Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

Bible rolled through the stop. Andrea watched the green street signs slip away. She wondered if Mr. Wexler was a dark horse in the paternity race. It wouldn’t be the first time a teacher had dabbled in statutory rape. That might explain why Wexler wasn’t mentioned on the Where Are They Now? portion of the Longbill High School’s website, which claimed to offer a complete list of faculty who had come and gone since the school’s founding in 1932.

Google wasn’t much help, either. Wexler was a German surname meaning “money changer” and, apparently, a shit ton of Wexlers had dropped anchor in Chesapeake Bay back in the 1700s. Going by the area White Pages, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a Rhinelander.

“This is it.” Bible turned on the blinker, though they hadn’t passed another car since leaving town.

Andrea leaned over so she could take in the tree-lined driveway that spanned at least half a football field. A set of iron gates was wide open despite the death threats. She wondered if they were broken or if the judge was just trying to annoy her security detail.

Bible asked, “You know what Yankee Cheap is?”

Andrea shook her head.

“Southern Cheap is, I’m gonna eat stale cookies while I serve you these fresh, warm buttered biscuits. Yankee Cheap is, I’ve got ten million dollars in the bank but I’m gonna cut off the thermostat during a blizzard and here’s my great-great-grandpa’s mothballed coat from the War of 1812 if you don’t have the character and fortitude to generate your own body heat.”

She laughed. “That should be one of your Marshal rules.”

“I got another one for you.” He swung the car around in the motorcourt and backed it into an open spot between two others. “Marshal rule number nineteen: never let them know you’re intimidated.”

Andrea’s brain conjured up a photo of an imperious Judge Vaughn in one of her expensive-looking scarves. “Good rule.”

The late afternoon sun put a sizzling glow on everything as they got out of the car. Andrea saw a black Ford Explorer that looked exactly like Bible’s car parked nose-out to the driveway.

He provided, “Krump and Harri have day shift. Six to six.”

“Great,” she mumbled, because staying awake for another twelve hours straight would be super easy.

“Love your can-do attitude, partner.” He gave her a firm salute. “Why don’t you circle the grounds, get a lay of the land, then meet me inside? Go through the garage door and take a left.”

“Will do.”

Andrea waited for him to disappear into the garage. She was glad to get some fresh air into her lungs before she met the judge. Part of her felt wrong for knowing so much about what had to be the worst period of Esther Vaughn’s life. Andrea wasn’t sure how she was going to hide the fact that she knew more than she should know. Despite her duplicitous parents, being a liar didn’t come easy.

She started to walk the length of the house, hoping Bible understood that circling the grounds would likely take a good fifteen minutes. The garage alone could house six cars. Andrea could barely see the road down by the open gates. The distant roar of the sea told her the backyard probably had a La Terrasse à Sainte-Adresse feel. The house itself lived up to the setting. From the outside, the Vaughn estate was not exactly Escher-esque, but impressive in a Tudor-beheading-your-wife kind of way. It stretched out in the middle like a large two-story house, then someone had added two massive wings on either side. She immediately understood what Bible had said about Yankee Cheap. Absent a meth and/or gambling habit, the family had to be pretty flush, but the house was clearly not being taken care of. Rot had set in.

Andrea turned at the corner and caught a tinge of the ocean as the wind shifted. A meandering stone path led to an English garden. The style was marked by an abundance of overflowing flora and fauna. Colorful flowers crowded the beds. Random clusters of shrubs and bushes hung over the twisting gravel path. An irregular stone wall bordered a small fountain. No weeds were in sight. Someone clearly saw the garden as a labor of love. Andrea could smell the earthiness from the freshly mulched soil.

She also smelled cigarette smoke.

Andrea kept herself in the shadows of the massive house as she walked the rear of the property. The garden gave way to untended patches of grass and overgrown bushes. The tree canopy tightened, blocking out the sun. Her foot stubbed a paver that was sitting sideways in the ground. She realized it was part of another winding path, so she took it, walking through overgrown plantings until she arrived at a clearing. A swimming pool was to her left. On her right, directly beneath a balcony off the top floor of the main house, a warm light spread out from what looked like a converted potting shed.

“Fuck!”

Andrea turned, spotting a teenage girl in a halter-top and cut-offs struggle between anger and fear at being caught with a cigarette. Given her age, it was unsurprising to see anger win out. She tossed the butt into the yard as she stomped back toward the house. She left a miasma of smoldering nicotine and hate in her wake.

“Don’t forget to feed Syd!” Judith called from the shed’s open doorway. She was still dressed in her flowy attire from before, but she’d pulled her long hair back into a loose bun.

Andrea fought the earlier awkwardness she’d felt outside the diner, asking Judith, “Syd?”

“He’s our grouchy old parakeet, and that was Guinevere, my beautiful, tempestuous daughter. If you’re wondering, she hates her name almost as much as she hates me. I try not to take it personally. We all hate our mothers at that age, don’t we?”

Andrea had delayed her mother-hating years until the ripe age of thirty-one. “I’m sorry about before. It’s been a long day.”

“Forget about it,” Judith waved it off. “I want you to know how much I appreciate what you’re doing for my family. Granny would never say anything, but these last letters have really shaken her.”

Andrea took the confession as an invitation to come closer. “Do you know what they said? The letters?”

“No, she wouldn’t show them to me, but I gathered they were very personal. It takes a lot to make her cry.”

Andrea had a hard time imagining the Judge Esther Vaughn she’d read about being reduced to tears, but that was the problem with all those imperious adjectives. You could forget that you were reading about an actual human being.