Chapter 17
Lindsey sat in the vehicle and watched Sterling as he picked up the order for the animal sanctuary.
They had first stopped at a drive-through and picked up coffee and some breakfast sandwiches.
Then stopped at the first location for supplies.
She got a phone call just then from Chelsea. “Hey, Chelsea.”
“Are you all right?” Chelsea asked her.
“I’m fine. Did you hear already?” she asked.
“Yes, and the detective is coming this afternoon,” she cried out. “I’m so sorry. I feel awful.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m okay, and at least Charlie’s been picked up. This is on him, not you. Don’t you go blaming yourself for his bad choices.”
“Yes, you’re right,” she noted, “and now that it’s safe …” Then she hesitated.
“What?” Lindsey asked.
“I was wondering if you would mind stopping off at my place and getting me a change of clothes or something? I hate to even ask, and I know how busy you both are.”
“Oh no, it’s fine,” she replied. “We have no problem doing that. I guess you took off as you were.”
“Yeah, you’re not kidding,” Chelsea muttered.
“I have a small bookbag in the bedroom closet. I don’t have school today, so I can stay here.
However, if you could bring me a couple changes of clothes and my school bag?
A lot of my stuff is in my car anyway,” she added.
“I don’t really have very much of my own at my place. ”
“I didn’t see very much when I was there,” she agreed.
“Right, so just pack up whatever you can in the one bag, and that’ll be great.”
After agreeing to do just that, she waited until Sterling hopped back in.
“Ready to head out to the Haven?” he asked.
“Not quite,” she noted. “Do you mind a quick side trip to pick up clothes for Chelsea?”
“Gosh no, we probably should have thought about that already.”
As it is, when they got closer to the apartment complex, she got very quiet.
He looked at her and said, “Remember that Charlie’s in jail.”
“I know,” she whispered. “It’s a good thing that I’m here because it will give me a chance to work through it, but it’s a pretty powerful reminder of the whole thing.”
“I understand,” Sterling replied, “and I’m so sorry that you were involved. If I could have done something to make that easier on you, I would have done it in a flash. You know that, right?”
“I know. I know you,” she told him. “It’s not your fault.”
“No, but, at the same time, it sucks.”
She smiled. “It certainly does.”
They hopped out and walked up to Chelsea’s apartment. It hadn’t been locked, but it was closed up.
She quickly walked inside and headed to the bedroom, as she called out, “Chelsea wants whatever we can fit into the small bag in her closet.”
“Good enough,” he replied. “She’ll need some clothes to start with.”
As they both walked into Chelsea’s bedroom, Lindsey shook her head. “She really doesn’t have anything, does she?”
“No, she doesn’t. I don’t know why her mother seems to think she does.”
They quickly found the bookbag in the closet, and Lindsey put it on the bed, then opened up the couple plastic bins on the floor where Chelsea kept her clothes in, realizing again just how difficult things must have been on her. “It really pisses me off,” Lindsey muttered.
She turned around to check out the night table’s contents, and, as she straightened, she gulped audibly. Sterling looked over at her from the closet. When she nodded toward the bedroom door, he spun and saw a woman holding a small handgun.
“We’re not intruders,” Lindsey stated.
The woman’s face turned almost a deep purple. “Sure looks like you are to me,” she snarled. “This is my daughter’s apartment.”
“And we’re collecting clothes for your daughter,” Lindsey declared, realizing Penny now stood in front of them.
“Yeah? Where the hell is she?” Penny asked.
“She’s with friends,” Lindsey shared. Absolutely no way would she tell Penny where her daughter was.
“You better tell me where she is because I haven’t talked to that bitch in a few days, and she owes me money.”
Lindsey’s eyebrows shot up. “Wow, everybody seems to think Chelsea’s loaded with cash all a sudden.”
“She is,” Penny snapped.
“Are you talking about that student loan because I already had this argument with Charlie last night.”
“Charlie?” she repeated, turning on her. “You spoke to Charlie? Where the hell is he?”
“He should be fairly well settled in the jail cell by now,” Lindsey shared, her tone hard. “Not that you give a shit.”
Penny’s gaze narrowed as she stared at her and asked, “Who the hell are you anyway?”
“I’m Chelsea’s friend.”
Penny turned her gaze to Sterling and oddly seemed to dismiss him as not important. Penny turned to Lindsey again. “I don’t remember her ever talking about you.”
“I went to high school with her, not that you ever let her have friends over.”
“She had to work on the farm,” Penny said absentmindedly. “We didn’t have any time for her to have friends.”
