Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
HARPER
“I just don’t understand. My parents have always been tight as a couple. God knows my father has had his fair share of women throwing themselves at him. But he’d never done anything about it. And now, to think he did bang someone behind mom’s back makes me sick to my stomach.”
I sat up straighter. “Just walk us through it, honey, from the beginning,” Molly encouraged with a hand on the sniveling girl's arm.
Suffice it to say that the sleepover I had visualized was nothing like the real deal. And that wasn’t a bad thing, well, for me anyway. My thoughts of having to sit through an evening with Storm talking about herself on one hand and girly bullshit on the other had not lit me up.
Drama, however, I craved as much as the next teenager.
It appeared that those who had it all—didn’t always.
What unfolded as Storm gave us the reasons behind her distress was so much more than that.
And, for once in the privileged girl's life, her guard was down, and I saw the real person. And the version she allowed me to see wasn’t so bad after all, just like Molly had said.
In a nutshell, I was shown a Storm that I could finally get on board with.
Once she had pulled herself together and gotten over her initial tears, Storm took us over to the sofas by the window.
On the surface of the coffee table was a battered old archive box.
It was full of paperwork, postcards, photographs, and an old stuffed animal.
Beside it was a letter; the branding on the envelope said something about investigations.
Storm explained that she found the letter already open in the box, and it was a report from a Private Investigator called Pierce Banks.
He had been commissioned by her father to watch a family who had recently moved into the area from Jamestown.
I didn’t recognize their surname, but the family included a man, a woman, and their son.
Attached to the report was what looked like medical details.
Storm said that once she had read the letter, she had checked the rest of the box to establish why her father was investigating some random family.
Before Molly or I could ask any further questions, Storm delved into the box and plucked out some tatty old notepaper. She handed us both a couple of pages.
I scanned the fancy scrawl and gushing words, and Mols did the same. They were love letters addressed to Dom, aka Storm’s father.
“And these aren’t from your mother?” I asked, waving one at her.
“No, of course not.”
“How do you know?” The letter I held stated it was from Your Angel.
“The handwriting is totally different from my mother's, and she’s never referred to herself as that. How tacky.”
Initially, I wondered what the fuss was about, as it appeared the alleged affair had happened ages ago. From the date on the letter I held, Storm’s dad cheated on her mom before she was even born.
“What if they just wrote to each other, like pen pals?” Molly naively suggested. Clearly, the stuff in the letter she had read wasn’t as colorful as the one I held. It sounded like Storm’s father was amazing in the sack; silver linings and all that.
“No. Some of the letters reveal that they saw each other regularly,” Storm explained.
Shuffling further back into my chair, I decided to play the devil's advocate. Something I excelled at. “How do you know it was an affair? Maybe this woman came into his life when he and your mother were on a break or something?” I saw Molly cringe at my reference to Friends. I held my hands up, palms to the ceiling, as Storm frantically itched her nose. I noted how her usually perfect makeup was now smeared down her cheeks. “Maybe it’s not how it looks—is my point?” I spluttered with a ‘What did I say wrong’ face at Mols.
Storm took back the steamier letter I held and waved it in the air. “My parents never broke up once, even in the earlier days.”
Wrinkling my nose, I pointed out, “But it’s almost twenty years old?”
Storm chewed the inside of her cheek and then started rooting through the box like a crazy person. “Maybe this was a previous girlfriend, you know. Someone he was with before your mom?”
She stopped rummaging in the box and shook her head. “No, my mother and father just celebrated their silver wedding anniversary.” I hadn’t a clue how many years that added up to, but I imagined a couple of decades.
I glanced at Molly, who was watching Storm with an indulgent expression. Her cell vibrated in her pocket, but she ignored it. That was a first. So, this shit was serious if it caused her to leave Hudson unopened.
“Well?” Storm snapped, tugging my attention back.
“So? What do you want me to say? Congrats to your folks?”
She looked at me like I was stupid. “No. It means that he was married to my mother during his seedy fling! You celebrate your silver wedding for twenty-five years together.”
Ah. So, they’d been married five years when he got itchy feet; didn’t that happen at seven years? I shook off my unhelpful thoughts.
