The Senator’s Daughter by Christine Carroll

‘blind trust’ money from a certain gentleman who spends a portion of his year in our nation’s capital.”
    Lyle’s brows lifted. Chatsworth saying Tony was somehow out of his depth flashed on his memory screen. That wouldn’t seem to indicate a partnership. In fact, the Senator had walked away when Tony spoke of something going on “up north.” And what had that been about Chatsworth being unable to assist in a zoning matter?
    Castillo caught his expression. “Am I warm, my friend?”
    As he’d tried earlier with Cliff, Lyle shrugged. “You may have filmed me with the Senator’s daughter, but I’ve yet to become his confidant. Or yours.”
    â€œSo you have nothing for me,
amigo?”
    Lyle gave him a direct look. “I’m afraid not…
amigo.”
    â€œThen what’s your take on where Sylvia is? I figure with the clinch I caught for the show, you must know …”
    â€œYou’re the expert. Where do you think she is?”
    â€œI don’t know.” Castillo’s expression turned sad. “I’ve been tough on her; when she disappeared it made me think. I go to mass, I send up a prayer.”
    â€œRight,” said Lyle.
    Castillo pushed back his chair. “You don’t have to believe me, but I say,
por favor nos Padre,
some sunnavabitch hasn’t raped that beautiful girl and left her for dead.”

    For dead…for dead…
    The words echoed in Lyle’s brain long after he lay down in his oversized king bed.
    Raped and left…
    Was that Sylvia’s fate?
    Had it been his mother’s fate?
    Lyle felt the sting of tears, but, as he’d he told himself since he was ten, he was too big a boy to cry. He lay on his back, one hand spread over his lean stomach, and called on the part of him that was strong—the Lyle who walled off things he didn’t want to think about.
    When he slept, his iron control frayed …
    Ten-year-old Lyle stood in an onion field. His back ached from bending to tug at the thick green stalks, to expose the round white reward sheathed in papery layers. His hands were one big callus; that was how he was distinguished in school as a field-worker versus a town boy.
    There weren’t many kids like him, Caucasian, yet working like the illegal aliens who put in eighteen-hour days during high season.
    Lyle threw back the covers, pulled on a black silk robe, and padded to the roof deck door.
    Here was his home, protected by building security. He had all the comforts, a waterfront view, and as he stepped outside, he inhaled the salt air. Breathing rapidly, he told himself he didn’t have to run those traps anymore.
    But here came an image of his father, pulling up onions alongside him, the blue eyes Lyle had inherited incongruous in the face tanned the color of aged leather. The man had always stayed ahead of Lyle, experience outdistancing youthful stamina. It was in the fields, where talk wasn’t necessary, that he had always felt closest to James Thomas.
    With a bittersweet ache, Lyle recalled the last time he’d seen him. He’d driven out to the valley and parked his silver Mercedes 450SL in front of the weathered clapboard house. All of a thousand square feet, it was clean and neat inside—something Lyle had never attributed to Pop until Maddie had gone—and smelled of Murphy’s Oil soap used on the scarred pine floors. He and his father had sat on the front porch that used to face a panorama of open fields and distant foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Now, they saw the ornate entrance to a gated community with landscaped fountains and a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus.
    â€œYou ought to sell this place to the developers and move to something more comfortable,” Lyle had observed.
    â€œYou mean new and citified.” James stretched his long frame in the rocker Maddie had nursed Lyle in when he was a baby. “I’ll leave that