No Longer a Daddy's Girl [Christian Fiction]

Part 1 - Estrangement

Weldon Richardson returned home to his lavish mansion in Mitchellville, Maryland at 12:05 a.m. He had been out at the club, brokering a few deals, having a few drinks, and enjoying a couple of suggestive dances with a college senior who was blowing off steam from finals week. When he got home, he planned for another hour or so of intimacy with his live-in girlfriend, and he didn't care whether she was asleep or not. He would wake her. She wasn't enjoying all this opulence for nothing.

After setting the exterior alarms and petting Zeke, his 3-year-old pit bull, he walked upstairs, hoping to find his girlfriend in bed, waiting for him. Instead, he found an open closet door revealing a half-empty closet, hangers dangling from the closet rod like icicles from a power line. A quick scan of the room revealed that all her books, perfumes, body lotions, and other cosmetics were gone. Her laptop, a constant fixture on the nightstand, was nowhere to be found.

He ran to the closet and dropped to his knees. He reached in, worked his fingers around the edges of a loose floorboard, and pulled it up. The $10,000 was still there. He often kept that amount under the floorboards to discourage home invaders and make them think that was all he had. In fact, it wasn't. Nowhere close. And he was smart enough to keep the real money away from his house.

There were two cards in his driveway, a Jaguar, and a Bonneville. He took the Bonneville, the car he drove when he wanted to look like a normal Joe and not someone who made six figures a year on legal and illegal activities. He drove five minutes away to Upper Marlboro and turned off Crain Highway onto a dead-end street. Halfway up the street, he turned into the driveway of a rickety bungalow with peeling siding and windows in various states of disrepair. He parked, turned off his lights, and waited. Two minutes later, a sliver of light appeared from between the blinds on a living room window. Weldon got out of his car and waved. The sliver of light disappeared.

Weldon walked around the side of the house to the backyard. There was a neighbor's house clearly visible from the yard, and Weldon studied it to make sure no one was peeping from any of the windows. He then hurried down the rear stairs to the basement and used his key to open the door.

It was dark and musty, but he found the bathroom nonetheless. He had been here enough to know how to find it even with his eyes closed. He opened the doors of the vanity, reached in, and removed a rusty metal bucket and two cans of scouring cleanser. He immediately noticed that they weren't in the same positions where he had last left them. He closed the vanity doors and pulled out the vanity, separating it from the sink. Once it cleared the sink, he pushed it to the side, revealing the two-foot-square safe buried in the floor underneath.

Weldon unlocked the safe with another key. Inside was a year's earnings from the illegal escort service that he ran from the office of his record company. In the glow of a nightlight plugged into the lone outlet above the sink, he started to count, hoping that all the $300,000 he had earned over the past year was still there.

It wasn't. Ninety thousand was missing.

Weldon cursed under his breath. He couldn't believe Lonette Getter had betrayed him. Sure, they had argued when she found out that Weldon was unfaithful and also secretly running girls, but she seemed to eventually warm up to it and even offered to help him handle that side of the business. Now, Weldon realized that was all a ruse. She had no intention of sticking around once she heard of Weldon's side business. She was just waiting for the right moment, and the right amount of money, to make her move. Normally, Weldon cleared about $5,000 a week from the escort service. But this week, there was a convention in town, attended by lonely husbands wanting a respite from their wives. This week, he cleared $90,000, none of which made it to the safe.

Weldon found a large box in the basement, dumped the remaining money into it and secured the safe. Once he pushed the vanity back in place, he rapped on the ceiling three times with his fist. That was the signal to his sixty-year-old tenant upstairs to let him know that he was about to leave and to make sure that any visitors to the house did not see him. He grabbed the box of money and left the basement.