Stay (Dunham series #2) (3 page)

Eric heard Hilliard’s voice in his head now, in his
dreams—and he had nothing better to do but sleep—accusing him of
things he hadn’t done, presenting evidence so clearly, so
indubitably that now even Eric believed he’d done it. The clang of
jail cell doors, ever present, didn’t disturb his sleep

until he awoke in a panic, Hilliard standing over
him in his cot . . .

Looking at him completely differently.

“What,” Eric snapped, deeply offended that the
asshole had invaded his meager space.

“You’re free to go.”

“Uh—” He looked at his attorney, who had a pleased
smile on her face.

“Eric, we couldn’t have asked for better.”

He sat up slowly, looking back up at Hilliard
suspiciously, certain this was a trick, some cruel thing Hilliard
would do because Hilliard was cruel.

Perhaps he was just dreaming. There was nothing of
the rage, the hatred in Hilliard’s face now. A smile that bordered
on—relieved?—threatened to ruin Eric’s image of him, then he
turned.

“Bring him to my office when he’s ready to go,” he
finally said over his shoulder. “Make everything official. He
doesn’t belong here.”

“Thanks, Knox.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said as he maneuvered his way
around Eric’s attorney to leave the cell. “Thank one brave little
girl.”

Eric waited until Hilliard left, then looked up at
his attorney. He knew his confusion showed and he didn’t care. He
was broken. At seventeen.

“Simone confessed?”

She smiled and shook her head, but would say nothing
until Eric was attired in the suit she’d provided for him to wear
for the trial. They were the only clothes he had that weren’t neon
orange.

“Don’t worry about your hair now.”

Eric knew he was vain. Vain enough to want to keep
his hair long, vain enough to risk tucking it down his shirt collar
for his trial so as not to give off the stink of
half-breed-bastard-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks, vain enough
to fight for it.

When he was ushered into the Chouteau County
prosecutor’s private office, he was shocked to see its six other
occupants. He stopped and looked around, obeying his hard-won
instincts for suspicion. Nocek, the head prosecutor, had
disappeared. That really shook him up. Nocek ran the office and the
county with an iron—albeit crooked—fist and without ever leaving
his office. Was it possible Nocek himself was afraid of
Hilliard?

His mother, tears in her eyes. Eric hadn’t seen her
since before he was arrested four months ago.

Jenkins, his boss, the owner of Chouteau County Feed
and Tack. He hadn’t bothered to show up at the courthouse, even to
tell Eric he was fired.

Rayburn, the principal of Chouteau County High
School.

Two of his advanced placement teachers, science and
English.

Hilliard, leaning back against Nocek’s desk relaxed,
as relaxed and at ease in his boss’s office as if it were his, his
ankles crossed, his hands in his pockets. He had that same strange
expression on his face that Eric didn’t trust for a minute.

“I thought you said I was free to go,” Eric finally
muttered when no one seemed inclined to stop staring at him or to
speak.

Hilliard inclined his head. “You are. But. I have a
proposition for you.”

Eric cast a wary glance at his attorney whose mouth
crooked in a relieved smile, then back at Hilliard. “I’m not
fucking you.”

Hilliard laughed then—roared—his laugh no less
deafening than his most enraged bellow. He finally wound down to a
chuckle and wiped his mouth. “Ah, no. That’s not what I had in
mind. I want to send you to college.”

Eric’s mouth dropped open. College!

A vague hope before his arrest, one he had worked
toward in spite of his unwillingness to let the hope gel into a
dream or, even worse, a goal—the one he hadn’t dared think about
while he was in jail, on trial.

But Hilliard kept talking. “I’ve been watching you,
looking through your record, wondering how a smart kid like you
managed to fuck up so badly when what you want is crystal
clear.”

“Why am I here?” Eric demanded. “What happened?
Something happened and I want to know what it was.”

Hilliard’s mouth pressed a bit, but not, apparently,
in anger. In thought. As if he didn’t know whether to say or
not.

“We found proof of your innocence,” he finally said.
“Someone who knew something came forward.”

Thank one brave little girl.

