Trickiest Job (6 page)

I wonder when they gave up.
 

“Where are the photos?” I ask, and Miss Susan’s lips tighten. Up close, I see that the downy light hair on her cheeks has become thicker.

“Mr. Yorker had them removed,” she says. “He found them depressing, and he felt it would be more appropriate to keep all the photos in the same room.”

That’s so like something my grandfather would do. I don’t need to ask her which room because I’m sure they went into my parents’ former bedroom.

The mansion has several master bedrooms. After my parents died, their room became a sort of shrine. I used to go there on the worst days, in the times when Grandfather was preparing me or Layla—but usually me—to do something unethical for one of his millions of lawsuits.

Being there always made me feel better, but I tried to limit my visits; I didn’t want to give our grandfather something to use against me. He might have emptied out the room, or threatened to, if he’d known.

“Can I… go up?” I ask.

“Oh, my dear,” she says. “This is your house. Maybe your grandfather forgets that, but no one else has.”

I don’t have the heart to argue with her, and anyway I just wanted permission to go up. I’m already climbing the stairs, and I swear I’ve forgotten about the three men until I hear a set of footsteps behind me.

My fingers trail up the curving banister of cool polished wood. It was never right for sliding down, but that didn’t stop me and Layla from trying. Right at the top, my fingers make a tight turn, and there it is, that fracture from when Layla and I broke off a chunk thanks to an unruly soccer ball. We glued the broken and splintered pieces together before anyone found out, and it wasn’t until almost a year later that our father noticed.

Every step I take evokes a hundred more memories.
 

Deep inside, the knotted, petrified remnants of my heart are aching, twisting. It feels like my chest is going to crack open.

I go up the next set of stairs. As I turn, I glance back and see Romeo is following. I wonder how it was decided that he would come but not the others.

The bedroom is at the end of the hall. I know my mom loved it because of the balcony overlooking the pool. She could be doing her own thing, then come check on us.

Layla and I were never allowed in the pool without Miss Susan or someone else keeping an eye out, and even though our mother worried, we were pretty good about that, even if we broke a lot of the other household rules.

Like letting the dogs into our bedrooms.

Or watching television shows that we weren’t supposed to.

Or playing with the cars in the garage, listening to music while pretending to drive. The keys were always in the ignitions, so it was easy enough.

I touch my palm to my sternum. The skin, the bone, it all feels paper thin, like if I push hard everything will crumple.

My other hand rests on the polished knob.
 

I don’t know what I’ll discover behind the door, but I know what I won’t find. I know who won’t be sitting in her overstuffed chair, an open bottle of pink nail polish filling the room with its acrid odor—
Hey, baby love, let me do your nails? How about just one? You said the blue the last time wasn’t so bad.

She accepted me as a tomboy, but she never gave up hope. If she could see me now…

My eyes drift closed, and I wage an all-out war with myself. What good can come from going through the door? Over the years, I managed to channel my anger and indignation into resolve to survive.
 

Warmth starts at my back, shadows my arms as Romeo hovers over me, and I realize he’s wrapped his body around mine.
 

He’s barely touching me, but I feel his strength and power. His confidence feels big enough to envelop me, like a coat I can borrow.

I tilt my head back. He’s so tall.

In my whole life, I’ve never looked at a man from this angle. Maybe when I was a kid, but I don’t remember.
 

Even if it happened, it surely wasn’t as intimate as this.

“Do you want me to open it?” he asks softly, and there’s such tenderness in him. This is the man who pins me down and fucks me and holds my ass open for other men? This is the guy who makes me suck the fat head of his oversized cock while Hawthorne spanks me?
 

But it is. He is. There’s so much more to Romeo than I ever imagined.
 

My fingers tighten on the handle, and I push the door open.
 

It smells like pine, like fresh air. I’m disappointed because I guess on some level I was hoping to catch a whiff of one of Mom’s floral perfumes—the more flowery the better, she claimed. It’s a silly expectation given that the smell faded away years ago.

