The Beautiful Daughters (24 page)

With Adri in her getaway car, Sawyer was just one of ­Harper's many problems. She half expected Adri to bring up the conversation that they had abandoned the other day at Piperhall, especially since they were alone, and Harper had done everything in her power to avoid time alone with Adri in the last few days. But Adri didn't mention David now or the estate. In fact, she didn't say anything at all for a very long time. She just stared out the windshield and let Harper wander at will. When they skirted the city limits of Blackhawk, Adri finally pointed at an upcoming intersection and instructed Harper to turn.

“Why?” Harper asked, but she had already turned on her blinker.

“Don't you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“The fire escape slide.”

It had been ages since Harper had thought about the fire slide, but it didn't fail to bring a faint smile to her lips. Blackhawk didn't have much by way of parks, but the fire slide was legendary, an old, metal slide that was completely enclosed in a silo and nearly two stories tall. It had been around for decades, since long before people started worrying about safety hazards in playgrounds. Wicked fast, it boasted three sharp, steep turns before spitting breathless riders out onto the gravel. It had been a tradition for The Five, a necessary pit stop on the way back to ATU after weekends spent at Piperhall. For Harper, it was a way to leave everything behind, if only for the seconds that she was spinning, the centrifugal force pushing her shoulder blades
against the cool metal of the slide, her hair whipped back from her face.

“You want to go down the slide?” Harper asked, pulling into the small parking lot and putting the car in park. She was incredulous that as her life turned to ashes, Adri was ready to play.

Adri shrugged. “I always thought you loved it.”

More than the thrill, Harper had loved the attention. David once carried her up the three twisting flights of stairs to the platform at the top of the fire slide. And when she whooshed out at the bottom, someone was always ready to catch her, to pick her up from the gravel and dust her off.

“I like the slide,” Harper said. “But it's kind of cold outside, don't you think?”

“I didn't exactly expect us to go down it.” Adri turned in her seat to face Harper. “I just wanted you to stop driving so I could look you in the face.”

Harper stifled a sigh. “I don't want to talk about it, Adri. I know you don't want the estate, but Victoria left it to you and—”

“I don't care about the estate. You can have it.” It was a throwaway statement, Harper doubted that Adri meant it at all. But it was shocking all the same. “I'm serious,” Adri said, disregarding the look in Harper's eyes. “It's yours. Turn it into a bed-and-breakfast. Sell it and pocket the cash. Give ghost tours for all I care.”

Harper didn't know what to say.

“I want to talk about you. About why you're here and what you're running from.”

“Nothing,” Harper protested. But the word was weak and ineffectual.

“Okay, who you're running from.” Adri threw up her hands. “How stupid do you think we are? You showed up in the backseat of a strange vehicle, half-naked and without a penny on you.”

“I was not half-naked.”

“You were half-naked. You didn't have shoes, Harper. Shoes.”

“I gave them away.”

Adri was breathing hard. She sounded angry, but in the flickering light of the streetlamp, Harper could see desperation in her eyes. “No money, no purse, no clothes. Seriously, Harper, you don't even have a phone. You haven't called anyone since you got here, and the only person who's called for you did so in the middle of the night.”

Harper blanched. “I don't know what you mean.”

The look Adri gave her was cynical and searching, but she seemed to decide not to press the issue. “You can't even give me a straight answer when I ask you where you work.”

“I'm a waitress.” But Harper's mind was foggy. She couldn't remember if she had claimed to be a waitress.

Adri ignored her. “What have you done, Harper?”

“I haven't done anything.”

“Then what happened to you?”

Harper didn't know where to begin. But maybe the question was rhetorical. Maybe Adri didn't want an answer at all.

They sat for a few minutes in relative silence, the car engine idling and Adri's ragged breathing the only sound in the early-morning stillness. Then she reached past Harper, turned off the car, and yanked the keys out of the ignition.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm going down the slide, and I want to make sure that you don't drive away while I'm gone.”

Harper made a sound of indignation, but Adri wasn't buying it. “You weren't going for a joyride, were you? You were leaving.” She swung out of the car without waiting for a response.

