Dangerous Lies

  "I'm sorry."

  "Me too. We've all got our troubles, haven't we?"

  The phone rang.

  Carmina started to ease out of her rocker, but I jumped to my feet. "I'll get it." I was trying to help out around the house as much as possible, especially with her weakened heart. I didn't want her back in the hospital.

  I grabbed the phone in the kitchen. "Songster residence, Stella speaking."

  "Estella? Is that you? Is that really you? Oh, baby! I've missed hearing your voice."

  I went still. Utterly still.

  "Baby? You there? Say something to your mama," she chided me. "I've waited so long to talk to you. I can't wait another minute!"

  Panic fluttered in my throat. I'd made up my mind to call my mom, but on my terms. I hadn't planned for this. Caught off guard, I couldn't control my emotions. I hadn't seen her since the night of the murder. The night I was whisked into the protection of the U.S. Marshals Service and blissfully, blissfully separated from her. I'd managed to all but forget about her. And now here she was, causing months of buried anger and resentment to flash to life in an instant.

  I found my voice. "Why are you calling?"

  "Why on earth do you think, silly?" she went on, her voice as sugary and bubbly as soda. "I'm aching to catch up! Anyway, can't a mama call her baby just because?"

  Just because? I didn't believe it for a minute. "I can't talk. I'm busy," I said flatly.

  Disappointment swept into her voice. "Too busy for the woman who endured twenty-four hours of excruciating labor to bring you into the world? They pulled you out with forceps. Most painful thing I've ever endured. Getting a case of the wobbly-woos just thinking about it."

  "I'm on my way out the door," I said in that same bland tone. "I have to go to work."

  "Now, hold on a minute, Estella. I'm not finished. I called for a reason."

  That's more like it.

  "What's this nonsense about you testifying against Danny? Those detectives from Philly came to see me. At least one of us was smart enough to tell them to eat dirt. You can't do it, Estella. I won't let you. It's dangerous business. The men Danny works with? Believe me when I say they aren't to be taken lightly. They're bad men, sweetheart. Real bad."

  "And you let them into our life."

  If my remark rattled her conscience, she recovered quickly. "It's in everybody's best interest if you tell that frog-faced prosecutor from the federal courts that you're scared silly of Danny, and while you appreciate the government's protection, your life means more to you than their conviction."

  "They're protecting me because I agreed to testify. That was the deal. It's the reason they're protecting you, too."

  "Oh, darling. Don't let them hustle you. This is the U.S. government, for crying out loud. They aren't going to leave an itty-bitty seventeen-year-old girl at the mercy of a powerful cartel, even if you refuse to testify. And that's what you're going to do. Refuse," she said, the last word coming out almost threatening.

  "Do you even care about me?"

  "I-- What? What kind of question is that? I'm your mother. What do you think I'm doing? I'm trying to save your life."

  "Has there been one moment during all of this that you actually thought about me first?" I asked, my chin trembling.

  "What are you getting at, Estella?" she said irritably. "If you have something to say, come out with it. Right now."

  "I'm your daughter. You should be protecting me, not Danny. He doesn't care about you. Don't you get it? You were his income source. He let you believe whatever you liked about him, because he wanted your money. He didn't love you," I said, my voice pitching higher at the ludicrousness of the idea. How could she not see what I saw? How could she be so desperate and blind?

  "I should have known you'd refuse to listen." She cut me off, sounding flustered and indignant. But beneath that, in some small, human way, I heard her shame. For one moment, I thought I might get through to her. Deep down, a part of who my mother once was still struggled to survive, and I clung to it. "You never listen. Not to me. I did everything for you, gave you the best money can buy. . . ."

  I covered my face with my hand. I swallowed the unwanted and wavering tickle in my throat. It hurt, hearing her gloss over the real issue. Why couldn't she just confess her mistakes? I wanted an apology. I wanted my old mom back! I thought about telling her, but my anger was ebbing away, leaving hollow heartache. I felt completely drained.

  I said, "I can't listen to this. I'm done. Don't call back."

