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“Good, I guess. She had to go to NA, but she also has a supervised visit with the kids scheduled from noon to four.”
Van grew saddened. “That has to be torture leaving them behind after being torn away from them. What did the lawyers say?”
“They seemed pretty confident they would get both cases dismissed, CPS and the stupid drug trafficking charge.”
“And the work thing?”
“Yeah, that, too.”
“I hope she sues everyone when it’s done.”
“I don’t know if she has any fight left in her.” She had been subdued and aloof when I came home from my shift that morning. I worried about her. She was obviously depressed, and I wasn’t sure if the medication she was taking for the postpartum anxiety was doing enough. I wanted to bring it up, but I didn’t want to sound accusatory or overbearing.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Janie and how to help her even after my phone call with Van ended. I dragged myself out of bed and into the kitchen where I ate a bowl of cereal. My gaze fell on the giant stack of mail I had retrieved from the post office. It didn’t look as if Janie had touched it yet.
Wanting to be helpful, I alternated bites of cereal with sorting through the envelopes. There was a stomach-churning amount of past due bills and scary letters from our rental insurance policy and the townhouse insurer threatening to sue Janie and my dad. There were copies of letters from DFPS and notices from the prosecutor and the arson investigator.
Looking at the stack of mail, I could see why Janie hadn’t sorted through it. Trouble was piled on top of trouble. The stress she felt must have been crushing. It made me even more proud of her. She was struggling, but she wasn’t giving up yet. She could have been hiding under a blanket in bed, depressed and broken, but she was getting up and working the program to get Colt, Hannah and Daisy back.
As I moved through the stack of mail, I found numerous forwarded pieces of mail addressed to me from a box number I had never seen. My anxiety skyrocketed as my mind went wild with possibilities. When I turned one of the envelopes over, there was a sticky note on the back with a scribbled message about failing to pay rent on a mailbox.
What in the world?
I grabbed my phone from the bedroom and searched for the address. It belonged to a UPS store not far from Dad’s job. Why did he have a secret mailbox? What was he hiding now?
I opened the first of the forwarded pieces of mail. Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn’t statements for maxed out credit cards in my name. I had never even attempted to get a card of any kind which meant that my father had been using my identity to get his hands on money. Money that I now owed!
I wanted to puke. How was I going to pay for school if I needed student loans in the future? I wouldn’t be able to finance a Big Mac at this rate!
Fury swirled in my gut. I had long since stopped feeling any sort of love toward my father. Now I felt only anger and loathing. Why was he like this? Why was he so selfish? So cruel?
I grabbed another envelope, this one thicker and larger than the ones I had just opened. I pulled out folded paperwork. My blood ran cold as I scanned the forms. It was a life insurance policy—on me.
I gulped hard, trying to maintain control as my whole body trembled with shock and dread. I reached for another envelope and opened it. Inside, there was another policy from a different company, also on me. My fingers shook as I opened the third envelope. This one had a policy for my little brother, not much, probably just enough to cover a burial.
What the fuck?
The other envelopes held policy paperwork for Daisy, Hannah and Janie. The policy on Janie was big, but it was still less than the amounts of my policies added together. Almost a million dollars across all those policies on my life.
He tried to kill me.
He tried to kill all of us.
Whatever doubts I had harbored about my father’s involvement in that fire vanished. Suddenly, all those old uneasy feelings about my mother’s drowning surfaced. Had he killed her for her insurance money?
Memories of my childhood flashed before me. The late-night fights between my parents. My mother crying all the time. The electricity being cut off in the hottest part of summer. My mother’s little red sedan being repossessed. Being told I had to pick out the most important things and put them in a single moving box because we couldn’t stay in our house.
And then my mother died.
And, suddenly, after the funeral, we moved into a new house. Dad bought a new truck and then a boat. He met Janie and things were good until the money problems started again.
He tried to kill us because of greed.
I dropped the papers I held and backed away from the pile of mail as if it were a venomous snake poised to strike. I stumbled out of the kitchen and to the bathroom attached to my room. Numb, I peeled out of my pajamas and into a hot shower. I felt dirty and grimy and desperately scrubbed my skin to feel clean again.
I was pulling on a T-shirt when the doorbell rang. I figured it was probably Janie, and she had forgotten her key. I grabbed a pair of shorts and hurried to answer, not wanting to leave her out there in the heat for too long.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, not at all expecting to come face to face with Danny. In a Red Cross T-shirt. In my very boring cotton underwear.
