The Bad Daughter

by Joy Fielding

  “Not particularly,” said Alec.

  “Not at all,” said Melanie.

  Clearly, her siblings weren’t in the mood for conversation or speculation, so there was little point in trying to pursue either. They drove for a good five minutes without a word, the only sounds coming from the country music on the radio. Something about loss and heartache. Welcome to the club.

  Her phone rang.

  Thank God. At least someone wants to talk to me. Robin pulled the phone from her purse, saw it was Blake, and lifted it to her ear. “How’s it going?”

  “Slowly. Taking a fifteen-minute break,” he told her. “Looks like I’m going to be tied up for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “That’s okay. We won’t be home for a while.”

  “Alec still with the lawyer?”

  “No. He’s done.”

  “Anything to report?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Okay, listen. Something you should know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Landon—he went out shortly after you guys left. Hasn’t come home.”

  Robin’s eyes shot to her sister.

  “What?” Melanie asked without looking at her.

  “Okay, thanks,” Robin said to Blake. “See you later.” She returned the phone to her purse, debating whether or not to tell Melanie about Landon, imagining how the conversation might go.

  “Blake says Landon’s not home.”

  “So? He’s allowed out. He’s not a prisoner.”

  “I’m just saying…”

  “Don’t say.”

  She felt the car speed up, then slow down, then speed up again. “What’s happening?”

  “I think someone’s following us,” Melanie said.

  Both Robin and her brother immediately spun around in their seats to look.

  “Is it the sheriff?” Robin asked.

  “It doesn’t look like a patrol car,” said Alec.

  “Can you see who’s driving?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe they’re not following us,” Robin said.

  “They’ve been behind us since we left Main Street. I’m pulling over.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” Robin said.

  “You have a better one?”

  “Mom always said you shouldn’t go looking for trouble,” Robin reminded her sister as Melanie pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped.

  “Yeah, and look where that philosophy got her. Maybe if she’d looked for trouble a little earlier, she’d still be alive.” The car behind them continued past. “Okay. Good. Looks like I was wrong.”

  “No,” Alec said. “Look. They’re pulling over.”

  “Shit,” said Robin when the dark blue Buick stopped about fifty yards down the road.

  “Who the hell is that?” Melanie asked, as the driver exited the car and began walking toward them.

  Despite the sun in her eyes, Robin had no trouble recognizing Dylan Campbell. There was no way to disguise either his swagger or the unspoken dare in the tilt of his head. “Shit,” she said again.

  “Is that who I think it is?” said Melanie.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” said Alec, pushing open his car door.

  “Alec, don’t…,” Robin began, but Alec was already out of the car. “Goddamn it.” She opened her car door at the same time Melanie opened hers. A fistful of hot air hit her like a punch to the jaw, almost knocking her to the dry ground.

  “Well, hail, hail,” Dylan said. “Looks like the gang’s all here.”

  “Why are you following us?” Robin said.

  Dylan’s face relaxed into a big grin. Despite the heat, he was dressed all in black, and seemed none the worse for wear. “That’s my girl. No time wasted on foreplay. Hi, Melanie. You’re looking well. And Alec. How you doin’, buddy? Haven’t seen you in forever.”

  “Forever isn’t long enough, you piece of shit.”

  “At least this piece of shit wasn’t in Red Bluff the night someone shot the face off his beloved ex-wife. Which I understand is more than can be said for you.”

  “Okay,” Robin said, “you’ve said enough.”

  “Did you shoot her, Alec?” Dylan asked, ignoring her, and asking the question she was afraid to. “Did you kill Tara? Did you leave my little girl without a mother?”

  “I wouldn’t get too cocky if I were you,” Robin said, her voice carrying more bravado than she actually felt. “That alibi of yours isn’t all that airtight. You could easily have hired someone.”

  “You should know me better than that, Robin. I’m strictly a hands-on kind of guy. I’d never hire anyone to hurt Tara. If I wanted the bitch dead, I’d have taken care of it myself. I wouldn’t let someone else have all the fun.” He shook his head. “And I sure as hell wouldn’t have left any witnesses.” He pushed his hair away from his forehead, smiled as it fell right back. “Besides, I’m a changed man. Prison will do that to a guy. And I would have thought that you, of all people, would believe that everyone deserves a second chance. Gotta say, I’m kind of disappointed.”

  “Gotta say, I couldn’t give a shit.”

  “What do you want, Dylan?” Melanie said.

  “What do I want?” he repeated. “Well, let’s see. For starters, access to my daughter would be nice.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you,” Robin said.

  “I’m sure she could be persuaded, if you were to talk to her, get her to see reason.”

  “The reason being?”

  “That I’m her daddy. Her real daddy. And I want to take care of her, make up for all the time we lost.”

  “Not happening.”

  “We’ll talk to her,” Melanie said. “See what we can do.”

  “What?” Robin gasped. “We’ll do no such thing.”

  “The man has a right to see his daughter,” Melanie said.

  “Finally. The voice of reason.” Dylan tipped an invisible hat toward Melanie.

  “There is no way I am letting you anywhere near that little girl,” Robin insisted.