  "You listen to me. Do not testify against Danny. For once in your life, listen to your mama. This is not a man you want to cross. If you step foot in that courtroom, he will find you. He will use every resource in his organization to hunt you down and he will kill you. He knows people. Violent, nasty men--"

  Men she allowed into our life. Into my life.

  Trembling, I hung up.

  I would not let my mom follow me here, to my haven. I would not let her make me more afraid than I already was.

  That night, I dreamed of Danny Balando. I woke up panting heavily, sweat drenching the back of my nightshirt. I told myself it was just a dream, I was safe here, he'd never find me. But no amount of rational talk could calm my trembling.

  Light spilled under the door.

  "Stella?" Carmina said, knocking lightly.

  "I'm awake."

  She came in. "I heard you cry out."

  "I had a nightmare."

  "Trigger?"

  "Danny Balando."

  Still fragile from the heart attack, she lowered herself with care to sit on the bed. As she patted my knee, her fingers were blissfully cool to the touch. "Have you talked to anyone about the nightmares? I've heard you cry out more than once."

  "No. I live with them."

  "Would you like to talk to me?"

  I met her eyes. "What do you want to know?"

  "In my experience, sometimes you have to flush the bad stuff out before you can heal. Getting it out hurts, but it's better than holding on to the poison."

  I thought about this. "I could go back to the beginning. I could tell you about my mom."

  Carmina spread her hands as if to say the stage was mine; she would listen as long as it took.

  I don't know how long I sat there, trying to find the right words. I harbored so much anger at my mom, it should have been easy to let it spill out. I felt filled to the brim with that anger. But when confronted with the option of getting it out, it seemed I'd buried it deeper than even I knew. Carmina was right. It was poison. It was in my system; it had taken root.

  "She drank before, at social events, or she'd have a glass of red wine before dinner," I began slowly. "But during the divorce, she started drinking a lot. Sometimes right after she woke up in the morning. I think she drank to forget how sad she was. I don't think she was still in love with my dad, or mourning the loss of him. It was more personal. She saw the divorce as an attack on her, as a personal failure. My dad was cheating on her, and the divorce was his way of saying she wasn't young enough, or beautiful enough, or good enough for him anymore."

  "How do you know your dad was having an affair?" Carmina asked.

  "Affairs. Plural. My mom hired a private detective to follow him. There were photographs."

  "She shared them with you?"

  "She wanted to hurt him. He wasn't ashamed to admit his indiscretions to her, but she thought he'd be humiliated if I knew." I paused, remembering that awful night when my mom had dragged me out of bed well after midnight. I was already awake--I couldn't sleep through the shouting--and she marched me right up to my dad and shoved the photographs at us, demanding that he explain himself to me. He hadn't. Without looking at me, he walked out, slamming the front door behind him. The next day, he had his assistant come by to collect his clothes and a few other personal belongings.

  "When I agreed to testify against Danny Balando for the prosecution, the U.S. attorney's office offered to put my dad in WITSEC with me. After all, he
was family. He declined. He didn't want to quit his job, and WITSEC doesn't allow you to do the same line of work after you're relocated. They told him I'd never be able to contact him again, not in person, not through e-mail, nothing. I guess he was okay with that."

  Carmina guided my head down against her shoulder. She said nothing, but I could feel a change in her breathing. It was slow and deep, and troubled.

  "My mom started hanging out with a woman named Sandy Broucek right after the divorce. My mom complained the only friends she had were the ones she'd met through my dad, and who still moved in his social circles. She wanted to break away from that world and make her own friends--the old friends were polite to her face but gossiped bitterly behind her back.

  "She was on meds for depression, and when she went out with Sandy and her new friends, she'd come home smelling like pot. Then she started abusing prescription drugs. She and Sandy talked about a dealer they called the Pharmacist. I don't know if he was a real pharmacist, but prescription bottles of OxyContin labeled for other people started popping up around our house. She tried to hide them, but I knew. After a while, she stopped talking about the Pharmacist and I stopped finding prescriptions. Somehow she met Danny. He became her new dealer and gave her heroin. She was really happy at first. In the days after she'd had a night out with friends, she'd laugh and joke with me. She seemed interested in my life. She was depressed, but the drugs masked it. I think she thought they made her the person she wanted to be--happy, fun, relaxed. But she was none of those things. She was still depressed, and the drugs only distorted her perception of herself for a little while."

