The garage door was open. The back of Blake’s new Mercedes showed inside.
“Mom?”
Beth walked firmly up to the open garage door.
Darleen squeaked and ran to hug her.
Blake stood behind Darleen, a briefcase in his hand, staring at Beth with incredulity and fear. Accustomed as she had become to seeing a perfectable Beth in the mirror for the past week, Beth thought he had let himself go contemptibly. He looked ragged and puffy.
His bloodshot eyes widened as she pushed Darleen aside and walked up to him.
“We need to talk,” Beth said.
Blake looked behind her, turned, pressed the button to shut the garage door, and marched into the house through the interior door.
Darleen was weirdly quiet. She had an almost Blakelike air of furtive guilt. “Dad, you don’t have a lot of time,” she said. She looked her mother up and down, and Beth could see her pricing the sweat pants and flipflops, assessing how far her mother had fallen.
“It’s a company plane,” he said. “They’ll hold it.” He laid his briefcase on the kitchen counter and turned to face Beth agressively, his shoulders lifted in a way she knew well, as if to bulk himself up to look intimidating.
Beth put her purse on the counter. “Aren’t you going to offer me a glass of water?”
She remembered now. The company junket. It happened every year, twice a year. This would be the first time in twenty-three years that she was not joining Blake on that private plane. Which would soon take him to Mexico, out of reach of the law.
She rushed out, “Did they find out about your secret identity? The IRS, I mean.”
“Mom, you’re so melodramatic.” Darleen handed her a glass of water.
In that moment, Beth knew that Darleen would help her father escape, no matter what Beth wanted. Yet, a week ago, she was calling the cops because she thought I was dead.
Two weeks ago, she offered me the au pair’s room and job.
Beth looked from one face to the other, people she thought she knew, who had become a part of her identity so deeply that she had never drawn breath without wondering what she owed them from one minute to the next.
“Come on, Beth. I don’t have all day. What do you want?” Blake said brusquely.
She pulled her message together. “Your settlement check bounced.”
“I’ll give you,” Blake began, and his eyes went to the briefcase. Boy was he obvious. “Twenty thousand dollars cash.”
“The check was for a hundred thousand,” Beth reminded him.
“Take it or leave it,” he said. “I’m broke.”
“You lie,” Beth said calmly.
“It’s a good offer, Mom,” Darleen said, and Beth turned on her, her eyes narrowed.
“Did he buy you off? Funny, he didn’t buy me off.”
Darleen wouldn’t meet her look. “Mom, I don’t want to get in between you two.”
“That would sound so much better if you hadn’t been hiding him from the police while he liquidated all the assets he’s been hiding from me,” Beth said calmly. “Very well, we’ll take this conversation into the living room.” Blake reached for his briefcase and Beth slapped a hand down on it. “Darleen, you stay here. You can guard your father’s ill-gotten gains for him for a few minutes. I’m sure he trusts you.”
Beth actually enjoyed watching Blake look from her face to Darleen’s to the briefcase. Clearly, Blake didn’t quite trust his daughter, bought off or not. It was a nice, fat briefcase. How many millions would fit in there? She raised her eyebrows at her ex-husband.
There, that didn’t hurt did it? Jee’s voice seemed to say in her head. Ex. Ex-husband.
Beth turned and walked into the living room.
“You’d better talk to her,” she heard Darleen say. Her voice was resigned.
A moment later, Blake joined her in the living room. “All right, what is it?”
This was his Busy Man mode, one of several with which he had silenced her in years gone by. Beth saw with new eyes how shifty he looked. She also realized that she’d always noticed the shiftiness...and chosen to ignore it.
“Who are you? Really?” she said wonderingly.
Blake made an explosive sound of scorn. “I don’t believe this.”
“I saw this all those years, but I didn’t let myself really see you. You’ve always been a weasel and a liar. This was always coming. I think my fear of that kept me lying to myself. That’s why I was so angry when it finally happened. Angry at myself,” Beth realized aloud, holding Blake’s eye, feeling the burn flare up.
