Chapter 14

Sterling - Chapter 14

Laney turned over her cards when everyone had placed their bets. She hadn't won this round, but that was fine by her. Sometimes, she knew, the house had to lose or people wouldn't come around. Two people got up from her table and two more sat. It had been like that all day, and she wondered what was going on that would have it so busy here on a Tuesday afternoon.

"Hello." She nodded at the man and woman and asked them to place their bets. "Oh sure. You'll have to help me a little, I've never done this before."

That line had been used a great many times over the years she'd been working here. But for some reason, she had a feeling that he wasn't trying to pull a fast one. After a quick lesson in how things worked, he bought fifty dollars in chips from her and laid them out in front of him. The woman did the same.

The woman won three hands and tripled her money. The man only won one, but she had to smile at how excited he got. He was still in the hole but he was having the time of his life, she'd bet. The table cleared but for the two of them.

"I'm Sterling Calhoun and this is my wife, Marty." The name sounded familiar, but she didn't remember as she dealt out another hand. "We're from Ohio."

Her hand froze in mid deal. Looking at him, she tried to think what the fuck he'd be doing here and what her sister had done now. Instead of asking him, which she wanted to do in the worst kind of way, she finished dealing out the cards.

"We have Heather, your sister." Laney put the cards down and stepped back from the table. It was a cue that would have someone come and take her table for her, that she needed a break. But as busy as it was, she was still standing there when the woman continued. "My name is Marty Calhoun, as he said, but I wanted to tell you that Heather is safe. And your other sister and her husband are both dead."

"How?" She told her about the drugs found in the house. "They're really gone? Both of them? And if you're lying to me, I'm not going to be happy."

The woman pulled out her phone and laid it in front of her. Laney moved closer so that she could see them. Her sister and her piece of shit husband. They were in caskets with flowers across them. When she moved her finger over the pictures again, there was a picture of Heather. She was as beautiful as she remembered her to be.

"My brother, he's her teacher, knew there was something wrong when Heather started coming to school with her clothing cleaned and her hair brushed. She was hungry all the time, but he has this set up in his room that provides for children that are less fortunate. Basically, we went to her home, hoping to find out what was going on, and thought they were gone. But Heather told my wife that she wasn't able to go into their bedroom, and Marty checked. The police were brought in a few minutes later." Laney asked if Heather had been hurt by them. "Previously, the doctor said that she had been, but she had no drugs in her system when she was taken to the hospital. My parents have petitioned the county to have her stay with them. She's well provided for, and adjusting easily."

"I can't.... She knows me, of course, but I haven't had a great deal of contact with any of them for years. As you've mentioned, she's not my niece but my half-sister. Sally Anne was also my half-sister." Sterling said they were aware of that. "I don't know what to do."

"We're here to help you."

She didn't say anything, but was relieved to have someone come and replace her. She must have looked worse than she felt, because her pit boss asked her four times if she was all right. She wasn't, but told him she was fine.

"Laney, is there somewhere we can talk?"

"No. I don't.... No, not yet. I need time to...." She started to walk away. "I'll contact you in a few hours. I get off at four."

The man handed her a card and she nodded without looking at it. She was in the break room when it hit her what had just happened. Sally Anne and Clay were dead. Heather was staying with people that she didn't know, and Laney wasn't even sure how to contact her stepmother to let her know, if she'd even care.

The rest of the afternoon was a blur. If someone had asked her what she'd done today, all she would have been able to do was stare blankly at them. She was glad now that she was off for the next two days, and decided that she wasn't going to answer her phone if it was from work. Hell, she might not answer it from anyone. Laney went home to her little apartment and sat in the corner with her blanket wrapped around her.

There had been a lot of calls to her phone over the last few days. None of them were numbers she knew. Nor did she listen to the voice mails. Sally Anne had done this before…pretended all sorts of scams to get her to come home, or at the very least, to send money. She'd done that for a while, helping out with rent and food, but even that got old when she figured out they were using it for drugs rather than anything that she sent it for. Then she found out about Heather.

Laney knew that her sister was a drug addict. She also knew that Clay had been into more trouble than most hoods she met working in Vegas. But they were together, and that was all that mattered to them. Then one day, her stepmother had informed her that Sally Anne had a child.

"What do you mean, she has a child? She can barely take care of herself, much less an infant." Rosemarie told her that she thought that Sally Anne would make a great mother. "Of course, you would. You think that I'm a loser too. So, your opinion means shit to me. When did she have it?"

"You're always so quick to put her down. Why can't you be a little more like her and forgive occasionally?" The same thing she said to her all the time. She needed to be more like Sally Anne and Clay.

"Because I'm not a drug addict married to an equally stupid dope head. I also enjoy life too much to take drugs. Not to mention, having a roof over my head is sort of nice." Rosemarie told her that she loathed her. "Well, that's wonderful. I guess that your nomination for mother of the year award paperwork can hit the trash can."

