The Beautiful Daughters (23 page)

“Hey!” Will called. He stood for a moment beneath them, hands on his hips. “I feel like I should quote something. Isn't there a balcony scene in
Romeo and Juliet
? ‘But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?' ”

“There's no window,” Adri said. “And no light.” She was right. The sun had sunk behind a bank of thick clouds and the world was filled with the slanting shadows of an early dusk. Adri rubbed her face with her hands for a moment, and then turned to Harper. “We're not finished,” she whispered, only for Harper's ears.

“I know,” Harper said.

And then Will was taking the steps two at a time, apparently eager to reach them. When he got to the top of the stairs, he jogged the last few feet and caught Harper in one arm and Adri in the other. Pulling them close, he said, “It's good to hug my girls again. Are you both really here?”

He sounded so happy, Harper couldn't help but grin. She let her head fall onto his chest, but when she caught sight of Adri's grim look, she straightened up and backed away.

“I suppose we are,” Harper said. “Though I can't imagine why you seem so delighted. We were nothing but trouble.”

“
You
were nothing but trouble,” Will assured her. He still had Adri under one arm and couldn't see the serious furrow in her brow. “Adri here has always been a good girl. Haven't you, Adrienne?”

She extricated herself from his one-armed embrace and stood back to give him a halfhearted smile. It was a weak attempt, and Harper could see that Will finally felt the tension between them.

“Sorry,” he said, looking between Harper and Adri. “I didn't mean to interrupt anything.”

“You're not,” Adri assured him. She didn't sound very convinced. “How did you find us?”

“I went to the farm, and when you weren't there, I guessed.” Will shrugged. “It's not like there are a million places you could be.”

“Harper and I are just catching up,” Adri said.

“That's what I was hoping to do.” Will ducked his head almost shyly. “I thought maybe I could talk you ladies into a ride.”

“A ride?” Harper honestly had no idea what he was talking about.

“On horseback?” Will's smirk was good-natured. “Remember when we used to do that?”

Harper laughed. “Oh, no. No way. I haven't been on a horse in more years than I care to count. And I didn't particularly like it when I did ride.”

“You're joking.” Will seemed genuinely surprised. “We used to love riding together.”

“I tolerated it,” Harper admitted.

“I guess you were a good actor.” Will said, smiling but clearly disappointed.

“I'm tired,” Adri said finally. “I'm going to head back to the farm.” She hooked her thumb over her shoulder in the general direction of Maple Acres, and fixed Harper with a look that indicated she hoped Harper would follow. But Harper didn't want to continue the conversation they had begun, so she pretended not to notice.

“No to the ride,” she told Will. “But I'd love to take a walk. You up for it?”

“Sounds great.” Will smiled. “Sure you don't want to join us, Adri?”

“Yes.” She was already on her way to the stairs. “Have fun,” she called over her shoulder, but her voice caught at the end.

Harper and Will headed down the estate drive, following the
dissipating cloud of dust that Adri kicked up on her departure. The old riding trail seemed like the most obvious choice for their path, and Harper was glad that she had changed into a pair of jeans in the car between Fairfield and Blackhawk and slid her feet into the Chucks. She wasn't wearing socks, but the shoes were soft and worn and she didn't think it would be a problem. The warm sweater Adri had loaned her would be perfect for an early-evening hike.

Will didn't appear anxious to break the ice or start in on the catching up that brought him to the estate in the first place. Harper didn't care. She was content to walk and listen to the rustle of the breeze lifting dry leaves from a million crooked branches.

It struck Harper as they walked that she had rarely, if ever, been alone with Will. There had never been time or reason to. Of course, they had all suffered their fair share of crushes on one another, and friendships blossomed and deepened, then paled and ran shallow as the seasons of their college days changed. When Adri was busy with classes, it was easy for Harper to spend more time with the guys, especially David. And while Jackson was the ubiquitous calm of the group, the tranquil center, Will was fun-loving and perpetually ready for anything. It always seemed that there was someone around to match her mood. But Harper had sometimes avoided Will, because she felt that he watched her just a little too intently. Every once in a while she caught a longing in his gaze that made her feel breathless and almost timid. But he was Will. Her best friend's brother. The russet-haired boy-next-door who didn't make her fingertips tingle the way David ­always did.

And Will was unsettled. He played basketball for a year, then soccer the following. He quit both. Halfway through his freshman year he changed his major from business to preveterinary. Halfway through his sophomore year he changed it back. When he finally graduated, it was with an agribusiness degree,
something that he assured her married his two loves, but she didn't really understand what he hoped to do with his diploma. Take over his dad's dairy, she supposed.

