Enigma

Dedicated to my special angels, Bailey and Ziva, who bring sunlight into my world every day.

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CHAPTER 1

Why was I so tired today? Nothing out of the ordinary happened. Last night I actually got to bed nearly half an hour earlier than I normally do. Only reason being last night I’d worn myself out cleaning until my hands felt like they would fall off at Sharon’s. Sharon was my legal guardian for all intents and purposes. When my parents died three years ago and I didn’t have any other relatives, Sharon Mumford, my parents’ supposed friend from several years ago, whom I’d never even met, stepped up to take responsibility for me. That is a laugh, though. Sharon was probably the most irresponsible person I’d ever come to meet. To this day, I am convinced the only reason she stepped up was that she thought there would be money involved from my parents’ assets.

Unfortunately, she could not have made a worse assumption. As it turned out Sharon was always broke because she could not even keep a minimum-wage job due to her own self-destructive lifestyle. She was always with sleazy men who only wanted favors while drinking to the point of stupidity on the cheapest form of liquor or beer available.

It didn’t take me long to realize I was not about to spend the remainder of my teenage years with someone I didn’t know, much less someone who was about as useful and pleasant as cancer. Sharon was always crying over some skeezball who had done her wrong, broken a promise, stole from her, or left her. She could not pay her bills and often asked me for money once she figured out that her “man for the moment” never intended to take care of her to begin with.

The one thing that made my life a little easier was that Sharon could care less that I now lived with Lena Montgomery, my best friend, as long as she received her monthly check from Damien Montgomery, my best friend’s father. Feeling sorry for me about my parents and having to go live with a stranger, he struck a deal with Sharon so that I could move in with them instead. Even if I had gone to live with Sharon permanently, I knew she couldn’t have cared less where I went, when I came back, what I did, or who I did it with. Unlike my over-protective parents, who kept me on a tight leash, Sharon Mumford only cared about how she was going to get her next fix and how to catch her next man.

Since she was technically my legal guardian, she did feel it necessary to give me what she referred to as the only two rules in life: Rule One: Don’t ever get arrested! She proclaimed that if I ever got arrested, I would just have to stay there, because God knew she didn’t have the money to come get me out, and just getting into trouble with the law would put her under their microscope.

Rule Two: Don’t ever get pregnant! She kept going on and on about how she knew what girls who looked like me were up to. I was barely okay with kissing a guy, much less anything else!

Lena was always poking fun at me about my lack of knowledge when it came to the subject of guys, even at our early age of thirteen. I was one of those who always believed in romanticism and love. You know, the kind you see in the movies where the man and the woman realize they can’t live without the other and end up sharing a phenomenal kiss in the rain. I had no desire to go around leaving a trail of broken hearts or risk having my heart broken, much less ruining my life and the life of a child by bringing it into the world far before I could handle it.

Lena, on the other hand, did have a reputation for being what I called “the boyfriend bandit.” If she came with her own background music every time she made an entrance, people would hear
Another One Bites the Dust
. Lena was my best friend, but we couldn’t be more different if we tried. Where I always tried to do the right thing, Lena did what felt good at that particular moment. She lived for the excitement of the here and now, as if tomorrow didn’t exist. Lena Montgomery was the girl every guy wanted to be with and every girl hated but secretly desired to be friends with at the same time because they wanted to be her. Lena had it all—the looks, the life, the cars, the clothes, the money, the house; there wasn’t much Lena Montgomery didn’t have. Come to think of it, I couldn’t think of a single thing Lena didn’t have except for one thing—her mom. She told me her mother ran out on her and her dad and they had never heard from her again. She cried a single tear, wiped it away and never spoke of it again.

Sharon Mumford was so different from my parents I could not imagine how they were ever friends. We were never in need of money, food, basic needs, or shelter. Granted, we were not nearly as well off as my best friend and her father, but we were wealthy enough. I never had to want for anything. Our house wasn’t huge, but it was one of the nicer homes in town.

My mom worked as the president for a local charity that provided meals, food, clothing, and shelter to anyone who could not provide it for themselves or their families. She loved her work, and she truly had a heart for those she had the opportunity to help—never turning a single person in need away. She was always humming old hymns and never had a shortage of hugs.

I could tell if she was home just by breathing when I walked into the house. Her scent was subtle, light, and just smelled clean. I remember the little pink bottle it came in that sat on her vanity and how I’d watched her put just the right amount on hundreds of times. My dad had been the best criminal defense attorney in the state, so when the news of his death was made public, it was a huge deal. He took all of the most controversial cases that generally involved a lot of press time and earned him the reputation of being a true devil’s advocate. Whereas I looked at my dad as being the most loving man in the world, almost everyone else that didn’t know him on a personal level looked at him as a money-hungry liar who got the most notorious bad guys off the hook for crimes that called for severe consequences. It is no secret that being a criminal defense attorney has a stigma, but there were a great deal of people who literally hated my dad for being so good at his job.

