Better Left Buried (15 page)

“We’ll get it on the way out.” He turned to Harmony. “You can go ahead and make that call. I’ll be by later to handle the rest of this. I need to speak with your social worker. Sylvie, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.
Thank you.”

It was the most polite and cooperative Brea had ever seen her.

Uncle Jim pulled his hat down to the point that it made it harder to read his expression. “Officer Ruiz is going to wait out front with you.” Ms. Simmons started to say something, but he interrupted her. “I’ve made arrangements with Principal Anderson. She’ll relay them directly after the other girls have gone home. In light of the situation, and the fact that there isn’t a parent available to sign for Miss Wolcott, I think it’s best to get some distance between her, the other girls, and their mothers.” Ms. Simmons nodded. “Come on, Brea. Let’s go.”

“I’ll call you,” Harmony said.

Uncle Jim shook his head. “Maybe it’s better you didn’t.”

“Expelled?” Brea shouted. “Did you even hear what they did to me? What they were going to do? They locked my hair in a locker, took pictures and videos of me half-naked, and were going to put them all over the internet. Aren’t there laws against that?”

Uncle Jim’s
demeanor remained stoic. “There are, which is why Principal Anderson and
the girls’ mothers agreed to let me handle this. Harmony is not being let off, but if she’s lucky, she won’t get two counts of aggravated assault thrown at her. I have to talk to her case worker and see if there’s anything they can do to help her given her mental health history. Thankfully she didn’t hurt anyone. Had she done something stupid—”

“She
did
do something stupid. The knife was a dirty trick, but she sees me hanging from a locker by my hair, crying, being laughed at, and having pictures and video taken … she can’t help who she is. In her own way, she thought she was doing the right thing.”

“I don’t doubt that. That family’s sorely lacking a
moral compass. It’s no wonder Harmony’s feral. She needs guidance, and you need a better class of friends.”

“I don’t expect you or Mom to understand this, but
she is all I have.”

“What about
that boy from the other night, the kid in the Jeep?”

“
Who? Jaxon? Now you want me to have a boyfriend? You
are
desperate to keep me away from Harmony, aren’t you?”

“Your mother says he’s a nice kid, comes from a good family and all that.”

“Nice kid. Right.” She rolled her eyes. “That
nice kid
is the reason this whole thing happened in the first place. Rachael Warren is his ex-girlfriend. And I know why Mom likes him. His father’s a big developer, got his hands in the right pockets, but you know that, right? You also know about the fight between Mom and Charity that literally everyone but me seems to have heard about.” Her frustration with being kept in the dark finally breached the surface.

Uncle Jim lowered his eyes for a second, long enough for her to read remorse in them, and looked back at the road. He turned on his directional and took a right onto her street. “Do you know why I came to get you
instead of your mother?” Brea shook her head. “You’ve pushed her so far that she can’t even look at you right now. She’s livid. Did I know Charity attacked her? Yes. Did I know it was over that house of hers? You betcha. I also know she recently ate several bottles of pills and is currently on a medicated vacation in the Behavioral Health Unit at Reston Memorial. I knew that before Harmony told me. I just didn’t know if they’d let her out yet. I did the best I could to use it to Harmony’s advantage in that meeting, but there are limits to what I can do. I can’t fix their lives and neither can you. Things have a way of catching up with people. This is an old mess, Brea. You need to leave it alone.”

Old mess.

The phrase was an open door into the past.

Uncle Jim pulled into the driveway and shifted the car into park.

“You were on the force in ’96,
right?”

“I’m serious, Brea. I don’t want to talk about this. If you want to ask your mother about back then, be my guest—”

“But you know she won’t tell me a thing without something to prod her with. She only gives up information when she’s caught in something. I need to know
why
everyone is so dead set against me being friends with Harmony, or else nothing changes. We’ll keep doing the same rounds we have for years until I go to college, angry with all of you for whatever it is you won’t tell me. Well you know what? It’s only a matter of time until I figure it all out. I know Harmony’s father went missing—”

“Tom didn’t go missing, Brea. He left.”

“So you
do
know about him then?”

“Of course I do.” Uncle Jim sighed and set his hat on the dash. “Have you ever seen Charity’s scar?”

Charity, like Harmony, had more than her fair share. “You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

“The one along her rib cage.”

Brea shook her head. “No, why? Was it from the accident?” He looked surprised. “I told you, I’ve been doing some research.”

“Apparently, but no.
We tried to keep as many of the details as we could about that night out of the papers, hoping to ferret Tom out. Harmony must have been about two at the time.”

“Three,” Brea corrected.

“Okay, three. Charity and Tom had a party at their house and things got out of hand. They ended up in a fight. It got pretty violent. Everyone left and Tom stabbed Charity, or at least tried to, coincidentally with a pocket knife like the one Harmony carries around. The blade was short, he was drunk, the wound was bad, but not lethal. Charity wrapped a bandage around her ribs and put Harmony in the car. She wasn’t even wearing a seatbelt. We found her on the floor behind the passenger’s seat, wrapped up in a sobbing ball. She was covered in Charity’s blood and wouldn’t say a word. Charity had gone off the road into a ditch. She hit her head pretty hard and was knocked out. Paramedics rushed her to Reston Memorial and after three hours of surgery and several blood transfusions, she finally came around.”

“What did they do with Harmony?”

