Relentless: Three Novels (24 page)

The other night, I’d had a long talk with myself and I came to the conclusion that I was the mother, and I should not be frightened of my own child. I’d make the rules and she must abide them. Well, at least that was my mindset, that day.

“Jade, I said in a very stern voice, “you are not sick and you are going to school today and that’s final.”

“That’s what you think, Mom.” She gave me a devious smile, one that made me want to smack her little mouth. Then I became angry with myself for feeling that. Was I turning into my mother? I couldn’t be like her. The fact that I had a violent thought about my daughter frightened me more than Jade frightened me.

“Jade,” I said again, “if you go to school today, I will take you to get ice cream after school.”

“No. I don’t even like ice cream,” she said. I frowned, as she added, “If I go to school today, I want a new Barbie.”

“A new Barbie?” I asked, astonished. “Jade I can’t afford that right now, you know how tight money is since your father left.”

“Well then, you shouldn’t have made him leave, Mommy.”

“Jade,” I gasped. “You do not speak to your mother that way.”

She giggled, and stared straight into my eyes and said, “Then you probably shouldn’t make me mad, Mommy.”

My skin crawled at the look she gave me. It was as if she had no soul behind those beautiful, dark-brown eyes of hers. I decided to let her comment go, and focus on getting her to school. Jade had missed so much school this year that the school district was threatening to take me to court for her truancy. There was always something wrong with her attitude, and most of the time I didn’t have the energy to fight with her to get her to school.

Russ and I had divorced eight months earlier. I was just getting over a serious depression of losing him. I was trying to pick up the pieces of my life, but it was so hard after building a life with him for so long. The reason we got a divorce was even more difficult to grasp. Russ couldn’t stand Jade. When we first adopted her, he adored her, of course. She was an innocent little baby and he loved having a little girl. As she got older, he seemed to distance himself from her more and more and didn’t interact with her very much. I thought it was strange, but never asked him about it, until one night I found him crying in the shed. I ran to him to see what was wrong. Russ told me he was leaving me. He could no longer take Jade anymore; he even said that she was evil! Of course, I defended my baby and called him crazy. After all, what six-year-old was evil? I still to this day think it was a ploy to leave me for another woman. What kind of a sick man gives his daughter as the reason he wants a divorce?

I was appalled at Russ and hired a private detective to spy on him. The detective found no other woman, nothing, which made me think maybe Russ really did think Jade was evil. Evil, because from the moment she was born, I sheltered her with all my love and defended her to him, when he would say she was spoiled. I was aware of his jealousy over her but I didn’t think it would go to the extremity that it did. To leave me because I made our child a priority? He had had eight years of me before Jade entered our lives and I was livid that he was incensed that a mother should put her child first. Isn’t that what I was supposed to do? My reward for being a good mother was that I was now a single mother.

So here Jade and I were, alone in the house that Russ and I bought when we first married fifteen years earlier. We were mostly happy, though. Except for her occasional outburst, Jade was a good child. When she went to school, at my promises of new Barbies, Disney videos, or other rewards that she liked, she got good grades and stayed out of trouble. She even had a best friend, Carrie, a delightful little girl who was in her classroom.

“Mom, are you okay?” Jade asked. I didn’t realize that I had been staring in space for the past couple of minutes. “I’m fine, just get your backpack and after school, we will stop by the toy store to get you a new Barbie.”

“Yay! Yay!,” she jumped up and down. I glanced at my watch and saw that she had already missed the bus. I’d have to drive her. “Jade, let’s go, before you’re late again.”

Mommy’s Little Angel

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WHISPERED LIES

A thriller by Lindsey Stiles

(read on for a sample)

Chapter One

I didn’t mean to kill him—it was an accident.

Even though it was an accident, I knew I could still go to prison unless some expensive lawyer got me off on self-defense. That wasn’t going to happen, though. My grandfather had many friends in high places these days, and it was likely that I would be convicted of murder or second-degree manslaughter, which was still a prison sentence. I knew I had to get away as fast as I could.
Disappear.

I grabbed a suitcase from the hallway closet, and ran to my room to pack my things. I threw in a few pairs of jeans, blouses, tee shirts, socks, undergarments, a couple of dresses, and two pairs of shoes. I made my way to the bathroom and packed my toiletries.

I was out of there and intended to never look back. The hell that I knew all too well over the past eighteen years was finally over. I could finally start my life. I could finally live my life not terrified of my grandfather. I could do this because I had killed him. I had ended my torture. It was a freeing feeling.

My paternal grandfather had been an alcoholic and I had a sickening childhood memory of his liquored-up breath. I had lived with Grandpa since I was two years old. That’s when my parents were killed in a plane crash and he was discovered as my only living relative. He adopted me shortly after their death, playing the jilted hero, as he had been abusive to my dad as a child and once he was of age, Dad had wanted nothing to do with Grandpa.
Ever.
The truth was, Grandpa was after the vast fortune that my mom left to me from her royalties of her drug patents. Grandpa became the gleeful benefactor of my vast trust fund, finding ways to pull money out of it for himself and denying me the control of my own funds, even after I was in college.

On my twenty-first birthday, which I hoped to live to see, I would get full control of the trust. As time marched on toward that birthday, he made my life more and more miserable, as he realized that I would depart from his control with most of my mom’s fortune, the part that the lawyers wouldn’t let him access. Everything had to go through a lawyer and every month, he snatched that check from the mail with glee. I would have been better off if I would have been a passenger on that plane. Sometimes, I daydreamed that I had been on that plane with my parents and was with them in Heaven.