Storm raised her eyebrows as it clicked, and my face changed. “What makes it worse is that, from the date of this other letter I found. My mother would have been pregnant with me at the time.”
Crap. Now that was low.
We all sat in silence for a moment, attempting to digest what Storm had revealed.
Then I understood why she was so upset. That was like the ultimate betrayal.
Getting your wife knocked up and then going elsewhere for sex was surely unforgivable.
And then I realized, Storm had unearthed something she should never have known, and I felt bad for trying to belittle her situation.
“Are you going to tell your mother?” Mols asked.
“Hell no, it would crush her,” Storm huffed, wringing her hands together.
I watched as Molly dropped her gaze back to the love letters.
Her phone kept going off, and it was beginning to piss me off.
As she glanced at my expression, she retrieved it from her pocket and put it on silent without reading the messages.
“Sorry. Hudson gets bored quickly.”
“I’m not surprised. They’re watching Jaws. We’ve all seen it around fifty times.” Releasing a breath of frustration, I focused on the PI letter. From the postmark, it had been mailed earlier that week.
“So, where does this fit in with everything?”
“That’s her now. The woman from my father’s past.”
“How do you know? You only have Your Angel to go on, and that isn’t written here.”
“Well, of course not. But I know it’s her. Otherwise, why would that PI letter be in this box?” Storm had a point, but it was still only a hunch. If it was the same woman, why was he having her investigated now?
Shuffling to the medical section at the back of the report, I read the wording genetic health screening.
“How did you even find this box?”
Storm pinched the bridge of her nose and was silent for a moment before lowering her hand and confessing.
“Daddy’s been so stressed recently and was having a clear-out.
A few of the boxes next to this one had old stuff he’d kept of mine in them.
Elementary reports and pictures I had drawn when I was a kid.
My father’s assistant, Noah, was in the process of moving the boxes to the trash.
I got nostalgic and started going through them when I opened this one and found the letter on top. ”
It wasn’t hard to put two and two together at that stage.
“So, your father recently hired a private investigator to watch a woman he was banging around twenty years ago?”
“I think so.”
“But why?”
Molly’s Nancy Drew side kicked in as she gasped. “Maybe she’s threatened to blackmail him or something, now that he’s mayor?”
It sounded a little far-fetched.
I continued to read the report I held, my eyes falling on the DNA profiling and blood groups. “So why the medical data? Do you think she’s sick? Maybe he’s offered to pay her medical bills if she keeps quiet?” Even as I said those words, I realized how stupid I sounded.
Storm, being the most intelligent person there, must have figured it out, and her next words confirmed that. “If you flick to the back page, the medical stuff is from a hospital in Massachusetts, and they’re not hers. They’re for an adolescent male.”
As I continued to digest the details on the pages, I added, “It’s for two men, actually.” My eyes skirted across the boy’s name, Master A. Leibrock, and landed on her father’s name, clear in black and white. And then the penny dropped for me.
Tension rested in the air between us as Molly sagged back in her seat, wearing a confused expression.
Stormed sniffed and said, “I can see from your expression that you’re where I am now, Harper.”
Molly sat back up. “What?”
I handed her the report and explained, “There’s a DNA profile attached to the back, and it belongs to Mr. Summers.”
Keeping hold of the PI cover letter, my eyes scanned the page, catching the address of the family who had been investigated. Maple Avenue. Why did that sound familiar?
“Maybe we’re jumping to conclusions,” I suggested.
“Come on, Harper. It’s clear as day.”
“I’m sorry, you’ve both lost me,” Molly huffed, her eyebrows crinkling.
“The woman of the family my father had investigated is the bitch he cheated on my mother with. His medical records have been checked against the woman’s son. And why? Because Daddy wants to see if the child is his.”
As only part of the story was our best guess, I again played devil’s advocate and suggested. “What if your dad’s investigating this family for another reason?”
Storm frowned as if that thought hadn’t occurred to her. Trying to lighten the mood, I attempted a joke. “Maybe she didn’t vote for your father, and he’s planning on offing her. Have you ever thought about that?”
“Offing her?” Molly said as she tipped her head back to meet my gaze.
I glanced between them with a grin. “Yeah, take her out, have her killed.”