by Sophie Hill
It was that feeling you get when you see a thunderstorm on the horizon rolling towards you, staining the sky black and spitting bolts of lightning.
The man was handsome in that too-pretty Abercrombie model way, and he wore khaki shorts, Sperry topsiders, and a Tommy Bahamas polo shirt. The girl with him was tan and had a pretty, sulky face and wavy dirty blonde hair, and she wore a paisley print dress with a cinched waistline.
I stood there and watched as Heather rushed out of the door and threw her arms around the girl, giving her a tight hug. And the man tried to move towards Heather, tried to put his arms around her, but she backed away from him, pushing his hands off. They were yelling at each other, and that familiar black rage swelled up inside me. The girl grabbed the guy by the arm, trying to pull him away from Heather, yelling at him.
“Barron, get the hell off her! She doesn’t want to talk to you!”
I stomped over there, murder in my heart, and then I saw the look on Heather’s face when she saw me, and my heart froze in my chest.
There was shock written all over her face, dismay, fear.
Barron turned towards me, then back to her, lip wrinkling in scorn.
“So, is this your new piece? Good God, it is, isn’t it?” Then he peered at her closely. “Let me guess. You didn’t tell this dirtbag you were engaged, did you?”
He turned towards me and thrust his hand out. “Hello, I’m Barron Van Der Fleet. Apparently you’ve been fucking my fiancee.”
Chapter Fourteen
Heather
I could feel the sidewalk lurch under me. Barron’s mouth kept moving, words kept spewing out, as the world dropped from underneath my feet and my heart leapt into my throat and choked me.
“We’re due to tour Europe together this summer as soon as Heather finishes up her little Nancy Drew mystery mission here. I guess she decided to do some slumming to pass the time.” He smiled, the smile of a shark about to leap from the water and rip your throat out. “That’s okay. She’s done this before. We’ve always worked it out.”
Lies. All lies. I had never done anything like this before. And my parents had run the engagement announcement in the paper without asking me. My mother had paid for the European trip without asking me. I’d broken up with Barron the day after the engagement announcement ran.
But I could see the look on Slade’s face, the rage and the hurt that briefly flashed there before the doors slammed shut, before they were replaced by something much worse.
Cold, blank, indifference.
He hated me. He thought I’d lied to him.
“Slade, wait! He’s lying to you!” I cried out, but it was too late. Slade turned and walked away without a word, yanked open the door to his car, and flung himself in. He roared away without looking back at me.
I turned to Barron.
“What the hell was that?” I screamed. “You can’t have me, so nobody else can have me either?”
“It isn’t over between us,” he snapped. “You made a total fool of me in front of all my friends. I’ve heard what you’re doing now – working at this stinking garbage heap and fucking that pile of shit? Give this the fuck up, Heather, before I make you really sorry.”
“Shut up, you fucking moron,” his half-sister Veronica snapped. She was definitely his better half. We’d been friends forever; that was how I met Barron in high school and started dating him. We all used to hang out in Hidden Cove every summer; their parents owned houses on the beach near my family’s house.
She turned to me. “I’m really, really sorry. I came with him because he said he was coming here no matter what, and I hoped if I were here I could keep him from acting like too much of a scumbag. I guess I was wrong.”
“You owe me!” Barron shouted at me, eyes practically bulging from his head. “You made me look like a total loser! You know how you’re going to fix this? We’re going to fly the fuck back to Raleigh, together, announce that the engagement is back on, and-“
“It was never on in the first place, you jackass!”
“Really,” he sneered. “Because that’s not what your mother told me. She said that she’d told you I was going to propose, and you were jumping up and down with excitement. If you weren’t going to accept, why the hell did your family run the announcement in the paper?”
I went cold inside. I was shaking so hard I looked like I were about to have a seizure.
Had my mother really told him that? I knew she’d been pushing me to marry him, lobbying for it like a crazy woman. I couldn’t understand her desperation to marry me off at age 19.
