Deadly Games Read online

  Kylie sat beside her mother’s place, who’d always positioned herself at the head of the table. “Why have you always avoided it?”

  “Because,” her mother said, sitting down in her chair and lacing her fingers in front of her, “I don’t dwell on things that don’t matter. And I told myself twenty-four years ago that your father doesn’t matter.”

  Kylie threw up her hands. “But don’t you understand? It does matter to me! I’m the one who has his blood in my veins, and I barely even know what he looks like. The only picture I’ve ever seen of him is the one you keep hidden in the Bible, and that one’s so old you can’t even see it.”

  Rhonda leaned over and patted her daughter’s hand. “You are much more than your father. A much warmer, more caring, more compassionate person.”

  “Great. Fantastic. I inherited those things from you. But what about the things I inherited from him? Shouldn’t I know what those are?”

  Rhonda wrinkled her nose, like she’d smelled something bad. “Believe me. You inherited nothing from him.”

  “I had to have inherited some things. Like…I don’t know. I’m impulsive, and you never are. Maybe that’s him?”

  Rhonda sighed. “I—”

  Kylie barreled on. “I mean, he walked out on you, right? Kind of impulsively, without giving you any indication that anything was wrong? So…” She lifted her eyebrows, waiting for her mother to acknowledge the conversation.

  But she didn’t. She looked down at her lap, as if she’d fallen asleep at the table.

  After a full ten seconds, she pressed her lips together, then reached over with the spatula and started to plate their dinner.

  That went well, Kylie thought, assuming her mother would just do what she always did whenever Kylie got up the courage to ask about her dad—change the subject.

  It was only after a full two minutes, and they each had a square of lasagna and her mother had picked up her fork, that Rhonda finally spoke again. “I was only trying to protect you. I didn’t see what good could come of you knowing him. He didn’t just desert me, you know. You were part of the equation too. He left both of us.”

  Kylie swallowed. It took a special kind of jerk to walk out on a baby when she was less than a week old. “I know. But did he give you a good reason, at least?”

  “Oh, he gave me a reason. Not a good one.”

  The lasagna was too hot to eat, but Kylie didn’t have much of an appetite anymore. She sucked in a breath and said, “Linc wants me to officially move in with him.”

  Her mother’s eyes flickered to her, and a smile crept up her cheeks. “And…?”

  “And…” Kylie shrugged. “I don’t know what to do. With this big dad question mark hanging over my head, how am I supposed to give myself to someone when I don’t even truly know myself yet?”

  Rhonda’s expression was filled with compassion. “Do you love him?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  Her mother didn’t get it. “The problem is that I haven’t even told him that I love him, and he hasn’t said those three little words either.” When Rhonda opened her mouth again, Kylie held up a hand. “I believe he loves me too.”

  “I don’t see the problem,” Rhonda said gently.

  Kylie pulled the picture from her pocket, watching her mom’s eyes widen in surprise. “This. This is the problem. See the way Dad was looking at you? It’s totally clear that he loved you, too, once upon a time. But what if I, like him, decide in a few years that Linc isn’t everything I want? I don’t want to put him through that. I don’t want to be that person. But maybe I am, maybe it’s in my genes, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Maybe I need to turn Linc away before I hurt him like Dad hurt you and me.”

  Rhonda looked at her daughter for a long time. Kylie saw the tears shining in her mother’s eyes. She was about to apologize and change the subject herself when Rhonda leaned in and said, “I raised a good daughter. I have to believe that, even if the impulse to run away was in her blood, she’d know better than to do it in a way that was so horrible.”

  Kylie smiled sadly. “I’m glad you think that about me, but I don’t know what to think about myself. I’m scared. I know I have trouble controlling my impulsive behavior. And I just want to make sure, absolutely sure, that what I’m wanting now will be forever.”

