Chapter 84

The trip back to the house was made in relative silence.

“I didn’t mean that the way it came out,” Phil told her.

“It sounded like you meant it just the way you said it,” Hailey said. She had bit back her tears so she could drive. Now they streamed down her cheeks.

“Let me explain,” Phil said as they pulled into the drive. “I didn’t compile a dossier on you last year. I didn’t track down your elementary school best friend to dig up dirt and I didn’t try to pull your medical records. I was just trying to assure you that this is not a step I took lightly. I would never do this to someone close to me. I would only do it to those who threaten those close to me. This is what I’ve been trying to explain, Hailey. I pissed her off – either by ignoring her fame or by telling her the way life really works. She found she couldn’t make a run at me. I have no skeletons that could come up; most people believe that I’m actually a pretty decent guy.

“I couldn’t take the risk that she would find something harmful to you or the girls. I couldn’t take the risk that she would create something that could hurt you. I couldn’t take the risk that something might happen to one of you. You seemed to think I wasn’t compassionate. If you had been hurt, Hailey, I would have had her killed. I probably would have been caught but I don’t think that would have stopped me. I had to put her out of commission before things got to a point that I couldn’t do it and let us all emerge unscathed.”

“You should have talked to us!” Hailey insisted.

“Why?” Phil wondered. “It wasn’t going to change the outcome. I had already drawn a line in the sand. If she kept things to innuendo or harmless facts, I was going to let it go. The next set of pictures was even more graphic. They showed children. She was going to put Molly and Tiffany’s faces over that of a female pedophile. How do you think they would have reacted to that? Do you think they’d have laughed it off like they did the others? What if they had? Do you know what her next step might have been?”

“No,” Hailey said as she stared out of the windshield.

“I didn’t either,” Phil stated. “That’s something I couldn’t risk.”

“But she is utterly destroyed, Phil!” Hailey said.

“I told you I left her options,” Phil countered. “I didn’t have to.”

“That explanation isn’t going to cut it with everyone else,” Hailey said. “They were really upset that you took things so far. I was, too.”

“Go get them while I get the SUV,” Phil said. “You four seem to think the sun rises and sets on my mother’s ass so I’ll take you to see someone whose only crime was pissing off my mother. So go get them. I’m serious.”

Phil had already backed the SUV out when the four women came out. The still wore their Heilman baseball jerseys over blue jeans or cotton slacks. They all glared at Phil as they climbed in. He drove northward out of town and stopped in front of a convenience store. He looked in, saw what he wanted and turned off the vehicle.

“Go in and ask that woman if she’s Tonya Stanton,” he said to the three women in the backseat. “I’ll bet you a month of rent on the building against a pair of shoelaces she is.”

“So what?” Tiffany asked.

“More than 15 years ago, Tonya Stanton was the top of her class at Heilman,” Phil explained. “She was studying bio-chemical engineering and was set to graduate. Then she got pregnant. She was completely alone. Her parents threw her out and told her never to come back. She had spent so much time studying that she didn’t have any close friends.”

Phil didn’t have all the facts so he made up a few.

“She wasn’t completely sure who the father of the baby was,” he continued. “She had five months until graduation and no money. She was looking at hundreds of thousands in student loan debt and she wasn’t going to be able to find a job until after the baby was born. So she made a play to get some cash. She had an affair with one of her professors so she blackmailed him. He didn’t have enough to ensure her safety so she stretched out to a different target – my father. She said Dad had fathered her child.

“I don’t know if he had an affair with her. That’s really immaterial. Mom said he didn’t and I believe she believes that. Miss Stanton wanted $50,000 to keep things quiet. Instead Mom had her put in prison. The state took the baby as soon as it was born and put it up for adoption. Since the woman got out of prison, Mom had made sure she never got farther than that job right there. She defaulted on her loans because she was in prison. She couldn’t go back to college. She couldn’t get a job. If she ever did work her way up, Mom made sure to cut her back down to this. She can’t date a guy twice without someone calling the man to make sure he knows what sort of person he’s around.

“So this woman – an intelligent woman who was scared to death – works for $9 an hour ringing up beer sales and selling cigarettes. She lives in a trailer park about half a mile from here and drives that 20-year-old car. I could have done that to Courtney Hollings. I could have handled her the same way as my almighty mother handled this woman. After all, this woman did nothing but threaten to spread rumors. Courtney actually did that. This woman didn’t fake photos or send a rapist to pay Mom a visit. She asked for money – which the Bartons have more of than sense. Now once a year, Tonya Stanton gets an unsigned greeting card that says, ‘Remember Me?’

“My mother did this because Tonya Stanton pissed her off. She didn’t do anything that could remotely harm us. She just pissed her off so my mother destroyed her. Is that what you’d prefer? Courtney got a taste of her own medicine. She still has options to earn a living. I won’t let her make motion pictures but I won’t stop her from working in other entertainment venues. When she is released from jail in a week or two, I certainly won’t track her movements or send a reminder every year on the anniversary of her release. The rest of her life is hers to do with what she wants.”

“What do you mean you won’t let her make pictures?” Molly asked.

Phil explained his family’s connection to the Hollywood studio.