Apparently even that wasn't quite right. Adri had told Harper that Will wasn't a farmer. He was a general contractor who built beautiful homes and remodeled old ones. Though Harper couldn't claim to know him anymore, the idea that Will spent his time building things and fixing things felt right to Harper. She told him so.

“Thanks,” he said, giving her a sidelong glance. “I'm assuming that was a compliment.”

Harper laughed. “A bad one, but yes. It feels right somehow that you're doing what you're doing.”

“Brothers Construction has been a good fit,” he agreed. “Jackson and I make a good team. He's the brains, I'm the brawn. Or something like that.”

“Brothers?”

“Come on, Harper.” Will bumped her with his elbow. “Jackson and I are practically twins. And besides, weren't we all a bunch of rowdy siblings back in college?”

“Something like that,” she said, borrowing his phrase.

“Jackson and I are like you and Adri.”

Harper didn't bother correcting his use of the present tense. She and Adri were about as far apart as two people could possibly be. And while it seemed like Adri wanted to change that, to dredge up past events and uncover the truth behind the lives they now led, Harper was eager to hold her old friend at a safe distance. There was simply too much at stake. So she said, “What about David? Where did he fit into the mix?”

The second the pair of questions were out of her mouth, she realized that she never should have uttered them at all. A pall fell over the path before them, and though it was likely only the dimming shadows of the now ominous clouds, the woods suddenly felt haunted.

Where had David fit? He hadn't. It was as simple as that.

“So,” Will said, trying to steer the conversation back onto more solid ground. “What have you been up to these days?”

Harper gave him the same story that she had told Adri—a string of jobs, a crap apartment, nothing to write home about—but her mind was elsewhere. It was on David and where he had fit. How he had played into the five points of the star that had been their impossible, entwined group.

“Are you okay?”

Harper had stopped on the trail and when she blinked and realized that Will was before her, she almost burst into tears. But she stood her ground, screamed silently at the David in her mind. At the stupid, careless, wicked girl she had been.

“I'm fine,” Harper said. But she didn't sound fine.

Will took a step for her. Reached for her hand. “I turned around and you were gone,” he said. “I thought I lost you.”

Harper smiled, but her heart wrenched. You never had me. She thought. No one has ever had me.

20

T
hree days later, the entire vogt household was ripped from sleep when the telephone rang at 3:20 in the morning. The house was small, the insulation poor, and when the shrill chime split the night, harper sat up straight in bed as if she had been shot. A second ring, and then the sound of footsteps on the floorboards, a door being yanked open. Adri seemed to take the stairs much too swiftly for someone who had been so rudely woken, and if harper could trust the voices that filtered from the kitchen, sam had been roused, too.

It wasn't her home, but the adrenaline buzz of an anticipated emergency was already humming beneath Harper's skin. The last couple of days had been a careful balancing act, an intricate game of memory that required her to keep her story straight. If that wasn't hard enough, everything was complicated by another, even more labyrinthine set of related riddles demanding every last shred of her energy and concentration: What was she supposed to do with Adri? Will? David? Sawyer? Harper had run to Adri when she called, but now she battled the urge to run away. If only she had somewhere to go. But even if Harper had other options, she didn't know if she would be able to leave the woman she had thought about day and night for the past five years.

Because she was awake, and because she was already high-
strung and predisposed to fear the worst, Harper pulled a sweater over the T-shirt that she had been sleeping in and yanked on a pair of jeans. She crept down the stairs on bare feet, and paused a few steps from the bottom so she could listen to the conversation in the kitchen.

“No one was there?” Sam asked. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. Breathing, I think. And then they hung up.” There was a note of exhaustion in Adri's voice. Or maybe frustration. “It was probably Caleb. It's hard to get the timing of calls right.”

“Are you going to call him back?”

“No. He'll try again if he needs me.”

“So you'll wait up?”

“I'm up now, Dad. Could you go back to sleep?”

He chuckled. “Sweetie, my alarm is about to go off. Well, almost.”

Harper could hear the sound of a cupboard opening, and then Adri poked her head around the corner and caught Harper in the stairwell. “You want a cup of coffee?” she asked. Her eyes were tired, but as warm as Harper could hope for in the middle of the night.

“I'd take a cup,” Harper shrugged. “I'm up now, too.”

