Chapter 36

Phil had seen Hailey on campus in the past weeks and felt a pang even from a distance. Now that she was standing three feet in front of him he found he couldn’t do anything but look at her.

He noticed the pale, gaunt face and the dark circles under her eyes first. She looked tired and Phil felt a stab of guilt. He wasn’t her only concern. She was also dealing with her mother’s actions. She wore a loose T-shirt that covered the top of her shorts so he couldn’t determine how much weight she’d lost.

“Getting rid of the evidence?” she asked, gesturing to the sheets on top of the basket. Phil immediately looked down at what he carried and back up at Hailey. She was wearing a rueful smile.

“I’ve heard from a reliable source that it is possible to just show up here without getting tossed out on my butt,” she said. “Is that true?”

“Uh, sure,” Phil stammered. He hated that he couldn’t come up with what he wanted to say. He didn’t feel guilty about the night before but he knew he looked like he did. “Head on up.”

“Keep your eyes above the belt line, Sunshine,” Hailey said. “I don’t want you ogling my tush.”

She knew she was forcing conviviality into her voice. She shouldn’t be uncomfortable with someone she had shared so much intimacy with but she was. She came to understand as she walked up from the basement that she wasn’t upset about what happened with Tiffany (as much as she wanted to be) but instead she was scared at being rejected.

Sol was already inside when Phil got up the stairs. He had no doubt that the man had been there when Hailey had arrived (otherwise she wouldn’t have known where to find him).

“It’s unlocked,” Phil said. “Go on in and make yourself at home.”

He hoped to use a few minutes of making the bed to get his thoughts in order. She had surprised him, which appeared to be her intention, and caught him off guard. She continued to befuddle him because she followed him into the spare bedroom and helped him to make the bed. She didn’t glance at the open window or the air freshener on the dresser. She knew what had transpired but, as Tiffany had suspected, was only happy that it hadn’t happened in the bed she shared with Phil.

“I was going to call you today,” he admitted as they each put a pillow into a pillowcase. “I was just waiting until I could think of some way to tell you that I’m sorry for how I’ve been acting.”

“Me, too,” Hailey replied. “I truly regret what I did, Phil. I regret the situation I put you into. I regret not telling you what I wanted to do. I regret that my actions affected no only you but someone completely unrelated. We tried to help Collette.”

“Tiffany told me,” Phil said. “She said you’re going to be on restriction. How long?”

“All summer,” Hailey said with a shrug. “It’s not a big deal. If we complete three months of probation and attend an alcohol seminar it will be off our records. The only way they could be sure to make the charges stick was for us to admit everything. We didn’t think that was asking too much given what we’d done to Collette and to you. The police said you both could sue for restitution but not to hold your breath. I figured your mom would tell you about it. She knew.”

“We have kept our discussions away from personal things,” Phil said.

“I’m sorry about that most of all, I think,” Hailey told him, sitting down on the freshly made bed where four hours before her best friend and her ex-boyfriend had made love. “She didn’t say anything to me about it. We didn’t know it had affected that part of your life, too.”

She rubbed a hand across her tired eyes. She didn’t think she had any more tears left in her.

“What happened with your mom?” Phil wondered.

“She caved in,” Hailey replied. “The police left me a message on that Monday but I didn’t get back to them until Wednesday. By then, we weren’t talking any more. She had hidden my clothing and most of my jewelry in her car. I asked her to mail it to your house – just to twist the knife a little, I suppose. She’d already sold a couple pieces of jewelry. I agreed I wouldn’t press charges if she included the full amount of their value. It was about twice what she’d got for them but I told her it was better than prison. She tried to access my bank account but couldn’t. I told her that grand theft and theft by deception charges wouldn’t look very good during her job search.

“Your Mom said everything arrived the Monday after we left. She’s been handling the liquidation of assets for me. I planned to send Mom most of the money I got but after the shit she pulled, well, she got 10 percent. She had to sell her car, which I know pissed her off. She called last week to let me know she was interviewing for a job in Iowa but I didn’t hear how that went for her. Hell, she might have been so excited to find a few new playthings that she’s still there.”

“At least you got your things back,” Phil said, mostly to have something to say.

