Sense of Rumor (Mount Faith Series: Book 6) (2 page)

BOOK: Sense of Rumor (Mount Faith Series: Book 6)
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"It's your house," Alric said. "Where are your parents?"

"Work," Tracy frowned. "Alric, please stay. The music is not that bad. I can't play Rock of Ages or Amazing Grace at my party, and it's not real alcohol. It's fake champagne and root beer."

Alric shook his head, "I have to go to work. See you around."

He cast his eye across the back of the building. There was a sliding glass door, which was heavily tinted and probably led to a changing room. That was probably where Arnella went with those guys. He was itching to go in there, and he almost did, but he thought about how ridiculous he would look; instead, he stormed off from the pool area and walked around to the side of the house, angrily brushing aside the overhanging hibiscus as he made his way to his car.

He still felt angry toward Arnella even when he was driving along the avenue and into the town of Santa Cruz.

It wasn't until he was making his way up to Mount Faith to his summer job as a lab instructor that he recognized that what he was feeling was jealousy. When he recognized it, he had to stop at the side of the road, gasping from the intensity of it. He had to squash this feeling. There was no way that he was jealous about Arnella, no way.

 

Chapter Two

 

Arnella woke up with a bitter taste in her mouth. She looked around the guest room where she had been sleeping and grimaced. She couldn't remember how she had gotten there. Was the party even over?

She looked down on herself. She was wearing one of Tracy's nightgowns, a pink fluffy thing that was so Tracy-ish. Pink and girly was Tracy's middle name. She would have preferred to sleep in one of Vanley's old boxers and a ratty t-shirt.

So, what was going on? The last thing she remembered was drinking a drink that David gave her and then feeling dizzy. Cory and Jeff had been around too and they had led her to the poolside changing room.

She raised her head from the pillow when she heard Tracy's mother at the door. She knocked briefly and then stuck her head around it. Her perfectly coifed hair was neat as usual.

"Ah, Arnella," Audrey Carr whispered. "Do you want to join us for breakfast?"

Mrs. Carr had a soft motherly voice, the type she wished her own mother had. She had always envied Tracy for her mother.

"Breakfast?" she opened her eyes again and looked in Mrs. Carr direction. She was still standing at the door, obviously dressed for work.

"But what about the party? Is it over?"

Mrs. Carr looked as if she nodded. Arnella couldn't be sure because her vision was blurry.

"Tracy said you have been asleep since yesterday afternoon. I was all for calling the doctor when we came in last night and saw that you were still out; I thought it unnatural but Tracy said you were just tired."

Tired? She was not that tired. For the past few days, she had done nothing much except twiddle her thumbs, debating with herself, whether she should call her uncle and throw herself at his mercy. Where did Tracy get her 'tired' story?

"Where's Tracy?" Arnella asked uncomfortably.
What the hell happened to me? Tracy was the only one who would know,
she thought.

"Downstairs," Mrs. Carr said softly. "Your clothes are at the foot of the bed. Please join us; we haven't seen you in quite a while."

Arnella glanced down to the foot of the bed. Her tie and dye, backless, summer dress was there all right. She got up gingerly and wondered why she felt sore all over, even her knees and especially her throat and vagina.

Oh no! I wasn't raped, was I?
The thought filled her with dread. At first, her mind wouldn't cooperate with trying to remember, but when she hobbled to the en suite bathroom and stepped under the hot shower, snippets of the previous afternoon came back to her. She remembered Cory behind a video camera, grinning. He was naked.

God, no! please no!
Not that nerdy, imbecile who she had rejected time and time again from high school days! But there he was in her mind's eye, naked and grinning. She pushed her mind to remember more but that was all that she saw.

She stepped into the shower and soaped up thoroughly. Out of nowhere came the memory of David, his buzz cut hair in her line of vision as he whispered, "You'll like this, Arnella. All my girlfriends say I am good." Then she remembered him, his face sweaty above her panting, "You are tight, like a virgin," and then she heard chuckles in the background.