  "It was easier for her to drink and do drugs than face her problems and get help," Carmina said.

  "After her initial happiness, things got bad. I tried to get her help. I drove her to the city early every morning to wait in line at the methadone clinics. Methadone was supposed to help her get off heroin. The clinics were in bad parts of the city, and we'd wait outside, in the cold or heat, surrounded by unwashed, desperate-looking people. Sometimes fights would break out in line and I'd beg my mom to leave, but she had to have enough medicine to get through the day.

  "When the methadone didn't work, she reverted back to heroin. She lost so much weight she was almost unrecognizable. She stopped eating, showering, or leaving the house, except to party with Sandy. She refused to get out of bed unless it was to get more drugs. Over time, her partying isolated her from me. She wasn't there when I needed her. She broke every promise she made. It got to the point that I was so scared, I called my grandparents--her parents. That made things worse. She got really angry and wouldn't talk to me. Her parents put her in rehab, but the center told us going in that withdrawal is extremely painful and that she'd probably relapse. She did."

  "How many times did she go to rehab?"

  "This is her third."

  "In my whole time as a cop, I only saw a handful of abusers recover. Drugs bring out the bad in people. Sometimes it's hard to remember that addiction is a disease--it doesn't define the person who's suffering. Behind the addiction is a real person, a human who deserves respect."

  I shook my head fiercely. "Don't take away her accountability. She chose this life. She had me, but she chose drugs. She's a coward. I don't ever want to be weak like her."

  "She needs your faith, Stella."

  "You think I should believe that this time she'll get better," I said, my spine stiffening. Was Carmina listening? This was my mother's third attempt. The longer she stayed on drugs, the harder it was to quit. I'd given up on her. It hurt too much to care. When you cared, you had something to lose all right.

  "Before believing comes faith. Before faith comes hope."

  "I don't want to hope."

  "Because it hurts?"

  I couldn't hold the tears back any longer. My lip quivered and my throat burned. When I spoke, my words sounded thick and fragile. "It hurts when she lets me down. It hurts knowing drugs are more important to her than me."

  "It's easier to ignore her, wish her away. If she doesn't exist, she can't hurt you."

  "Yes," I choked.

  "Oh, Stella. My sweet Stella." She gathered me into her arms and rocked me while I cried.

  When the worst of my tears had subsided, I said, "Before she called today, I'd actually given some thought to calling her." Sniffing, I wiped my nose on my sleeve. "I thought it would make me feel better to tell her I don't hate her anymore, and that I'm ready to move on. I can't decide if that makes me stupid or just naive."

  "Brave, Stella. That's what it makes you."

  "I don't want her to think I'm weak or that I caved. She wants me to call back. I don't want to give her what she wants."

  "What about what you want? Why not look at it that way?"

  I considered this. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to heal. Most of all, I wanted Carmina to be proud of me.

  I said, "Why did you take me in? Why would you do that? You didn't know me. You didn't owe me anything."

  "Well," she said, "the short answer is, because they asked me."

  "The long answer?"

  "I suppose you should know I was appointed to the U.S. Marshals Service when I was thirty-four. I was getting ready to head to Glynco, Georgia, for basic training. Training was seventeen weeks long, and Angie, my daughter, was going to stay with Thomas and Hannah Falconer while I was away. Days before I left, I found out Angie was pregnant. She was fifteen and due in six months. Well, I stayed. I took care of her, then I took care of Nathaniel. Never ended up a U.S. marshal. But I must have stayed on their radar, because they called me and said they needed me to take in a girl who'd been placed in witness protection, keep her safe for the summer."

  "You sacrificed your own success to take care of your family, and then you gave up your retirement to take me in."

  "You make me sound like a good woman, Stella. But I figured it out too late. A few years too late," she echoed. "It was hope that kept me afloat in those dark weeks after Angie ran away. Hope that I could change. Hope that she'd someday forgive me."