“She signed a four-picture contract two years ago,” Phil added. “She’s made two. ‘Demon’s Kiss’ and its sequel were to be the third and fourth. I’ll keep her contract and bury her in Hollywood. The adverse publicity this episode generates will give me all the reason I need. There’s also the fact that a lot of studios come to Barton with their hand out every time there is a big-budget film on tap and they need money. My mother transferred control of that section of the company to me. The Lambswool stock is through the family, not the corporation. I hold that now, too. I could keep her from doing TV or Broadway if I really pressed it. I won’t. I probably won’t even keep her out of movies forever. Courtney Hollings will never be the lead actor on another film – or by the time she is able she will too old for Hollywood. That usually hits about 30, I think.”

“I’m sure the other shareholders just love this,” Hailey noted.

“It’s a vanity project for most of them,” Phil explained. “They put money into like my family does. They don’t really care about profits. They like to say they own part of a studio. Or hell, they like to get one of the actors to show up at their granddaughter’s birthday party. They won’t make a lot of noise on this ... or at least they haven’t a lot of noise when far bigger issues arose than this.”

“I just don’t understand why you couldn’t tell us about this,” Katelyn said.

“I could have,” Phil said, “I just didn’t. It wouldn’t have changed a thing, Katie.”

“What did you mean about sending a rapist to visit your Mom?” Tiffany wondered.

“Ryan Boatwright,” Phil said, explaining the situation in Colorado in fuller detail.

“Are you sure?” Molly asked incredulously.

“As sure as I need to be,” Phil responded.

“It’s just not like you,” Tiffany told him. “It all started with that job at Waterford. You became, I don’t know, meaner.”

“You only think I became meaner because I stopped letting you walk all over me,” Phil said, turning around to face her. “I started calling ‘bullshit’ on you four and you didn’t like it. You’ve gotten used to it. I wasn’t going to sit on my hands and wait for one of you to really get hurt. She was too unpredictable to let that happen. Now she’ll be so desperate trying to survive to worry about us. By the time she is back on her feet, we’ll be less vulnerable than we are now – or you four will be, at least. I’m not going to let people get away with stuff like this. I’m not going to let the four of you walk all over me and I’m not going to let anyone else walk all over you. It’s pretty much that simple.”

“Do you have other files we need to worry about?” Molly asked. It was evident to Phil that his explanation was doing little good.

“No,” Phil said. “If I did, I’d lie to you about it anyway. This is not something you’re going to change my mind about. You only have to look inside that building to know I come by it honestly. I will protect you four – and probably a few others we know – if I have to. If I had thought I could have talked her out of things, I would have taken that route. If I thought I could have ended things without leaking her entire life online, I might have. That’s immaterial because I couldn’t have. So here we are. You can be mad if you want. I’d prefer you weren’t but that’s up to you. Your anger isn’t going to change the way I handle things in the future.”

“Even though it only affects us?” Tiffany pushed.

“It didn’t affect only you,” Phil responded. “As I told Hailey, this wasn’t about you. It was about me. You four are just where I’m most vulnerable. Now anyone who tries this again knows how I will respond to a threat to any of you. I consider Courtney Hollings an object lesson to anyone who makes a run at me in the future.”

“Jesus, you’re serious!” Katelyn said.

“Of course I am,” Phil said. “Do you know how many times a year someone tries to dig up dirt on me or my cousins in order to have leverage with Barton? Christ, with as much money as I have access to, my credit rating is still average because so many fucking people hire an agency to check it every year. My cousins are the same way. My uncle’s oldest daughter had to get him to co-sign a car loan a year ago. She’s the oldest of us so she turned 18 first. The day she turned 18, her credit score was accessed 35 times! She wasn’t trying for a loan or a credit card or anything. Data brokers just hired the reporting agencies to see what her score was or to try to find a way to get personal information on her.

“We’ve had people steal our garbage and access my driving record illegally. The reason I spent so much money on security at the penthouse was because someone put a GPS tracker on my cousin’s car the last time she visited. You’re going to face the same thing if we’re in business together.

“There will be sections of our lives that will be scrutinized by people we don’t know or don’t like. They will seek an advantage in negotiations, to extort money from us, to embarrass us publicly. They will seek to obtain our Social Security numbers or our e-mail passwords or copies of our financial statements in order to gain access to our identities. They might take out credit cards or they might try to get a loan. More people are going to seek to discredit us as we rise higher. Courtney Hollings wasn’t the last person to make a run at us. If we don’t put our foot on their necks from the outset we’re going to have even more people taking shots at us. Now people know how it will end if they try – and it’s always going to be me who deals with people like that. I’m the only one with the stroke.”

Phil was facing the backseat but he saw Hailey shifting in the passenger seat. The people in the backseat looked at him incredulously.

“Hailey, how seriously does Mom take her personal and electronic security?” Phil asked.

“Very,” Hailey said. “That’s the main reason she brought on Waterford. It’s because they have some security measures that she really wanted. Hackers hit the company servers dozens of times each day. We couldn’t download any email with an attachment and we couldn’t plug our iPhones into our terminals because she worried about getting a virus or malware. I know she makes sure that her car is always in sight of one of the company security guards and I know she had it checked for trackers after we had it while they were in Las Vegas. She bought InterAgency Security Incorporated because it was cheaper than outsourcing. Those guys are all ex-FBI and ex-Secret Service and it didn’t come cheap but she said it was worth it. Corporate espionage is rampant. Barton has such a solid reputation that a lot of other holding companies would love to undercut it. They’re a lot like Courtney. They don’t really care how they do it. I guess I can understand Phil’s reaction. I wished he’d talked to us about it, though.”