“Good morning, Harper,” Sam called from where he stood at the counter. He slid her a tired smile and nodded in greeting.

“Morning.” Harper stifled a yawn. She tripped down the last few steps and pulled out a chair at the table, but before she could sink into it, the phone rang again. A chill went through the kitchen. Nobody called at such an ungodly hour—twice—unless something was wrong. Harper froze with her hand on the back of the chair.

Adri was still holding the phone and she anxiously clicked it on and pressed it to her ear. “Hello? Hello, Caleb?” She waited for a moment before trying again. “Hello?” After a few more seconds, she held the phone out in front of her and studied it as if there was something wrong with it.

“Nothing?” Sam asked. A fresh coffee filter was cradled in his palm.

“I can hear somebody breathing,” Adri said. “But I don't know if they can hear me. Maybe Caleb accidentally switched his phone to mute.”

“What makes you so sure it's Caleb?” Sam asked. “It could be Will.”

“Will wouldn't be out at three o'clock on a Wednesday morning,” Adri reasoned. “But if you had caller ID we wouldn't have to guess. We'd know who was phoning.”

“It's not something I've ever needed.” Sam dropped the filter into the top of the machine and reached for the container of ground coffee. “I pick up the phone and say hello if I want to know who's calling. Try the other phone.”

“The rotary?”

“It's worked forever and a day,” Sam said. “I don't know what makes you think the new one is better.”

Adri tucked the cordless phone under her arm so that she could take the carafe from her father's outstretched hand and fill it with water from the tap. But Harper wasn't paying attention to them or their good-natured bickering.

Sam's and Adri's backs were turned to the little desk that housed the two phones, and when they weren't looking, Harper moved around the dining room table and reached for the phone jack. Popping the cord from the base of the handheld, she plugged the rotary into its place.

When the phone rang a third time, she answered it. “Hello?” She forced herself to say the innocuous greeting, even though what she wanted to do was scream into the mouthpiece. Or unplug both phones and pretend that their middle-of-the-night wake-up call was nothing more than a bad dream. But she knew that it wasn't. And she knew that the phone would only keep ringing and ringing and ringing. Unless she stopped it.

Sam and Adri spun around at the sound of Harper's voice, and she made herself shrug dispassionately. Then she rolled her
eyes as if she was experiencing the same thing that Adri had: a weighted hush, nothing more.

But it wasn't nothing.

Sawyer was on the other end of the line.

They breathed together in silence for a few moments, and Harper hoped that maybe Sawyer hadn't recognized her voice. She had said just one word. But just as she was about to hang up, he whispered through the line: “As if I wouldn't find you.”

The phone went dead.

Harper didn't stay in the kitchen for a cup of coffee, and the phone didn't ring again. She feigned exhaustion and mounted the stairs for the spare bedroom, but the adrenaline flushing through her system was so potent that she felt like she could crawl right out of her skin. Fly away. It was exactly what she needed to do.

Dressing in layers, Harper yanked on a pair of new socks and wished for a scarf and some gloves. It was cold outside. She could feel the icy air seeping through the warped frame of the window, and when she squinted at the yard below, she could see the grass glow white with frost. At least, she assumed it was frost. September snow wasn't entirely unheard of.

Though Harper wanted to leave immediately, she didn't dare. Adri was likely still in the kitchen, and while Sam would be heading out to the barns soon enough, Harper wanted to be sure that he was installed in the milking parlor before she made her escape. Escape? Did she really feel like she needed to escape Maple Acres and the Vogt family and the reminders of the life she had once led? No, she wanted to wrap them all up, tuck them away where they would be protected always. But if she had learned anything in the last several days, it was that she couldn't go back. No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn't undo the things she had done.

It was Sawyer she wanted to escape. And the sickening knowledge that he had found her. That he might come here.

Harper had been stupid. Her knowledge of computers was
limited, but she had been too careless—scrubbing the history after her forays onto the internet wasn't enough. Of course there were other markers that pointed to her online activity, a veritable trail of bread crumbs that would lead Sawyer to her fake Facebook account. Her email. A message from one Adrienne Vogt, who could be easily traced to Blackhawk, Iowa, and the little farm at the end of a long gravel road. Information wasn't a commodity these days, it was an inalienable right. Of course, Sawyer couldn't have done it on his own, but his resources were virtually unlimited.

Harper perched on the end of her bed, picking at the fabric of her jeans, bunching it in her hands as if she was holding on for dear life. She needed a plan.

She'd have to steal Betty.