It was still dark, but there was a smudge of light on the horizon, and the stars were beginning to fade. Harper watched as Adri made her way across the park, her footprints cutting a perfectly straight path from the car to the base of the slide. Harper didn't know what to do. Adri was right to take the keys—if she
had left them, Harper might very well have driven away. She didn't know if she could just leave Adri in the dark, but Blackhawk was small and it would be easy enough for Adri to find her way home. A quick phone call to Sam or Will, even Jackson and Nora, and her world would be set right. No Harper in it.

Harper wrenched the car door open and followed in Adri's footprints. It was cold, and she hugged herself, grateful for the long-sleeved T-shirt she had tucked under her sweater.

Adri was already at the top of the slide, and as Harper stepped on the first stair, she could hear Adri pitch herself over the edge and into the tunnel. Harper went up as Adri went down, and by the time she peered into the gaping mouth of the tall slide, the park had been shrouded in silence. She didn't know if Adri was waiting for her, or if she had already headed back to the car. It was a ridiculous hope, but Harper prayed that Adri had stayed. She didn't want to be alone.

There was a thick bar at the entrance to the slide, and sometimes Harper used to hold it and whip herself into the darkness. The cold metal was fast enough on its own, but with a little extra force, she could send herself twining through the tunnel like madness itself. Often, when she crashed to the bottom, the world had been tipped sideways, and the off-kilter tilt was enough to make everything seem fresh again.

It was stupid to be afraid, but Harper was. She sat shivering at the top of the slide, and when the coldness seeped into her jeans she forced herself to scoot forward the single inch that would send her down. Sometimes it felt like her life was decided by an inch. A detail. A secret told.

When Adri came back to their apartment the day after David hit her, Harper knew that something was wrong. They had breathed the same air for over three and a half years, and it was almost impossible for them to keep secrets from each other. Even when they wanted to. And the second Adri stepped into the apartment and shot Harper a flimsy smile as she sat curled in the shabby La-Z-Boy, Harper could tell that something
monumental had happened. Maybe it was the tightness in Adri's eyes, the way she held herself so carefully it seemed she was clinging to composure like a threadbare blanket. Maybe it was just that Harper loved her more than she had ever loved another person, and she could feel the pain radiate off her friend in waves.

Harper flew out of the chair and grabbed Adri by the arms. Adri still had her backpack slung over her shoulder, her smile fixed all warped and crooked to her face, but she started to cry almost instantly. Big, anguished tears that spilled off her chin as she began to gasp for air.

“We. Are. So. Fucked. Up.”

Harper had to stifle a smile at that. Adri never swore, and the proclamation sounded downright comical from her lips. But in the next moment the story came tumbling out, and suddenly Harper wasn't smiling anymore.

David hit her.

It was the only thing that Harper's fury-clouded brain could think. David hit her.

Something fierce and almost maternal reared up in Harper. She wanted to strangle David, to throttle him for what he had done. Hurt him. Make him regret he'd ever laid a finger on Adrienne.

It was unforgivable.

And yet, while Harper was angry, she wasn't entirely surprised. She had experienced enough life to know that a woman like Victoria didn't become so hollow-eyed and solitary without strong provocation. Though she was quiet and withdrawn, Mrs. Galloway had always been straight-backed and proud, the angle of her delicate chin a kind of regal. Even though her dark eyes told a story all their own, Harper couldn't begin to imagine Victoria with a hair out of place or a note of impropriety in her tone. She exuded composure and good breeding. Perfection. A woman like that didn't roll over and play dead. She was beaten down.

Piperhall, as much as Harper adored it, was a burdened place that harbored many dark mysteries. Only they weren't so mysterious to Harper. How could a child grow up in such an environment and not be affected? How could David endure the iron fist of his father and not boast threads of steel in his own bones? Everyone knew that Liam had abused Victoria, but had he bent his hand toward David, too? Or was David just a good pupil?