He didn’t even change color. His hands twitched at his sides, another telltale get me out of here gesture she knew well.
“I spent years learning how to read you,” she said aloud. “And then, once I knew all there was to know, I spent more years trying to forget. Because it wasn’t pretty.”
“You don’t need a settlement,” Blake said, looking her up and down. “Where did you get the money for botox and lipo and plastic surgery?” He had calmed down, now. He would only lie to her, and attack, and change the subject in inexcusable ways.
Beth felt her anger cooling again. Is that it? Am I done now? If not, will I ever be done? How will I know?
“Mom?” came Darleen’s voice from the kitchen, incredulous, questioning.
Beth blinked.
Blake made a convulsive bolt for the kitchen and, she presumed, his briefcase and Mercedes.
But Darleen blocked the door. She was holding Beth’s borrowed white Coach bag with its red-nail-polish S-curve and its half-million-dollar motherlode of diamonds inside.
“Mom, where did this come from?”
She turned big round eyes on Beth. For the first time, Beth felt her daughter was actually seeing her. This time, instead of the flipflops and sweats, maybe Darleen saw that the gray was gone from her mother’s hair, she was down more than thirty pounds, and her face was wrinkle-free and fresh. Darleen looked into the bag and back. “Wow, Mom.”
And the avalanche started—the end of all things, her family dissolving out from under her, the truth she’d learned and tried to unlearn years ago. Darleen was Blake’s daughter through and through.
“They’re borrowed,” Beth said. Now she knew why Jee had loaded her down with diamonds. Somehow Jee had known this moment would come. Because every time the succubi took their eyes off her, Beth had tried to reach out to her daughter. This conversation had been inevitable.
Pog had seen that coming, too, she realized. Pog had wanted to spare her.
“Mom, why didn’t you tell me?” Darleen sounded hurt, wondering, accusing.
“What?” Blake said roughly. “Goddammit, I have to leave.”
Darleen just looked into the purse, her mouth hanging open.
Blake walked over and took it out of her hand. He looked inside, did a double-take, looked again, plunged his hand in, and brought it out with a fistful of glittering diamonds. His face changed. He snarled at Beth, “You don’t need money.”
“I did. I don’t now,” she said.
“Then what the fuck are you here for? I have to go,” Blake said, and stomped for the door.
“I think you should stay,” Beth said sharply.
“Why?” He spun around. “What on earth can you possiblly have to say that would interest me?” He was already halfway across the kitchen. He had his briefcase in his hand again. Holding it seemed to give him strength.
She leaned back against the door jamb. She remembered what she had wanted to say to him at last, even though she didn’t want it now.
Now, she only wanted to screw up his getaway.
“I want to hear all about it. I want to know when you started cheating us, hiding money from your family, playing Blake Shanley, high school basketball star. I want to know why you decided to pull the plug on our marriage when you did. It wasn’t Farrah, I know that much.”
If she kept him talking here long enough, the company plane would leave without him.
/>
Blake looked at his watch with a swift, powerful, impatient jerk of his forearm. That used to be another conversation stopper. She’d been afraid of his impatience for years.
What had she feared he would do if he lost patience?
Well, this.
Beth was free of fear now. Watching Blake fidget with his briefcase in his hand, edging closer to the kitchen-garage door, she realized that he was afraid, too. Maybe he’d always been afraid.
“Dad, I think you owe her the money,” Darleen said.
Beth watched Blake’s blank face and realized there was simply no one home. He felt nothing for her, or Darleen, or the life he had destroyed. He certainly didn’t care about poor little Farrah. He was completely and utterly sociopathic.
Even Pog, who had thrown Reg off a balcony, had feelings.
Beth looked around Darleen’s immaculate showroom of a kitchen and thought, One of these things doesn’t belong here. One of these things isn’t the same.
Darleen’s eyes were glued to Amanda’s purse, still in Blake’s hand.
