The Bad Daughter

by Joy Fielding

  She should have known better.

  “My brother didn’t die because he was asthmatic,” Blake said now.

  “What?”

  “He died because he overdosed on a combination of cocaine and heroin. Actually the coroner said he had so many drugs in his system that it was a wonder he’d survived as long as he had.”

  “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  He ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. Maybe I thought you had enough on your plate. Maybe I thought another fucked-up family would scare you away. Maybe I just didn’t want to deal with it.”

  “You didn’t trust me,” Robin acknowledged quietly.

  “No. I…”

  “It’s okay. I didn’t trust you either.”

  He smiled sadly. “So what do we do now?”

  Robin exhaled a long deep breath. “We make the decision to trust each other. Or else what’s the point?”

  “You think it’s that simple?”

  “I think it has to be.”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me about your brother,” she said.

  “It was such a stupid waste.” The words tumbled effortlessly from his lips, as if they’d been sitting on the tip of his tongue for years, just waiting for a push. “He was this charming, charismatic guy. Which I guess was part of the problem. Everything always came so easily for him. He never had to try, never had to put himself out there. School, job offers, women. All he had to do was smile. A movie producer actually spotted him on the street one afternoon and offered him a small part in a film. The lead actress was supposed to walk into a party and grab some random guy and start making out with him. Naturally she picked my brother. He told me that they spent all day making out on set and all night fucking in her mansion overlooking the ocean.” Blake shook his head at the memory. “You can still see that dumb movie on TV sometimes. Don’t ask me what it’s called. House Party? Pool Party? Frat Party? Something like that.”

  “Did you ever watch it?”

  “I did—once. But it was too painful. You can see he was stoned out of his mind. Goddamn drugs.”

  That’s why you never take so much as an aspirin, why you were so concerned about my taking Valium.

  “He was only twenty-four when he died. He’d had asthma when he was a kid, so my parents decided to tell everyone he’d suffered a fatal attack. Pretty soon I adopted that story as well. It was easier that way.” Blake brought his hands together, as if to signal the story was coming to an end. “Anyway, my parents divorced soon after that, my older brother took off for China, and I buried myself in my career.” He looked directly into Robin’s eyes. “Then one night I reluctantly agreed to accompany a colleague to a party, and who should walk in…but the love of my life.”

  Robin covered his hand with her own.

  There was a knock on the door. Robin spun around to see Melanie in the doorway.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but…” Melanie took a deep breath.

  Robin rose slowly to her feet. “What’s the matter?”

  “Alec is gone.”

  “What do you mean, he’s gone?”

  “I mean he stole your fiancé’s car and took off.”

  “Please tell me this is your sick idea of a joke.”

  “Sorry, little sister,” Melanie said solemnly. “Looks like the joke is on us.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  They waited until almost midnight before giving up on Alec and going to bed.

  “Why would he do such a stupid thing?” Robin had lost track of how many times she’d asked that question. “What the hell was he thinking?”

  “Obviously he wasn’t.” Melanie stood up from the kitchen table, where the three of them had been lingering since dinner. No one had had much of an appetite except Landon, who’d wolfed down two hot dogs and three helpings of beans before retreating to his room and resuming his rocking. “But at least the sheriff hasn’t called to say they picked him up, which means they probably don’t know he’s gone. So maybe he’ll get smart and come back before it’s too late.”

  Sheriff Prescott would no doubt be checking in with them in the morning. It wouldn’t take long for him to realize that Alec had gone AWOL. It would take even less time for a warrant to be issued for their brother’s arrest.

  “Unless, of course, he’s guilty,” Melanie said.

  “He isn’t,” Robin insisted.

  “There’s also the little matter of your fiancé’s car.”

  “Looks like your brother’s going to need a good criminal attorney sooner than we thought,” Blake said.

  “Do you know anyone?” Robin asked him.

  “Not from around here.”

  “I hear Jeff McAllister’s pretty good,” Melanie said. “I’ll phone him in the morning. Anyway, I’m calling it a night, and I suggest you do the same. Tomorrow is shaping up to be a very eventful day.”

  Robin listened to her sister’s footsteps as they retreated up the stairs. “Do you think she could be right?” she asked Blake, reluctant to accept the possibility that Melanie could be right about anything.

  “I don’t know,” Blake said honestly. “But if he doesn’t come back by morning, then I’m going to have to report my car stolen or risk being charged as an accomplice after the fact.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry about. This is Alec’s fault. Not yours.”

  They went upstairs and lay down on top of the bed, not bothering to change out of their street clothes or climb under the covers. Robin felt the weight of Blake’s arm as it wrapped around her waist, his breath steady and reassuring on the back of her neck. Thank God you’re here, she thought. Then, Where the hell is my brother? Why isn’t he answering his phone? Is he, at this very minute, barreling down a distant, dark highway, headed for the Canadian border?

  Did you do it, Alec? Did you shoot our father and Cassidy? Did you murder Tara?