  Rhonda’s eyes traveled over the table. Set with a white linen tablecloth, it could easily hold another ten people, but Kylie couldn’t remember a time they’d ever had more than two, or more recently, three, when Linc joined them. For so long, it had been just her and her mother, eating together, here. She’d often wondered, if her father were around, where at the table he would have sat.

  With a long sigh, Rhonda pushed her lasagna away and laced her hands together in front of her. “What would you like to know about him?”

  Kylie was shocked at the invitation. She’d waited decades to hear it. “Well…everything. Where did you meet?”

  Taking a sip of her water, Rhonda said nothing until the glass was precisely centered on its precise spot on the placemat. “Well, you know that after I graduated from high school, I went up to New York, hoping to get a bite of the big apple.”

  Kylie raised an eyebrow. “Yes. You lived in an apartment with a bunch of girls from your graduating class, right? You went to college there. And that’s where Dad grew up, right?”

  “Right. In Brooklyn. It was my senior year, just a couple months before I graduated with a Bachelor of Business degree. I was also waitressing at a twenty-four-hour diner, and that was where I met your father for the first time. He was one of my best customers. He was a garbage truck driver for Cityside Garbage Services, and the diner was on the way home from his route. He used to come in and flirt with me. I can still remember how bad he smelled.”

  Kylie leaned forward, hanging on every word. She raised an eyebrow. “Is that what made you fall in love with him?”

  Rhonda laughed. “The smell? No. He was a charmer. Not only was he handsome, but he had this cute little Brooklyn accent. He made fun of me, called me a Southern belle. My girlfriends at the diner all thought he was a player, but he’d always give me a massive tip. Like twenty dollars on a five-dollar bill.”

  Kylie grinned. “So, he tipped his way into your heart.”

  Rhonda grinned back. “That makes me sound like a hooker, but no. What got my attention was that he clearly couldn’t afford to be that generous, but he was with me. So, we flirted a lot, and one day, when I got off from work, he was waiting for me with a single red rose. When we started dating, he treated me like a princess. Then…”

  Kylie could barely breathe. “Then what?”

  Rhonda looked at her daughter with the same level of love she’d smothered her with all these years. “Then you came along. The minute he found out I was pregnant with you, he got down on his knee and proposed.” Rhonda’s eyes misted, and she lifted a napkin to just under her nose, blinking furiously. When she was composed, she met Kylie’s gaze again. “So, you see, he wasn’t afraid of commitment at all.”

  Kylie’s eyes widened. Now that the door had been opened, she wanted more. “And then you got married?”

  “Yes. Small ceremony. City Hall. We lived in his place above Able Body Hardware Store, which was just a couple blocks away from the diner. It wasn’t fancy, but I don’t think I’d ever been so happy,” she said, getting a faraway look in her eyes as she stared at nothing in particular. “I think he was happy too.”

  The lasagna was now cool enough to eat, but Kylie couldn’t even think about food. She fisted the napkin in her lap. If they’d been so happy, then what happened?

  “And?”

  Rhonda Hatfield’s brow knitted, and a pained look flitted across her expression. “And…then things changed. Actually, he changed. At the time, I was too hurt to question it. But I still haven’t the foggiest idea why, other than that it must’ve had to do with his new job.”

  3

/>   Rhonda Hatfield sat at the head of the table, gazing at the candles that flickered at the center of it. It was much easier than facing her daughter.

  Her daughter, who had been so starved for information about her father that she was practically salivating, begging Rhonda with wide eyes to go on.

  It was Rhonda’s own fault, trying to protect her by withholding all the information. She wished she’d been given a Single Mother Rule Book. She didn’t want to bad-mouth the man who’d left her alone to raise their daughter, but she didn’t want to wax poetic, constantly bringing up the painful memories of the past, either. So, she’d done what was easiest, and what she thought would keep Kylie blissfully unaware of the pain she’d endured at Adam Hatfield’s hands.

  It was a rare thing for her to mention Adam Hatfield at all.

  Rhonda dropped her hands under the table and pressed them into her thighs to keep them from shaking. All her life, she’d coddled Kylie, bending over backwards to try to make up for her lack of a father.

