Just Desserts (24 page)

And there was still no sign of Atlanta.

Savannah tried not to even think about it, let alone panic. God knows, her head couldn’t take any added strain. But the thought of a girl as pretty and as naive as Atlanta running around Southern California scared her half to death. It was a toss up which brand of trouble she would dive into first.

Ah ha! There it was, shoved into the back of the vanity’s lower drawer. The all-purpose hot water bottle, cold water bottle, enema, douche bag. She hadn’t used it in years, so it kicked up a bit of dust as she pulled it out, along with its various attachments.

Just as she was about to close the drawer something caught her eye—a flat gold box. A very nice garment gift box with tissue spilling out one side.

What was this? A present long forgotten? She was forever poking things into strange places, then finding them later and being delighted with her “new” treasure.

A bit of black lace peeking out hinted at something naughty and nice. For some reason she instantly thought of Ryan.

Pulling the box out, she lifted the lid and found a pair of almost there, G-string panties, made of high-quality black lace and satin, as well as a matching garter belt and stockings. “What the ... ?” A gossamer-thin chemise of soft, rippling chiffon completed the costume. Pure, elegant, slutty ... and it
wasn’t
hers!

That meant—

Oh, lord, she didn’t want to think what that meant.

She could have happily waited another twenty years to know that her sweet, innocent little sister wore this sort of garb. But if she had seen it in Atlanta’s suitcase, or in one of the drawers with her other lingerie, she wouldn’t have been so concerned.

This stuff had been hidden. And was in a gift box. And since some of the how-to-launder tags were still attached, she assumed it was new.

To the best of her knowledge Atlanta hadn’t had enough money to buy something like this since she had arrived. That only meant ...

She searched the box for a receipt—anything—and found a white card. Scrawled across it, beneath the embossed name of the store, were the words:

To Atlanta,
A rare and delicate Southern beauty,
At the beginning of a long, fulfilling career.
Forever yours,
Max

“Savannah! What are you doing?” The shrill voice shattered her nerves, and she dropped the box, spilling its contents onto the floor.

She spun around—a movement that cost her dearly—and saw Atlanta standing in the doorway, her face as dark as a Mississippi River thunderstorm.

“You
are
just like Mom!” the girl shouted. “Neither one of you have any respect for my privacy!”

She ran into the room, scooped the lingerie from the floor, and shoved it back into the box. Holding it tightly against her chest, she began to cry. “You had no right, going through my stuff like that! This is
my
room and—”

“Wait a minute!” Savannah held up one hand in a gesture reminiscent of her traffic cop days. “Just hold on a gall-darned minute. I’ll have you know that this is, first and foremost,
my
house. Every inch of it. I bought it, I make the payments on it, and I’m the one who’s going to have to put a new roof on it next year.”

She slammed the drawer closed with her foot. “You,” she continued, “are a guest in
my
home. My home, my room, my vanity, and my drawer. Got it?”

Atlanta plopped down on the unmade bed and stuck out her lower lip in a petulant pout.

“Furthermore, you are a minor in my home, temporarily—I hope—under my guardianship. And while I do respect your right to your privacy, I don’t expect you to abuse that right by hiding things from me. Privacy is fine, but we’re talking secrets here, and people only hide things they’re ashamed of.”

“You’re wrong!” Atlanta shoved the box under the blankets. “I’m not ashamed of anything. I just know that you’re so straight and hung up about things that you wouldn’t approve of me developing a relationship with an older man. So I had to—”

“An older man? Just how old is this Max guy, if that’s his real name? And what the hell is he doing giving you crap like that?”

“It’s expensive lingerie, not crap.”

Savannah recalled the feel of the heavy silk between her fingers. “All right, it’s expensive crap. Now, who is this guy?”

“I’m not going to talk to you about him. I have something very beautiful with him, and talking about it with you would make it seem dirty or something.”

“Very beautiful?” Savannah couldn’t comprehend the depth of this girl’s naïveté. How had she managed to live for sixteen years without learning anything about the world and its scumbag inhabitants? “You’ve only been here a couple of days! How can you have something beautiful with
anybody
that quick?”