  Even though my eyes felt raw, tears surged back. "I don't want to hope. I'm terrified my mom will prove me wrong. She's let me down too many times. That night--the night I went into WITSEC--I swore it would be the last."

  "Tell me about that night. Tell me the worst of it. Get it all out. Tell me, then let it go."

  I wanted to tell her. I wanted it more than anything. To let go of the poison and move on? It was all I thought about. But I was afraid. The fear and shame and guilt coiled around me like a snake ready to strike. If Carmina knew what really happened that night, if she learned what I did, I was terrified she wouldn't like me anymore.

  She'd turn her back on me. And hand me over to the authorities.

  29

  BEFORE WORK I STOPPED BY RADIOSHACK. AFTER a little searching, I found a cheap, no-frills, pay-by-the-minute phone.

  The guy working the register scanned the bar code, whistling appreciatively. "Got yourself a real dinosaur here."

  "I'm on a budget."

  "You said it. Anything else?"

  "Yeah, how much would a cell phone plan for an iPhone cost?"

  "Looking at around seventy a month."

  "Is an Android any cheaper?"

  "Same ballpark."

  I calculated a rough sum of my saved tips. Maybe it was better to hold off getting a cell phone plan until my birthday, when I left Thunder Basin and settled somewhere permanently. Recently, I hadn't given much thought to how my life would change after I turned eighteen, but here it was a few days shy of August. I'd served over half my time in Thunder Basin, and while the realization should have thrilled me, I felt a strange pang of misgiving. In four weeks, I would be leaving Thunder Basin for good, and I hadn't told Chet. Nor had I discussed my plans with Carmina. I cared about them both deeply, and didn't look forward to saying good-bye, but the rational part of me knew Thunder Basin wasn't my final destination. Maybe it was the kind of place Stella Gordon could settle dow
n in, but changing my name didn't erase Estella Goodwinn from my blood. Could I feel complete here, content? Or was I destined for bigger, better things? I'd always clung to the fantasy of running away with Reed and starting our life over together, of having him nearby to take care of me, but that was no longer an option. Nor was I sure I'd want it if I could have it. This summer had changed me.

  I wanted to find my own way.

  At work, we were short staffed. Inny had called in sick, and Dixie Jo was on the phone frantically trying to reach Deirdre to see if she could help out through the dinner rush.

  "Any luck?" I asked, peeking my head in her office.

  "No." Dixie Jo rubbed her temples. "And this on a Saturday night, of all the bad luck."

  "I'll do my best to keep up with the cars."

  "Oh, I know you will. That's not what's bothering me. It's Inny," she admitted. "I can't reach her. She called and left the message hours ago telling me she was sick. She left a message on the machine. It isn't like Inny. She'd tell me to my face she wasn't up for a shift. She'd offer to help find a sub. I can't shake the feeling she's avoiding me on purpose. Now, why would she do that?"

  "She's due any day now," I reminded her. I had a baby gift at home ready to take to Inny the minute I heard she'd gone to the hospital. "Do you think she went into labor?"

  "Thought of that and called the hospital. She hasn't checked in. She isn't answering her cell phone. What if she's on some lonely road, in the back of her car, trying to deliver the baby herself?"

  "Would she do that?"

  "She's worried she can't pay the hospital bills." Another temple squeeze. "She's picked up extra shifts for months now, saving up. Her parents don't support the pregnancy, said they'd have nothing to do with her if she kept the baby. Even threatened not to pay the bills. Legally they'd have to, of course, but it's a matter of pride now. Inny won't accept their help. If she's afraid she can't afford the hospital, I wouldn't put it past her to deliver the baby in a field. Anything but ask her parents for money. She should've come to me. I told her to come to me."

  "She wouldn't do that." In the two months I'd known Inny, I'd never seen her ask for help. Even with swollen ankles and her belly protruding to the point where she looked like she'd swallowed a beach ball, she refused to sit down for a breather at the end of the night and let me fill her salt and pepper shakers. She was bound and determined to do everything herself.