  She’d exceeded her credit card limit during Christmases to get Kylie the gifts she desperately wanted, volunteered as the only female coach when Kylie went out for basketball, and had even humored her through her extended years of undergraduate education. She’d somehow believed that Kylie’s indecisiveness was because she hadn’t had adequate male guidance to help her pick a profession.

  Deep down, she’d hoped that she’d done a good enough job cobbling together a happy childhood for her daughter that Kylie never would question her about her father.

  Clearly, she’d failed.

  “But that’s why I don’t speak of him much,” Rhonda lied, not making eye contact with her daughter. “I really don’t care. It was so long ago. And I’ve moved on.”

  Of course, that wasn’t true. Was it possible to move on from the love of your life? It might have been if there’d been anyone else in the twenty-four years since Adam Hatfield left. But she’d been too heartbroken to look at first, and then, when she’d gradually warmed to the idea of not spending the rest of her life desperately alone, finding a new man had proven as difficult as finding the right needle in a stack of needles.

  Kylie had gone off to college, and her house was so quiet. She was so set in her life alone that she wasn’t sure if she wanted a man, or one of those fancy new whole-house sound systems. Plus, she was forty-seven years old, and wasn’t dating something teenage kids did?

  Gradually, she’d just settled into life. Until recently, she’d worked as an administrative assistant for a manufacturer so close she could walk to her job. Her life had always been solid and predictable. She had a small circle of friends and neighbors, no excitement, no romance, no surprises from day to day…and she liked it very much. She needed nothing more.

  Kylie eyed her doubtfully. “But you said he changed? How?”

  Even now, Rhonda could see her earlier life vividly. The sights, the smells—which weren’t all that appetizing, to be honest—but more especially, the feelings. How her heart pounded. How his fingers felt on her skin. His lips…

  Rhonda mentally shook herself. All she needed to remember now was how it felt when he left.

  But her daughter needed more, she knew, so she made herself keep talking. “I hate to even think of that awful city. How I even survived up there is beyond me. But I guess it was…him. He was my life. We were living in that apartment on Gold Street near Vinegar Hill. It was awful. Cockroach infested and probably not the best place to raise a child. But I didn’t mind. I knew we could make it work. We were in love. You can turn a blind eye to many things when you’re in love, right?” Rhonda even managed a smile at the end.

  Kylie stared at her blankly. It occurred to Rhonda that her daughter might have shared her vivacious, outgoing personality and looks, but Rhonda had jumped feetfirst into her first relationship with Adam. Kylie was always cautious when it came to men, passing up dates and turning down boyfriends.

  Even now, she was so wishy-washy when it came to Linc, and he was clearly a good man. Definitely the most solid and dependable man she’d ever dated. Was her caution because she’d never had a positive male influence in her life?

  Probably. Another mom-fail.

  “Anyway,” Rhonda continued, tamping that worry down, “I might have been happy in our little place, but Adam sure wasn’t. He was always talking about the future and thinking up schemes that might bring in more money. Trying one thing, then giving it up for another. I suppose that’s where you got that tendency from.”

  She hadn’t intended to make it a slight and was relieved when Kylie only nodded, accepting the truth in the words. In truth, that part of her daughter’s nature often scared her. She’d spent many a sleepless night worrying that Kylie’d do something stupid on her career hunt, just because nothing seemed to make her happy. Rhonda had been so elated when Kylie accepted the private investigator job, even as dangerous as it was, because it finally looked like Kylie had found something she wanted to settle into.

  “When I was six months pregnant, he came home and told me he’d gotten a different job, working in Manhattan. It was a supervisory level job in construction. I was floored. I asked him how he qualified for such a job, since he’d never told me he worked in construction before. But he was pretty silent about it. He told me that he’d made friends with the owners of the company, who were on his route, and this was an opportunity we’d be crazy to refuse. He wanted it so much, so we went with it.”