Arnella leaned her face down on the tile in the shower cubicle. Was that her giggle she heard in her ears? Was she the one sinuously stretching in front of the camera? Camera! Had they videotaped her in the poolroom? She couldn't be sure if it was a video camera or one that took still images. She wasn't even sure that there had been a camera. Maybe it was the sun coming through the window.

They must have drugged her. The thought gave her goose bumps under the heat of the water. Why would Cory and David do that to her? And Jeff! She remembered his leering face as he rammed his penis down her throat.

A sob threatened to tear from the bowels of her belly, but she managed to swallow it back. She closed her eyes and willed herself to remember the details of what else happened to her, but she couldn't. Her brain felt foggy, and she felt really hung-over, like she had consumed several tons of alcohol, though she could not remember having a drop of alcohol at the party. What could wipe out her memory like this? What had those cretins put in her drink? She had found it strange that all three of them had come to her acting extremely friendly. David had handed her that cup with root beer and had made a quip about success and long life.

She forced herself to get out of the shower. She was not the type to cry about these things, even though she was cringing inside at the thought of them and her together. She closed her eyes, willing the hazy thoughts to go away. She opened her eyes again and stared at the cream finish of the tiles. It was as if her eyes were fixated on the thing. She couldn't make her body move.

She was devastated. She tried to shovel her feeling of being unclean back into that deep vacant hole where all her fears and pain lurked, but it was proving to be quite a task.

She wouldn't show how much this had hurt her. As usual, she would put on her Arnella veneer and act as if it didn't trouble her and move on.

She went back into the shower to give herself a last wash to try to get the unclean feeling to leave her body. She wondered briefly, as she sloughed the water over her head, why it happened to her, as if her life wasn't hard enough as it was.

She quickly finished her shower and pulled on her clothes after she dried herself. The Carr's bathroom was luxurious. They had plush guest towels, perfumes, and all manner of cosmetics to make a person feel special. She rubbed one of the lotions on her skin and thought,
where was Tracy in all of this?
It was her party. Hadn't she suspected what the guys had done?

Arnella swiftly looked in the mirror. She was not one to dwell on her looks, but she checked to see that all her parts were in place. She feverishly scanned her face. She looked fine: no damage to her big brown eyes and arched eyebrows, though her lips looked a little bruised and her nose looked slightly red to her.

She needed to go see a doctor after this and take all the relevant STI tests. She shuddered to think what she might have caught from these guys. She didn't know them that well, nor what their lifestyles were like. She left the room in a hurry, trying to leave her thoughts behind in there as well, and went downstairs to the Carr's vast breakfast room.

Mr. Carr had his head buried in one of the daily newspapers. Tracy was on the phone giggling. She waved to Arnella, and Mrs. Carr was looking at her, concerned.

"Morning all," Arnella said, forcing herself to sound breezy and unaffected.

"Are you feeling all right dear?" Mrs. Carr was sipping her tea and looked at Arnella quizzically, like she wanted to say something more but was feeling her out first.

"Fine," Arnella nodded and sat around the circular table across from Mr. Carr. He was a big man with a huge head and thick curly hair that formed in a peak on his head. He did not have much of a neck, and his extremely light skin had swaths of red all over, like he was permanently flushed. He had two diamond rings on his pinky finger and they twitched when she sat across from him.

Arnella imagined that he was biding his time to address her. He had never liked her, so she would only visit Tracy when he wasn't home. Whenever they happened to meet, he would always have a slight sneer on his lips. Arnella could conclude that he had heard some of the rumors about her and didn't want his precious only daughter to become ensnared with her.

Their helper wheeled in a trolley and started putting items on the middle of the table. She smiled shyly with Arnella, and Arnella grinned back. She had fun times sneaking out of the house through the kitchen in years past when Mr. Carr had arrived home.