I mean, sure, he was perfect on paper, but there were a million things about him that annoyed me more and more the longer we dated, and I’d been trying to come up with a way to break it off with him for a long time when the whole engagement fiasco happened.
“That doesn’t excuse that bullshit you just pulled. The lies you just told,” Veronica snapped.
From my peripheral vision I could see Dottie barreling out of the diner towards us.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Was it twue wuv? Did I hurt his widdle feelings?” The grin on Barron’s face was demonic.
A red ball of panic and fury and hatred bunched up in my chest and exploded, and a freight train roared through my head.
I turned and swung on him, slapping him so hard my hand stung. He let out a howl of rage and raised his fist to punch me, and suddenly Veronica and Dottie were both on top of him, pounding on him and screaming at him.
Dottie landed a kick to the groin that doubled him over, leaving him puking on the sidewalk.
He staggered away from them, groping for his car keys, fumbling the door open. Then he fell into his car and slammed the door.
“This isn’t over, you fucking bitch,” he yelled out the window, before he pulled away.
I turned to Dottie. “Oh my God. Oh my God. I have got to talk to Slade.” I was crying hysterically, my face drenched in hot tears.
“We’ll take my car,” Dottie said.
Dottie, Veronica and I raced over to Slade’s house. As we pulled up, the front door swung open. Slade walked out, with my suitcase in one hand, and an open bottle of scotch in the other.
No.
This couldn’t be happening.
The wail of sorrow that wrenched from my throat nearly ripped me in two. He couldn’t leave me like this – because of lies.
“He’s lying!” I screamed. “You’re going to believe him over me? You can’t do this to me!”
He turned and walked back to the house and slammed the door shut behind him.
All the strength drained from my body, and I literally fell back against Dottie’s car. I thought I’d pass out. It was over. It was really, really over. He’d just thrown me out like a bag of trash.
If he could let me go this easily, he’d never loved me at all.
Veronica raced up the walkway and pounded on his door. “God damn it, open up the door!” she yelled at him. “My brother is an asshole and a liar! He’s a manipulative little shit! Are you going to let him jerk you around like his fucking puppet? Are you that weak? He is lying to you!”
I couldn’t hear Slade’s answer, but Veronica hesitated, then turned and walked up the pathway, stopping to grab my suitcase and bring it back to Dottie’s car.
“What…what did he say,” I said dully, choking on my tears.
“He suggested that I should leave,” she said, face pale. I knew that whatever he’d said had been much worse than that. Slade could be absolutely vicious when he was provoked. He’d probably said something like “Get your whore off my lawn”, or worse. Something I couldn’t bear to hear. Something that would literally kill me, that would tear my heart in two.
“Dottie, I can’t…I can’t work today,” I said dully.
“I know.” Her voice was quiet. “It’s fine. Look, there’s no talking to him now, but he may calm down in a few days.”
“No,” I shook my head, in a daze. “No. He…he dumped me just because of li
es that Barron told him. If he loved me, if he’d cared at me at all ever…he’d at least have heard me out.”
Dottie pulled away from the curb. “You don’t understand. Deep down underneath it all he’s really insecure. If you just give him some time-”
“Noooo.” It was a low animal wail of grief that drifted from my mouth.
“Okay.” Dottie’s voice was so quiet I could barely hear her.
“You can come stay with me,” Veronica said. “When my mom and stepdad split up, we got that house on Sea Oats Boulevard. Barron and his dad aren’t allowed there.” Barron’s dad was one of Veronica’s stepfathers. Veronica’s mother was as pretty as Veronica, and she got married a lot. And always came away the richer for it.
“All right,” I said dully. Then I added “Thank you.”
A Tremaine never forgets her manners.
We pulled away and I leaned my head on the cold glass of the car window and I cried and cried until there were no tears left. And then I cried some more.
Chapter Fifteen
“You sure you’re up for this?” Veronica asked.
“Absolutely. Why the hell not?”
