Summer Girl

by Sophie Hill

  Heather would be long gone by the time I got out of prison, but that wasn’t my biggest worry. How could I protect her from Barron? And from whoever tried to run her off the road?

  I could beg Sheriff Blackstone to keep an eye on Heather for me while I was in prison. And my uncle…I could ask him to help her out any way that he could. For as long as his health held up, anyway…

  A wave of frustration swept over me. I couldn’t keep her safe. I was completely helpless.

  The sheriff paused when he reached the cell and gave me a long, hard look. His eyes, which used to crinkle with concern when he looked at me, were cold. Then he unlocked the door and held it open. “You’re free to go,” he said.

  I shot up off the bench, jaw dropping in astonishment.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “You heard me.”

  I walked out of the cell, staring at him. He thrust the familiar paper bag at me, with my wallet and all my possessions. Good old paper bag.

  “What happened?”

  He looked at me. “Your friends went to bat for you. Did some investigating on their own. Turns out one of Barron’s friends beat him up so that they could set you up, and he bragged to a few of his friends about it. They’re not the brightest bunch. I hauled Barron in here and started questioning him about exactly what happened, and his story started falling apart. Major inconsistencies from the first time he described what happened, and the second. Guess he never expected anyone to look at his story too closely.”

  “So he admitted he was lying?”

  “He had to. I pinned him down on where the alleged assault took place, and he started panicking. He tried to say that you took him down Country Road 23 and beat him up out there, and I told him that road’s closed for construction. Then he suddenly remembered that you took him to a spot behind the grocery store and that’s where you beat him up. I told him about the security cameras that were put in back there after some tourist got mugged. Told him they’d show exactly what happened. He got real quiet after that.”

  “There were security cameras behind the grocery store?”

  “Nope. But I know a frame up when I see one.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Sheriff Blackstone had come through for me, after everything that I’d pulled.

  “I don’t deserve your help,” I said.

  “No, you don’t. But I’m not going to be part of some rich brat’s vendetta. When I bust you, it’s going to be because you did something to earn it.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Barron is forbidden from setting foot in this town ever again. He had no choice but to agree. He’s left town already.”

  I took a deep breath, my hands shaking with relief. That had been a close call; much too close. It could very easily have gone the other way, with me spending years of my life in prison.

  “You know, you’ve been way easier on me than I deserved over the years. I’d be in prison by now if you’d wanted me there. I realize that now,” I told him. “I know I deserved it every time you busted me. I know that driving around town the way that I did that day was unforgivable. The only thing that I can tell you is, I have not had a drink since that day, and I never will again. I mean, look at me. I’m clean. I swear to God.”

  He looked me up and down and nodded, and his expression softened a little bit. “I hope it sticks.”

  “It will,” I said fervently. “I have someone else to think about now other than me. Is Heather all right?”

  “As far as I know, she’s fine.”

  But that was just temporary. I knew what I had to do. It might cost me my new-found freedom, but the Rodriguez family needed to understand what would happen if they ever messed with Heather again.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Heather

  The Huntsman restaurant hadn’t changed a bit from the days I used to eat there with my parents. The walls sported horrible animal head trophies staring down at the diners with their glassy eyeballs.

  How is a hacked-off head on a wooden plaque appetizing in any way? That place used to freak me out beyond words when I was a little kid.

  It was lunch time, and it was packed with the well-heeled crowd from my old neighborhood, men in polo shirts and ugly plaid shorts, women in tennis dresses with gleaming, blow-dried hair and just the right shade of sun-kissed glow to their skin. Not too orange, not too pale. Standing in the entryway, I recognized a lot of them, including the Biltmores. I waved at them as they waited for a table, and their eyes widened, and they all started whispering to each other.

  Aurora walked up, looking wonderfully out of place in her cat-eye glasses, peasant shirt and tiered cotton skirt.

  “Why are we here?” I asked her. “What’s the emergency?”

  She flashed a secretive smile. “You’ll see. Follow me.”

  Dottie had called me earlier that day and insisted that I leave the kids with Veronica and meet her at the Huntsman, which, believe me, is the last place on earth that you’d find someone like Dottie. Or Aurora. Or me, these days.

  I followed Aurora back through the restaurant to one of the private reservation-only rooms in the back, and things got even stranger.

  Dottie and Slade were waiting in there, side by side. Slade was standing there with his arms folded, glowering at my parents. My mother. My father. The two of them were sitting sullenly at the table, several chairs apart from each other.

  The sight of Slade was almost too much for me to bear; I had to struggle not to burst into tears. “Oh, my God,” I said, and I threw my arms around him and hugged him hard. His strong, muscular arms wrapped around me and I sagged into him, pressing my face into his chest.

  “Jesus, I missed you,” he groaned.

  “I missed you too. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry about everything.” I stepped back away from him reluctantly; I wanted his arms around me forever. He looked amazing, clear eyed, clean-shaven, and the curve of his upper lip made my heart race.

  “There’s nothing to apologize for. It’s your father who should apologize, but that would require morals and a conscience.”

  I glanced at my father, startled, waiting for him to jump up and bluster and try to bully Slade, but he didn’t say a word, just glared at the table. That was so out of character for him that alarm bells started ringing in my head.

