21. Kiera
Kiera
K iera had thought Hunter would be over the moon about the solution she’d worked out to help her and Piper with their financial problems. Instead, she looked as if Kiera had just kicked a puppy or something.
Deflated, Kiera followed her into the empty house. They went down the hall to the kitchen and Hunter sat down at the small table, motioning Kiera to sit in the chair beside her.
She did, then asked, “What's going on?"
Hunter ran her fingers through her hair, looking upset in a way that made Kiera nervous.
“You're scaring me,” she said, taking Hunter's hand in hers.
Hunter sighed and said at last, “There are some things I haven't told you about my family. I thought I’d be able to protect you from it all, but I’m realizing now how na?ve that was.”
“What is it?” Kiera asked, alarmed.
"Piper's husband isn't just some deadbeat dad who skipped out on his family,” Hunter said. "He's a con artist and a manipulative prick. He’s in prison right now, serving ten years for running a counterfeiting operation.”
“Okay,” Kiera said tentatively. “So he’s out of the picture now that he’s in jail?”
“I hoped he would be,” Hunter said. “He has this preternatural hold on my sister - always has. He gets her in his claws and he can make her do whatever he wants, including helping him with his cons. A big reason I moved in with her when he was put away was that I hoped I could use this time to convince her that he had her brainwashed and she really didn’t need to do that stuff to survive. ”
Hunter was having a hard time looking at Kiera as she spoke, focusing on the table instead, and Kiera could see tears forming in the corners of Hunter’s eyes.
“I’m guessing it didn’t work, or you wouldn’t be telling me this,” she said softly.
"About a year ago, Piper and I were having a lot of problems regulating Josh’s insulin.
We had all kinds of medical bills we couldn’t pay, and we were barely getting by,” Hunter said.
“Then one day, poof - the bills were all paid and Piper said we were fine again. It took me a while to figure out what she’d done. ”
Kiera listened with increasing horror as Hunter told her about Jason Dawes, the stolen wallet, and the credit card that she’d found in Piper’s laundry.
Then, shaking her head, Hunter said, “Jed didn’t even have to be around to make that one work.
He walked her through the whole thing from his prison cell.
I made Piper promise that she wasn’t going to communicate with him after that, and she stayed away for a while.
We struggled, but we were doing things the right way. ”
Kiera’s mouth felt dry as she asked, “You think she’s talking to him again?”
Hunter let out a long, tortured sigh.
“I have no proof,” she said. “It’s just a feeling. But I can’t shake the fear that he somehow pulled her back into his grasp. I thought you should know before you go offering her jobs where she’ll have access to large amounts of money.”
“Garrett’s the only one who will have access to the grant money,” Kiera pointed out.
“Doesn’t matter,” Hunter said. “If I’m right, if Jed’s got his claws in her again, then he’ll find a way for her to get at it.”
They sat quietly for a minute or two, Kiera’s hand still wrapped around Hunter’s as she tried to reconcile this new image of Piper with the version that she thought she knew.
“Oh god,” Hunter said after a while, taking her hand away from Kiera so that she could bury her face in her hands.
“What?”
Hunter lifted her head again and said. “I just thought of something that Abby said a few weeks ago. Do you know anything about a flower vase that she kept on the mantel? A crystal one?”
Hunter looked at Kiera with agony written all over her face and Kiera’s heart dropped into her stomach. She said quietly, “Yeah. My mom gave it to her for her seventieth birthday.”
“Christ,” Hunter swore. “Abby said it was missing. She was having a bad day and I thought she was just confused. It seemed like a weird place to keep a vase, so I didn’t think anything of it.”
“You think your sister took it?” Kiera asked. “When could she have?”
“She’s been here at least a dozen times dropping the boys off,” Hunter said. She got up from the table and went into the den, and Kiera followed behind her, hoping with every step that the vase would be on the mantel right where it belonged.
But it wasn’t.
She knew before she came into the room that it wouldn’t be there, and she looked over at Hunter, pain written all across her face. Kiera asked, “How could she do that to us?”
“It’s Jed, I know it,” Hunter said weakly.
“I’ve tried in the past to convince myself that it’s not her fault.
Our parents abandoned us when we were kids and we bounced from foster home to foster home and then onto the streets.
When Jed came into our lives one day it was like he was Piper’s personal Jesus, ready to rescue her.
He took her off the streets, provided for her, and was even so generous as to take care of her tagalong little sister, too.
I don’t blame her for falling for his tricks – she did what she had to in order to keep us safe – but then she fell in love and we found out what he was really like.
He had her in his claws and he knew it, so he started using her for his cons. ”
Hunter glanced over at Kiera, watching to see how she was taking all this, no doubt.
“Look, I don’t expect you to feel sympathy for her,” Hunter continued, looking like a total emotional wreck.
Kiera resisted the urge to fold her into her arms, not sure how to feel.
“I have no right to ask, but could you see it in your heart not to call the police? Piper screwed up big time, but Josh and Andrew don’t deserve to have two parents in jail.
I’ll find out what she took and figure out a way to get it all back, I swear on my life. ”
Then she broke down, tears streaming down her face. She slumped against the doorframe and Kiera came over and pulled her into a tight embrace.
“Don’t cry,” Kiera said as Hunter tried to push her away.
“You shouldn’t be the one doing the comforting right now,” she pointed out.
“You’re a victim in all of this, too,” Kiera said, not letting Hunter wriggle out of her grasp. She tilted Hunter’s head up and brushed away her tears with the pads of her thumbs, then said, “I won’t call the police, so that’s one less thing you have to worry about.”
“I’ve been killing myself for the last two years, trying to get her to see that there are other ways to live,” Hunter said, starting to sob all over again.
Once she’d opened up about this, a secret that Kiera suspected she’d been keeping close to her chest for a very long time, all of her emotions suddenly spilled out.
She buried her face against Kiera’s shoulder and cried, her voice garbled as she said, “I think something truly drastic is going to have to happen before she figures it out, and I’m afraid the boys are going to be the ones who get hurt the most.”
“Hunter, listen to me,” Kiera said, turning her head up once again to make Hunter look into her eyes. “You are a good sister, and a great aunt. We’re going to figure out a way to fix this, okay?”
Hunter nodded, wiping away her tears. They stood together, their arms wrapped tightly around each other, for a long time. Then Kiera said, “Cynthia.”
“What?”
“There was a ceramic doll called Cynthia that Nana mentioned the other day, said she was missing,” Kiera said.
She took her phone out of her pocket and looked up the figurine, then went into the hall to look through the shelf of Florence dolls.
Hunter followed and helped her look, but after five minutes of searching the shelves, they couldn’t find it.
Kiera sighed and then said, “I think the first thing we do is figure out what Piper took, or as much of it as we can. Then we figure out how to make sure she never does it again.”
“What about your sorority meeting?” Hunter asked.
Kiera laughed, then looked at the time. “It started fifteen minutes ago and I’m hardly in a frame of mind to prep for the charity 5k. Let’s just do this, okay?”
Hunter nodded, then asked, “What about Abby? Are you going to tell her when she gets home?”
“I don’t know,” Kiera said. “I think we need to eventually, but I don’t know if I have the energy to do it tonight.”