For the life of him, Eric couldn’t figure out who
could do that other than Simone, and his attorney had already said
she hadn’t done so.

“College,” Hilliard said, jerking Eric’s attention
back. “Mr. Rayburn and your teachers have vouched for your
willingness to work, to improve your station in life. Mr. Jenkins
has told me how you’ve managed his store for the last year,
part-time, taking a heavy course load and getting straight A’s. So.
I’m willing to pay for your education provided you work as hard
during your senior year as you have in the past and provided you go
where I send you and obey their rules.”

“Anything,” Eric breathed, willing to go to all the
way across the other side of the northland to William Jewell in
Liberty, at least twenty-five miles.

“Don’t you want to know what the rules are?”

“I don’t care.”

“Mmmm, you might. No drinking, no smoking, no drugs.
No fucking around. At all. You’ll have to get rid of the earrings,
cut your hair. Short. Your course load will include religion
classes.” Eric blinked. “Those are their rules. You need an
attitude adjustment and you need to learn some propriety. I don’t
have time to kick your ass constantly, so the deal is, you spend
this year working on getting into Brigham Young University.”

Eric had no idea what or where that was, and
apparently his face showed it.

“Mormons. Utah. You go there, you do a good job, you
follow their rules. You stay there until you graduate—and I don’t
give a shit what you study—then you stay another three years for
grad school, because I think you can do it. That’s the deal and
I’ll give you a free ride all the way through. Any scholarship
money you come up with is fine, but your job is school and don’t
even think about working during the school year. I’ll give you what
you need.”

Eric knew nothing about Mormons, though he knew
where Utah was on a map. It was a long way away, but he sure as
hell was not going to pass up this opportunity.

“Yes, sir,” he breathed, wondering how his nemesis
had turned into his mentor in the blink of an eye.

“We’ll help you, Eric,” said his science teacher.
Eric turned to the man who’d spent the last year torturing him with
physics and who’d spend next year torturing him with chemistry.
“BYU is a prestigious university and difficult to get into,
especially for a non-Mormon who’s not an athlete.”

“But,” Hilliard murmured, “you’re half American
Indian and that trumps everything else in that admissions office.
With your grades and ACT score, there won’t be a question.”

“You’ll need an ecclesiastical endorsement,” added
his English teacher, who was also his guidance counselor, “but I
don’t think we’ll have a problem rounding up a preacher somewhere.
Do you have a church?”

“He is Osage,” his mother said, her tone sharp, “as
Mr. Hilliard just said. He doesn’t go to any white man’s
church.”

“He won’t have to,” Jenkins said gruffly, the way he
said everything. “My pastor owes me a favor. He’ll do it.”

Hilliard nodded then, satisfied. “Thank you,
everyone,” he said, and Eric knew it was settled. Had settled. All
around him. Like the snow in a snow globe. Eric felt as if he’d
been inside it and gotten his head rattled around. “Eric, you
stay.”

Everyone took this as their cue to file out. The
door closed quietly after them.

Eric swallowed, not sure how to treat this man, only
barely able to look at him, wondering what obeisance would be
required, willing to walk away from the deal if Hilliard wanted . .
.

“The Whittakers,” he said, low, and Eric snapped to
attention, looking Hilliard square in the face. “You know the
family?”

“I told you everything I know,” Eric replied, still
wary, still suspicious of a trap. “Simone dresses up older than her
age and puts out to anybody who’ll have her. I’ve seen her sister.
Seen their mother here and there, shootin’ her mouth off, slappin’
the little girl around.” That woman was plain evil.

Hilliard nodded slowly, looking at the floor, his
tongue stuck in his cheek. Eric knew that look by now. Thinking.
Eric waited long moments before Hilliard decided to speak again;
even so, it startled him.

“Simone had planned it to the last detail and was
stupid enough to write it down. I don’t know if her mother was in
on it, but I suspect so. Simone seems to get vindictive when she
doesn’t get what she wants and what she wanted was
you
.”

Eric swallowed. For once in his life, he’d done the
right thing, and it had nearly destroyed him.