"You're so mean. The least you can do since you won't share your money with us is provide a nice gift to the baby. Money is what they need." She had sent money after that, but only the one time. Two days after they had cashed the check, they were both arrested for being publicly intoxicated.

She stopped sending cards with money in it for the little girl too. They took the money and used it for things that didn't benefit the child. Laney wished that she'd had some way, any way, to have taken little Heather from them years ago.

Her cell ringing stirred her. Laney hadn't realized that she'd fallen asleep sitting there, and couldn't move well enough to go and get it. She hurt, her legs were tight, and her arms, from holding herself securely, were sore as well. By the time she got to her phone, it had long since stopped ringing and alerted her that she had a voicemail. Laney went to take a shower instead of bothering with it.

Three hours later, after taking a bath instead of a shower, Laney felt almost human again. There were several more missed calls, three from work, the rest from a number she didn't know, and more voicemails. She sat on her couch to listen to them. But instead, she looked at the card that she'd gotten from Sterling Calhoun. It was the same number that had shown up that she didn't know. Laney wasn't even going to speculate how he'd gotten her number.

She didn't want to call him, but knew that she had to. Her little sister was out there and might need her. Laney had decided not to call Rosemarie. It was just too much drama to deal with her, and besides, she was in no better position to raise Heather than Sally Anne was.

Laney was still trying to figure out how Sally Anne had ended up with Rosemarie's child. Their biological father was a horror of a man too, beating whoever got in his way, or even if someone was breathing the same air he was. The man hated people. There had to be a good reason for Rosemarie to have given up the child, and she was going to find out. Calling the Calhouns, she wondered if they had the information that she'd not been able to find.

~*~

Sterl hung up the phone and looked over at Marty, who was napping. She'd been doing that a lot over the last few days, and he was worried about her. He needed to wake her to let her know what he'd set up with Laney. But a few more minutes wasn't going to hurt, he thought, when he decided to think about what Laney had said.

He knew that she was aware of the child being her half-sister. But how it had happened, she had no idea. He did. Joe had found out for him when she'd started searching for it. It had only taken her a few hours to find out that as the mother and Sally Anne lived in different states, it was easy for them to both claim her on their taxes and with the welfare offices. Rosemarie had even gone as far as applying for a second Social Security card after Sally Anne had. It was a scam that was going to get the mother in deep trouble when it came out. And it would.

"Did you talk to her?" He nodded and laid down next to Marty when she spoke. "You're worried about me. Don't. I'm tired a lot, but I think it's more to do with the fact that I've never felt so safe before. I'm catching up."

"You promise that you aren't sick?" She told him that she felt wonderful, but tired, that was all. "Well, we're going to meet Laney for dinner in a couple of hours. She has a lot of questions. Do you suppose we should have brought Heather with us? I know that Noah said not to, but she might have been a little more receptive if we had."

"No. I think this way is better. And even he admitted that it was for the best. Joe was right in thinking that bringing her here and Laney rejecting her might have been too much on the little girl. Besides, your parents are having the time of their life with the kids." He knew that as well. "Oh, we're supposed to go and purchase some of those big candy bars for your parents. I think they want to give them to the kids for Christmas."

"I have a list that they want. Do you want to go with me to dinner? You can rest more if you'd like. I can wake you when I get back." He wiggled his brows at her, which made her laugh. "There's my baby. Come on now. We really need to get going."

They were in the restaurant before Laney was. While waiting, Sterl looked over the contract for the gallery opening. They wanted a minimum of ten paintings, and would take up to twenty if he had them. Right now, he had seven that he was finished with, and two more that he was working on. The one of the faerie was his favorite by far. He thought of it now. Just thinking of it made him feel good, like he was in sunshine all the time.

The queen was standing in an open field. Her gown was of the purest white, with silver lines. But only when you looked at it from a distance. The closer one got to the painting, the more you could see that the color was an illusion, the lines something more.

The dress wasn't made of material either, but of every creature that he could find in the woods. Each line of silver outlined them so that you could make them out when close enough. Some of them animals that hadn't been seen in a long time.

The trees behind her were also made of animals, some of them peeking from branches, others hiding in the leaves. There was a bear in front of an oak tree just staring at the beauty before him. It had taken him hundreds of hours to get it right, and he'd loved every second of it.

"It says here that I must make an appearance for at least half the showing. I wonder why they'd put that in there." Marty told him what she'd found out from the secretary. "Oh. Well I guess I can understand that. But I'd never get lost in gambling and forget about what was going on with my paintings. I mean, I don't even know how to gamble, much less get lost in it."

"Most people would, I suppose. All the glitter and glitz. There, she's coming. I feel so sorry for her. To find out about your family this way, from strangers."

He stood up when Laney was shown to their table.

"I don't know why I agreed to this." She didn't sit right away, but the host clearing his throat had her moving. "I'm sorry. As I was saying. I don't know why I'm here. I haven't had anything to do with Sally Anne or her husband for years. And I know very little about Heather other than what I could find out on my own. My sister and I...we never really got along well."