  She tried picturing her brother with a gun in his hand, a ski mask covering his thin face and full mouth, hiding everything but his beautiful gray eyes.

  Did you do it, Alec? Were you so consumed with bitterness, even after all this time, that you murdered one person and tried to kill two more, including your own father? Did you hate them that much?

  Her father and Alec had always had a contentious relationship, even before Greg’s marriage to Tara. Alec had never lived up to their father’s stereotypical expectations of what a man should be, what a son of his should be.

  “Do you have to be so hard on him?” she remembered her mother asking repeatedly throughout Alec’s childhood.

  “Do you have to be so soft?” had been her father’s automatic response. “You have to stop babying him. He needs to toughen up. You want the kids at school to walk all over him?”

  But who needs outsiders when your own father’s footprints are already imprinted on your back?

  It was even worse the few times Alec had tried standing up to him.

  Robin recalled her father’s indignation when Alec refused his advice regarding a school project. The first-grade class had been told to design a park, and Alec had come home full of enthusiasm. He’d been…how old…six, maybe seven? His park would consist of a swing set and a sandbox made out of construction paper, he’d announced, as well as a Lego boy hanging from a set of monkey bars constructed from straws. There would be two cardboard trees.

  “Two trees?” their father had bellowed. “What kind of park has only two trees? You need more goddamn trees.”

  Alec had stared at his father. “Whose project is this?” he’d asked. “Yours or mine?”

  Their mother had glowed with quiet pride, but Greg Davis had stormed angrily out of the room, viewing his son’s legitimate question as a threat to his authority and vowing never to help him again. His anger had resurfaced when Alec came home a week later, beaming with delight at the B-plus he’d received. “I bet all the other kids got
an A,” his father said dismissively. “It was the damn trees. I told you. What kind of stupid park has only two goddamn trees?”

  The next time Robin saw Alec’s project, it was stuffed in the garbage bin under the kitchen sink, its monkey bars dismantled, its cardboard trees upended and shredded beyond recognition.

  Alec’s teen years were no better. If he answered nine out of ten questions correctly on a test, his father would harp on the one question he’d missed. If he came in second in a track-and-field meet, he would be berated for not coming in first. His accomplishments were consistently viewed through the lens of failure, and no matter how hard he tried, he came up short. He was always a disappointment.

  Eventually he stopped trying. What was the point when you were never going to be good enough? His grades slipped. He had to repeat his final year. He didn’t even bother applying to college. “What are you going to do now?” his father had demanded. “Start your own business?” Then, without waiting for a response, “I’ll tell you what you need to start a business—you need capital and you need balls. I didn’t have a dime when I started up, but I had enormous balls. You don’t have either. Looks like you’ll be working for me full-time. And don’t expect any favors because you’re my son.”

  In truth, it was unlikely that Alec had expected anything from his father, other than abuse. And if he harbored any hopes that Greg Davis would miraculously turn into some sort of mentor, he’d been quickly relieved of those illusions. The man in charge showed no inclination to share anything of what he’d learned over the years. Alec was quickly relegated to the role of glorified errand boy, there to do his father’s bidding and bear the brunt of his daily rants.

  Robin recalled stopping by the office one day to get her father’s signature on a scholarship application form, when she heard him berating Alec long and loud from behind his office door, unmindful or unconcerned about the fact that two clients sat waiting in his outer office. “Some men should never have sons,” the female client whispered to her male colleague.

  The man nodded. “I hear he eats his young.”

  My father the cannibal, Robin thought now, feeling Blake’s arm slip from around her waist as he turned onto his back, giving in to sleep.

  The one bright spot in Alec’s life had been Tara.

  They’d known each other for years, as a result of Tara’s friendship with Robin. Even though Tara was a few years older than Alec, she never looked down on him. She seemed to value his opinion, regularly seeking his advice on everything from the boys she was dating to the clothes she should wear.

  “What are you asking him for?” their father had scoffed once in passing. “He doesn’t know anything.”

  “Sure he does,” Tara had responded easily. “He knows lots. You’re being a bully, Mr. D.”

  Robin had held her breath, waiting for her father to erupt and order Tara out of the house. But instead, he’d laughed out loud.

  “That girl’s a little firecracker,” he’d pronounced at dinner that night.

  Robin knew her brother was in love with Tara even before he did. The few girls he dated all looked vaguely like her—the blue eyes, the long, straight brown hair, the willowy, athletic bodies. But these romances never lasted long. “What was the matter with that one?” Tara had asked him after one breakup.

  Alec had shrugged. “I don’t know. She just wasn’t…I don’t know.”

  She wasn’t you, Robin had answered silently, staring at her friend. If Tara knew about the crush Alec had on her, she never mentioned it to Robin. Still, how could she not know?

  “So, Alec, what do you think about Dylan Campbell?” Tara had asked when she and Dylan first started dating.

  “Don’t like him much,” came Alec’s quick response. “He’s kind of rough.”