  “What is happening? Why are we all in the same room here?” I demanded.

  “I contacted your father in Raleigh yesterday. I told him that if he didn’t want me to reveal certain things, he and your mother would meet us here today at noon,” Slade said coolly.

  “Why here?” I wondered.

  “Leverage. Your father knows all these people out there. And I know his dirty little secret, the one he’d rather die than have them find out. I want to remind him what he stands to lose.”

  My father glowered at him and clenched his fists, but didn’t say a word.

  “I visited the Rodriguez household yesterday. Pedro was there alone. We had a little talk.” Slade held up his fists; his knuckles were split and his hands were swollen. “And now I know who Consuelo’s real mother is, and why your family freaked out when you said you were going to find Consuelo.”

  I gaped at him. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Are you saying that Maria is not Consuelo’s mother?”

  “No, Maria is not her mother. Maria is her grandmother. Trinidad was her mother.”

  “Keep your voice down!” My father hissed.

  “What? No!” I gasped. I turned to stare at him, but the look on his face gave it all away.

  “She was just a kid!”I protested.

  “She was fifteen when your dad knocked her up. And that was the start of Operation Cover-up,” Slade sneered.

  “Quiet!” My father begged. His face was wild, his eyes shuttling around the room.

  “Pedro told you this?” I couldn’t believe it. And yet, everything suddenly made sense now. No wonder my parents had lost their minds when I said I was going to find Consu
elo. My father hadn’t just committed adultery; he’d committed a felony, and Consuelo was the living proof of it.

  “Pedro turned out to be pretty god damned cooperative once he understood that was the only way that he was going to keep breathing,” Slade said, icicles dripping from his voice.

  I looked at my mother, and understanding dawned. “You sent me away to summer camp and boarding school to protect me,” I said. That’s why she didn’t bother sending my brother away.

  “To protect you, to protect your friends…I didn’t know what he was capable of,” she said, casting a bitter, disgusted look at my father. “The summer I spotted Trinidad and her little bastard, and realized how old she must have been when he knocked her up, that was the summer you were sixteen. Just the age he likes them, apparently.”

  “You’re sick!” My father hissed, face reddening. “My own flesh and blood? You knew I’d never...That’s disgusting!”

  “So was knocking up the maid’s daughter.” My mother raked him with a look of pure loathing.

  The map of my world had just vanished, and everything that I thought I knew was a lie. Yet again. The people in this room, wearing my parents faces, were strangers to me.

  “Why didn’t you just divorce him when you found out?” I demanded, my voice shaking.

  “I threatened to, but he said that I’d been in rehab so much that he’d have me committed, and take you away and make sure that I never saw you again. I know it sounds crazy, but you never know how things will play out in divorce court. He’s got money and power and connections. So we reached a compromise; I agreed not to say anything as long as he let me send you to summer camp and boarding school.” My mother’s face was a mask of misery. “I’m sorry. I thought that I was doing the right thing.”

  I felt the room moving, as every truth I’d lived my life by splintered and fell. “That’s why you wanted me to marry Barron,” I said, leaning on the table for balance. “You wanted me out of our house for good.”

  “Don’t you see how crazy she is?” my father’s voice was shaking with rage. “To think I’d ever do something like that? I made one god damned mistake! One! And Trinidad had the body of a 20 year old, and by the way, she came on to me, not the other way around!”

  “Don’t,” I said, shuddering with revulsion.

  “One mistake? You’d been running around on me for years,” my mother sneered at him. “That was just the first time that you ever screwed a child.”

  “She wasn’t a child!” He was pouting now, as if he were a child himself. The man who’d bullied and intimidated me, my mother and my older brother was gone, and a sad, self-pitying shadow of him sagged in the chair before me.

  “I still don’t understand what happened with Consuelo,” I protested. “Why was she living with her grandmother?”

  “Well, going back to the beginning,” Slade said. “When the Rodriguez family found out that Trinidad was pregnant, they left town, on your father’s dime, and they forced Trinidad to give birth at home. Consuelo doesn’t even have a birth certificate. She officially doesn’t exist. She’s never been to school. They blackmailed your father into buying that house for them; they made sure it was far enough away that they wouldn’t run into your family, but close enough that they could make him feel threatened in case he ever tried to cut off the cash flow.”

  “You went along with all this?” I glared at my father.

  “The house is in trust for Trinidad and Consuelo,” he mumbled. “I took care of my mistake.”

  I clenched my fingers so hard that my nails sank into my palms. His mistake. Consuelo wasn’t a god damned mistake, she was a frightened, lonely little girl with the weight of the world on her narrow shoulders.

  “So, Trinidad got older and was a wild child, fighting with her parents all the time, screwing around, fathering those two little boys,” Slade continued.

  “Consuelo said they were her cousins.”

  “According to Pedro, they’re her half-brothers. When Trinidad turned 22 she wanted to move out, but her parents didn’t want her to leave, because of all that money your father was paying for Consuelo’s support. Your father was buying the family new cars every couple of years, sending them on expensive vacations, and paying them ten thousand dollars a month to keep quiet.”