I hadn’t heard from Slade in two days, and I didn’t expect to. He’d surgically excised me from his life like a cancer. I cried myself to sleep at night, quietly, in Veronica’s guest bedroom, and when I slept, movies flashed through my mind. I saw him on his bed, naked, writhing under a pile of beautiful girls, touching them the way he’d touched me, and I sat up in bed with a start, gasping. I dragged myself out of bed in the morning, aching and exhausted, and moved myself through the day like a robot.
That morning, I’d decided to just go to the Rodriguez family house, march up to the door, and knock.
What difference did it make any more?
So here we were in Veronica’s BMW, pulling up in front of their house at 9 a.m.
I was nervous as I marched up the driveway, but mostly I was just filled with a dull, angry ache that made me not care what the hell happened to me any more.
I rang the doorbell, and waited as I heard footsteps, and the door yanked open.
It was a Hispanic man in his twenties, wearing an Ed Hardy shirt. He had waxed eyebrows and hair gelled in little spikes, and it was clear that he spent a lot of time at the gym. The first few buttons on top of his shirt were unbuttoned, and I could see that he waxed his chest too.
I squinted at him, trying to reconcile this big muscular man with the skinny teenager who used to race across the dunes with me clinging to his back. “Pedro?” I asked.
He stared at me suspiciously. It was pretty obvious that he recognized me, and he wasn’t happy to see me.
He turned and yelled “Mom!” and we stood there in uncomfortable silence as his mother walked up.
She was still beautiful. She had to be in her 40s now but she looked like she was in her late 20s, with perfect unlined skin, and that voluptuous 1950s movie star figure. She wore a red halter dress and low-heeled red pumps that accentuated her curves perfectly. She was nothing like my mother, who was pale and slim like me.
Her eyes went wide with surprise when she saw me.
“What are you doing here?” she said. Not a hello, not a “My, how you’ve grown.”
My suspicions were confirmed. They were living off my father’s money, and my presence here made them worry that their supply was going to be threatened.
“I’d like to meet my half-sister.” They stared at me, scowling, stone faced.
“Consuelo,” I snapped. “And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Your daughter. Consuelo.”
“My daughter Trinidad died of cancer last year.” She scrunched up her face as if she was crying, and dabbed at a non-existent tear with the back of her hand. I mean, there were absolutely no tears at all there, but she was really working it. “You’re upsetting me. I don’t know any Consuelo. Get off my property before I call the police.”
“Oh, please call the police,” I said coolly. Screw them; they were lying to my face. “Maybe they’ll know who Consuelo is. Or where she is.”
They glanced at each other, fear and anger on their faces. Clearly, they did not want the police asking about Consuelo.
Pedro spoke to his mother in Spanish. “She must be the one who was watching us from the car the other day.” So we hadn’t been as stealthy as I’d thought.
“What do we do? Why is she here? She’ll ruin everything!” Maria muttered furiously, also in Spanish.
“I’ll take care of her.”
My stomach turned to ice water. He’d take care of me? What exactly did he mean by that?
Pedro turned to me and pasted a fake smile on his face. “Come in. It’s hot out. Let me get you some lemonade. We’ll tell you all about Consuelo.”
I backed out of the doorway hastily. “I took Spanish all through high school and college, you assholes! I’ve got a friend waiting for me, and plenty of people know that I’m here! And I’m not giving up until I figure out what the hell is going on!”
Rage flared in Pedro’s eyes, and he clenched his fists and opened them and clenched them again, but he could see Veronica’s car parked at the end of the driveway.
Veronica honked her horn, and I turned and ran down the driveway, full speed, and didn’t stop until I’d leaped in the car and slammed the door shut.
“Go! Go!” I yelled and we peeled out of there, and I looked back to see Pedro and his mother standing in the doorway, watching me.
“Jesus Christ, I think Pedro was going to kill me,” I gasped as we burned rubber out of town.
“Seriously? What are you going to do? Do you want to call the police?”