  “We’ll talk to Cassidy,” Melanie said as another car pulled to a stop behind them.

  Robin watched the car door open and a pair of scuffed brown leather cowboy boots hit the gravel shoulder of the road.

  “Is there a problem here?” Sheriff Prescott asked, the rest of him emerging from behind the wheel.

  “Well, hello there, Sheriff,” Dylan said. “Now isn’t this a coincidence? Us all being out here together.”

  “Problems?” the sheriff asked again.

  “Nothing we can’t handle,” said Melanie.

  “Dylan was just leaving,” Robin said.

  Dylan nodded toward Alec. “When are you gonna arrest this man, Sheriff?”

  “When I damn well feel like it, Dylan.”

  Dylan chuckled. “Okay. Seems like we’re all a bit sensitive today. Must be the heat. Guess I’ll get going, leave you guys to it. I’m staying at the Red Rooster Motel, if you need to get ahold of me. You’ll talk to Cassidy?” he asked Melanie.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Robin said as Dylan sauntered back to his car.

  “Please don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.”

  “Well, you won’t get any help from me,” Robin said.

  “When have I ever gotten any help from you?”

  Robin bit down on her tongue to keep from snapping back as she watched Dylan get into his car and drive off.

  “The man is Cassidy’s biological father,” Melanie said. “As far as I’m concerned, if he’s willing to take Cassidy off my hands, then I’m more than willing to let him.”

  “There’s no way I’ll ever let him get his hooks into Cassidy,” Robin said.

  “You may not be able to stop him. He has rights, whether you like it or not. Whether Cassidy likes it or not. She’s a minor. He’s her father. What do you say, Sheriff?”

  “I say that you’ll probably have
to talk to a lawyer about that,” Prescott said. “Jeff McAllister, for instance. I hear you’ve already paid him a visit. Care to share, Alec?”

  Alec laughed. “Not much in a sharing mood, I’m afraid.”

  “What are you doing here, Sheriff?” Robin asked. “Surely you have better things to do than trail after us all day.”

  “Just doing my job. Keeping tabs on the good citizens of Red Bluff. Hoping they stay out of trouble. You do know that the city limit is just a few miles up the road. Wouldn’t want to see your brother get hauled off to jail because he was unfamiliar with the town’s boundaries. Or you, for inadvertently aiding and abetting.”

  “My brother has no intention of leaving Red Bluff.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “So why don’t you stop harassing us and concentrate on finding out who shot my family?” Robin said as the sheriff turned to leave.

  “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, Robin. I’ll be in touch.” He climbed back in his car and drove off.

  “Wow,” Alec said to Robin. “When did you get so feisty?”

  Robin spun toward her brother. “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Whoa. What?”

  “Did you do it, Alec?”

  “What?” he repeated, looking helplessly toward Melanie.

  Melanie shrugged. The shrug said, Don’t look at me.

  “Because I gotta tell you,” Robin continued, a line of perspiration wriggling down her neck, “I’m getting really sick and tired of all this bullshit.”

  “What bullshit?”

  “I want you to stop with the excuses and the evasions and the smart mouth and tell me the truth.”

  “I have told you the truth.”

  “You didn’t shoot anybody,” Robin stated.

  “I didn’t shoot anybody,” Alec confirmed.

  “Then what the hell were you doing in Red Bluff that night? I need to know, and I need to know now. Do you hear me?”

  “I can’t tell you. If they call on you to testify in court…”

  “Then I’ll plead the fifth, or I’ll lie, or God forbid, I’ll tell the truth. God knows somebody around here has to start.”

  “Shit,” Alec said.

  “Now, Alec. Or I swear I’m going back to L.A. and you can deal with this crap on your own. Is that what you really want?”

  There was a long pause. Alec swept his hair off his forehead, unconsciously mimicking Dylan Campbell. He looked up and down the dried-out, deserted stretch of country road, as if hoping for someone to come to his rescue. “I came to see Tara,” he said finally, his voice so low that Robin had to strain to hear him.

  It took another beat for his words to register. “You came to see Tara?”

  “What do you mean, you came to see Tara?” Melanie demanded. “You were in their house that night?”

  “No,” Alec said quickly. “I never went inside. Tara and I were supposed to meet at the Riverbank Inn. She called around nine, said there were problems and she couldn’t get away.”

  “Wait—go back,” Melanie said. “What do you mean, you were supposed to meet?”

  Robin fell back against the side of her sister’s car, the heat of its exterior burning through her clothes. So her suspicions about Alec and Tara had been correct. “They were having an affair.”

  “It was more than an affair,” Alec said sharply. “We were in love. We always have been. She knew marrying Dad had been a huge mistake. She was planning to leave him.”

  “Holy shit,” said Melanie.

  Robin stared at her brother, her eyes filling with tears. “I think you better start at the beginning.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Can we at least get in the car, so I can put on the air conditioner?” Melanie pleaded.

  The three siblings climbed back into the old Impala, Melanie in front, Robin and Alec in the back, Robin holding tight to her brother’s hand. Melanie started the engine, and a weak blast of tepid air shot toward the backseat.

