Someone Else's Fairytale (20 page)

“Matthew know about this?”

“No. He's been in
Texas
over the weekend and into this week and I don't want to have this conversation over the phone.”

“Lori?”

“I told her enough to convince her to stay with Charles for the next little while, but she's going to want to know details eventually.”

“That's gotta be rough.”

“I'm just lucky your family already knew. And are amazingly, incredibly charitable.”

“Yeah, they're nice, but my dad's not lying about needing pro bono hours. It's required for the bar. And hey, you gave them free coffee today.”

“Because coffee is all they would order!”

“Let people be nice to you. Someday you'll be out solving cases and saving lives and putting bad guys behind bars. The karma will more than even out.”

“But-”

Someone knocked on the front door.

“One sec,” I said. I got up and opened it. Matthew stood on the doorstep, a sheaf of papers in one hand. “Matthew! Hey!” I hugged him.

“You got a moment?”

“Yeah, sure, come in.”

“I'll call back later,” said Jason from my netbook.

“That Jason?” said Matthew.

“Yeah, he and I were talking about-”

Matthew went around to my netbook, knelt down, and held out the sheaf of papers.

“Am I being served?” Jason asked. “You must be Matthew. Chloe talks about you all the time.”

Matthew took a few deep breaths. His knuckles were white and his mouth pressed into a thin, firm line.

It was a moment before I figured out he was angry. I'd seen him upset before, but this was something more extreme.

“I should go,” said Jason.

“We had an internet assignment, for Media Studies,” said Matthew.

“You talking to me or her?”

“I decided to do some searching on the web, for stuff about you.”

“Who?” I asked. “Me or him?”

“That'd be
whom-”
Matthew was a bit of a stickler for grammar “-and I'm talking about him. You'll want to read this, Chloe.”

“I can't imagine I'd care.”

“Ye-ah. Anything you want to talk about, Chlo,” said Jason, “we can. You can ask anything.”

“Like the all night sex party you held at your house?”

“Stuff like that. Right. I am going to hang up now, okay?” The sound of the line cutting out whistled from my netbook.

“Matthew?” I said. I'd never heard him raise his voice or accuse anyone of anything. He was the quietest, most withdrawn guy I knew.

“That's only the beginning.”

“Okay.”

“He's a scumbag. If you got involved with him-”

“What? Wait a minute. I am not interested in anything like that.”

“After you read this, you won't even want to talk to the guy. He's a user. Him calling you all the time? It's probably just a game to him, to see if he can put another notch in his belt.”

I sat down on the couch. “Some stuff happened this weekend. He's being the opposite of a user right now. I owe him – not that I'll put myself at risk of... you know... whatever's in there.” I nodded at the stack of papers.

“He got sued for statutory rape. You got many other friends who can say that?”

“You know the press isn't always accurate.”

“Yeah, check my research.”

“Okay. Can I tell you about this weekend? Because I really need to tell someone.”

“Yeah.” Matthew put the papers down. “Of course.” He turned to me.

I related the whole story, beginning with Beth's visit and ending with Doug and Steve gathering evidence for a restraining order. “I need to tell Lori more details. I need to move house. I've waited too long as it is.”

“What did your brother do to you ten years ago?”

“Um, he shot me a few times...”

“Go stay with someone, now. Tonight. You're right, you shouldn't be here.”

“It would put whoever I stayed with in danger.”

“Whomever. You think he'd find you?”

“I have a rather distinctive car.”

“Oh, right. So stay with someone who doesn't live in the area. I'll drive you to school if you want.”

“I hate having to rely on other people for help with my problems.”

“Chloe, I don't see how any of this could possibly be your fault. You have a psycho relative. No one's going to blame you.”

“I guess I could ask Val if I could stay at her place.” Val was an archeology graduate student I'd done some work for. She lived clear out in the Four Hills area and was doing her fieldwork right now, so her apartment was empty.

“You do that.” He handed me the sheaf of papers. “Take these. And read them. And by the way, it's good to see you again.”

“You too.”

He slipped his arms around me for another hug.

I hugged back and tried to gauge whether this was a friendly hug or something more.

But he let go of me before I could decide. “I gotta go run some errands. I'll call you later?”

“Yeah, okay.”

I managed to reach Val on Skype and she told me I could of course stay in her apartment and gave me her housesitter's phone number. While I waited for the housesitter to call me back, I read the sheaf of papers that Matthew had left. I reminded myself that Jason liked to lie in his interviews.

But these weren't interviews. The article on statutory rape was testimony by a woman who said this had happened to her friend, and that Jason had paid her friend a quarter of a million dollars to keep her mouth shut. The website this was from wasn't a tabloid, it was a mainstream news outlet.

The interview with Donovan Reilly wasn't about Jason at all. His comment about Jason's “after hours activities” was an aside, a corollary to the story went on to tell about why no one else from the cast ever hung out with him much while they shot the first
New Light
.

The all night sex party was out of a police report that they'd broken up a party at his house and arrested four people for indecent exposure. Jason, apparently, was so drunk he couldn't even stand up to take a breathalyzer test.

 
And then there was story after story of Jason out partying at all hours and leaving clubs with one or more women in tow. There was a complaint from the director of
New Light
that Jason's wild ways interfered with the movie shoot. There were pictures of Jason with scantily clad women getting in and out of his car. It looked like he drove a gray Prius in LA. There were dozens of pictures like this.

My netbook rang. Jason. I wasn't sure I wanted to answer.

But I did. “Hi.”

Jason looked at me, and at the papers I held, then at me again. “Hi.”

“So... yeah. I told Matthew about Chris and-”

“That really what you want to talk about?”

“Um...”

“Well, I guess I'd rather not talk about
that
-” he nodded to the papers I held “-over Skype. But I do want to talk about it. Tell you my side of things.”

“Are any of these true?”

“I'm not sure what you've got there.”

I dropped my papers. “Okay, you know what? Never mind.”

“Chloe, I don't know what you think of me right now, but it can't be good.”

“I'm not interested in you as anything more than a friend, so I don't really care about this stuff.”

“Okay.”

“Except the rape case.”

“I can tell you everything, but I'd rather do it in person.”

That meant it was true. There was no way I wanted to meet up in person to discuss it.

“Sorry,” I said. “I should go.”

“Sure. Right.” He didn't move as I cut the connection.

Steve and I met up again in the
UNM
law library the following day, and continued to work off the outline he'd drafted under his father's supervision.

“You don't have to do this,” I said to him. “I can try to look up statutes and-”

He shook his head. “I need to know how to do this stuff. You, I hope, don't.” He looked sidelong at me. “You still have scars?”

I nodded and pulled up one pants leg. There, in the side of my calf, was a silver dollar shaped scar. I twisted around so he could see the identical one on the other side. “That's one of them.”

“Yeah, I won't ask to see them all,” said Steve. “But can you take pictures? In case we can enter them into evidence?”

“Sure.”

He shook his head and launched his internet browser. “Statutes are online... here. Okay, a lot of them are going to be the same as in the old criminal complaint.” We had a copy of that on the table between us. “But we always check. I don't want to accidentally cite to some farm subsidy statute or something.”

I laughed.

“Right, so... kidnapping...” He clicked hyperlink after hyperlink until he found it, then jotted the statute number down in another window. “False imprisonment... right.
Battery
... okay. Assault with a deadly weapon... okay. I guess assault goes first, really. Um... right, endangerment of a minor... not sure what that'd be under. I still can't believe they didn't get attempted murder.”

“I wasn't in bad enough shape.”

“The heck you weren't.” I got the impression that the Vanderholts weren't big on swearing. “I'm looking up the criteria, just to see.” His finger tapped away again and again at the touchpad on his laptop.

He paused and looked up at me. “How are you, by the way? Here my dad and I have been so absorbed with this, we didn't ever ask. How do you feel about getting this restraining order?”

“I'm fine, I guess. Stressed.”

“Yeah, Jason said you guys hadn't talked much about it. He did get these, by the way.” Steve dug out a stack of pictures. I stared. Sure enough, the guy behind the wheel of the little sedan looked like an older, fatter Chris. His hair was buzzed and his eyes were behind sunglasses, but I could see his distinctive, tapering jaw.

Guilt welled up inside of me like blood from a wound. Jason had put me in touch with his family and gotten me some evidence, and I'd cut him off last night.

“I don't mean to pry, but... my brother did call me yesterday,” said Steve.

“What did he say?”

“That your 'friend',” he curled his fingers in the air, “dug up a bunch of dirt on him and made, like, a little case file.”

“He's just trying to protect me.”

“From what, exactly?”

“Matthew thinks Jason's trying to hit on me or something. And I don't know, maybe I talk to Jason too often. Maybe it does look bad.”