I took a deep breath, trying to clear my thoughts. “I don’t…I don’t think that I could prove anything. Let me ask Aurora what she thinks.”
I called Aurora on my cell phone and told her what had just happened, as Veronica and I sped down the highway back towards Hidden Cove.
“Well, the next step is up to you,” she said. “I haven’t been able to find a birth record for a Consuelo Rodriguez that fits what we’re looking for, but it sounds like it’s pretty obvious that this family knows something.”
“So how do I make them talk? If we don’t even have any birth record, we’ve got no proof of her existence.”
“You’ve got the photograph and the letter. It doesn’t sound as if it would be safe for you to go back there by yourself. You could take that letter and picture to the police department and ask them to do a child welfare check. I could send them a letter on my legal letterhead, telling them that I’m contacting the North Carolina Child Protective Services unless they reveal Conseulo’s whereabouts and provide proof that she’s all right.”
“That’s a good idea. I tell you what. I’m going to call my mother and tell her that if I don’t get some answers immediately, I’m going to CPS. If she doesn’t come forward, that’s what we’ll do. Thank you, Aurora, you’re a lifesaver.”
“Tell all your rich friends,” she said with a laugh, and hung up.
Later that afternoon
I was working the two to ten shift that day. Around three p.m., the door jangled, and my stomach tightened as I saw Barron and three of his friends walk in the door, laughing loudly.
They flung themselves into a booth in my section. “Waitress! Hey, coffee bitch! Bring me some fucking coffee!” his friend Roland yelled at me, and pounded on the table with his fist so hard that he made the napkin holder jump.
A family of townies, a mother, father, grandmother, and three young kids, turned and swiveled to stare at them, mouths open
“The fuck you looking at, you inbred morons?” Roland growled, and they hastily turned back to their meals.
“Her section’s full,” Dottie said coldly.
“Fuck you. There was an empty booth here.”
“Move out of that booth, and watch your mouth, or get out of the restaurant.”
“Didn’t I fuck you last summer?” One of Barron’s
friends peered at her drunkenly. “Yeah, I did. You’re the tattoo chick. The town whore.”
Suddenly he jumped up with a scream as a mug of hot coffee accidentally tilted in her hand and spilled on his lap. “Bitch! I’ll fucking kill you!”
Chuck the fry cook rushed out from behind the kitchen counter, holding a frying pan full of sizzling bacon. “Touch her, and you’ll have a face full of blisters.”
Barron turned and fixed me with an ice cold glare. “This is how it’s going to be, Heather. I’m going to be here with my friends morning, noon and night until you give up this fucking joke you call your new life, and come back to Raleigh with me.”
I choked out an incredulous laugh. What had I ever seen in him?
“You actually think that acting like the most repulsive pile of vomit in the universe and insulting my friends is going to make me want you again?”
He shrugged, a sneer tugging at his mouth. “It’s either that or I ruin the lives of each and every one of your so-called – ouch! Motherfucker!”
Sheriff Blackstone was standing behind him, and he’d grabbed Barron by the ear, twisting it painfully. He’d been sitting in a booth in Dottie’s section; I hadn’t even seen him.
Sheriff Blackstone let go of Barron’s ear and Barron stumbled back, rubbing his ear furiously and glowering like an angry toddler.
“You’re 86ed from this diner, forever,” he informed Barron. “I can arrest you for disturbing the peace, right now. Or you can walk out of here and never come back. If I hear about you causing any trouble in this town, for anyone, I’m going to stick to you like a burr on a horse’s ass, and make your life a living hell.”
“You’re going to take me on?” Barron hissed. He glanced at his three friends, then back at the sheriff. He stood up straight and squared his shoulders and clenched his fists. “You and what army?”
“Me, for one,” the fry cook snapped.
Two men from a booth in the back of the restaurant walked up. They were big and burly, wearing greasy coveralls; they’d just come from Tom’s Shadetree Mechanix shop.