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* * *
Jules sat in his office at the Family Center tapping away on his laptop when someone knocked on the door. “Enter,” he said, not looking up from the screen.
Brenda, his assistant, appeared anxious.
“What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he noted. “Scrap that. You look like a ghost, the color has drained from you face. What’s wrong?”
“Oh, Jules. I…I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. I hope Amber doesn’t see it. I’m trying to speak to the magazine’s IT department to do something about it.”
“About what?” Jules felt his blood pump hard. Why did he have the sinking his wife may be in danger?
“I…well, have you seen the Spring Magazine’s home page?”
Jules quickly switched over to the company’s home screen page. There was the image of the month of Jules, Amber and little Crystal in that PR pose for Family of the Month. “What the…?”
Brenda bowed her head in shame.
Below the picture there were rude comments he’d rather not take in. But he couldn’t help but scan the screen. One comment in particular, grated on his nerves:
“Some family of the month. He’s not even the baby’s daddy--LOL!”-K.P.
Who the heck was KP?
There were mostly congratulatory comments but the one caustic comment seemed to stand out and Jules’s gut clenched. Anger seethed through his blood. He felt his temperature boil to the point where he felt as if he was in an inferno.
“Damn!”
“I’m sorry this happened, Jules.”
“So am I.” Jules’s tone of voice was razor sharp and pointed. “Get their team on the phone. The last thing I need is for the local press to get wind of this. They’d distort things and that would really piss me off.” He then asked Brenda to call his family’s press secretary, Pamela, to prepare some damage control statements just in case it was necessary.
The last thing he’d want was for the media to go buzzing about who the biological father of Amber’s child was. Damn it! He didn’t even know the answer to that question.
* * *
Amber sat at the salon, trying to enjoy her treatment. Her mind was on little Crystal. She really needed the break but she was always wondering how her baby was doing. She knew Crystal was in good hands at the Romero residence with her grandparents so she tried to squash any worries.
“Honey, what’s this?” Luckella, the hairdresser, said to Amber after she’d finished with her conditioner treatment.
“What’s what?” Amber’s curiosity was piqued. She had given Luckella a copy of the brochure, inviting her to the community barbecue and had told her about her upcoming photo shoot at Spring Magazine.
Luckella had, of course, gone online to see the photo op on the Spring Magazine website from her smartphone. She then showed the display of her phone to Amber. “Why haters gotta hate like that?” Luckella commented.
Amber felt sick to her stomach. A wave of nausea slammed into her gut. “What?” she said, her hair still dripping. She squeezed her eyes shut then re-opened them.
“You want me to reply to that asshole?” Luckella got her phone ready to rip him (or her) apart.
“No. N-no.” Amber couldn’t think. She was disgraced. Horrified. Who would have written such a nasty remark?
* * *
An hour later, Jules had his shirtsleeves rolled up. Spring Magazine was on the phone with him apologizing. They knew how generous and influential the Romero family was. It was a small community magazine and often featured locals in the area but had never had this happen on the website before.
The IT team from the magazine traced the IP address from the so-called anonymous commenter.
“Well, you know we have the person’s information if you’re interested.”
“I am,” he said, anger curdling his blood. If he ever got his hands on the lowlife who did this.
“Do you know a Mavis Murray?”
Jules almost wasn’t surprised but the confirmation still came as a rude awakening. He grabbed his jacket off the counter and told Dion to meet him at the café.
* * *
“Did you have anything to do with Amber’s parents’ deaths?” Jules challenged Mavis later at the Murray Café. Mavis stood by the window of her office, her chin up, her arms secured across her chest.
“I admit I made a mistake and wrote that…comment. But I…,” Mavis appeared shaken and sat down in the chair beside her in her back office at the Murray Café. “But I swear to you, I wasn’t the driver of the car who killed my sister and her husband. I…I wasn’t.” she stammered. Her eyes barely met with Jules.
