Passion's Fury (The Doms of Passion Lake Book 2) (8 page)

“To this day, I don’t know how we kept my father from finding out.  We were just fortunate that he was so rigid, he never allowed anything to alter his daily schedule.  All I had to do was make sure I got home before he did.  I kept my ballet things hidden in the back of my closet, Mom kept her sewing things in a box in the basement.  For the first time in my life, I was happy.

“And ballet wasn’t the only thing Janelle introduced me to.  She had books.  The most wonderful books.  After I read all of her Nancy Drews and Judy Blumes, she would ride her bike to the library and check out more for me.  I couldn’t risk being seen going there by any of the church members, so I had to sneak them that way.  My life revolved around books, ballet and Janelle.” 

She paused.  “And then my mom got sick.  Cancer.  My father did a laying-on of hands and invited the congregation to come and pray over her.”

“He didn’t take her to a doctor?” Simon asked incredulously.

“He didn’t believe in doctors.”

“What the fuck was wrong with him?”

“He didn’t believe in health insurance, either.  He kept telling her his prayers would be answered, but of course she got progressively worse, so he accused her of having committed some heinous, secret sin.  He harangued her for hours every day, exhorting her to confess her sin so God could forgive her and heal her.  But she never said a word.  She kept both our secrets and when she died, she looked so serene…almost…happy.”

“How old were you, sugar?” Caleb asked.

“Fifteen.  I rarely saw my dad after that, which was a blessing.  It was like he forgot I existed.  Every Sunday, after church, he turned over the offering money to me and I took over paying the bills and preparing the meals, which mainly consisted of peeling potatoes and opening cans.  We even used canned meat, mostly Spam.  It didn’t matter, though.  He rarely ate.  He just kind of…disappeared into himself.  He died eight months later.”

“Thank God!” was Simon’s heart-felt reaction.

“Hear, hear,” Ash agreed.  “Good riddance.”

“Yeah,” Kylie agreed.  “I felt like I’d been let out of prison.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“What did you do after he died?”

“Well, Children’s Services picked me up and were about to send me to a foster home, when the Goodmans stepped up, offering to be my foster family.  I was thrilled to be living with them.  They really wanted me.  I even had my own room, which they let me decorate any way I wanted to.  Mom—she asked me to call her Mom—and Janelle and I had so many good times shopping for stuff.  And clothes! Oh, my God, they helped me pick out the cutest clothes!  The food they served was so delicious.  They actually had meat for dinner every night and not just once a week.  And it wasn’t canned! I never knew food was supposed to taste like that.  I ate like I was starving.  Gained twenty pounds almost overnight.

“They were very loving and supportive and not the least bit judgmental, which was a completely different experience for me.  They encouraged me to come to them with any question I had about anything.  And they took me to a psychologist, a guy who specialized in de-programming people who had been rescued from religious cults.  They did a lot to make me realize how twisted and ugly and hate-filled my father and his beliefs had been.  They weren’t church-going people, but they did their best to give me a solid foundation in good morals, tolerance of others, and high values. 

“School was a nightmare at first. I was abysmally ignorant in so many areas—I didn’t even know who the President was.  They had no idea where to place me.  So they kept me with my age group, but I was on an accelerated curriculum.  I had nearly ten years of education to catch up on. After being stunted by my father’s extremely narrow world view for so long, I soaked it all up like a sponge, and by the time we graduated, I was third in our class.”

“Baby, that’s amazing!”  Ash’s warm praise filled her heart nearly to the bursting point.

“After graduation, Janelle got a scholarship to study at the School of Pennsylvania Ballet.  Mrs. Goodman suggested that I audition, too.  They accepted me, even gave me a partial scholarship.  I studied with them for a year and a half.  Janelle was their star, though.  I was good, but not on her level.  She got picked for the lead in nearly every student production.  I was always in the chorus, or not chosen at all.  They kept saying…” her voice trailed off and her face fell.

Simon rubbed his calloused hand up and down her leg in a soothing gesture.  “What did they say, darlin’?”

“Nothin’ good, from the looks of it,” Ash murmured sympathetically.

“They said I’d never be a dancer.  No boy would ever want to partner me because I was such a cow.  And my breasts were way too big.  They kept after me to lose weight, making me weigh in, in front of everybody, before each class.”

“Jesus,” Simon muttered.  “No wonder you have issues with your body image.”

“I tried to lose the weight.  Breakfast was an unbuttered English muffin or a rice cake.  I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those, but, believe me, Styrofoam would be tastier.  Lunch was a salad and a hard-boiled egg.  Dinner, another salad, no dressing, and either poached fish or a broiled chicken breast, no skin.  I lost the twenty pounds, but I was unhealthy.  My periods stopped and I barely had the strength to get through the day.  But even then they weren’t satisfied.  They finally told me that I had to have breast reduction surgery in order to have any hope of being asked to join the company. 