Harper knew who David was. She always had. And she had believed that she could control him, that she could keep the monster inside at bay. Weren't they the perfect pair? Beautiful. Dysfunctional. Fire and water and earth and air. Caught forever in a feverish dance, circling each other, near enough to touch but never close enough to wound. At least, not lethally.

But David chose Adri and screwed everything up.

Harper hated him for it. And she hated him for hurting Adri.

It was after midnight when she slid out of the apartment like a shadow. Adri had been asleep for hours, traumatized and exhausted and anxious for the respite of a deep and dreamless sleep. Harper had given her sleeping pills and kissed her forehead as she closed her eyes. But Harper couldn't sleep. Her blood seethed beneath her skin, licking at her heart like a tongue. A hot and living thing that surged through her and begged her to move.

She didn't know where she was going, but she could hardly wander around in the dark all night. The weather had turned and it was starting to sleet; already a fine sheet of ice crusted the sidewalk and splintered beneath the wedges of her boot heels. The sound was cathartic somehow, sharp but incomplete, for even as she walked away the ice continued to crack and moan along invisible seams. A path split before her, the glow of each perfectly spaced streetlamp highlighting a spiderweb map, a broken atlas of her uncharted life.

It took her to David's door.

He was living alone in an off-campus apartment. Jackson
and Will were roommates, and there would have been room for David, but he had elected to rent the second story of a converted farmhouse on the edge of ATU's small campus. Slumming it like the other college students, instead of commuting from his mansion on the hill. The apartment was a place to gather, a place to drink. During the week it was both common room and community center for The Five, a sort of home base that was as much theirs as his. Harper had always wondered why Will and Jackson didn't just join him in the apartment instead of living on campus, but Will had once let it slip that they hadn't been invited. He didn't seem put out. David was just David.

The front door of the farmhouse opened on a short hallway, and it was never locked. To the right was the door to the ground-floor apartment. A simple
#1
had been painted onto the faded wood, but David's neighbors kept to themselves. Harper didn't even know who they were. On the left was the narrow staircase to apartment 2, each step so shallow Harper had to tiptoe up the stairs. It had been murder moving David's furniture in. Though Harper and Adri mostly watched from the front lawn, laughing at the guys and offering suggestions in the form of thinly veiled insults. “Lift with your backs, boys. Lift with your backs.”

She took the steps now two at a time, propelling herself forward with one hand on the rail. David rarely locked his door, and he was a legendary night owl—Adri often mused that she worried he was a vampire, he slept so little—but, as incensed as Harper was, she couldn't bring herself to just walk in. A wall had been erected between them, and it was more than she could surmount, even in the midst of her fury.

Harper would have pounded on the door, but some small part of her registered the hour and the scene that she would make. Taking a moment to get hold of herself, Harper balled her fists and exhaled. Then she knocked quickly, softly, four times, and waited. Nothing. Four more. She could hear footsteps deep
in the apartment, and something being shuffled around. Harper could picture David stumbling from the bedroom in the back, throwing a T-shirt on over his bare chest and cursing whoever had woken him up.

But when David opened the door, it was obvious he hadn't been sleeping.

His hair was so fingered through that it stuck up straight from his forehead, and his eyes were bloodshot and wild. Harper wasn't used to seeing him disheveled, for even when they partied he kept himself tightly reined. He was a slow burn, a quiet fury, and Harper hardly recognized him with his shirt half untucked from his designer jeans, his feet bare on the old hardwood floor of his tiny living room. David looked lost, empty, but his hands were full. In one hand he held a bottle of his father's vintage Scotch, and in the other he balanced an empty glass between his fingers and the round door handle. He smelled of alcohol and cologne and sweat.

“What have you done?” she said. Her anger flared and fizzled and flared again, and she couldn't decide if she should hit him or hug him, he looked so wrecked. Instead, Harper elbowed her way into the apartment and closed the door with her hip. Taking the bottle from David, she glanced at the label and wondered just how much a 1985 Macallan would cost a mere mortal like herself. It was mostly empty, but she lifted the bottle to her lips and took a swig that burned all the way down. She put the Macallan on the nearest end table and stifled a cough.