  Kylie tilted her head. “You moved to Manhattan?”

  Rhonda nodded, thinking of the beautiful apartment she’d lived in for just a few short months of her life. It was the only time in her life that she’d ever felt wealthy. Doormen and crystal chandeliers and people calling her “madame,” even though she’d been barely as old as Kylie.

  “A couple of weeks after he started his new job, we moved into a beautiful place on the Upper West Side. I felt like I was in a fantasy. The only problem was that your father was barely ever around. Even when I went into labor, I couldn’t get in touch with him. He arrived after you were born.”

  Kylie gasped, and Rhonda realized this was the first time she’d ever told her of this part. “You went through labor alone?”

  It was terrifying.

  “Yeah, but it was okay.” It wasn’t, but Rhonda needed to keep that to herself. “He was bringing in great money at the time, and I was living like a pampered princess. He kept bringing home gifts for you and me, so I excused him. After I was released from the hospital, we went back to the apartment, and he’d set up the most beautiful nursery for you as a surprise. All pink gingham check and lace, and so many stuffed animals. He was so proud. I remember him saying all this stuff about how he was going to make the best father possible.”

  Tears flooded Kylie’s eyes, and she used a napkin to dab them away. “And?”

  “And well…you know the rest. Four days after you were born, he disappeared.”

  Kylie dabbed at her eyes again. “Do you have any idea why?”

  Rhonda’s heart picked up rhythm, almost like it was reliving those dark days. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I was beside myself. I called the police. Called everywhere I could think of. Went looking for him. Nearly had a breakdown, since I was trying to take care of you at the same time and had no support system whatsoever in Manhattan. I almost checked myself into a hospital, I was so beside myself with worry. I really did think he must’ve been murdered. Then, a couple days later…I received a letter.”

  “A letter?”

  This was part of the story that Rhonda had never shared with her daughter. In her mind, it was better that Kylie not know how casually they’d been tossed aside.

  “You were colicky, so I had you strapped to my chest in one of those baby carrier things. It was a pretty day, so I’d taken you for a walk. We stopped at the mailboxes on our way back in, and I pulled out a manila envelope with no return address.”

  Kylie had started screaming again, almost like the infant had known that
the contents of that envelope would change everything.

  “What did it say?”

  Rhonda blinked out of the memory, but the feelings of that moment didn’t depart so easily, and she hugged herself now as she’d hugged her baby then. “It was a deed to this house, and a ten-thousand-dollar check. There was a note that said he was sorry, that the marriage was a mistake, and that I should try to forget about him. That was it.”

  Kylie’s expression was the very definition of sadness. “That’s all?”

  Rhonda shrugged with a nonchalance she didn’t feel. “Yes. It was at that moment that I realized he wasn’t dead…he just didn’t want me.”

  “Or me,” Kylie whispered.

  Rhonda didn’t have the heart to disagree. What could she say, anyway?

  Should she tell her daughter of how she’d cried for days, barely able to take care of her also crying infant? How betrayed she’d felt? How rejected? How alone?

  By that time, her friends had graduated college too and were living their own lives. She had no help, no support system. And the rejection, coming so suddenly and awful, had made her simply want to die.

  Should she tell her precious daughter how, at one point, she’d poured the entire contents of the bottle of pain pills she’d gotten after giving birth into her hand? How she’d had them within an inch of her mouth, wanting to end it all, when she finally came to her senses?

  No. Her daughter didn’t need to know that. She didn’t need to know how desperate she’d become. How Adam’s games, playing house then disappearing, had almost become deadly.

  Rhonda lifted her chin, gazing straight into her daughter’s eyes. “But I wanted you, Kylie.”

  Kylie dabbed at her eyes again. “What did you do?”

  “Well, I did the only thing I could do. I took it day by day. I stayed in the apartment for a little while, but I knew even with the money from the check I’d never be able to continue to live there. So, I packed you up and left New York, moved here.”