  “Good God. All this was going on, all this time…” How could my father wake up in the morning and look at himself in the mirror, knowing about his dirty little secret…and then come downstairs to breakfast with the family like life was normal? Who does that?

  “Maria threatened to take Trinidad’s children from her if she left, and according to Pedro, Trinidad was a drug addict, so she was afraid that Maria might really be able to do it,” Slade said, his gaze leveled at my father. “Trinidad reached an agreement with them that she’d move out, take her kids with her, and they’d split the money from your father. She never talked to them again after she moved out. So when she died of cancer last year, Consuelo and her brothers went to live with their great-grandmother, Mr. Rodriguez’s mother, and the Rodriguez family kept all the money for themselves every month.”

  “I didn’t know that,” my father whined. “How would I know that?”

  “That’s why Consuelo sent that letter,” I said, stunned. “They were broke. They were probably living off the grandmother’s social security check. And she’s been forced to live with this secret her whole life. She has no birth certificate. She never went to school. Everybody threatened her with all this bullshit about how she’d go to jail if she ever told anyone the truth.”

  My father glared down at the table; he couldn’t meet my eyes. “If people found out, it’s not just me that’d be ruined,” he mumbled. “You have the same last name as me. Our whole family would have been humiliated.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that was on the forefront of your mind when you did this,” I sneered. “You were thinking about everybody else, not about saving your own ass. Have you ever even seen Consuelo since that picture of you was taken?”

  “I didn’t even know they took a picture of me,” he mumbled. “I haven’t seen her since she was five.”

  So it was just as I suspected…the picture had been taken with a hidden camera. Maria or Trinidad must have set it up, for further leverage against him.

  I turned to Slade. “Is Pedro going to press charges against you for beating him up?”

  “Are you kidding? They could go to prison for fraud for all that money they stole from Consuelo. And child abuse, and child neglect. And I know damn well that he’s the one who ran you off the road, even though he denies it. He doesn’t want the police looking at that too closely; that’s an attempted murder charge.”

  I sank into one of the mahogany chairs, knees trembling.

  Slade continued, relentless. “I told Pedro what he and his parents are going to do if they don’t want to go to prison.” He turned to Aurora. “Here are the papers that you’re going to draw up, and Heather’s father is going to pay you for your services – unless he wants me to contact the authorities and suggest they do a DNA test on Consuelo. Pedro and his family are already packing; they’re taking their nice new cars and all their fancy furniture, and they’ll be out of the house and out of North Carolina by week’s end. They’ll sign over legal guardianship of Trinidad’s children to Heather. They’ll let Heather either move in to their house or sell it, and the proceeds will go into a trust for Consuelo and her brothers. They will never collect another dime from Heather’s father.”

  My father started to perk up at that, at the thought of saving all that money, but Slade swung on him, savagely.

  “You will pay the money to Heather every month, because she will be the children’s guardian. If your wife wants a divorce, you’ll give her a divorce, and you’ll give her whatever she asks.” He fixed my father with a cold glare. “People divorce all the time. A divorce won’t hurt your reputation. But a DNA test of Consuelo will.”

  “I don’t want money from my father,” I protes
ted.

  “He owes it to Consuelo. He’s her father, he’s obligated to support her until she turns 18.”

  My father’s lips had gone white with anger, but he didn’t say a word. What could he say?

  Later that day, when the paperwork had been drawn up and signed, I sat in Aurora’s office with Slade’s arm around me and leaned against him, drinking him in hungrily. His hand was wrapped around mine, squeezing me tightly, like he’d never let me go.

  “This is really what you want?” I asked him for the millionth time.

  “It really is,” he promised. “I wouldn’t tell you that if I didn’t mean it one hundred percent.”

  Aurora pushed her glasses up on her nose and glanced at me. “You know, I need a paralegal here. I could train you to be a paralegal, and we could work around your college schedule. I love my niece, but she doesn’t really have front office potential.”

  “Fucking A I don’t,” Dottie agreed.

  “Man, I’m jealous.” Veronica’s eyes gleamed. “I would love to work in a law firm.”

  “You’d make a great lawyer,” I told her. “You love to argue, and you never back down.”

  “I can’t afford two clerks,” Aurora sighed. “Although I agree you’d be great, Veronica.”

  Veronica perked up. “I don’t need money. I’d work for you free part time. I bet I could get college credit for it. I’d love to argue with people for a living.” I couldn’t help it; I burst out laughing. It was so perfect.

  Aurora’s face lit up. “I never turn down free help.”

  Veronica turned to me. “If I had a law firm some day, we could be partners. You could be the appellate lawyer. You know, because you’re basically a big nerd and you love to do research and write papers.”

  I laughed. “Maybe. One step at a time.”

  Slade

  The view on Overlook Point is spectacular. It’s up on a ridge of hilltop that looks down on rolling hills carpeted in green, and a sky that seems to stretch into forever.

  Aurora showed up right on time, with a home baked apple pie, and a puzzled expression. “I don’t quite understand the concept of a pie emergency,” she told me. “You urgently needed me to show up here because you wanted…a pie? I could have dropped it off at your house, you know.”