Blake noticed them both looking at the purse. He snapped it shut and, taking its straps in the same hand that held the briefcase, he opened the door to the garage, then reached out his other hand to Beth. “Come on. I’ll drive you to the bus stop.”
Beth looked from one to the other. “I suppose my work here is done.” The look on Darleen’s face made her sick. Her daughter’s eyes darted from Beth to Blake and then, as if no stronger magnet existed in the universe, to the purse and briefcase in her father’s hand.
Fighting nausea, Beth walked past Blake into the garage.
He popped the trunk with his automatic opener, then walked around the car and tucked his briefcase and her purse in the back seat behind the driver’s seat.
“They’re not mine, you know,” she said. “I’ll have to take them ba—”
And then he hit her in the face with a spade.
Pog
“I’m in your car on Interstate 88.” Reg’s voice was high and anxious.
I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even four o’clock. “Where is she?”
“She went into that house, and there was this woman there, and a guy, her ex-husband, and I reckonized him from the pitcher in the paper, and he shut the garage door, then a few minutes later he come out in his car and drove off. I din’t like the look on his face. What if he’s kidnapped her? Pog, what do I do?” Reg sounded panicky.
“Follow him,” I said, figuring Beth knew how to handle her own daughter, but she was notoriously naïve about her stupid ex. “Follow him and keep me posted.”
“Is Jee coming?” Of course he thought only Jee had any brains or balls in this bunch.
“When she’s ready,” I said. Jee was busy incentivizing the downstairs tile crew. I checked my watch. “You’re way out in the burbs. It’ll be at least forty minutes before we can get there. Stay on him.”
“Tell Jee, okay?” Reg said tightly.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll tell Jee.” I hung up.
“Tell Jee what?” Jee said, walking to her fridge and pulling out a brew. She popped the cap with her thumb, took a swig, rinsed out her mouth, and spat into the sink.
I handed her a pen. “Reg followed Beth to her charity office today. Remember she was starting that job?”
“Yeah.” Jee opened the freezer on the far end and jotted on the incentives list taped to the inside of the freezer door.
“So that cop was there and he tried to bust her, and Reg held him off, and she got away. Reg followed her out to Naperville to her daughter’s house. Now she’s either in the house with her daughter or in her ex’s car.”
“So he can’t see her in the car?”
“She could be in the trunk. That’s why Reg is panicking. He says we need to get out there.”
Jee smiled. “We?” She smiled wider. Of course. There was an excellent chance she’d get to hurt somebody.
“Reg wants you. Apparently he can’t do nothin’ til Martin gets there. “
“He certainly can’t,” Jee purred. “So. What shall we wear?”
“I don’t think this is an occasion for full warpaint,” I snapped.
“He can’t hurt her,” Jee said.
“He can’t kill her. He can scare the living shit out of her,” I reminded my blood-thirsty roomie. “Where’s Amanda?”
“Tag teaming the tile guys with me.”
“I’m done,” Amanda said, walking into the kitchen and heading straight for the freezer on the end. “Where we going now?”
Beth
Beth woke in the dark with the smell of her own blood and Blake’s spare tire filling her world. She had the headache of the century. I am a prize ass. She lifted her hand and tried to wipe blood out of her nostrils in the dark.
The Mercedes’ engine roared. Blake was going somewhere in a hurry.
She wondered idly if he would drive the car into the river, or toss her into the quarry with rocks tied to her, or what. He would certainly be taken aback if he opened the trunk and found her awake.
She remembered how Reg had nearly been killed, yet he recovered completely. She hadn’t quite believed it then. She almost wished it wasn’t true now. Her head was splitting. Gingerly she touched her forehead. It was the wrong shape. With an icky, fluttery feeling, moving quickly so she wouldn’t think too much about what that spade must have done to her, she smoothed her hands over her scalp and down her face, picturing how she wanted them to be. While I’m at it, how about getting rid of this fucking headache?
She must be feeling more like a sex demon again. She’d thought a bad word.
But her headache eased.