“They’re just things,” Hailey replied. “They aren’t important. The only thing they mean is that I have a way to survive until I can figure out what’s next.”

“You still have your internship,” Phil told her.

“Yeah,” Hailey agreed. “I tried to get out of it, you know. Your mother insisted that I would regret it if I dropped out. I don’t think it was a threat but it might have been. The paperwork had already been submitted and she was right anyhow. I would have regretted it.”

“I would have regretted it, too,” Phil told her. “You will do a great job this summer and you’ll be locked in for the next three years. You’ll have a nice career in front of you when you graduate and you can work on your MBA over time. It won’t really matter until you hit the top of the food chain and that’s probably at least a year or two away if college is any indication of your rise to prominence.”

“Oh, you,” Hailey said, blushing. “Thanks, and I hope I live up to her expectations.”

“Have you thought about where you’re going to live?” Phil asked.

“We’re going to take a bus down to look the weekend before finals,” Tiffany said. “We think that with all four of having jobs we can afford a decent place.”

“You can stay in the apartment,” he told her.

“What about you?” Hailey asked, startled by the suggestion.

“What about me?” he wondered.

“You’ll be in the city, too,” she told him. “Where will you live?”

“I can live with my parents or even there with you guys if it works out,” Phil answered.

“We’re not guys,” Hailey rejoined. “You have definite confirmation on at least two of us.”

“I do,” Phil said, keeping his voice level. “I hope you’re not pissed about that.”

“I was,” Hailey admitted. “Then I realized that I have no right to be angry at her or you. I put us in a situation where you were available to her. She seems to think it was inevitable that you two were going to find yourself in that situation but I think I knew you better than that. You might have sprouted wood every time she walked past but you wouldn’t have done something like that if I hadn’t given you the opportunity by being a clueless, selfish bitch.”

“We were all clueless,” Phil said.

“I noticed you didn’t refute the selfish bitch part,” Hailey replied.

“We were all selfish, too,” Phil admitted. “At least I was. I was happy with what I had – a hot girlfriend I could talk to and who liked to have a lot of sex – and I ignored the warning signs because I didn’t want to face what they meant. I got so caught up in showing you a life that I thought you’d drool over that I glossed over the situation with your mom and the fact that it might make you uncomfortable. I thought if I just kept busy everything would work out. I’m not saying that I’m not pissed off that you put yourself in danger but I do recognize why you didn’t tell me what you wanted.

“I probably would have reacted just like you thought I would. I would have whined and moped and wondered why I wasn’t enough to keep you entertained. I didn’t want to come off as the jealous type or as too needy so I didn’t say that I wanted you to come back with me. I wanted time alone with you, first of all, but I also wanted your support with the committee Mom roped me into joining. I should have just told you all of that.”

“I should have recognized it,” Hailey countered. “It’s stupid. We vow to have no secrets and the first thing we do is hide things. I was overwhelmed a bit at how much influence your family has. I knew your mom was a powerful businesswoman but I didn’t understand how much power she has in other areas. I mean, she basically gets to pick the next mayor. Whoever she supports will win. If it’s Joe Pepper, she’ll have a lot of markers to call in when she wants something or needs something.

“I knew that this is how things work but to see it up close – and to have it hit me that the guy I’m dating is going to have the same influence in a few years – it threw me. I’ve always thought I’d be able to manipulate the guy so I would have the power but I came to understand that would never be the case with you. The situation with Tiffany bothered me. The stuff with my Mom bothered me. I didn’t want to sound like a whiner so I pushed it all down. I thought a night on the town would be a good idea. The second place we went wasn’t in the plans. I thought we’d go to some club and dance. I figured there would be hundreds of people instead of 12. Then you know what came next. The cops said we were very lucky.”

“I told you the same thing,” Phil said.

“I thought you were just trying to scare us,” Hailey told him, shaking her head. “I thought you were just talking about worst-case scenarios.”

“They’re called trawlers,” Phil reported. “They go to the Under-21 clubs and find some naïve young women who hopefully are new to the city or who have no ties to it. Then really bad things happen. I wasn’t trying to scare you. You’ve heard of Bill Stout, the former senator?”

Hailey nodded.

