Exposure (4 page)

Now he climbed out of his Maserati GranCabrio, and smiled at the resounding thump the door made when it shut. The last couple of years had been tough for high-end sales, but this car, well, this one got deep-pocketed corporate execs excited, eager to jumpstart the economic recovery and look awfully good doing it. A family car, Maserati’s first true four-seater. He drove it just so he could turn those prospective buyers’ heads, get them looking for the showroom.

“Heh,” Harlan chuckled, patting the car’s hood. “A little better’n that piece o’shit Cutlass.” His first car, bought with the first two hundred dollars he’d made, dealing pot. Amelia didn’t know that part of his story; almost no one did. Building his empire by first selling marijuana to his shiftless teenaged friends was information best kept to himself.

Buttercup greeted him in the back foyer. He squatted down to scratch her ears, and gave her a kiss on the muzzle. Then he dropped his keys on the counter, next to Amelia’s laptop—one of those amazing lightweight Macs, thin as a notepad. They’d bought it to help minimize the weight she had to haul around in her book bag. Sheri read some old Richard Russo novel where the teenaged daughter was overwhelmed by a too-heavy bag, and had gotten concerned for Amelia. Harlan wasn’t much of a reader himself, but Sheri took a lot from books, and he admired that about her. As for the Mac, well, it was a slick piece of technology, and Harlan was all for that.

He grabbed a bottle of cold beer and took Buttercup outside, into the backyard. The maples, oaks, hickories, and sweetgums on and surrounding his two acres were in full November color. The beeches, always lagging, were just beginning to turn. What a difference between the seasons here and up in leaf-naked Ohio, where he’d just spent a week touring Honda plants. Truth told, he hated being away for such a long stretch. Oh, Sheri did fine without him. Amelia too. If he had to admit it, he’d say he was the one who got lonely and morose when he was away on business. Being away deprived him of his moorings. In a rental car, or on the sidewalk of some random city, he was just some random guy. He was, too easily, that mongrel kid who’d lived in a busted-up trailer, eating stale Cap’n Crunch and wondering when his parents would get sober and wander back home.

His cellphone rang and he answered, “Wilkes here.”

“Mr. Wilkes, this is Parker Finch. How’re y’all doing today?”

“Parker, my boy!” Harlan had been expecting the call. “Whattya have for me?”

“Well, I’m pleased to say that we’re gonna be able to come through on the loan. With the securities you’ve pledged, the board is more than happy to front you the cash.”

Harlan grinned. The country-and-western nightclub in which he was buying a stake was a dream that had its roots in his earliest days selling cars. Back then, after long hours spent selling nothing to nobody and despairing that he’d never get his business off the ground, he’d go knock back a few beers at a little country tavern run by a guy named Clem Carroll. Clem and Harlan passed the time talking about the nightclub Clem meant to open someday. They’d lost touch for a time, and then two years ago Clem walked into Wilkes Toyota to buy a Tundra, and to see whether Harlan had a taste for a beer and a go at co-ownership of that nightclub. Harlan had proposed that when Clem got up 70 percent of what he’d need for start-up, Harlan would front the rest. Now, that time had come.

Harlan asked Parker, “You do own a pair o’ boots, don’t you?”

Parker said, “You let me know when that club’s open for business, and I’ll show up wearin’ them.”

“Fair enough.” And by that time, July most likely, Harlan would be ready to introduce Parker to Amelia. With Parker working out of the bank’s Chapel Hill office and Amelia not too far away at Duke, they’d have a just-right arrangement for casual dating that, in due time, might well lead to the boy becoming kin. Harlan liked this idea a lot; Parker was exactly the kind of guy who would keep Amelia living the life she was accustomed to, the life she deserved. He was the kind of guy to keep Amelia from ending up the way Harlan’s mother had.

After he got off the phone, Harlan put his fingers to his mouth and whistled the dog in. “C’mon,” he said when she came trotting back. “Let’s get us some lunch.”

