23. TIFFANY
“Babe, you gotta be shitting me?”
A snort sounded down the line, making me shake my head. “I’m not shitting you. Anyway, it wasn’t me doing the shitting. You found out on the news.”
I rolled my eyes. “Exactly. You should have told me first!”
I was actually a bit pissed off at that. Pissed off and hurt.
Lily was my best friend, and I was hearing this shit about her dad from the TV? What the fuck was that about?
“I didn’t know,” she admitted softly. “I didn’t realize something was being released so soon.” She sighed. “Not to the news anyway.”
“It’s not true, is it?” I whispered, my eyes on the screen. “I mean, it can’t be. Can it?”
I’d known Donavan Lancaster since I was a little girl.
He wasn’t the warmest of fathers, in fact, he’d always given me the creeps, but creeps and this? They were two different things.
Believing someone to be odd and then finding out they had women captive in the forest? Women they tortured…
My stomach churned.
This had to be a joke.
I mean, we’d had the Lancasters over for dinner. I’d eaten bouillabaisse with Luke and Donavan while I’d been texting under the table with Lily…
“Lily,” I whispered, “please. Tell me this is some kind of dream.”
“I’m sorry, love. It isn’t.”
There was something in her voice, something that put me on red alert. “You knew?”
“About the women?” She cleared her throat. “I’m the one who found the evidence to give to the police.”
A sharp gasp escaped me. “Oh my God, how the hell did you find that?”
“I snooped around on Luke’s computer. He was a sick bastard, Tiffany. I can’t even tell you what he did to them. Not without wanting to throw up.”
The trace notes of a quiver in her voice made my eyes well with tears. “Did Luke hurt you?”
“In ways no one can ever understand,” she rasped. “But I don’t want to think about that now. I don’t have to.”
I shook my head like I’d just climbed out of the pool and was trying to get water out of my ears.
I’d always known things with Lily’s family were odd, but this went to another level that was just beyond the extreme.
“Are you okay?”
“I will be.” She blew out a breath. “I’m going to go, love. I have things to sort out.”
I could only imagine. “Keep in touch.”
“Are you sure you want to? Now that you know?”
Anger washed through me. “Lilian Maria Lancaster! How dare you? I stood by you through the Mohawk Disaster of 2015 and the Cheerleading Charade of 2016.
“You aren’t getting rid of me, even if your family is starting to look like it belongs on an episode of Mindhunter.”
“Mindhunter?” She snorted. “I don’t want to know.”
“I swear, how is it you know none of the shows on Netflix?”
“We don’t all have a cinema in our pool house,” she teased, and I pulled a face at said cinema as I slouched back on my favorite armchair in the room.
“True. Girl, I love you, you know that, right?”
“I do now, Tiff. Thank you, sweetie. I’ll speak to you later.”
“Do,” I urged, suddenly concerned that I’d never hear from my bestie again, and I cut the call so she didn’t have to.
For a second, I stared at the ceiling that had faux stars in it that twinkled, then I switched my gaze to the screen that had the news on a loop.
Donavan Lancaster’s fall from grace.
Lancaster’s evasion of arrest.
The Lancaster Corp throws Donavan Lancaster from their board of directors.
Lancaster’s flight to Vietnam.
It felt surreal. But what felt even more surreal was the woman on the screen. A woman who was talking about what the Lancasters had done to her.
Shakily, I switched off the news and clambered to my feet.
My sanctuary felt like it had been violated as I shuffled out into the hall, and I carried onward until I was by the pool.
The garden was neat, manicured precision wherever you looked.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mom, when no one was looking, dropped a squat and measured the blades of grass on the ground just to make sure they were the perfect height.
Rolling lawns led to a kind of rockery that surrounded the pool where I lived, and surged into the sandy gardens that housed hundreds of succulents and cacti that were my father’s pride and joy, even if he didn’t do a damn thing to take care of them.
Dad liked to think he was helping the environment even as he was raping it by building these massive developments, and the truth was, I couldn’t fault him for trying.
We had more solar panels on our roof than tiles, and we more than did our bit to save the Earth.
I tried to reconcile that man with the one who knew Donavan. How had they been friends?
I mean, they had been friends. We’d gone on vacation with their family. You didn’t just do that because your daughter was friendly with another family’s daughter, did you?
Had it been business?
As far as I knew, Donavan had never invested in my dad’s deals. Just like with the development here, he’d been a prick and had built outside my father’s subdivision…
Perplexed and unsure what my brain was even struggling to form, I slouched into the house from the veranda and headed to my dad’s office.
The shouts hit me first, which had me pausing and hovering in the hall.
Mom and Dad never argued. At least, I hadn’t heard them argue ever since they’d started going to Dr. Leibowitz three times a week.
“You son of a bitch!” she was screaming. “You were friends with that prick! How could you?”
My eyes widened.
How could he what?
Heart stuttering, I wandered closer, trying to pick up on my dad’s mumbled retort.
Sliding forward as I strode down the hallway that led to his study, I tried to eavesdrop, but it was just my mom calling him a bastard, an SOB, over and over again.
When she started crying, I almost anticipated the crash and figured she’d thrown one of his whisky bottles against the wall.
Back before Leibowitz, that had been one of her regular weapons.
I made it to the door, eyed the carnage in his office, and saw that my dad was sitting at his desk, back bowed, head in his hands.
My mouth opened, then it closed. I did that a few times before, feeling like a little girl rather than a twenty-three-year-old woman, I managed to rasp, “Daddy, what’s going on?”