“What could they do? Tom was missing, Charity was unconscious, and Harmony wouldn’t talk. I followed the ambulance with Harmony in my car and sat in the waiting room for almost five hours. I remember the vacant look on Harmony’s face and how hard she fought when the nurses, who’d put her in a pair of clean pajamas from the children’s ward, tried to take off this pair of pink mittens she was wearing. It was the weirdest thing. Anyway, they wanted to turn her over to Child Protective Services, but I wouldn’t let them. I told them I’d keep an eye on her until her mother came around. I couldn’t just hand her over. Not as scared as she was. When Charity came to, I brought Harmony into the room and I could see then what I see now, that something had broken inside of her. She pushed Harmony away and asked for more pain meds.”

“And that’s when they took her?”

“We didn’t want to put her in foster care, Brea. It was temporary, but there was clearly more to the story than we were getting.”

“And what was it?”

“I already told you. Tom attacked her and not for the first time.”

“Charity didn’t fight back? She might be a lot of things, but she’s tough. That doesn’t sound like her.”

“If she did, we never knew about it. Charity tried playing off the cut as part of the accident, but nothing lined up. Only the car’s front end was damaged, nothing loose or in the driver’s seat, and it was a relatively clean cut, the kind made by a blade. She had a long history of covering up injuries and in the end we figured that’s what had happened again. Tom was a good guy, a good father, but a mean drunk. He’d knocked his share of women around. The only thing different about Charity is that she took him back, every time but that last one. I think he must’ve known she was going to press charges and kept his distance. No one’s seen or heard from him since. Like I said, things have a way of catching up with people. A couple of weeks in the hospital with Harmony in a temporary foster home must’ve been enough to bring Charity to her senses. She gave Tom up as her attacker and the rest is history.”

Somehow, Brea
was sure there was more to it.

Harmony sat on the stone wall next to Officer Ruiz, waiting longer than she’d have liked to for her ride. Twenty gut-wrenching minutes had passed and she was holding the others up from leaving.

Principal Anderson stared from the vestibule
and exaggeratedly checked her watch. The girls and their mothers stood behind her.

Harmony
redialed Lance’s cell and listened to a half a dozen rings before hanging up and trying again.

Lance Harris was a twenty-three-year-old tattoo artist who worked at the Ink Spot in Mason and lived a couple streets over in Pinewood Estates, the trailer park her mother lived at.
Harmony had met him when her mother sent her to pick up a dime bag. She was fourteen-years-old at the time and already reckless. Life had forced her to mature early and it was as if her body knew it. By fourteen, she looked eighteen, and she split the difference when Lance—exotic with his dyed black hair, muscles, and tattoos—had asked. She confessed to being sixteen, apparently the age of consent in his book, because he took her virginity that night—unbeknownst to him. They’d done it with the lights off, him inhaling a joint between thrusts and breathing the smoke into her mouth. He’d given her more than one addiction that day. She suspected he later realized the lie about her age but, even now, never acknowledged it. He wasn’t big on questions or explanations, which was part of his allure.

He hadn’t asked why she needed a ride home from school and she didn’t tell him. He was an escape, and either he was poor
at math or thought nothing of a twenty-one-year-old senior.

Harmony
dialed a third time and could see Officer Ruiz’s impatience. “Come on, Lance. Pick up.”

“I’m pulling in now.” He hadn’t even said “Hello”.

Harmony heard the car before she saw it, driving down the access road that was treed on both sides with dense pine. Light reflected off the chrome grill and wheels, which were the only things on the 1980 Grand Prix not covered with repair work or rust. The exhaust hung at an awkward angle and from the sound of it, was broken somewhere in the middle. He was in the process of a three-year restoration with parts always on order but never showing up. In the sparse patches between Bondo and primer, the car’s original brick color showed through.

“That’s my ride
.” Harmony collected the things Officer Ruiz let her take from her locker.

“O
fficer Jenkins will be in touch.”

Smoke rolled out the driver’s side window and Harmony shook her head.
“I hope that’s a cigarette.” She tossed her things behind the passenger’s seat and climbed in up front.

Lance leaned over, gave her a p
eck on the cheek, and handed her the joint. “Only if you believe I’m rolling my own.” He pulled away from the curb and turned up the live instrumental music that sounded a lot like Pink Floyd. “These guys are pretty good. I saw them play at The Cage last month.” He handed her a CD case for the indie band they were listening to.

“
Ugh
, I hate that place.” The Cage was one of the few bars in Mason that refused to let her in—even with the convincing fake ID she was still angry with Adam for destroying. She kicked out the CD and pressed the tuner button in search of a radio station. The radio slid through the hole in the dash.

“Take it easy, would you?
There’s no antenna. The radio is temporary, until the original I ordered comes in.” He pressed one of the presets and bubblegum pop played through the speakers. Harmony cocked her head. “It’s either this, the CD, or nothing.”

“This is fine,” she said and
re-lit the joint.

The warm smoke filled her lungs and coated her mouth with the familiar taste she had longed for
more than she cared to admit. Bennett had her on random drug screenings and Adam, who hated Lance more than anyone, enforced a strict drug-free policy she resented him for. Their relationship had lost something in Adam’s change from the homeless-do-anything-for-a-buck guy she fell for and the do-gooder-mechanic. He’d become controlling when the last thing she needed or wanted in her life was to be controlled. She took a long drag and leaned her head back, closing her eyes, and holding her breath until she had no choice but to exhale.

“That’s a girl,” Lance said. “Let it out.”

She took another drag and passed it. Calm settled over her, the artificial sense of wellness and a welcome respite from her life of shit. “Thanks for coming to get me.”

“No problem. I mean, I had to cancel my afternoon clients, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it.”

In hindsight, it could have been Lance who put her onto the concept of paying in trade.

Harmony had convinced herself that if she wasn’t taking cash for sex then she was nothing like her mother, but some deep-seated part of her knew better. She finished the joint in three long drags and set her hand high on his thigh.