Daniel Read Online Free PDF

Benny.
He’d like that.

Chapter 4
     
    Doyle was in his office when Daniel went
to find him the next morning. He was a huge man, and he seemed to be fitting in
well with the company. One of the things he’d wanted to do when he’d signed on
was be able to run the security team as he saw fit. After the help he’d given
them before, Royce and all of them had agreed.
    “I need your help on something. It’s
about a woman. And her kid, she has a kid.” Daniel tried to calm himself and couldn’t.
The woman had sounded terrified and he couldn’t do a damned thing about it. “Her
name is O’Reilly Harlequin, and she lives at…. Why aren’t you writing this
down?”
    He’d driven by her house last night and
stood at the gate. He hadn’t touched it, but stood there, listening to the hum
of the electricity running through it. Then he’d driven by again this morning,
wondering if she ever left the compound. He hadn’t seen anyone either time.
    “Don’t need to. Her name is O’Reilly
Harlequin, only child of Olivia and Reilly Harlequin. The dad died when she was
a baby, hit and run that never turned up any arrests. Her mom remarried when
O’Reilly was five to a man who had a daughter already. Her name was Meagen
Harper. She was a class act, too.”
    “Was? Her sister is dead?” Doyle nodded.
“Why do you know so much about her? Is she in trouble?”
    He reached behind him and unlocked the
bottom drawer to his cabinet. He laid a file in front of him and looked at him.
“It’s not pretty, not all of it. I’ll give it to you like we figured it out,
all right?”
    Daniel nodded, sure that this was going
to be horrible. He looked at the newspaper clipping that showed a young girl
and a large vase. He couldn’t make out the design, but thought it was pretty
enough.
    “O’Reilly was twelve when she made that.
There was this contest in her hometown that was sponsoring an essay contest,
some big corporation that was trying to make a community impact. Winner won a
trip to Paris to study art for a year. The essay was to be about earth.”
    He looked at the picture again in the
clipping and took the better photo when Doyle handed it to him. His breath
caught. The design on the vase was stunning. At the center of the piece was a
large tree. The tree was bare of anything other than large branches. There was
a single leaf on the topmost branches that seemed to strain out. Something was
written at the base of the tree. Daniel looked up at Doyle when he spoke them.
    “All that we have, all that we will ever
be, is in our nature. Whether it be in ourselves or in that which surrounds
us.”
    “She won.”
    Doyle shook his head and laughed. “No,
she didn’t win the contest, but she did win the hearts of those who were at the
park that day.” He handed him another picture. “About a week after she was disqualified,
a big news dump happened. From all over the world, news vans showed up to see
what they’d been asked to come and witness. See, the step-daddy thought they’d
done an injustice to his new daughter and was going to prove them all wrong.
They’d called her a cheat.”
    “On what grounds? