Better Left Buried (24 page)

Brea couldn’t believe what Pat was alluding to.

Tom was jealous of what?

Were there rumors about her father and Charity?

“So you know Tom didn’t just up and leave, too?”

“Of course I did. Everyone knew, but there was no evidence. Tom was gone, plain and simple. A man like him, who beat women and stabbed their wife in front of their child, who was going to miss him?”

She was starting to understand why his ghost was so angry.

Pat parked in front of the police station door and left his cruiser running. “Are you sure you don’t know where Harmony is before I waste my night helping Bruce look for her?”

Brea shook her head. “I told you, she’s been at Lance’s. Since she’s obviously not there, I don’t know where she is.” She hoisted Harmony’s bag onto her shoulder and went inside with Pat following closely behind her.

The main room of the Reston police station was quiet, the gray walls and silence lending a miserable feel to a place that was already depressing enough. A disheveled vagrant slept handcuffed to a bench and smelled of urine, even at a distance. Brea tried not to breathe too deeply as Pat led her past him, headed toward the young officer at the intake desk, who was casting sideways glances at Lance, immediately identifiable by his tattoos.

“Is Jim back? I have his niece.” Pat spoke softly to the man whose nametag
read “Phillips”. He was young, early twenties, and had a lean runner’s physique.

Brea thought about Bruce chasing Harmony through Oakwood and thought, if it had been this guy, she wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Phillips shrugged. “I’m not sure. You want me to call back?”

Brea couldn’t stop looking at Lance. She knew she should be quiet, humble, that she was in trouble, but something inside her had snapped the minute Pat spilled the beans.

“No, I’ll just take her to his office. Let me know when Joan gets here, would you?”

Phillips nodded and answered an incoming call.

Brea had no doubt that her mother would announce herself.

Lance sat, head in hands, with the dazed look of someone trying to shake a drugged
fog. He clenched and unclenched his jaw and shook out his hands.

“Come on,” Pat said, waving for Brea to follow him.

She couldn’t walk past Lance without saying something. “You know goddamned well Harmony didn’t steal your car.” The accusation was out of her mouth before Lance knew what hit him. He looked up and she could see there was no spark of recognition. “You were supposed to be her friend.”

Pat grabbed Brea’s
arm and dragged her away. “Don’t say another word.”

She tried to
break his hold, but he wouldn’t let go. He was stronger than she would have guessed. She stopped struggling the second she laid eyes on her uncle. For as imposing a figure as Uncle Jim normally was, he was ten times more intimidating in uniform.

Brea’s
bravado melted away. She felt six-years-old, about to answer for spilled paint, instead of sixteen and being questioned about a stolen car. Her heart beat faster and the air seemed hard to breathe.

“Sit,
” Uncle Jim said.

Brea
collapsed into one of two chairs in front of his unadorned metal desk. His office hadn’t changed in sixteen years, probably longer. His worn leather chair told of long hours of being sat in, of dedication, and a single focused life. Dusty commendation plaques lined the walls, the only personal item among them being a framed picture of her and her mother from when she was three-years-old.

Uncle Jim
spoke to Pat in hushed tones just outside the door and dismissed him when he was finished.

“I can’t believe I have to do this, Brea. Do you have any idea how embarrassing this is?” It was her family’s way to worry more about embarrassment than the sin that had caused it. “Where’s Harmony?”

“I don’t know.”
It took all of her courage to say it.

“There’s no way I believe that. Not for a second. Where is she?”

“Like I told Pat, she’d been staying at either Lance’s or Adam’s. If you can’t find her there, then I can’t help you because I have no idea where else she would go.”

A door slammed,
followed by the heavy footfall of high heels on tile.

“Brea Allison Miller, where are you?” Her mother’s voice echoed through the precinct, the use of Brea’s full name a show of intimidation.

“Joan, please, calm down.” Pat, who had said he was going to help Bruce find Harmony, stuck around, probably long enough to cushion the blow.

Brea
watched him walk toward her mother, arms outstretched for a casual, diffusing embrace. There was no way that was happening. Her mother was still screaming.

“Don’t even try to stop me, Pat. Let me at her.”

“Joan, she really wasn’t the one—”

She waved him off, a bundle of wel
l-groomed disciplinary energy. “There is no excuse for something like this. Not a one.”

She looked nothing like one would expect for someone
dragged out of bed to pick her daughter up at the police station. She wore a v-neck sweater, slim-fit designer jeans, and a pair of polished high-heeled boots. Her red hair was styled in a loose French twist and her face was freshly made-up.

“There you are,
” she said.

As if her uncle’s office wasn’t the first place anyone would look.

Brea made herself small in the chair, slinking down from the polished fingernail wagging in front of her face.

“This is it, young lady.
The last straw!”

Pat moved between them, dragging the empty of
the two chairs into the corner. “Here, Joan. Have a seat.”

“I don’t want to sit
! Jim, help me out here, would you?”

“It’s going to be fine, Joan. Please, lower your voice. Pat
, would you close the door on your way out? Thanks.”

“Mom, let me explain.” For as much as Brea wanted to go on the offensive, there was no way to turn such a volatile situation
around.

Joan’s
china-white complexion quickly grew red. “Explain? Do you have any idea what it’s like getting a call telling me that my daughter, who I think is sleeping in bed, has been arrested?”

“Not arrested,” Uncle Jim corrected.