After he adopted me, and the social workers stopped coming, once he bought a house in a gated community and showed up temporarily sober for every one of their meetings, my next several years were filled with physical and mental abuse. He had so much rage at my father’s rejection of him that I know he took it out on me, and I became my dad’s whipping girl for every single thing that my grandfather perceived that he had to beat out of me, too. He often told me before he beat me or whipped me that I was just like my father. But this last time that Grandpa had hit me, I had taken his beatings one too many times—my courage rose up for the first time and I fought back. He was beating me so severely that I was fighting back for my life—it really
was
self-defense!

I had never done anything like this this before and I was amazed at myself when I did it. It was like I was watching somebody else in slow motion: a much braver person, a person who was invincible, a person who wouldn’t have put up with his crap for so long. That person was me, the
new
me. I would come into a fortune on my next birthday and flee from my grandfather, as his son had done, years before. My dad had never talked much about his mother, only that she had died, and from the sorrow in his voice, I assumed that she had either committed suicide, or that my grandfather had somehow contributed to her death. Now, I would never know what happened to my grandmother. Because my parents were dead and now, my grandfather was dead…
by my hand
.

The second I stabbed him in the chest with the kitchen knife, I knew that I was a free woman.

When he fell to the ground and didn’t move, I wasn’t really sure if he was dead.

I squatted down to feel his pulse. No pulse. He wasn’t breathing either. He was
dead
.

I hadn’t planned on this and I knew I had to get out of there fast before Greg, the butler, came in for work. He arrived at 6:00 a.m. every morning and it was already a quarter past five. Sickened, I carefully drew the knife out of Grandpa’s chest and knew I had to take it with me and dispose of it because my fingerprints were on it.
Evidence.

I managed to collect my belongings and get out of the house in five minutes, the knife in a plastic zipper bag from the kitchen, together with the bloody hand towel that I had wiped my hands on, after I washed them.

I climbed into my BMW and headed west. I was going to stay with my friend, Brooke, who lived three states over, in California. We had met some years ago while skiing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and struck up a friendship that we kept going by email and phone. She had just graduated from college and was now living in a small beach city. Knowing my terrible living situation, she had invited me on numerous occasions to come and live with her. My grandfather wouldn’t let me leave, I was almost a prisoner in his house. But not anymore. He was dead and gone and it was my time to live.

I decided not to tell Brooke about what had happened. She would definitely freak out and tell her mom, who would call the cops. She was a good daughter and told her mom everything. So, I decided to keep my secret to myself. It would be best that way. I couldn’t afford for this to get out, what I had done. Killed my blood kin.

I would have to change my name. Well, at least my last name, so the police couldn’t find me.

I had planned on moving in with Brooke in a couple of months anyway, after I turned twenty-one and my trust fund could be released from my grandfather’s iron grip. It was not a secret from me that should anything happen to me, he was the sole beneficiary. It was frightening to think about. My plan was to sneak off when my grandfather was asleep, but now this had happened. He didn’t know Brooke and I knew I would be safe at her house.

I already purchased a fake I.D. from some guy that I met through a friend of a friend. I meant business, I just wished I wasn’t carrying such heavy baggage.

Before I left town, I stopped for gas. I pulled out my debit card and my fake identification card fell out of my wallet. Everything was the same, except that I was no longer Melanie Maynard. I was now Melanie Hathaway.

Chapter Two

Before I arrived at Brooke’s house, I went to the Pacific Ocean. I put on my faded high school swim team bathing suit in the restroom at Santa Monica State Beach, knowing what I needed to do. Conveniently, the tide was going out. I braced myself and went for a swim in the choppy ocean, gasping at the shock of such cold water and the immense pull of it. In Wyoming, I always swam in a heated pool, never an ocean. The lakes in Wyoming were certainly too cold for anything but a quick splash in the hottest part of summer. On my swim in the Pacific, my baptism to California, the plastic bag, the bloody towel and the knife were released separately to the outgoing tide as I swam as far out as I could bear. Then I fought my way back to shore, swimming diagonally against the riptide. Finally, with teeth chattering, I retrieved my towel and my car keys and put on dry clothes, again using the beach’s public restroom to do so.

At dusk on my fourth day of travel, I arrived utterly exhausted at Brooke’s place, shivering and with my hair still wet. She embraced me like I was a cute stray kitten and dragged me into her house to fuss over me and make me feel more welcome than anyone ever had. It was wonderful to feel wanted and safe. She was my best friend in the whole world.

I had been in California for a few days before I decided to look for a job. I didn’t have any real skills. I never even had a job before because that was one of the ways that my grandfather controlled me. I was a college dropout, too. My grandfather had badly beat me just before my finals and I just ended up leaving college, unable to cope with the pressures of college and living with an abusive person who controlled my every move and hurt me sometimes. Of course, I was unemployed and directionless as far as a career. I had been in pre-law in Wyoming, but hated it. It wasn’t what I chose for myself. My grandfather had chosen it.

Yes, my grandfather was wealthy, but it was through
me
that he was rich. I had saved a lot of the money that I had access to for the past six months that I had been planning my escape. I had ditched my car in the next city over from where I lived and had taken a bus to California. I was trying to be as careful as possible. My first intention had been a plan for my grandfather not to find me after I ran away from him. After the night that I had killed him, I was now worried about running away from the police. It seemed that I was destined to run from my life, leaving my fortune behind. It couldn’t be helped. I was a huge mystery novel fan and I knew that I could be tracked through any use of my bank card.

Sad to give up my BMW, I gave Brooke some of my cash to purchase a vehicle for me. She registered and insured it in her name. Even though I now used a fake surname, I was still feeling a little unsure of my actions and my personal safety. After all, I was just a sheltered rich girl. What did I know about the real world?

I figured that the police found my abandoned car by now, and were searching for me. I tried not to think about that. I tried to just live my life one day at a time. What I soon figured out that it was way easier said than done.