easier. Hard as it might be to go along with this, it’s probably in your best interests, both yours and Courtney’s.”
“She’s not going to see it that way,” Lief said.
On instinct, he drove out to see Kelly. One look at his angry face and she said, “Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”
“Do you have a little time to talk? I have to talk to someone. I’m going to drive to Grace Valley and talk to the counselor, but I have to sort it out first.”
“It’s Courtney, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “No. But it’s going to be, I know that. It’s her father.”
Kelly frowned. “You’ve so rarely mentioned him, I didn’t think he was a factor.” She pointed to a stool at the work island and poured him a cup of coffee. “What’s happening?”
“I should never have turned my back,” Lief said. “I know this will be hard for you to envision, but before Lana died, Courtney was the sweetest, kindest, most loveable child. There was almost never a problem. Discipline was easy with her. But then her mother died and her life became hell. Not only was the poor kid a puddle of grief, but she started living with Stu, her surviving parent, and visiting me every other weekend. And at her father’s house, she was treated worse than a dog.”
“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