  “I know,” said Tara, with a laugh. “That’s what I like about him.”

  Tara married Dylan and Alec never said another word against him until Tara showed up at their house one day covered in bruises, her infant daughter in her arms. “You have to leave him,” he’d said simply. “He’s going to kill you.”

  And now Tara was dead.

  But it wasn’t Dylan Campbell who’d killed her.

  Was it Alec?

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” Alec had asked Robin one night. She was home from Berkeley for the week of spring break. They were sitting in the backyard, staring up at the thousands of stars surrounding the full moon, like freckles. “It’s about Tara.”

  “What about her?”

  “Do you think she’d…?”

  “Do I think she’d what?” Robin pressed, although she didn’t have to hear the rest of the question to know what it was.

  “Do you think…I mean, now that Dylan’s out of the picture for good…if I were to…”

  “…ask her out?”

  “Do you think she’d go?”

  Robin smiled. “I think she’d be a fool not to.”

  Tara was no fool.

  “I don’t get it,” Greg Davis had sneered. “A girl like that. What the hell does she see in a lightweight like Alec?”

  “Alec isn’t a lightweight,” Robin’s mother had protested. “He’s sweet and he’s sensitive—”

  “He’s a goddamn wimp. What that girl needs is a man.”

  Robin wondered now if her father had set his sights on Tara even then, if he’d deliberately set out to sabotage his own son.

  Some men should never have sons.

  I hear he eats his young.

  She sat up in bed, careful not to disturb Blake. She stared down at his handsome face, his mouth partly open in sleep, nighttime stubble grazing his cheeks and jaw. He’d been so good about everything, so patient and understanding. If he was upset about Alec running off with his car—and how could he not be?—he hadn’t taken it out on her. Unlike her father, who’d always found a way to blame everyone else whenever anything didn’t go exactly according to his plan, Blake had been quick to shoulder part of the responsibility for what Alec had done. “I should never have left my fob out where he could just pick it up,” he’d offered generously.

  “You couldn’t have known he’d do something like this.”

  “I should have at least considered the possibility. It was careless.”

  She reached over and gently flicked several stray hairs away from his eyes. He was right—he was not her father. They weren’t anything alike.

  Still, she couldn’t blame her father for everything, despite the temptation to do exactly that. She wasn’t a child. At some point, you had to grow up, accept responsibility for your own actions. You could blame your parents for only so long.

  Wasn’t that what she regularly advised clients?

  Maybe she wasn’t such a bad therapist after all.

  Try to remember this resolve in the morning, she told herself, about to lie back down when she heard the rumble of tires on gravel. She got out of bed and opened the bedroom window, straining to hear more.

  Had she heard anything at all?

  It was several more seconds before she heard a car door close. In the next instant, she was downstairs and at the front door. The second after that, she was outside, her eyes straining through the darkness.

  Slowly a figure emerged.

  Her brother.

  Thank God.

  She was assaulted by a multitude of conflicting emotions—anger, gratitude, apprehension. Above all, relief. She burst into tears. “Alec, what the hell…?”

  He stopped several feet from where she stood, his sigh sending ripples through the heavy air. “Follow me,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Where are we going?” Robin demanded. “And where in God’s name have you been?”

  Alec had already started up the path to the road. Robin raced to catch up to him.

  “Where have you been?” she asked again as she reached his side. “We’ve been worried sick. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  “Don’t have one.” He stuffed his han
ds into the pockets of his jeans and refused to look at her.

  “What do you mean, you don’t have one?”

  “Tossed it in the trash before I left San Francisco.”

  “You tossed it in the trash?”

  “Yes. Are you going to keep repeating everything I say?”

  “Why would you throw your phone in the garbage?” Robin asked, making a conscious effort to rephrase the question.

  “Didn’t want the police searching through its history,” he said, as if this fact should be self-evident.

  “You didn’t want the police…” Robin left the sentence hanging. “Why not? What were you afraid they’d find?”

  He shrugged, brought his fingers to his lips, his eyes searching the darkness. “Ssh,” he said.

  “What do you mean, ssh? Don’t shush me.”

  “There are ears everywhere.”

  “It’s almost one o’clock in the morning. Who do you think is out here?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised who might be listening.”

  “Where the hell have you been? And where the hell are we going?” Robin asked as he turned left at the road.

  “Nowhere in particular.”

  “We just happen to be walking toward our father’s new house?”

  “Not quite so imposing in the dark, is it?” Alec said.

  It was her turn to stop. “You called it the biggest fucking house in Red Bluff.”

  “So I did.”

  “How did you know that unless you’d seen it?”

  “Lucky guess?”

  “Alec…”

  “Come on,” he urged. “Enough questions. Can’t we just go for a pleasant evening stroll?”

  “Evening was six hours ago. Are you going to tell me where you’ve been since then? How could you just take off in Blake’s car like that?” She continued without pause. “Do you know how…?”