Inside, he took out a tub of potato salad, Sheri’s special red-skin recipe, and sat down at the counter bar. With nothing more than curiosity motivating him, he opened Amelia’s computer. A box appeared in the center of an otherwise black screen, awaiting a password. Of course she’d have the thing secured; if she forgot it at school or left it at a friend’s house, she couldn’t have other people messing up her files and such. He tipped the screen forward, almost closed it, and then pushed it up again.

B-U-T-T-E-R-C-U-P
, he typed. Amelia loved the dog like the sister she never got, though not for lack of him and Sheri trying. Sheri had carried three more babies to near twenty weeks and had almost bled to death miscarrying the third, so the doctor said that was it, and tied her tubes.

Nope,
Buttercup
wasn’t the password.

Thinking of Amelia’s sense of humor, Harlan tried
P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D
. Not that either.

He rubbed his mouth, took a swig of beer, then tried
C-U-R-R-I-T-U-C-K
, the street on which their beach house was located, down on Bald Head Island. Amelia loved that house, could hardly wait for the day each year when they trundled out of here for the summer—or, that was how it had used to be. This past summer she’d gone grudgingly, then moped around for days before settling in to the routine of island life. Harlan had been worried, but Sheri told him to let her be. “She’s seventeen. It’s lonely here. Dull, compared to her usual schedule and school. Her friends are her life.”

Strike three. The Mac politely informed him that he’d tried to log in too many times without success, and to try again later. Harlan snapped it closed, feeling mildly embarrassed. Theirs was a household built upon mutual respect for one another and here he was, trying to pry into his daughter’s personal stuff as surely as if he’d gone into her bedroom and tried to jimmy open a locked desk drawer.

Actually, he’d done that once, when Amelia was eleven or twelve—not because he was suspicious of anything, but because he wanted to know, really
know
, the little changeling she had become—from a combination, he thought, of puberty and getting closer to finally conquering the stutter that had been troubling all of them since near her fifth birthday. The drawer had held the treasures particular to girls of that age: pretty stones, pressed flowers and leaves, poems that she’d either copied out or made up; Harlan, with his meager high-school education, sure couldn’t say. There was a playbill from their first trip to New York, when they’d seen
The Lion King
. Tucked into it was a carefully written list, at the top of which was, “Steps for Success.” She’d come up with only three:
1. Practice singing, 2. Watch more plays, 3. Ask Daddy for his secrets
. And she’d followed that plan strictly; she was his girl, all right.

He opened the laptop again. The password screen obligingly reappeared, giving him another turn at bat. He stared at the rectangular box with its blinking cursor, trying his best to get into Amelia’s mind. But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? He couldn’t get in, not really; that’s why he was sitting here, a flush creeping up his neck as he steadfastly ignored the impropriety of what he was doing—trying to do. He rationalized that it was parental diligence to see what your kid was up to, and anyway, she’d never know he’d done it.

L-A-D-Y-B-U-G
, he tried, his nickname for her. No dice.

L-I-M-E-C-I-C-L-E
, her favorite treat. No.

Harlan leaned away from the counter and closed his eyes. What else was significant to her? Dance. Singing. Drama. He thought of the
Lion King
playbill, and of how Amelia, eight years old at the time, had been so entranced by the production that she spoke of nothing else on the flight back to RDU. “I w-w-want to be Nala,” she’d declared in a soft, deliberate, voice, her eyes shining. Then, all serious: “Daddy, w-why does it have to be
k-king
of the jungle?”

Her stutter pained him. The doctors had no explanation for why it had started and why it persisted, and that pained him, too; he liked action, motion, progress. When they’d first gotten her a speech therapist, he’d told the woman, “Let’s nip this in the bud,” only to get a lecture about setting reasonable expectations.

Reasonable. Well, that all depended on who was doing the reasoning, didn’t it? If he had followed a “reasonable” track all his life, he’d have spent the years struggling the way Clem had for so long. But he’d minded the woman’s advice after Sheri pointed out that he knew less than nothing about curing a stutter.