“Jesus Christ, Kylie that was downright cruel.”

She shrugged.  “That’s the world of ballet.  Dad was so incensed, he drove down there, marched into the Administrator’s office and gave him a scathing lecture.  Then he pulled me out of class, helped me pack up all my stuff, and brought me home.  That was eight years ago.  They enrolled me in the local community college where I exhibited a talent for numbers.  So I studied bookkeeping.  I worked for a really nice woman named Norma, until she retired and moved to Costa Rica with her husband.”

“How long did you work for Moretti?” Caleb asked.

“Four months, two days, and eleven hours,” she answered.  “Long enough to know I didn’t want to work for him one minute longer, even if it meant running through the entire rest of my savings  looking for another job.  I was on my way to tell him so, too, when I found him murdered.”

“You ran through your savings?” Caleb asked.

“I—After my former boss retired, it took a lot longer to find a job than I had anticipated.”

“Didn’t your parents offer to help you?” Simon wanted to know.

“I-I didn’t tell them.  I-I didn’t want to worry them.”

Caleb hooked his finger under her chin and lifted her face to his.  “And how do you think they’re going to feel now, once they know about this?”

She didn’t answer. Didn’t look at him. Couldn’t. Just bit her lip and turned crimson with shame.

Ash reached for his laptop, which was sitting on the coffee table, and opened it up.  “Okay, Kylie, I asked our friend Jason to look into your former boss.  Here’s what he came up with.  Moretti was one of the accountants employed by the Righetti family to launder their ill-gotten gains from drugs, prostitution, gambling, and other criminal enterprises through their so-called legitimate businesses, the businesses whose books you were hired to keep.  Moretti kept a second, secret set of books. Evidently the Righettis discovered that he was embezzling money from them.”  Ash clicked a few keys.  “The day after he was found murdered, someone broke through the crime scene seal on the office door and ransacked the place again.  Same with the guy’s house.  They stole all the computers and your set of ledgers.  Evidently they were looking for that second set of books.”

“Did they find them?” Caleb asked.

“The cops don’t think so.”  Ash tapped a few more keys.  “Kylie, did you do your accounts on a computer?”

“No.  My boss insisted that I do the books the old fashioned way, in ledger books.  He didn’t want any information in a place where some unscrupulous hacker could get at it.”

Ash just smiled and she gave him a sly smile of her own in return.  “I’m sure
your
hacker is
very
scrupulous,” she said primly.

“Did he himself ever use a computer?”

“No.  As far as I know he didn’t even own one, unless he had one at his house.”

“Did you ever see him with another set of books?”

“No.”  Her face brightened.  “But if they exist, I think I might know where he kept them hidden.”

They all looked at her.

“Where?”  Ash could barely keep the urgency from his voice.

“Once, around a month after I started working for him, I entered his office without knocking first.  He was just getting up from the floor beneath his desk.  But backwards, you know?  Almost like he had just crawled out from under it.  He was a big man and out of shape and he was breathing so heavily I was afraid he’d fallen or was having a heart attack.  I asked him if he was okay.  He just screamed at me to get the fuck out of his office.  He didn’t need to tell me twice.”

Ash’s face took on a thoughtful expression.  “Did the two cops who interrogated you ask about the second set of books?”

“Yeah.  But I didn’t tell them what I just told you.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“I’ll never forget them.  John Bullard and Tony Angelino.”  She gave a delicate shudder.  “It was awful.  They kept twisting my words, trying to trip me up and get me to confess to murdering Mr. Moretti.  Why?  Why would they do that?”

“Well…”  Ash paused.  “Seems they are the lead investigators on a special, multi-agency task force looking into mob activity in Philadelphia.  They’ve had their eye on your boss for several years now.  When the Righettis discovered his enormous Cayman Islands bank account and realized that the only place so much money could have come from was them, they put a contract out on him.”  As Kylie stared at him, aghast, he placed a comforting hand on her knee.  “Unfortunately, you got caught in the crossfire, baby.  There is now a contract out on you.”

She had often heard the expression, “It made my blood run cold.”  But until this very moment, she had always thought it was just that, a colorful expression.  Now she knew it was real.  Very real.  Her blood literally felt like ice flowing through her veins.  A huge ball of it, heavy as an iceberg, settled in the pit of her stomach.  All of a sudden she couldn’t breathe.  Her entire body buzzed, as if she’d swallowed a hive of angry bees and they were now swarming just beneath her skin.  “I—I—”She was shaking so hard, her teeth were chattering.

