Chapter 4 - THE BOY WHO HELPED AND HURT HIM
Wyatt called from a family restroom at Miami International Airport.
His voice was thin and rushed. An announcement echoed behind him.
“I’m flying home alone,” he said. “Mom thinks I’m in the food court.”
“Why did you make the binder?”
“I didn’t make all of it. Candice kept the original lists. I started adding dates after I saw what they were doing.”
Wyatt explained that Marla had opened a teen checking account in his name. She said it would teach him responsibility. Instead, refunds from canceled cleaning jobs and transfers from prepaid cards began passing through it.
When Wyatt questioned the names, Marla told him the widows had authorized everything.
Then he heard Denise laughing about a woman who had forgotten she had already paid.
Wyatt began printing statements at the public library. He copied pawn receipts and added notes whenever Candice traveled with Gabriel’s schedule taped inside the kitchen cabinet.
“Why did you hit Lucas?” Gabriel asked.
Wyatt stopped talking.
A hand dryer started somewhere nearby.
“Because they kept saying he thought he was better than us,” he finally said. “Because Candice said if I didn’t teach him respect, Mom and I would have to leave.”
“That doesn’t answer it.”
“I wanted them to pick me.”
The honesty was ugly enough to be believable.
Wyatt admitted striking Lucas during two arguments. He had also stood outside the laundry room while Candice withheld dinner and made Lucas clean until morning.
Later, ashamed, he began slipping food into Lucas’s backpack. He moved Clara’s silver cup from a box Marla planned to pawn and hid it above the binder.
“The cup wasn’t the reason Candice locked the drawer,” Wyatt said. “The binder was.”
“Why didn’t Lucas tell me about you helping him?”
“He didn’t know if he could trust me. He was right.”
Wyatt’s flight boarded in forty minutes. Gabriel told him to go to an airline employee and explain that he was a minor afraid to return to the adults traveling with him. Then Gabriel called the child-welfare investigator whose number the clinic had given him.
Before hanging up, Wyatt said, “There’s something else. Candice didn’t start stealing from those women.”
Gabriel waited.
“She found out Denise and Mom were doing it last winter.”
“And then?”
“She started moving your money around to cover what they took.”
May you like
That meant Candice had not created the scheme.
She had discovered it—and chosen to protect it.