On the plane that day he’d told Amelia, “It doesn’t have to be, Ladybug, that’s just a play. When you’re a little older we’ll go to Africa on safari, how’s that? And we’ll see lionesses for real—they’re the ones in charge, i’n’t that right, hon?” Sheri, sitting across the aisle from them, reached over and patted his arm. “Always,” she said, smiling.

He’d expected Amelia to jump on the idea of taking a safari, but no. She’d sat back in her seat, curled her legs beneath her, and gazed out the window. Her dreams had nothing to do with Africa. Thanks to Sheri’s indulgence, and thanks to older girls that Amelia had since met at singing competitions and in community theater who’d gone on to get meager jobs in New York plays, she was
still
dreaming. She kept up with these girls on Facebook and was always telling him and Sheri about so-and-so’s latest whatever. This was why he made an ongoing, serious effort to direct her toward more practical pursuits, secure ones. He had to make certain that too much of what she’d inherited from his mother didn’t come out and ruin her life as surely as his mother’s dreamy, poorly considered choices had ruined hers—and nearly his own.

B-R-O-A-D-W-A-Y
, Harlan typed, and then he hit
ENTER
.

“Bingo,” he breathed, grinning as the screen became a field of wildflowers backdropped by blue sky. His pleasure would last a mere seven minutes, and that seven-minute span would be the last of it for a long time to come.

4

HE BUFFED, GLOWING FLOORS OF THE
R
AVENSWOOD HALLWAYS
were aswarm with students hurrying to their lockers or pushing their way toward the cafeteria or the exit to the parking lot. Kim Winter stepped into the chaos with Brittany Mangum on her heels.

“But see, Ms. Winter, I really do actually know how to conjugate
dormir
and
venir
, it’s just that I was up really late Sunday, studying, for, for my Algebra II test, okay, and so I was so-o-o tired by French, right, and I didn’t even eat any breakfast that day, I mean, I know I should have, and I do, most days—”

“It was one quiz,” Kim said. “You’ll have chances to make up the lost points before term ends.” Looking past Brittany, she spotted William Braddock at the far end of the hallway, near the stairwell entrance. He caught her eye and smiled.

“I know, I know,” the girl said, flinging her straight brown hair behind her shoulders, “but see, my dad, he expects me to get all A’s on quizzes—no excuse for a bad quiz grade, that’s what he says, quizzes being easier than tests, right—”

“If I let you take it over, I have to do the same for everyone who did poorly.” Which was most of the class. When the students traded papers and Kim had begun reading out the answers, groans came from every row.

“Okay, yeah. Strictly speaking, you would, right, to be fair—which is why we don’t have to
tell
anybody. I’ll come in after school, and—”

“Brittany. No. I’m sorry. Tell your dad you’ll do extra credit—I have several opportunities outlined on Blackboard—and then make sure you do it.”

“Please? Please please
please
?” The girl pouted charmingly, but Kim wasn’t swayed. Based on what she’d overheard in first period Art Studio, she knew Brittany’s Sunday night hadn’t been occupied by math, but by Seth Herzog, her boyfriend, who’d hosted a big parents-are-gone party. What might Brittany’s dad think of that? What might William Braddock think of it—and had he heard the tale yet? Kim glanced at him. His cheekbones still showed signs of his weekend sunburn, a reminder of their lunch date in a kayak on Lake Johnson. Might he be wearing the same aftershave he’d worn Saturday? Scent had a lot to do with attraction, though he could smell like dirt and she’d hardly care—

“Ms. Winter?” Brittany said.

“What? Oh,” she said, turning back to the girl. “Nope, sorry. Now go on and get some lunch.” The girl was too thin by far.

Kim watched William—admired him, really, as he bantered with passing students, until Debbie Marchek, the twenty-three-year-old newly minted teacher who taught German in a neighboring classroom appeared next to her, saying, “Is it just my students, or is there something in the air today?”

“What’s that?” Kim asked, turning toward Debbie reluctantly.