“Max and me, we’re soul mates. We’ve been lovers before in a previous life. I knew it the minute I saw him, and so did he. But you wouldn’t understand anything like that, because you aren’t a spiritual person. You’re probably a young soul. In fact, I’ll bet this is your first time around.”

“Around what?” She shook her head, trying to clear it. This was getting more bizarre by the minute. “Look,” she said, carefully reining in her anger, “I don’t know who this man is or what has happened between you, but I can tell you now that, whatever line of bull he’s given you, he doesn’t have your best interests at heart. And if he’s been sexual with you in any way, he’s a criminal. You are still under age and that makes it child molestation.”

Atlanta grabbed one of the pillows from the bed, buried her face in it, and began screaming hysterically. At first Savannah was alarmed; the kid appeared to be completely unhinged. Had she suffered some sort of nervous breakdown? Did sixteen-year-olds have nervous breakdowns?

Then Savannah remembered having witnessed this sort of spectacle before—when Atlanta was younger, say, about three. This wasn’t soulful agony, resulting from emotional trauma. This was an old-fashioned temper tantrum.

“Atlanta, stop that! You’re overreacting.”

Instantly the hysterics ceased and the room was silent. The pillow lowered, and Savannah was looking into two of the angriest eyes she had seen in ages, even counting the ones that had been sighting down a gun barrel.

“That does it,” Atlanta said with deadly calm. “I hope you’re proud of yourself. I loved you. I trusted you. And you’ve violated me. Thanks to you I’ll never be able to love or trust another human being again.”

Savannah had heard enough. As Gran would say, her can was full—way full and overflowing. “Sure you will, ‘Lanta,” she said with equally cold sarcasm. “You’ll trust that Max pervert, who’s just out to get into your pants. At least I hope that’s all he’s after. But you won’t trust anyone who truly loves you, unless they’re kissing your cute little butt and telling you everything you want to hear.”

“Shut up, Savannah! You don’t even know Max. How can you say things like that about someone you don’t even know?”

“Just answer me a couple of questions. Is he over twenty-one?”

Reluctantly, she nodded.

“Over thirty?”

Again.

“Has he screwed you yet?”

“No!” She pulled herself up into that haughty pose that Savannah was quickly learning to despise. “He has
not!
He says he has too much respect for me to just
take
me like that. He wants to wait until the time is right, a really romantic time, when he can make it special for me. He said so.”

She paused and fluffed her hair, striking what she probably thought was a sexy pose, but Savannah found the look overt and foolish. The kid didn’t know the first thing about the subtleties of feminine sensuality.

“For now,” Atlanta said, a dreamy look in her eyes, “Max says he just wants to worship my body from afar. He wants to record my beauty for all the world to enjoy. He says every woman will envy me and every man will want me.”

“That son of a bitch has talked you into posing for him, hasn’t he? He wants you to do nude shots and—”

“No, he doesn’t. Max said I didn’t have to show anything I didn’t want to.”

“Didn’t have to ... ? You’ve already done it? You’ve posed for this jerk?”

“He isn’t a jerk. He’s a very nice man who helped me realize that I should be proud of my body. Nudity is healthy. Only those who are ashamed of their bodies feel the need to cover them up.”

“How about good old decency and modesty? Those are healthy, too, you know.”

Savannah’s strength left her in a wave that traveled from her head to her feet, then seemed to flow out onto the floor around her. If she didn’t lie down soon, she was going to fall down.

“Atlanta, I was assaulted last night,” she said, holding her hand to the back of her head, which felt as though a worker for Cal Trans was drilling into it with a jackhammer. “And I—”

“You were assaulted? What do you mean?”

“I mean one of the bad boys knocked me in the head and I was unconscious for several hours.”

“Oh, mercy! That’s awful! Are you all right?”

Savannah felt a passing wave of relief to see that the girl wasn’t so self-centered that she couldn’t appreciate someone else’s misfortune. Maybe there was hope for her after all.

“Can I do anything for you? I mean, do you want me to warm up some soup for you or get you some ice cream?”