But I guess in my mind, my childhood is condensed into just a few memories, and most of them are from
before
. Before the day my parents walked out of the house and never came back.

The relocated photos aren’t on the walls. There are a few boxes piled up under the writing desk—a desk that I think was never used for anything other than holding dirty clothes until someone took them away for washing.

I put one of the boxes atop the desk and remove the lid.

It’s not the missing framed photos.
 

I’m looking at stacks and stacks of snapshots. With a little gasp, I grab a greedy handful. My fingers can barely stretch around the fat, slippery stack.

They’re from when Layla and I were small. A vacation at one of the Great Lakes, though I never knew which one, and I can’t tell from the scenery.

As I flip through, I’m struck by how young my parents were, maybe around Romeo’s age. I shoot a glance his way and see him standing by the door. He doesn’t want to intrude.

“Do you wanna see a picture of me as a kid?” I ask, because I’m giddy at the discovery.

I’m sure he’s not interested, but he’s polite, so he comes over. “You really do look like your mother,” he says. “If not for the clothes and the hair, that could be you.”

There’s no point in arguing, in pointing out that she was much prettier than her photos suggest.

I spend a few minutes looking through another stack, then allow myself to choose five to take away. I expand that number to ten when I dig a bit deeper and find some photos from the summer before my parents died. I’m not stealing them; there’s a plastic box of memory sticks, and my sister can print as many copies as she wants.

It’s tempting to take the memory sticks and leave her the photos, but deep down, I feel she has the greater claim on them because she’s been here the last seven years.
 

“Can you hold these for me?” I ask Romeo. “My purse is in the limo.”
 

“Gladly.” He steps forward and takes them, slides them into an inside pocket of his suit jacket. If ever there was a man I would entrust with my most valuable, delicate possessions, it’s Romeo.

We walk out, and I close the door behind me. The sound it makes feels final.

Chapter 8

We sit in the kitchen and sip coffee, and Miss Susan talks about some of the things I’ve missed over the years. Cousins married, household employees retired, neighbors divorced. Layla learning to drive.

“Your grandfather isn’t a natural teacher,” Miss Susan says. She’s careful not to be too critical of him. That much hasn’t changed. “And he refused to pay for lessons, so Jeremiah taught her.”

“Jeremiah? How is he?”

“He retired a year ago,” she says, and that makes me sad. Jeremiah owned the landscaping company that tended to the flowers and lawns. He would often bring captured grasshoppers and caterpillars for Layla and me to look at.
 

“Your grandfather claims you’re homeless and living on the streets,” she volunteers during a lull.

Startled, I set down the cup. I don’t slam it, but it doesn’t exactly alight delicately on the saucer, either. “Did you… Do you believe him?” I ask.

“No, I didn’t. It’s a sin what that man did to you girls.”

“Girls?” The panic makes my voice sharp, and Miss Susan reaches over and strokes my cheek, just as she did when I was young.

“It wasn’t easy for Layla to lose you,” she says. “But he doesn’t play his games with her. It all seemed to stop the night you disappeared.” She gives me a canny look.

There’s a chime; someone is driving through the front gate.
 

My heart jumps into my mouth, and I feel suddenly all wrong. Awkward. I’m not ready to see Layla.

“I’ll bring her in,” Miss Susan says, and she leaves.
 

I fold my hands in my lap, and I try to imagine what I’ll say. Of course I’ll hug her, but what if she doesn’t remember me?
 

It’s a stupid worry, but I can’t help it.

“You’ll do fine,” Romeo says, and I feel his strength wrapping around me.
 

“Lindsay!” calls out Miss Susan, and there’s panic in her voice.
 

I surge to my feet, and my pounding heart races even faster, the individual beats too close together to know where one ends and the next begins.
 

There’s only one thing that could put that fearful tone into Miss Susan’s voice, and it isn’t Layla.
 

She rushes in. “Your limo is still out front,” she says. “Mr. Yorker won’t be able to miss it.”

