Harvest Moon (Virgin River #15)(66)

“How, Lief?” she asked. “Was she abused?”

“Stu has a bitch for a wife and two little brats for kids. I think his boys are maybe seven and ten right now. Two years ago, at five and eight, they were horrible, undisciplined monsters. The entire household was one screaming, fighting mess. Courtney would come home for her weekend with me in tears, begging not to be forced to go back there, but my hands were tied. Once she even had a child’s bite mark on her leg! A bite bad enough that I had to take her to the doctor. The clothes in her suitcase would come back ravaged and stained—not with food but with things like marker, paint, bleach. One of the little bastards cut her hair while she was asleep. It was a nightmare.”

“Why would her father let that happen to her?”

“He was absent. He’s a producer, mediocre at best, and his hours were long or he was on the phone or computer. Sherry, the stepmother, didn’t watch the kids—just told them to go play, told Courtney she was a big girl and to stop whining. I’ve never been able to figure out why Stu wanted her around at all—he didn’t spend any time with her, didn’t protect her. I paid child support for the privilege of having her a couple of weekends a month, but surely that wasn’t enough of an incentive for big-shot Stu. And you can probably guess what happened—Courtney changed. She started to look different. She started to act out, to fight back. By the time her hair was seven different colors and she looked like a little horror flick, Stu was ready to negotiate—she could live with me most of the time, visit him once in a while. For the next year she lived with me, visited Stu, kicking and screaming the whole way.

“There were things I noticed much later, after I had her back, things I should have noticed right away, but I’m not an experienced father,” he went on. “She stopped crying about six months after her mom died, about six months after being tortured at Stu’s house. She stopped smiling, too. I regularly checked her internet hits and found she researched suicide. She didn’t eat enough to keep a bird alive and had no guilty pleasures, like ice cream or chocolate. She was failing in school. Things like that. And then one day about a year and a half after Lana died, it all came to a head. Courtney called me from her dad’s house and said to come and get her—her stepmother had told her to get the hell out and stay out or she’d put her in foster care. She said she was going to run away if I didn’t come. She was sleeping on the floor because Sherry’s mother was visiting and her head was bleeding from getting hit with a toy truck.”

Kelly gasped and covered her mouth.

“And I lost it. Lost it. I was there in thirty minutes. Courtney answered the door and I told her to show me where she was sleeping—sure enough, a sleeping bag on the toy room floor. I asked her to show me her regular room—it was a guest room made up for the grandmother, the closet and drawers and bathroom full of the grandmother’s clothes—Stu hadn’t even provided a room for his daughter. Bleeding head from a toy truck? One about big enough to ride! I heard the TV and found Sherry and her mother doing yoga to the TV in their screening room while drinking wine and giggling because they were tipsy. I told Courtney to wait by the door and I went to Stu’s home office, yanked him out of his chair by his shirt, dragged him to the toy room, to the guest room, to the screening room, to the front door to take a look at the back of Courtney’s head, which later took three stitches. And then he told me to get the little freak out of his life, he’d had it with her constant complaining. And I slammed him up against the wall, called him a lot of horrible names and threatened his life.”

Kelly was quiet for a moment. When she finally did make a sound, it was “Whew.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking down. “Big-time Hollywood producer shouldn’t mess with a farm boy. We’re raised a little scrappy out in the country.”

“My God, Lief. I had no idea how traumatized she’s been.”

“Completely. I brought her home, got her right into counseling, though I couldn’t see that it helped much. I started looking for a house out of town and found the one I’m in now. It took me five months to get in it. And believe it or not, Courtney’s come a long way since last spring.”

“Looks like she’s come a long way since I met her. At least she doesn’t ever have to go back to her father’s house.”

“Well, there’s the problem. Stu called me this morning. He wants her for Christmas…”

“Don’t!” Kelly said.

“I called my lawyer—I’m in a box. Since Stu pretty much threw her out, I knew I had her. All I wanted at the time was to get her some help, get control of the situation, and I never legally changed our custody arrangement. I should’ve done it while he was seeing her as a weird little freak who was more trouble than she was worth—he probably wouldn’t have given me any trouble. I’ll do that now, of course, but it’s not going to get us out of Christmas. Stu says they’re taking a family vacation to Disney World. Hopefully she can get through it. I’ll talk to him again before that—I’ll make sure I know where they are, make sure he knows I’m going to be nearby in case there’s a problem, make sure he’s not putting her on the floor in the kids’ toy room.”

“You think she’ll go?” Kelly asked.

“I’ll take her. I’m not sending her into the lion’s den. I’ll take her and stay in the same hotel…”