“Well, you certainly went out of your way to make Amber’s life miserable. Why?”
“It’s not what it appears. I’m so sorry. You won’t tell Amber, will you?”
Jules exchanged an incredulous glance with his brother who stood in the corner like a bad cop while Jules continued to interrogate Mavis.
Dion slid his hand in his pocket and extracted an old newspaper clipping to Jules. Jules took the paper and showed it to Mavis.
Her eyes widened. “H-how did you find this?”
“It wasn’t hard, Mavis.” Jules’s voice softened a fraction but he was still riled up. “I understand your…disappointment in your fiancé.”
Mavis snapped the picture from him and glared at it. It was an engagement announcement in the Mayberry Hill Times, over thirty years ago. A picture of Amber’s stepfather and a young woman—Mavis.
Mavis swallowed hard and threw the picture on the table. Her lips were thinned but trembling. “Yes, we were supposed to get married. But…” she paused, drawing in a deep breath. “My sister decided my fiancé was good enough for her so she took him instead. How do you think it makes me feel looking at…Amber year in and year out? She was a reminder.”
“She was an innocent party to this. She’s not even the product of their marriage. You know that.”
“I know, but she still looks just like her. My sister. I despise looking at her, okay? It hurts me to look at her every day. And then when her parents got killed, I was forced to look after her.”
“You really need to get help, Mavis,” Jules said as sincerely as he could.
“I’m not the one with the memory issues. She can’t even remember anything that happened that night.”
Jules shot Mavis a scorching glance. His patience was stretched to the limit. No more mister nice guy. “You need to get help,” he repeated in a controlled voice. “Then you need to stay far away from my wife from now on. Find another job, too. Do you hear me?”
Mavis responded to Jules by glaring at him.
Jules was about to walk away when something in his gut pulled him in a different direction. It was something Mavis said. Mavis had mentioned she wasn’t the one driving the car in the crash that killed her sister and her sister’s family. What did she mean by that? Something else Amber told Jules was also making things fit into place.
“How old was Amber when she started her therapy?” he asked Mavis. He had his smartphone out of his pocket ready to call JoJo from the agency. Something really wasn’t adding up. He didn’t like the sinking feeling he was getting at all. But his gut was telling him that Mavis was telling the truth. She was not the one driving the car but she sure as hell could have been in the elusive car.
Just then, his cell phone rang and he answered it. “Yeah?”
“I’ve got some strong leads. We managed to track down that mystery witness that came forth recently but then backed out of telling the cops everything,” his source reported to him over the phone. “The guy was some storm watcher who took snapshots at the time of the accident. Saw the whole thing before he came down with a sudden case of amnesia. It’s not good news, Jules.”
“I’ll be right there,” Jules confirmed with his source before finishing his call. “Better let the boys down at the division know what’s going on,” Jules then said to his brother, Dion.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
An hour later, after her session at the beauty parlor, Amber felt anything but beautiful. The ugliness of the day clawed its way in. That awful remark. And Jules. Poor Jules. It had to be someone in the family circle who knew about Crystal’s real father.
She received a text from her aunt Mavis to meet her at the apartment above the café so she decided to go straight there.
Amber walked up the steps, feeling dreary. Was Aunt Mavis behind the comments? Was she going to apologize? She saw a missed called from Jules but decided she would call him right after she found out what her aunt had to say.
Amber knew she would burst into tears if she spoke to Jules. She should have been upfront about Amber’s real father. Was Jules disappointed in her?
She finally reached her old unit and was surprised to see the door ajar. “Aunt Mavis?” Amber continued inside.
She turned around feeling something was a bit off; the place seemed eerily abandoned. But it was too late to act, the door slammed shut behind her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“You sure you’ve got this all figured out?” Dion turned to Jules as Jules pushed on the gas pedal of his SUV hoping to reach Amber’s old apartment in time. He tried her cell phone again. No answer. That just wasn’t like her.