Romeo stands and buttons his suit jacket. “We’ll take care of that,” he says. “Is there somewhere Lindsay can stay while we deal with Mr. Yorker?”

“But I don’t want to see him,” I say. I’m completely panicked.
 

“You won’t have to,” Hawthorne assures me. “We’ll say we’re here because we’re interested in doing business with him.”

“At his
home
? That will never fly,” I whisper.

Miss Susan touches my arm. “It could. If you know anything about real estate…” She looks pleadingly at the three men.
 

“That won’t be a problem,” Romeo says, and Miss Susan sends me into the rear living room.

“I’ll come get you when the coast is clear, and you can make a run for the car,” she says anxiously, a little breathlessly. “I’d better go fill in your friends so they know what to say.”

At that moment I realize that the stakes are high for her, too. At her age, so close to retiring, it wouldn’t be easy to find another job without a letter of recommendation.

If my grandfather finds out that she let me in but didn’t alert him, that she hid me…

“I understand,” I say, but she’s already hurrying away.

~ ~ ~

It’s like being in a soundproof room. Even with the double doors slightly open, I can’t hear a damned thing.

I’m dying to sneak out. I don’t want to be seen by my grandfather, but I realize I’d like to see him, to look pure evil in the eye. As a child, I didn’t fully appreciate what he was, but now I know.
 

Perhaps he’ll be mundane, a withered old man, though I very much doubt that.

He’s the sort of person who will be healthy and cruel up until the moment he dies, which could easily be another thirty-five years.

The light in the hallway flickers on, and I melt away from the door.
 

“From what I heard, they grade on a curve, but it’s not just our class. It’s all the intro classes, and since we’ve got a sucky professor, we’re doubly screwed.” The female voice is light, laughing.

It’s a voice I’ve never heard before—at least not like this.

She was twelve, just a kid, the last time I actually spoke to her, and even though her voice has matured, I recognize the way she talks. She also sounds a bit like me, a bit like our mom. She sounds like David, too. Just little traces, but they mix together perfectly.

I cup my hand over my mouth, and I feel tears on my fingertips, on my wrist. I want to go out there, to talk to her.

And I could. My grandfather can’t hurt me so long as the three men are nearby. Seeing me would surely renew Grandfather’s resolve to have someone track me down, get me back under his thumb… but I’m sure I would be safe tonight at least.

But… Miss Susan. She would pay the price.
 

I can’t do that to her.

So instead I strain to catch every word Layla is saying. She’s obviously on the phone, now talking about a guy, and I feel a sad smile tugging at the corners of my mouth.
 

If things had turned out differently, I would have been the one giving her advice about relationships.

Not that I have anything useful to share.
Don’t trust anyone. Men only care about sex, so keep emotion out of it. Use whatever you can to get ahead, and take no prisoners.

Maybe she’s better off without me around.
 

I hear her climbing the stairs, her footsteps and voice both fading, and I whisper, “Don’t go.” I wish I’d been able to see her at least, to verify with my own eyes that she’s doing well.

The door opens and Miss Susan silently beckons me out.
 

She points in the direction of the front door, which isn’t visible from back here, and I nod.

I’m starting to walk away when she pulls me into a pine-scented hug. “You can’t imagine how much we missed you,” she whispers. “You could call, you know. Our secret.”

Even though I nod, I suspect I won’t have the guts to call. It would be too painful, for both of us.

Chapter 9

I’m in the darkened limo for a good twenty minutes before my former bosses come out the front door.
 

To my surprise, my grandfather steps out behind them.
 

Even though I’m sitting on the far side, even though it’s dark outside and the windows are tinted, I feel myself shrinking into the padded seat. My bun unwinds and my hair cascades over my shoulders.

He looks the same… too much so. Just under six feet tall, with the same bristly mustache and thick head of chestnut hair. He was always a vain man, and I see that hasn’t changed.

I swallow even though my mouth is dry, and my throat burns as I gag on nothing. I dive for one of the bottles of water and it dribbles onto my lap as I take a desperate sip.