I can’t count the times he received threatening hate mail, obscene messages on the answering machine, or had angry individuals confront him at the most inopportune times. Oftentimes he would stay at his office for hours, putting cases together, and then be out the door again the next morning before I even got up for school. Once he was at home we never discussed his work. It was a topic that was not welcome beyond the front door. He was so protective against me hearing evil things in the world that he rarely even turned on the news. Even being so busy, it was obvious to everyone that he loved me and my mom more than anything in the world by the way he protected us, even if I did think he was a little over the top about it.

My parents’ death came as a complete shock to everyone. After all, they were both well known in the community and had what seemed to be close to perfect life. No one could believe it when the news announcers on every channel had their brutal deaths as the breaking story. At first, because of the brutal scene, it was thought that perhaps someone who was seeking revenge on my father lost their mind and took matters into their own hands before the police released details about the crime scene. Eventually when the lead detective, Joe O’Donoly, released a statement it was described as a murder suicide. At the crime scene—my house—they’d found a note. I never saw it; I couldn’t bring myself to view any of the evidence collected from the scene. Evidently my dad had been planning the event, considering the will had been changed recently, leaving everything solely to me.

He had added a clause that determined that a generous set amount would be available to me every month if something should ever happen to him and my mother. Everything was so unexpected. This didn’t even seem like something my father could be capable of. He loved my mom, and everyone knew it; they never even argued! I wasn’t about to accept the possibility. From newspapers to television, my dad was being painted as a murderous, greedy, ill-tempered maniac who slaughtered his wife and then killed himself. Every time someone saw me, whether they knew me or not, they couldn’t resist telling me how it was a miracle I wasn’t home that night because he would have killed me too.

Of course I got glares from some who thought our accountant and I were working together to set up the entire thing to benefit from the money since my parents had left me everything and named their personal accountant, Allen Hearsch, to be responsible for overseeing all financial matters from that point until I turned eighteen.

The day of the funeral had to be the worst.

I never could bear the idea of cremation as it seemed to me like a preview of hell, so I settled on a combined closed-casket funeral. I couldn’t believe how many people came. Aside from the people from our neighborhood and several students and faculty from the school showing respect for me, it was obvious that most were there from the charity my mom was president of. Everyone from workers to volunteers, and even those who my mom had helped through the years all came to lay roses on her coffin.

Lena, Damien, Sharon, and I all went to the graveside, where I bid my final farewell to my parents in front of their joined headstone. From now on I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand coming here and seeing their names on a piece of stone. I vowed to myself at that moment that I wasn’t going to be returning.

Even though the situation was completely devastating, I did find relief when Mr. Allen Hearsch and an attorney informed me that the will specified I was to make decisions regarding the remaining properties and belongings. Any money accrued from these decisions went straight to my trust fund. After finding out what kind of person Sharon was, which only took about two days of asking around, I was not about to allow her to move into the house I considered a sacred place of mine and my family—no matter how good of friends she claimed they were once upon a time. I made the decision to hold an estate sale and then sell the house as well. If Sharon was my legal guardian, fine; I would deal with that, being that I didn’t actually have to live with her on a permanent basis, but I was not about to allow her and her lifestyle to destroy all the things my mom and dad had worked so hard for.

I still couldn’t quite comprehend how she could have been such close friends with my parents and not even see them for thirteen years. The only sense I could make of it was that once my parents had grown into mature adults, Sharon’s life choices drove a wedge into the friendship.

What was more perplexing was the fact that my mom and dad had never even talked about her or mentioned her name. They didn’t even have any photos of her. Whatever happened really must have made them decide they wanted nothing to do with her, and I was beginning to understand how they might have felt.

When Sharon first heard the news of my decision to sell the house and all of my parents’ belongings, she was not happy. For weeks on my voicemail, all I heard was how ungrateful I was. She went on and on about how she could have just let me go to the state’s foster system, never agreeing to accept responsibility for me, and how I should appreciate her going out on a limb for me, even though my parents had never asked that of her.

After a while, I just let her words go in one ear and out the other, often erasing the messages as soon as I heard her voice. Sometimes she called so often that I would just turn my phone on silent. I was so depressed about not having my parents anymore that the last thing I needed was to hear this lunatic yell at me because she wanted their belongings. The sound of Sharon’s voice made me sick.

Damien Montgomery worked in special effects for movie productions. Where it is a very high-paying position, it also meant that he was home less than a week and a half each month. When we were younger, he hired a live-in nanny that cared for us, but once we turned fifteen, the nanny was dismissed, leaving Lena and me to make our own decisions. Unlike my parents, who were very strict and never let me out of their sight, Damien was quite the opposite. Lena never had a curfew, and as long as I had known her, she’d been allowed to do whatever she wanted to.