Darkness at the Edge of Town (Iris Ballard #2)(30)

“Do you still have it?” I asked.

“Hell no. I ripped it up after I spent all evening looking for him.”

“What did it say?”

“Usual Dear John bullshit. It’s not you, it’s me. We’ve grown apart. I’m on a new journey you seem unwilling to take with me. I need to be alone and without distraction to continue discovering the real me and my purpose in the universe. I never meant to hurt you, but, and I quote, ‘this is what the universe wants for us both. Trust in that and your own path to happiness and fulfilment will be shown to you.’ Helen said that at the end of every seminar. Such bullshit. He sounded like a fucking pod person in it.”

“What did you do after you found the note?”

“I went looking for him! I called Kevin on the way to The Temple and he told me Billy up and quit his job at the plant the day before. Didn’t say goodbye to him. And he had no idea what was going on with Billy either. Then I got to The Temple and that bitch Helen was there. She pulled that whole sympathetic mom routine with me but wouldn’t answer any of my questions. All I got out of her was he’d been asked to live at that farm, and I needed to respect his journey. How I stopped myself from bitch-slapping her I don’t know. And no one else there would talk to me or they played dumb.”



“When did you find out he took your money?” I asked.

“Oh, on the drive back home,” she said harshly. “I was on the verge of fucking tears but had to get gas. Of course my debit card didn’t work. Insufficient funds for twenty bucks of gas. When I got home I immediately checked the accounts. The fucker left me a hundred dollars in savings. We had two grand. So I got shit-faced, cried my eyes out, then woke the next morning and called your mom looking for him. I had to work, so she took over the search. I know she went to the police but they couldn’t do anything, so I guess she called you. Surprised you got here so fast. Hell, I’m surprised you got here at all.”

Another dig I had to let slide. “So you have no idea where this farm is?”

“None.”

I sighed again. “Okay, now that you’re out of the boiling water, so to speak, and can look at things objectively, why do you think Billy was so drawn to this group?”

“Besides, apparently, the free snatch?” she spewed out. “I don’t know. They treated him like he mattered. Like he was smart, funny, and important. He had people he could go and talk to. He had a non-insane mother who listened without making it all about her, a ton of sisters and brothers who made time for him, a father figure full stop. I know you don’t give a shit, but what your father did really fucked him up. Not just the years and years and years of neglect. You know he went to your father for help? It killed, killed Billy to go begging to that bastard for the money, but ten grand was nothing to him. It wasn’t like he’d ever paid child support, and he did pay for all of your college. But he wouldn’t even see Billy. He tried and tried to get an appointment at your father’s office. Billy had to barge in at his fucking mansion during some party and get down on his hands and knees begging for help and that evil bastard just called security. I lost our baby three days later.” Gia fell back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. “He spent like two hundred grand on your college but wouldn’t spend a penny for your brother and me? I think that hurt him almost as much as losing our baby.”



I bit my lip. I felt like I had to let her in on one of my few secrets. “He only gave me the money for college because I blackmailed him into doing it.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What?”

“Yeah. I, uh, I got a lot of grants and scholarships, but they didn’t cover it all, so I did some investigating. I broke into his office one night and went through his files. I found out he’d invested in a sweatshop in China and was in on a Ponzi scheme. He got out, but he didn’t tell his friends and other investors about it. I was already nuclear pissed about what his daughter had done to me, so I blackmailed him. He didn’t give me the money out of fatherly love; it was to cover his own ass. He did get a tax write-off out of it, though.”

“Holy shit. I didn’t know that.”

“No one did. Well, I think Grandpa suspected. I technically committed multiple crimes, so I wasn’t gonna broadcast that fact. The official story was he’d created a scholarship for the betterment of psychology or some such shit. It paid out all the way through my Ph.D.”



“That’s hard-core. Wish I’d thought of it,” Gia said.

“I’m only telling you…fuck, I don’t know why I’m telling you,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“You should be telling Billy this,” Gia said. “It always made him feel like even that piece of human garbage thought you were better than him. There were already enough of those people, thank you very much.”

I scoffed. “For years I was known as ‘Abortion Whore.’ They wrote it on my locker, even scratched it into my car. Billy, on the other hand, was the sweetheart.”

“And ‘Gay Boy,’?” Gia countered. “The pansy who needed his sister to do his fighting for him.”

I glared at her. “I’m sorry, do you expect me to apologize for sticking up for my brother? Not a few minutes ago you were accusing me of not giving a shit about him. Pick a damn lane.”