Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4), Nick Pirog [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

said, “Been home with the kids ever since.”

We chatted for another hour, then the boys returned. Patrick really wanted to show me his room, and I let him take my hand and lead me up the stairs.

He was big into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and his room was painted dark green with posters of all the turtles on his walls.

There were a couple pictures on his dresser and I picked one up. It was Patrick riding a horse with a big smile on his face. He was a little smaller, and I guessed the picture was taken about a year earlier.

“Do you like horses?” I asked.

He crooked his head to the side, “Yeah.” Then he added, “But not as much as Ninja Turtles.”

It was closing in on 8:00 when I returned to the farm.

There was a blue sedan parked in front of the house.

Caroline’s car.

Bollocks.

I stepped from the car, then pushed through the front door. Harold and May attacked me with kisses.

“Hi guys,” I said, craning my neck into the living room. She wasn’t there. “Caroline?” I shouted.

There was no answer.

Maybe she was outside somewhere.

“Where is she?” I asked the piglets.

They didn’t know. Or they were too hungry to care. While filling their food bowls, I heard a creak. From upstairs.

My stomach dropped.

I made my way upstairs. The door to the master bedroom was closed.

“Caroline?” I shouted. “Um, if you’re in there, can you come out so we can chat?”

I waited a long minute.

Maybe she wasn’t in there. Maybe I closed the door myself. Or maybe the wind blew it shut.

I closed my hand on the doorknob and pushed the door in.

Caroline was on the bed. She was lying on her side, her head resting on her hand. She was completely naked.

I took a deep breath and said, “Hey.”

“Hi,” she purred.

She massaged one of her large—and I must admit, perfect—breasts with her left hand.

“So,” I said, “I need you to put some clothes on.”

“You don’t want to finish what you started?”

She swiveled from her side to her back. Then ever so slowly, she began to spread her legs.

A better man may have been able to shield his eyes. To look away. But not me. I stared at her vagina as if there was an endangered fresh water dolphin on my bed.

I mentally splashed cold water on my face and said, “Put some clothes on. This isn’t going to happen.”

Then I walked out of the room.

She came downstairs a couple minutes later. She was wearing a black robe and sandals. Apparently, that’s the only clothing she brought.

“You really know how to make a girl feel unwanted,” she said brusquely.

“I’m sorry, Caroline, but this,” I moved my hand from her to me, “just isn’t going to work.”

She took a couple steps forward. She was only a foot from me. She pulled her robe open. “Don’t you want to touch them?”

I took a steadying breath. “Caroline.”

Finally, accepting defeat, she closed her robe.

“Please leave,” I said, nodding toward the door.

She stalked to the door, then slammed it.

Headlights appeared through the window and I walked outside. It was a truck. Wheeler. She parked and stepped out.

Caroline was just getting in her car and rolled down the window. “You can have him,” she belted, then gunned the engine and accelerated away.

Wheeler looked at me questioningly. “What was that about?”

I told her.

“She spread her legs?”

“Basic Instinct style,” I said with a laugh.

“Then you kicked her out?”

“I did.”

She fought down a smile, then said, “About earlier, about my dad.” She paused. “I know you were just showing me what you found. I shouldn’t have screamed at you.”

“Don’t worry about it. I probably would have reacted the same way.”

She handed me a couple sheets of paper.

I looked down at the pages. They were bank records.

Wheeler said, “My dad had been getting ten thousand dollars a month from Lunhill for twenty years.”

“He told me the money was coming from a rich guy whose dog he saved many years ago,” she said. “It was when my dad was first starting out. Some bigwig was traveling through town and his dog got hit by a car. My dad saved the dog, and the guy was so appreciative that he set up a trust to give the clinic ten grand a month.”

“And you’re sure this isn’t the truth?”

She shook her head. “I have a friend at the bank. She traced the account number. It’s not a trust. It’s something called Hillman Enterprises, which I’ve been researching on the internet for the past few hours and doesn’t seem to exist.”

“And you think it’s Lunhill?”

“Don’t you?”

I did and told her so.

“There’s more,” she said. “The year my dad started taking the money. That’s the year my mom left.”

“You think she knew?”

“I called her.” She took a deep breath. “The clinic was struggling. My dad could barely keep up with the bills. Then Greg Mallory called him to come look at some of his cows. There was a guy there. Offered my dad money to keep what was happening at the dairy quiet. My dad took the money. My mom was disgusted. Left him and me a month later.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why didn’t your mom ever tell you?”

“She said she didn’t want me to hate my dad.”

I put my arm around her shoulder.

“He was my hero,” she sniffed.

“I remember when I found out my dad wasn’t perfect,” I said. “I was fifteen. I walked in on him doing a line of coke in his office.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he do?”

“He told me he didn’t do it very often. Only when he had a bunch of work to do. Then he said if he ever caught me doing it, he would cut off my balls.”

“Wow.”

I said, “I’m sorry about your dad.”

She sniffed and said, “And I’m sorry your dad was a cokehead.”

We both laughed.

I took her hand and said, “Think about how many animals your dad helped over the past twenty years. If he hadn’t taken that money, he might not have been able to do that.”

She