"I can understand that. She and her husband, Clay, they weren't people that I would want to know either. As I told you before, Heather is in my brother, Randal's, kindergarten class, and he is the one that first noticed something was going on with her. He told the police all that he knew, which, as it turned out, was very little."

The waiter took their orders and left them again. He was impressed that for as stressed as Laney was, she didn't drink. When he asked her if she was all right, she nodded, then shook her head.

"I'm so lost right now. I've been working on trying to find out what I could about Heather and why my stepmother would have turned her over to Sally Anne, but there wasn't much to be found. And Rosemarie—my stepmother's name—she isn't any better than Sally Anne and Clay were. But the drug of choice for our father and Rosemarie was alcohol, and using their fists was the first line of action instead of talking things out. So because of them, I don't drink, take drugs, even the over the counter ones, nor do I get angry about things that I can't control."

"How long have you lived out here?" Laney told them that she'd been living here her whole life. "I didn't realize that you'd not grown up in Ohio."

"My stepmother again. She wanted me and my dad to move out here just after they were married. I was living with my dad then, and Sally Anne was staying with her mother out here. I had no idea until they married that my dad had been having an affair with Rosemarie and they had Sally Anne. It's how we became a blended family. It wasn't great growing up with them…Sally Anne was spoiled, my father gave into her a lot, claiming that she had had a hard life, and Rosemarie never liked me from the start. I think that's when my dad started to become less of a father than he already had been." Marty said she was sorry. "Don't be. The way I look at it, because of them I have money in the bank. I don't have a lot of debt. I also come and go as I please. I've been happy without them around."

"Heather is going to need you." Sterl was sad to see her shaking her head. "Then she'll end up in the system. I'm sorry about that, but my parents are simply too old to care for her, and my brothers are all working too much to take her in. My wife and I came out here for a business reason, and we thought we'd come by to see if we could take you back with us, just to see the little girl. And figure out what you might like to do about her."

He hoped that his parents would forgive him for saying that they were too old, when in fact, they both were as fit as he was. And with the children around, they'd been taking them for walks and such, so it was a way for them to get into better shape as well.

"I can't care for her. I know nothing about her or my family. My stepmother is a bitch, my father a prick. I see them occasionally, but not enough to go out of my way to be around them." Laney looked at him with tears in her eyes. "I would love to take her in. Raise her as my baby sister, but I don't know how."

"Understandable. It is. We've only recently taken on a child that belonged to a very good friend of ours. Without family to help us, I don't know what we'd do. Benson is about a year old, much younger than Heather, but it's a scary thing to have someone depending on you so much." Laney nodded as their food was set in front of them. "But it would help the adoption agency to get her into a better home if you were to come out and sign some paperwork on this."

It was a lie, all of it. She had no reason to come back with them. She could just as easily give up her rights to the child from here. And Sterl had a feeling that she knew that as well. But the longer she sat there, toying with her food, the more he thought she was going to tell them no.

"If I go out there, will I have to pay for anything that they have incurred? I mean, I don't want to sound cold or anything, but over the years, I've given up a great deal to support the two of them. Am I going to have to pay for their funeral? Back rent? Anything that they might owe?" Sterl told her that it had all been taken care of. "By you?"

"My family. We didn't want Heather to have to be burdened with anything if she were adopted out. I don't know what the system would do, but my family and I, we decided that we'd just take care of it for her." Laney nodded. "We can leave in the morning, or even tonight if you wish. We have a plane."

"I know who you are, Mr. Calhoun. I might be a little slow, but I did look you up. Your family is very wealthy." He nodded. "I also know that I don't have to go there to sign anything. Good try, but I'm not stupid."

"None of us thought you were. We were...I guess you could say we were hedging our bets to get you to come out." She nodded and asked not to be lied to again. "I can do that. But Heather does need you. You are the first person she mentioned when we asked her about relatives. And she told us about the cards you sent with money in them."

"All right. I'll go, but I need to be back here in five days. I've applied for personal time for the death of my sister, and I only have five days plus the two I have off. I won't.... When I want to leave, I expect to be able to do so. No questions asked, nor will I be guilted into taking my sister. I won't go without those reassurances."

"You have them." She nodded and played with her food. "When would you like to leave, Laney? Like I said, we can leave here tonight if you wish."

"Yes. Tonight. But I have to talk to my stepmother first. I don't think she knows that Sally Anne is dead. Unless you notified her." He said that they hadn't. "All right. I'll contact her and let her know. You do whatever it is you need to do to get us out of here in a timely manner, please."

She left them there. Sterl looked over at Marty when she laughed. After asking her twice what was so funny, she patted him on the cheek and dug into her meal as she explained.

"Poor Randal. He's going to have his hands full with this one. And I'm glad that I'll be around to see it. Laney will have him so tied up in knots, he's going to wish he'd never met her. For a while anyway."

Sterl laughed too. This was going to be a blast.