I want to ask him again, but I let it drop. We all have our pasts and our secrets, and if Baptist isn’t ready to share then I won’t force him.
My phone dings as we begin our descent. It’s an address from Cowan and a message:Get to work.
Chapter12
Blair
“He could’ve at least sent us somewhere nice.” I trudge through an empty field and barely manage to step over a massive muddy puddle. “Seriously, what the hell are we doing out here?”
Baptist grunts in response and glowers all over. He’s staring around like he wants to use Superman heat vision to burn the whole place to the ground and frankly, I hope he does it. We drove an hour north into the suburbs only to end up walking through what looks like an abandoned farm. Weeds sprout all over and the woods are beginning to encroach on a field complete with rusty tractors and overgrown weeds. In the distance, a lone house stands at the top of a shallow rise, and it feels like it’s getting further and further away as we head in its general direction.
“I suspect we’re not going anywherenicefor a long while, or at least until Cowan isn’t in control of our lives anymore.” He kicks a rock aside. “At least nobody’s trying to kill us.”
“There’s still time for that.”
He grins and stretches. “Nobody’s shooting and nobody’s doing drugs. I’d say this isn’t so bad. Besides, the fresh air is kind of nice.”
“Speak for yourself.” I make a face as I stomp through some short weeds and get gossamer spiderwebs all over my legs. I brush it off, shivering. “God, I hate camping. Did I ever tell you my dad used to take us camping when we were younger?”
“You don’t talk about your dad much.”
“There’s not much to say.” I smile grimly as a dozen memories sift through my mind, none of them good. “When I was like twelve and Max was still little, my dad went on this crazy nature kick. He was obsessed with hiking and biking and camping and fishing. He said the modern world is too soft and we needed to harden up.”
“I can guess where this is going.”
I smile ruefully. It certainly doesn’t have a happy ending, that’s for sure. “The trips were awful. He’d bark at us the whole time, snapping whenever we made a simple mistake, and we made a lot of them because we were pampered suburbanites, not farm hands. Mom was pretty checked out by then but at least she was around to try to soften some of his bad moods. I remember this one trip, we hiked really far along this trail then tried to set up camp, but Dad forgot some pieces to the tent and we couldn’t get it up, and he was screaming at us and raging at the woods. He was stomping around kicking bushes and breaking sticks and throwing shit all over. Max kept crying and crying, and Mom tried to calm him down but he called her every nasty thing you can imagine. Eventually, we had to walk back, and it was dark by the time we made it to the car. We didn’t talk on the drive home.”
He eyes me for a moment, frowning. “That must’ve been hard.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t so bad, but that’s why I hate nature. All thanks to my dad. He had to turn everything into a contest, and if we didn’t live up to his impossible standards then he’d treat us like garbage.”
“Was your dad always like that?”
“Pretty much. Nothing was ever good enough for Alexander Webb. Did you know he wrote some critically acclaimed movies in the nineties? He never let us hear the freaking end of all his amazing accomplishments.”
“I’ve heard people like those movies,” he says, smiling slightly. Everyone knows my father in the business and everyone worships the ground he walks on, even though he hasn’t written anything for years, every single film he’s ever been involved with has been a huge success.
He’s still referred to as the writer with the golden pen in the studios, and it makes me sick. If they knew the sort of asshole they were enabling, I like to think they’d stop treating him like a prince—but it’s Hollywood, and I shouldn’t be so naive.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a monster in the world of glitz and glamour, so long as you make money.
“He never let us forget it. Even when we were young, he’d make sure that we understood he was the head of the household because he wrote a bunch of hit movies. And now, looking back on it, that’s not really a sign of a very stable and healthy man, is it? But we didn’t know any better.”
“No, when you have to brag to your kids and act like a bully, that’s probably not good.”
“The worst part is, he wasn’t wrong. All my life I’ve dealt with people wanting to get to know me just to catch a glimpse of my famous father. I can’t tell you how many dates I’ve gone on that ended with the guy asking about Alexander Webb and if maybe I could introduce them sometime. It’s sickening, and each time I want to explain that actually, my father is a piece of shit and has made my life miserable, but it’s never worth the stress.”
He sighs and bends down to grab a stick, breaking it into pieces as we get closer and closer to the farmhouse. “That must’ve been hard.”
“I think it’s even worse for Max. I handled it by getting out of that house as soon as I could, but Dad got harder and harder to deal with over the years. Max takes the brunt of it now. There’s a reason my little brother is living with me instead of at home with his father. Nobody’s around to help him anymore.”
“Family is hard,” Baptist says with a grim shake of his head. “You’re a good sister for letting Max stay with you. I’m sorry you had to deal with all that growing up.”
“I’m still dealing with it. You think my dad’s changed at all? Hell no, not even a little. He’s still constantly criticizing me, reminding me that he’s the successful one in the family and the rest of us are freeloaders, making sure I know that I’ll never be as good as him. I’m the guy’s daughter and he treats me like this, imagine what he’s like to work with.”
“I’ll never know. I don’t even like his movies that much. They’re pretty boring.”
I laugh. I don’t know why, but I find that hilarious. He smiles back, not sure what to make of it, but the laughter is cathartic. I really need a release right now, and cracking up about that stupid joke is exactly what I wanted. Finally, we reach the house, and my laughter slowly fades as we stand at the edge of the crumbling front porch and stare at the broken windows covered over with plywood, and the moldy facade beginning to fall apart. It looks like it hasn’t been occupied in twenty years or more, but that can’t be right. The fields are still somewhat barren and not completely overgrown, which means it couldn’t have been more than a season or two since this place went dormant.