Savannah’s heart melted. This was the Atlanta she remembered with so much affection, the considerate, loving little girl who had rubbed her neck and brushed her hair when she was a child. This was the Atlanta who had seemed to disappear with the onset of puberty, to be replaced with the vain, egocentric, bubble head whom she had been living with the past few days.

Savannah walked over to her sister, sat on the edge of the bed, and put her arms around her waist. Holding her close, she said, “Thanks, sweetie, but I’m all right. I just need to lie down.”

She pulled back and looked down into her sister’s eyes, which were wet with unshed tears. “But what I want more than anything,” she continued, “is for you to be safe and happy. I love you, ’Lanta. I don’t want you to get hurt. And, whether you’ll believe me or not, you’re very close to getting badly hurt. Some of the mistakes you’re about to make can have lifelong repercussions.”

Atlanta pushed her away and rolled to the other side of the bed. “You need to trust me more, Savannah. I’m not stupid, you know. I can take care of myself, if you’ll just leave me alone.”

“Stay away from him, Atlanta, or I swear I’ll bust him for messing with a minor.” Considering her current lack of status with the SCPD, Savannah knew the threat was as empty as a race horse’s bladder, but Atlanta didn’t know that. “I will; I’ll do it. If I even get wind of you seeing him again, he’s in the slammer. And you should see what they’ll do to this ‘soul mate’ of yours in prison. Even the least desirables of our society hate child molesters.”

She had scored that time; she could see the fear mixed with rage in Atlanta’s eyes. Maybe, just maybe, it would work.

“If you ever did anything like that ...” Atlanta said, her voice shaking with fury, “if you ever put a friend of mine in jail, I swear, I’d hate you forever.”

The animosity in her words took Savannah off guard. She had bluffed the kid; now the kid was bluffing back. Or maybe she was serious. Either way, now wasn’t the time to back down.

Savannah looked her squarely in the eye and said, “Okay, if that’s the way you feel. I can live with it.”

With a studied nonchalance that was one hundred percent a facade, Savannah rose from the bed and left the room. It wasn’t until she was safely ensconced in her own bed that she allowed the mask to drop and herself to cry.

“Mom, you
have
to take her back. I’m not kidding, Mom! If you think you had problems with her there, you should see the kind of trouble she’s into here! I’m serious, Mom. Mom, you’d better—”

Beep! Click. Dial tone.

That damned answering machine of her mother’s always ran out of tape before she ran out of wind. Angry, she hung up the phone, picked it up again, and punched redial.

Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz ...

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s busy, all right. Takes half an hour for that stupid fossil to rewind.”

She tried again. This time she got through.

“Hi, this is Shirley Reid. I’m sorry I’m not home to take your call but ...”

Savannah drummed her fingers on the kitchen counter, waiting for the rest of the message and her beep cue.

“Mom, really, call me back about Atlanta. We have to figure something out right away. This
isn’t
going to work! And by the way, Mom, you really shouldn’t say your name on your machine. And it’s best not to tell them that you aren’t at—”

Beep. Click. Dial tone.

“... at home. Shit.”

S
avannah knew she should be home in bed, not only because Dr. Weinberg had told her to stay there, but because she felt dizzy, queasy, and ready to throw up all over the interior of the Camaro. Not good; she had just had it reupholstered.

She rolled down the window, just in case.

Doctor’s orders or not, headache and nausea aside, she simply couldn’t stay in that bed another minute. Somewhere out there in the big, bad world was a stringy-haired, scraggle-toothed blond who had chosen the wrong broad to bop. She and he had a little rendezvous with destiny, known as payback time.

A rendezvous with destiny,
she played the words over in her mind, enjoying the melodrama of the phrase.
Savannah Reid, Private Investigator—the streets and its criminals never sleep
...
and neither does she.

She would like to,
she quickly amended,
she just never gets the chance.

Rounding the corner on Laurel Street, she pulled into the gas station where she had last seen the unkempt gentleman in question about a week earlier. She had come out of the adjacent convenience store, peach-flavored Snapple in hand, to find him with his head stuck through the driver’s window of the Camaro, looking around.