“Vanessa. The little girl. Simone’s sister. She
brought me Simone’s diary. It was all there. Not only did Simone
not get you, she lost the rest of her playmates, too. She named
names. I’m rounding them up right now.”

Eric’s breath stuck in his throat.

“Tell me something. Would
you
want to go back
home to LaVon Whittaker, knowing you’d gone against her? Go back to
school knowing that half a dozen
male
juniors and seniors, a
teacher, and a couple other grown men with their own families are
going to prison because you coughed up the evidence?”

“Fuck no,” he whispered, horrified. LaVon Whittaker,
all Eric’s burly classmates and their fathers, the families of the
other men who’d done Simone Whittaker—versus one little girl.

“Yeah, me neither. So you think about that. Think
about what a twelve-year-old girl did for you just because it was
the right thing to do. Don’t let her down, Eric. Don’t let what she
did for you be in vain.”

* * * * *

4: Young Mr. Wilder

May 1996

And there
he
was again. Tall, dark, and very
dangerous.

The senior girls had always flocked around him
because he was “hot.” They said he knew things—things about girls
and how to make them feel good.

Well, Vanessa felt good every time she looked at
him.

She had watched him for the last year, since she’d
gone to see Mr. Hilliard, silent, invisible, wondering when or even
if he would see her and acknowledge her. Eric Cipriani would
graduate in a month. After that, she would probably see him around
town and in the feed store he managed, but she wouldn’t see him all
the time, like she did now. Every day, she woke up wondering,
hoping
that today would be the day he approached her to
say:

“Thank you, Vanessa. You’re probably the bravest
person I know.” And then maybe he would kiss her. Maybe on the
lips, even.

The thought made her catch her breath and get a
funny little sensation in the pit of her belly, which always
happened when she thought that maybe, just maybe he would like her
a little bit more than just as a brave person. Maybe he would come
to like her, you know,
that
way.

Because once he graduated, unless he had
that
reason to seek her out, she would have no such easy access to him
as she did now, no reason to go to the feed store, no reason to
cross his path at all. Vanessa was running out of time.

She stood behind a tree, peeking around it, to watch
him. He and his friends sat on the picnic tables just off campus,
drinking beer out of longneck bottles and smoking cigarettes while
they watched the senior girls, and pointed at a few of them here
and there, laughing. Although she didn’t know what was funny about
the senior girls, she loved his laugh. His smile made her want to
smile, too, so she did.

At that moment, his gaze met hers, and he stopped
laughing. Stopped smiling. Hurt began to blossom somewhere deep
inside her chest and she bit her lip, hoping his expression didn’t
mean what she thought it meant.

He turned away from her then and his beautiful long
black hair floated on the breeze. He didn’t respond to the talk
going on around him anymore and he took a long drink from his
bottle. He threw his cigarette down on the ground and stubbed it
out with his silver-tipped cowboy boots the high school girls said
had retractable knives in the toes.

He walked away from his friends—away from
Vanessa—without a word. Her attention caught on the way his tight
ripped jeans moved over his butt with every step, and there was
that funny little feeling in the pit of her belly again.

No “thank you” for Vanessa today. No kiss. She
whirled and, her back to the tree, she slid down its trunk to curl
in on herself, tamping down the sharp pain in her chest. She
managed not to cry about it for two whole months, until cheer camp
that summer.

“Vanessa,” drawled Annie Franklin, captain of the
squad. “Did you invite Knox to our camp closing exhibition?”

“Yes,” she lied. She hadn’t dared, though she knew
very good and well that her access to “that hot prosecutor Knox
Hilliard” was the only reason the cheerleaders, prodded by their
mothers, had reluctantly recruited her for the varsity squad.
Considering Vanessa wasn’t eligible to cheer varsity for two more
years, their mothers had lobbied the Alumni Association for an
exemption.

“Well? Is he coming?”

“He has a family thing.”

“Did you give him that note?”

“Yes,” she answered truthfully. That was why she
hadn’t dared ask him anything else.

“What did he say?”

Is she out of her fucking mind?!
“He was in a
hurry. He just put it in his pocket.”