The food items included freshly baked bread, and when the scent hit her, Arnella realized how famished she felt. Her belly was rumbling and empty.

Mr. Carr lowered the newspaper. His light skin was freckled, and his left eye was ticking. It was the first time in years that Arnella was actually staring him in the face.

"Are you related to the Bancrofts in the hills?" he asked without preamble.

Arnella nodded slowly, "Yes, why?"

"It says here that Marcus Bancroft has tied the knot with Senator Durkheim's daughter, Deidra, in a surprise twilight ceremony in Kingston. Were you invited?"

Arnella shook her head. "No, I wasn't."

"Oh, so they are distant relatives," Mr. Carr said disappointed. "You know, if I were you, I would claim whatever relation I had with them and attend the university at a reduced cost. I mean, look at you; what do you do?"

"Nothing," Arnella answered him saucily.

She couldn't tell him that her uncle, Ryan Bancroft, president of the university, had insisted, just last year, that she attend the university like her brother Vanley and that he would take care of her fees; neither could she tell him that she is an artist. He wouldn't be interested in that. People like Mr. Carr thought that formal schooling was the only vehicle to success. He reminded her of her uncle in that regard.

"You will amount to nothing, if that's the attitude you have," Mr. Carr raised his eyebrows at her nonchalant attitude. He picked up an English muffin from the pile of food in the middle of the table and then put it back. "How will you feel when all your peers are moving on with their high powered jobs and you are stuck in some dead end job somewhere?"

Mrs. Carr cleared her throat, trying to give her husband the 'cease and desist' look, though she seemed to agree with him.

"What will you do," Mr. Carr was warming up in his diatribe, "when people like my Tracy has to be the one who bails you or your brats out of jail later on in life. Do you want to continue living off your parents?"

Arnella rolled her eyes. "I could always model." She bit into a small cinnamon roll, then grabbed six more and put on her plate; they were good.

Mr. Carr almost snapped. "Do you think that your pretty looks, which you are slowly damaging with all those piercings," he looked at the clip on her nose and the one on her eyebrow, "will last forever?"

Arnella was glad she removed the one on her tongue. She won't put it back on either. She had done it to shock the people around her. Since she had succeeded, she could move on.

"You look ridiculous," he ranted. "As a matter of fact, you look unemployable. Now tell me, which employer in his right mind will want to hire somebody looking like you?"

Arnella continued nibbling her rolls and watched as the vein on the side of Mr. Carr's head got bigger and bigger. "Maybe a mechanic or a construction site wouldn't care much," she said contemplatively, deliberately irking Mr. Carr, who obviously had been building up for years to give her this lecture. His disregard for her was finally finding an outlet.

"I have told Tracy, time and time again, to have nothing to do with you," he raged. His light complexion looked flushed. His neck had bands of dark red across it, despite the central cooling in the house. He looked back at Tracy, who was still on the phone. "I told her to cancel all ties with you. You know why?"

Arnella spooned out some stewed chicken onto her plate and shook her head solemnly. She had some muffin in her mouth so she mumbled a garbled sounding, "no."

"Because you are little more than the scum of society! You contribute nothing! You add nothing! Can you even speak properly?"

Arnella grinned. Obviously, he wanted tears and she was not going to oblige. His wife looked as if she was on the verge of tears on her behalf. The insults were trickling down her back like rain on a smooth surface.

"I would speak, but I have nothing worthwhile to say. At least I don't go around shouting at people I barely know."

"Argh." Mr. Carr growled. "I know you, and I know your type. It's sickening."

"Calm down, dear," Mrs. Carr jumped in quickly to pacify him. She had been listening to her husband berate Arnella, hoping that she could at least be spurred to action, but now she thought her husband had gone too far. He looked as if he was about to jump across the table and choke the life out of Arnella. It didn't help that Arnella was looking at him, unaffected by what he had intended to be a lecture.

BOOK: Sense of Rumor (Mount Faith Series: Book 6)
2.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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