The Mercedes kept moving. Highway speed, she guessed, from the way the tires sang close below her head. Now, would he try for the airport, or would he try to dump her body first?
If he had any sense, he’d leave the car at the airport and let her rot in the trunk. But that wouldn’t be Blake. Blake liked the elaborate. That was why that stupid bachelor pad at the Doral. And why his fellow sociopaths at the real estate development company regarded him as negligible. Blake cared too much about how things looked.
Suddenly the car slowed down. It took some turns. She thought she smelled...pine trees? They hit a bump, and she jounced helplessly in the trunk, and her head hit something hard and clanky.
The spade. He’d tossed that into the trunk with her. In the dark, Beth did a Pog-style eyeroll. Did he really think he could bury her body in a few minutes? He was stupid to keep the junket plane waiting. Those sharks would leave him behind in a New York minute.
Suddenly angry again, Beth punched the trunk lid and was gratified to note that she made a huge dent in it. She was about to punch it again when she realized that she might mess up the catch on the trunk. While it appeared that she could in fact punch her way out of here, she didn’t really want to.
So she waited until Blake stopped the car, slammed his door, crunched around the car on gravel, and opened the trunk. Apparently he was too overwrought to notice the fist-shaped dent in the trunk lid.
Beth lay still and held her breath, hiding her face under her arm.
Blake pushed her to one side. He took the spade out of the trunk. She heard him crunch away. Presently she heard the distant sound of the spade cutting earth and Blake’s out-of-shape grunting and panting.
Smells of pine woods and sunbaked wildflowers washed away the spare tire odor. Birds and crickets sang nearby.
She squirmed gently, trying to find a more comfortable position on the spare tire. Her discomforts faded as her demonic powers of recovery finished the job.
Now she had nothing to do but think.
Who am I? How did I go from wife, mother, socialite, and respected charity volunteer to waiting in the trunk of a newish German luxury car for my ex-husband to finish digging my grave? I’m starving. I want a deep-dish four-cheese pizza with triple anchovies, six orders of garlic bread, a couple of bottles of Chianti, a fettuccine Alfredo with
Gorgonzola and garlic, a nine-by-twelve-inch tray of tiramisu, and a spoon. Her stomach rumbled. The waistband of her sweatpants felt uncomfortably tight.
Why don’t I just get up and walk away from this car? she wondered. Well, principally because I want to see the look on Blake’s face when he finds I’m not dead. And I want Jee’s diamonds back. And I want to tell him what a shitweasel he is. What would Reg do in this situation? He’d ask me how I was feeling. Or start throwing punches.
She felt sick to her stomach. It wasn’t starvation, although if she didn’t eat something pretty soon she’d outgrow these sweatpants and take a big bite out of the spare tire.
What sickened her was the memory of Darleen’s face as she looked from the purse full of diamonds to her mother. As if her mother had magically become a human being.
I was always a person, Darleen. She tried to tell herself that these moments happen all the time. Children seldom see their parents as human beings, mere mortals.
Nope. That wasn’t it.
It was the charity board all over again. Beth had transformed from an unwanted middle-aged woman to Rich Mom in the time it took Darleen to snoop in her mom’s purse.
Sorrow pierced her. I’ve lost my daughter.
Darleen was still there, back in that picture-perfect house in Naperville. But the daughter Beth had cherished in her heart, the fantasy she’d carefully fostered all Darleen’s life, of a sweet, kind, generous, thoughtful, selfless little girl—that daughter was gone. In her place was Blake’s daughter.
In that moment of sadness and clarity, Beth knew what she’d been trying to get out of Blake for the past week. Why she hadn’t let go.
And now it was time to get it.
In that moment, she heard Blake give a final loud grunt and a curse and come crunching across the gravel to the car.
She cleared her throat.
The crunching footsteps stopped. Then, more slowly, they came around the car. Blake stood facing the open trunk of the Mercedes, his jaw dropping, his eyes popping, making little choking noises in his throat.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 24