willow. You want me to blindly suppor
t you? You got it. You want to hear what I think as a doctor? Fine. Or you want me to be a friend? It’s your call.”

  “What would you say if you blindly supported me?”

  Josh looked thoughtfully at the ceiling as he searched for the words. “I would tell you that you’ve got this. You’re tough and smart and you can do it. That you’re right.”

  “And as a doctor?”

  “As a doctor I’d tell you,” Josh swallowed hard before he continued, “I would tell you that it is incredibly dangerous to go into an environment like that and try to stimulate the return of those memories without being under the care of a professional. It can be potentially catastrophic and result in something as serious as a psychotic break. You’d be opening a floodgate and could very easily find yourself swept up in the undertow. The odds of any of these stories having a happy ending are statistically low. If that’s the case, it could push you over the edge. You’re likely to feel worse, and possibly need significant professional intervention if you try to go it alone.”

  Willow averted her eyes again, trying to take in his words without letting them scare her. She needed to face this but his advice couldn’t be ignored.

  “And if you were my friend?” she asked quietly, turning her eyes back toward him. This answer was the one she was most interested in, the one she needed to hear.

  “I would tell you that if all of that happens, if it’s too much and you can’t take it, I’ve got your back. You won’t be alone.” The earnestness in his voice was piercing through Willow’s armor.

  She tipped her head back toward the ceiling hoping gravity would keep the tears that were forming from falling. “I need to do this. I really believe that.”

  “Then let’s book some flights. You say you remember her face? We can find a sketch artist. I think getting it on paper could help.” This was his way of showing he was serious, actually willing to help, not trying to trick her into coming home. And it was working.