Caleb’s arms tightened around her and she curled into him like a frightened animal seeking safety.  “Hush, sugar, it’s all right.  You’re safe here with us.  We’re not gonna let anything happen to you.”

She grabbed his shirt and turned her face against his broad, hard chest.  Simon put his arm around her along with Caleb’s.  Ash moved to kneel beside her legs, pressing his cheek against her thigh and draping his arm over her lap.  “Nothing’s gonna happen to you, baby.  We’ll take care of you.”

“Why?” she wailed.  “You don’t know anything about me.  I’m a total stranger. I have…
issues.
I worked for a mobster for God’s sake, and didn’t even know it!  And people are trying to kill me!  Why would you offer to take all that on?  Why do you even care what happens to me?”

Ash raised his head and the three brothers looked at each other.  Then Simon started speaking.  ‘Okay, darlin’, listen up, ’cause I’m gonna tell you why we care what happens to you.  We grew up in a lovin’, polyamorous household with a mom and two dads and an older sister.  The three of us have always been very close, often knowin’ what each other was thinkin’ or about to say.  And we’ve known from the time we were teenagers that we all wanted what our fathers had.  A woman we could all love, cherish, treasure and protect.  A woman who was lovin’ and generous and adventurous both in and out of bed.  A woman who was beautiful without always having to fuss with her hair or check her make-up or obsess over her figure.  The minute I saw you this mornin’, all disheveled and dazed, your eyes swollen from cryin’ and heavy with sleep, I knew you were the one we’d been lookin’ for.”  He gave a little laugh, just shaking his head.  “So I took your photo with my phone and sent it to Ash and Caleb with the caption, ‘I’ve found The One.’”

“And we both texted back, “Who is she, where is she and how soon can we meet her?” Ash said.

“We nearly drove to the diner to horn in on breakfast with you and Simon,” Caleb chimed in.  “But we didn’t want you to think we were stalkin’ you.”

“So that’s what all that messing around with your phone was all about,” Kylie said, turning her head to give Simon an accusing glance.  “You were taking pictures of me and discussing me with your brothers.”

“I was merely showin’ them how adorable you are,” he defended himself, feigning a wounded look.  His phone rang and they all turned to look at him.  He took it out of his pocket and thumbed on the speaker.  “Rafferty.”

“Hey, Honcho, Sam Olsen.  Finally got a chance to look at that little Honda p. o. s. we towed in.”

“And?”

“Not good.  Engine’s blown.  New one would cost more’n the car’s worth.  Plus the undercarriage is completely rusted through.  It’s a wonder she hadn’t put her foot through the floorboard.”  Sam Olsen sounded completely disgusted.  “One good jolt and the seat will be skidding along the highway.  If that happens at sixty miles per hour, it would not be a pretty sight.  It’s a death trap.”

“Okay, Tool.  Thanks for lookin’ into it.  I’ll bring her by in a little while to clean it out, then you can go ahead and junk it.”  He hung up.  Nobody said a word.

Kylie didn’t even realize she was crying until a sob wrenched from her throat and, for what seemed like the hundredth time in twenty-four hours she dissolved into tears.

Geez, you’ve got to stop bursting into tears at every little setback!  Where’s your backbone?  Why have you suddenly turned into this spineless wuss?

Because these have been so much more than just
little
setbacks!  I can’t take any more!  This thing with my car is the last straw!  The absolute
last straw!  “Herkimer’s gone,” she wailed.

“Who’s Herkimer?” Caleb asked.

“Her car,” Simon answered.

“She named her car?” Ash, this time.

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Go ahead,” Kylie sniffled.  “Make fun of the poor, stupid girl driving the rust-bucket car.”

“We’re not makin’ fun of you, darlin’,” Simon assured her.  “In fact, I been thinkin’ of namin’ my own car. How does Snodgrass sound to you?”

Kylie couldn’t help it.  She laughed and the somber mood was dispelled.

“Still,” Caleb pursued.  “Why
were
you drivin’a rust-bucket car old enough to be an antique?”

“I-I just never thought about it.  I was so focused on saving enough money to put as a down-payment on a house, I-I—”

Without saying a word, Caleb somehow managed to get his brothers to get off the couch and give him room.  Simon moved to one of the chairs, Ash perched on the end of the coffee table, his computer in his lap.  Caleb swung his legs up onto the couch and leaned back against the overstuffed arm, nestling Kylie’s head on his shoulder and holding her like a child, stroking his hand up and down her back, just letting her sniffle and hiccup as she struggled to get her sobs under control.  Until she was utterly drained and limp as a rag doll, slumping on top of Caleb’s hard body, feeling safe and protected in his sheltering embrace.  Within minutes her breathing evened out and the brothers let out a collective sigh.