“At the police station for pick-up?” Her mother checked to see if he agreed with her terminology. “I told you Harmony was trouble, Brea. The kind of people she comes from—”

“
People
you were friends with, right, Mom?
People
with their own secrets about this family and about my father. What exactly are you all covering up here, huh?”

Uncle Jim held his finger to his lips for her to be quiet.
“Joan, you have to get her out of here. Now.”

The panic in
his eyes fortified Brea’s fight. “What happened between Dad and Charity, Mom?” She stood and moved within arm’s reach of her mother, fully expecting to be slapped.

“
Nothing
happened.”

“Then why was he a suspect
in Tom’s disappearance?”

Her uncle looked panicked.
“Joan, get her out of here.”

“I’m not leaving until someone answers me. You want to punish me for sneaking out with Harmony, fine, but don’t think for one minute
that whatever you’re all so determined to keep away from me doesn’t have something to do with why I went.”

“We’re not talking about this here,” Uncle Jim said. “Unless you can tell us something about the stolen car, we’re finished.”

“Harmony didn’t
steal
Lance’s car. She
borrowed
it, maybe even while he was sleeping, but she’d have returned it. This whole thing is bullshit.”

“Language!”
Joan grabbed Brea by the sleeve. “Jim, let me know if you need me to sign anything, or what’s going on with this.” She waved her hand in Lance’s direction, which Brea found funny. She wouldn’t have expected her to know who he was. “Brea, let’s go. We’ll finish this at home.”

As they headed toward the front doors, Adam came crashing through them.

“You piece of shit!” Adam’s face twisted with anger. He flew at Lance and grabbed him up out of the chair. “Where’s Harmony?” He shook him, hard, and slammed him up against the wall. “Where is she?”

Lance was
six inches shorter than Adam and his feet dangled beneath him.

Officer Phillips
rushed around the intake desk and grabbed Lance by the back of his jacket, failing, initially, to get a hold of him.

Uncle Jim flew across the lobby to back him up while Pat, who
still
hadn’t left, stayed on the outskirts.

“She’s seventeen-goddamned-years-ol
d. You had no right.” Adam let Lance go and dealt a solid punch to his left eye. Lance’s head spun hard to the side and he returned the hit with little effect. “You asshole!” Adam shoved him and his breath caught when he hit the wall with a gasp. Officer Phillips moved between them, but the fight kept going. Lance came at Adam, who ducked and landed a solid punch to Lance’s gut. Lance doubled over and an unnatural wet noise rose from his throat. Adam kicked him in the ribs and was about two seconds away from taking a face full of pepper spray before he calmed down.

“Stop this, right now!” Officer Phillips
wrestled Adam to the ground with her Uncle Jim’s help. They pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed him.

Lance collected himself and got to his feet, but he wasn’t standing straight and looked like he was about to be sick.

The officers lifted Adam to his feet and he spat in Lance’s face. “You’re fucking pathetic.”

“Cool off, all right?” Uncle Jim took over, directing Adam toward an empty bench on the far side of the room while Officer Phillips grabbed Lance some ice. “What’s going on?”

It wasn’t the first fight inside a precinct and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

Brea watched, waiting for her uncle to place Adam under arrest.

Adam blew out a long breath and the vein in his forehead stopped throbbing. The color returned to his reddish purple face and as though he just noticed her, he locked Brea’s gaze.

“Where is she, Brea? Is she okay?”

Brea shrugged, knowing it wasn’t the time or place to tell him what she knew, and stumbled when her mother nudged her toward the open door.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s late.”

The car ride home registered somewhere between tense and angry, and neither Brea nor her mother conceded to the fact that they might
have been out of line.

“Did Dad have an affair?”
Brea asked. There was no point in suppressing things when she was already in so much trouble.

Joan sighed, the fire that had her so battle-ready at the station having died to a smoldering ember. “No, Brea. Your dad isn’t that kind of man. You should know that.”

“Should I? I didn’t think he was capable of being a murder suspect, either. I’m not a little girl anymore. Mom, what happened to Harmony’s father?”

“I honestly don’t know.
Maybe he left, maybe he didn’t. Who told you about your father?”

“Pat let it slip. I baited him, don’t get me wrong. He thought I knew.” She was tired of lying.

Joan shook her head. “Where is any of this coming from? It’s been well over ten years. This should all be water under the bridge.”

The fact that a ghost was involved was
Brea’s most guarded secret.

“That’s not an answer. Why do people think something was going on between Dad and Charity? How did he get caught up in Tom’s disappearance? Why isn’t any of this anywhere in the papers? Is this why Dad left?”

“Whoa, hold on. Too many questions at once.” Her mother turned off the radio and slowed down. The car swerved back and forth in the heavy wind. “We
were
friends with Charity and Tom back then.” Joan rubbed her temple. “Uncle Jim said he told you about Charity’s accident, that Tom attacked Charity, and not for the first time. There was a party at their house that night, maybe twenty people, including me and your father. You were there, too, playing with Harmony and the girl who was babysitting you both. We all had a bit to drink, your father and Charity more than most, and she was “flirty”.” She said it as if she meant “slutty”. “I think if I had the sense back then, I’d have noticed her for what she was: loose and unstable. Maybe I’d have sided with Tom when he started spouting off, saying the things everyone else had been saying all along. There was nothing going on between Charity and your father, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying on her part. Your father felt bad for her. You might even say he led her on, and he felt worse when Tom started screaming at her for it. Things got awkward and people tried to step in, but Tom was a hothead. Worse when he was drunk. We decided it was better if we left, all of us, but we were wrong.”