“Funny, yet you had time for a boyfriend.”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I have a boyfriend?” Penny glared at her. “You think I’m too old or too ugly? Is that what it is?”
Penny again turned on a dime, her moods so mercurial that it made no sense. Lindsey stared at her and snapped, “No, that’s not what I was thinking at all. I’m just wondering why you could have a boyfriend, since you wouldn’t let Chelsea have a boyfriend.”
“If she had a boyfriend, she wouldn’t be working all the time, would she? And the agreement was, if she got a job, she was supposed to pay me.”
“Why would she pay you if she got a job?” Out of the corner of her eye, Lindsey saw Sterling moving a couple steps closer, but Penny didn’t even seem to notice.
“If she wants to get a job, she has to pay me since she’s supposed to be working at home on the farm, and she’s not.”
It was such a twisted logic that Lindsey was dumbfounded. “Yet you don’t even have a farm to work now, do you?”
“No, it went broke,” Penny stated, “because that little bitch didn’t work hard enough.”
“Oh my God,” Lindsey said in astonishment, staring at her. “You and Charlie are both messed up.”
Penny flushed and asked, “Where the hell is Charlie?”
“I already told you where he was.”
“He would have called me if he was down at the station,” Penny noted, with a dismissive wave. “So I know you’re lying.”
Lindsey snorted at her. “Really? Why would you think that?”
“Because he would have called me. He has nobody else.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to call you. Maybe he was packing up to leave and trying to figure out how to get out of here with money in his pocket.”
“He didn’t have any money.”
“If he had money, he would have been gone already.”
“He doesn’t, so it doesn’t matter. I only give him enough to keep him wanting more.”
Lindsey stared Penny. “So, you could have given him more money?”
“Only if Chelsea would cough up what she owes me, and, when I find that bitch, believe me that she will.”
“I don’t think you’ll have much luck with that,” Sterling interjected in a bored tone, “because she’s with friends right now.”
“Then you better just tell me where the hell those friends are,” she bellowed, turning the gun on him.
He looked at the gun, crossed his arms over his chest, and shook his head. “Not a chance.”
Shock came on Penny’s face that somebody facing a gun would say that to her. “You do understand that I’m holding a gun on you, right? Or are you simply too stupid to figure that out?”
“I see it,” Sterling acknowledged, with a headshake, “but I really don’t give a shit.”
“Why not?” Penny asked in frustration.
“Because I already know who you are. I already know what kind of person you are. I already know what a piece of shit you are,” Sterling shared. “So I’m really not too bothered.”
She stared at him, stunned. “I don’t even know who you are. What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you know me, all right, or you should. I’m your nephew, the one who’s come for his property. The nephew you dumped into foster care,” he explained, taking several steps toward her. When she stood there with her jaw dropped, he immediately pulled the gun from her hand.
She lunged for it, and a tussle followed, and a shot was fired. She screamed.
He looked down at her and muttered, “You’re not even hit.”
“You shot me. You tried to shoot me. I saw it. You tried to shoot me.”
Sterling laughed. “Right. Yet you’re the one who came into the place and pulled a gun on us.”
“Yes, but you tried to kill me,” she yelled. “I’ll have you put away for life.”
“Except you won’t,” Lindsey declared. “You forgot that I’m here too.”
Penny’s expression turned calculating as she asked, “How much do you want to keep quiet?”
“There is nothing you can give me that will keep me quiet over this BS,” Lindsey replied. “Not only that, I’m pretty sure he already heard it all too.”
“Who?” Penny turned, and there stood Richard, fury on his face as he glared at her.
He asked her, “What the hell are you up to now?”
Sterling began, “This is my lovely aunt, the one who stole my property, who dumped me into foster care, and who told my grandfather that I was dead. She came in here with a handgun and wanted to shoot us because we wouldn’t tell her where Chelsea is.”
“I know exactly where Chelsea is,” Richard stated, turning to Penny. “She doesn’t want anything to do with you.”
“Of course she does, and, besides, she owes me money. You should be arresting her.”
“And what money is that?”
“The money that she owes me,” she snapped in fury.
Sterling sighed. “See if you can follow this, Detective. Chelsea supposedly owes her mother the student loan proceeds because, by choosing to go to school and to work for her future, that somehow immediately obligates her to give her mother money to make up for not working at the farm, which Penny here says went belly up because Chelsea didn’t work hard enough. ”
Richard tried to follow the convoluted logic and muttered, “What?”