  “It started about a year ago,” Alec began without prompting. “Tara emailed me, said she was unhappy, that Dad was up to his old tricks, that she had no one to talk to, that she missed me, that sort of thing. I wasn’t going to respond, but I never did have a whole lot of willpower where Tara was concerned, and soon we were emailing each other pretty much every day.

  “I guess Dad figured that something was up, that Tara was unhappy and maybe getting restless,” Alec continued, “because he suddenly agreed they should move into their own place. Tara had been after him to do that ever since they got married, but you know how stubborn Dad could be, and he wouldn’t budge. Suddenly, out of the blue, he up and decides she’s right—they need their own space. He’s going to build her the home of her dreams, yada, yada, yada. Of course, since this is Dad, what he’s going to build her is really the home of his dreams. He’s making all the decisions—where they’re going to build, how they’re going to decorate. He knows everything, after all.

  “Except what he doesn’t know is that the prestigious decorating firm he hires, McMillan and Loftus, is a mere ten blocks from my apartment in San Francisco, which makes it very easy for Tara and me to get together.

  “At first, nothing happened. We’d meet for coffee. We’d talk. The first time, she actually brought Cassidy with her. We pretended to be just a couple of old friends who’d happened to bump into each other on the street. Tara introduced me to Cassidy as Tom Richards, this guy she went to school with. Luckily, Cassidy didn’t remember me, and I probably wouldn’t have recognized her, she’d grown up so much. We went back to my apartment, I made the kid some hot chocolate, Tara and I pretended to catch up on old times. Anyway, after that, Tara usually came alone. It didn’t take long for things to heat up. Soon I was driving three hours to Red Bluff on a semi-regular basis. We’d meet at various motels on the outskirts of town.”

  “And Dad never suspected?” Melanie asked.

  “If he suspected Tara was having an affair, which frankly I doubt his ego would permit, he certainly never suspected it was with me.”

  “Okay,” Robin said, perspiring profusely despite the now cooler air. “So you and Tara were having an affair—”

  “We were in love,” Alec corrected a second time.

  “You were in love,” Robin repeated. “Was she planning to tell Dad?”

  “She was going to, but then there was the move to the new house and the house-warming party. She didn’t want to embarrass Dad, and she didn’t want to upset Cassidy, who for some inexplicable reason seems to really love our father. It just never felt like the right time. Plus Tara was worried about how Dad would react when she told him she was planning to leave him. I offered to be there with her, but she didn’t think that was a good idea. We were going to figure it out that night, make concrete plans, but then she called, said there were problems and she wouldn’t be able to make it, said she’d phone me later.”

  Alec looked toward the window, as if watching the scene play out in the reflection of the glass.

  “When it was after midnight and she still hadn’t phoned, I got worried and called her, but she didn’t pick up. So I drove over to the house. As soon as I got to the street, I saw the police cars and the ambulance. I thought maybe Dad had had a heart attack when she told him she was leaving, or that he’d done something crazy, maybe threatened her and she’d called the cops. To be honest, I don’t know what I thought. So I drove around for a while, trying to figure out what I should do, and I ended up driving back to San Francisco. Next thing I knew, the two of you were leaving frantic messages on my voice mail.”

  “But why not just tell us the truth?”

  “Honestly, at first I was too stunned. When you told me that Dad had been shot, my first thought was that Tara had shot him. Then you told me that Tara had been shot, too, and my next thought was that Dad had shot her and then turned the gun on himself. But then you said that someone had shot Cassidy, which was just inconceivable, and that it looked like some sort of home
invasion.”

  He slumped forward in his seat, lowering his head into his hands.

  “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to do. There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by telling anyone about Tara and me. I thought it would only complicate things, and things were already complicated enough. And then a few days later, you started asking about my car, and I realized that the sheriff had found out I was in Red Bluff, and I knew how it would look and that nobody would believe me. It was only my word that Tara was going to leave Dad. The sheriff was probably going to assume I killed Tara and shot Dad and Cassidy because Tara had decided not to leave him. He’d say that I was furious at being made a fool of a second time and I wasn’t going to let Tara get away with it again.”

  “Would he be right?” Melanie asked from the front seat.

  “Shit,” said Alec, looking imploringly at Robin. “You see.”

  “Just asking,” Melanie said.

  Alec turned back to Robin. “Look. As motives go, it’s a bit of a stretch to think I would still be carrying a grudge after more than five years, especially if I hadn’t seen Tara in all that time. But once I admit to an ongoing affair, it’s a whole different ball game. Put it together with my being here in Red Bluff that night, and they have a pretty solid case.”

  “What did McAllister say?”

  “He agrees. Says there’ll be plenty of time for the truth if and when they make an arrest. In the meantime, it’s not necessary for me to do their job for them.”

  Robin sank back in her seat. “Shit,” she said. What else was there to say?

  “I’m sorry,” Alec said. “I screwed up.”

  “That’s putting it mildly.” Melanie threw the car into gear and pulled away from the shoulder.

  “I didn’t shoot them. I swear it.”

  “I believe you,” Robin said, watching Melanie’s eyes narrow in the rearview mirror.