“Three years ago his daughter found herself alone on the Riverfront,” he said. “It was pretty much an identical situation to yours. She was a big name in the capital and where she grew up. She was big on the party circuit at college. She thought that she was invincible. She wound up being attacked at one of the clubs. She got hurt really badly and only got away because some stranger gave his life to save hers.”

Hailey gasped.

“Gave his life?” she asked.

“One of the guys had a knife,” Phil said. “The guy interrupted the attempted rape and was stabbed. She ran off and hid but the guy bled out on the ground. The cops never identified who did it.”

“I didn’t hear about that!” Hailey said.

“The Mayor hushed it up,” Phil answered. “They found cocaine and X in the girl’s system when they took her to the hospital – not to mention that she was eight weeks pregnant. Remember, he was this big Family First candidate and she was his smiling, virginal progeny. You saw the campaign commercial, I’m sure. It was everywhere: ‘I’m Heather Stout and I’ve pledged my purity to the man I plan to marry.’ Six weeks after he’s elected she’s found stoned out of her mind in one of the shittiest areas of the state – and she’s pregnant. That’s whose seat is open in three years. Stout resigned midway through his first year and told everyone his wife had been diagnosed with an illness. Mom said it was his daughter who had been diagnosed – with HIV either from sex or sharing a needle – or it could have come from her attack at the Riverfront. One of the guys had forcibly penetrated her before the bystander intervened. She aborted the baby because it would be born with it, too.”

“Jesus Christ,” Hailey said. “And the Mayor just hushed this up? Why in the hell would she do that?”

“This was a month or two after the British tourists disappeared down there,” Phil reminded her. “The media has always been in the mayor’s pocket so they just nodded dumbly when she constantly referred to the area as Newtown. Newtown is on the other side of the river. They disappeared in Riverfront. Everyone knew it. You can’t get off the highway in Newtown from the direction they were going. It was stupid but it just shows you how things are there.

“The mayor claims that the crime rate is down. You know why that is? It’s because she transferred new commanders to the high-crime areas with express orders to urge citizens not to report ‘unimportant’ or ‘unsolvable’ criminal activity. In other words, don’t bother calling the cops if you see a drug deal on the corner or if the three guys who held you up had on masks and gloves. It’s why I knew we wouldn’t get any help from them on the break-in. Sure, we had the guys on video trying to enter the lobby a few minutes earlier but that wouldn’t be enough to convince Her Honor to let the cops do their jobs.”

“And no one knows about this stuff?” Hailey asked dubiously.

“Everyone knows about it,” Phil told her. “Well, a lot of people. It’s not like Mom is in some secret cabal or something. The police commissioner fought the transfers and was replaced. He has memos – or so I’m told. There are others in the Mayor’s Office who she can’t replace; they know of it. The media knows but they won’t report on it. She’s the perfect example of an up-from-the-bootstraps politician and she parrots every one of their big government ideas right back at them.”

“If everyone knows, how did she get elected last year?” Hailey asked, crossing her arms in front of her. She had been put off by the mayor’s demeanor but she had also grown up listening to her mother proclaim the woman as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

“She had no viable opposition so they sat on it,” Phil said with a touch of chagrin. “The guy she ran against was financed by ‘out-of-state’ interests. I took that to mean he was hooked in with either a crime syndicate or one of those groups who’ve tried to put a casino in and get gambling legalized. I didn’t ask for clarification but I can if it’s important. It’ll come out as soon as she announces a Senate run – or sooner if someone else steps up who can run the city. Mom said the best candidate isn’t ready for the top seat yet – I guess she probably meant Joe Pepper.

“The woman is so arrogant that she actually thinks she’s hidden everything. I mean, the city council is her appointed lapdogs. They just nod and ask what color when she tells to them to crap. Her main voting bloc is the undereducated and underemployed who rely on government assistance to survive. She panders to them and they aren’t likely to change their mind just because of a few facts that paint her as she truly is. Mom’s biggest worry is that the woman will change her mind and convince the council to appoint her Mayor for Life or something like that. Before the Senate seat came open, she had talked openly about asking the council to rescind the term limit statute to let her run for a third term. But don’t worry, as soon as possible, her political career is going to come to a screeching halt – right alongside a lot of her cronies that she’s brought in with her.”