It tore her up to know that she was going to hurt Adri again. And it killed her to think that Sam and Will and Jackson, and even Nora, would think less of her. That the loving welcome she had received from them less than a week ago would be tarnished by the knowledge that she was a thief. But it was better than letting them know what she had really become. It was her only real option when she considered that Sawyer could destroy the one pure thing she still held dear.

Harper wondered if Adri would try to follow her.

And then she was seized with another thought. How would Sawyer know that she had gone?

If she stayed, Sawyer would come for her. If she left, he'd still come—he'd just find her gone, and use the people she cared for as leverage. Harper didn't dare to guess at what Sawyer was capable of, but at best he'd expose her in front of the only real family she had ever known. At worst . . . Harper didn't even want to think about that.

Sawyer knew her. He knew who she was and who she had been and what she had done. Once, she had loved him, or thought she did, and when she admitted the things that lovers admit, he had tucked each confession like a weapon into an
arsenal to use against her. Love and lies and jealousy and secrets, but nothing so damning as the truth of what happened that day with David Galloway.

Sawyer knew that Harper was a murderer.

Her only option, the only solution that her frozen mind could conjure, was to go back.

Harper was shaking so hard that her teeth started to chatter. She wrapped her arms around herself and clenched her jaw, furious that he could affect her so much. That she let him. She was stronger than this. Harper Penny was made of tougher stuff, and she wasn't about to let a man like Sawyer write the story of her life. But try as she might, she couldn't see a way out. He was as vast as the sea, and she was drowning.

It was still pitch black outside when the alarm clock on the nightstand read 5:00 a.m. The house was quiet. A couple of hours had passed since she'd thrown on her clothes and formulated a half-baked plan, but it felt like minutes. She must have fallen asleep.

The light was still on in the kitchen, and there were two empty coffee cups beside the sink. But as far as Harper could tell, no one was around. She crept through the bright space, pausing at the door to grab her shoes and stuff her feet into them. Then she was on the porch, the morning stars glittering madly overhead. She had read once that stars shine the brightest in the moments before dawn, but it had always sounded like a myth to her. A bit of convenient fairy-tale fluff. But she could believe it now. The world was so resplendent with starlight, it seemed the air itself shimmered.

Hurrying across the frosted lawn, Harper tried to keep her footfalls soft. The grass fractured beneath her rubber soles, leaving a trail so obvious that it was as if she was walking in sand. Sam and Adri wouldn't have to puzzle over where she had gone.

It was harder to heave open the garage door than Harper had thought it would be, and she struggled for a minute before she
realized she had to lift back instead of up. But once she got the feel of it, the heavy door swung up quickly, almost lifting her off the ground. Harper righted herself and said a little prayer that the keys were in the ignition. That's where Adri usually left them, and if they weren't where Harper expected them to be, she had no idea what she would do. The truth was, she had no idea what she would do once she started Betty and drove away, but she figured one step at a time was forethought enough. She reached for the door.

“Going for a drive?”

Harper whirled and saw Adri framed in the rectangle of the open garage door. Her hands were stuffed in the pockets of a heavy coat, and her face was completely obscured by shadows. But there were stars in her hair, and the silhouette she cut against the blackness was strong and lovely. Harper almost burst into tears.

Instead, she wrestled her emotions to the ground. “Yeah,” she said lightly. “I couldn't go back to sleep. I would have asked you, but I didn't want to wake you up. You don't mind, do you?”

Adri ignored the question. “I couldn't sleep, either.”

They stood there for a few heartbeats, studying each other in the darkness. It felt intense, almost calculating, through there was no way that Adri could see Harper any better than Harper could see her.

“Can I go with you?” Adri finally asked. Harper was too surprised by the timidity of the request to worry that her friend was foiling her pathetic plan.

“Sure.”

“Keys are in the ignition,” Adri said. “You want to drive?”

Harper tingled with the understanding that time was ticking away, that every moment she was out joyriding with Adri was a moment that should be spent making her way back to Sawyer so that he wouldn't come looking for her. Minneapolis was only a five-hour drive, and if he had left the moment he hung up the phone, he could pull up at Maple Acres in a couple of hours.
Would he do that? Harper didn't think so. She had a sneaking suspicion that he was playing with her. A handful of creepy phone calls in the middle of the night were probably just the beginning of an elaborate scheme to unnerve her. Well, she was sufficiently unnerved. No need to torture her any further. And no need to plague Sam and Adri with whatever else Sawyer had in store.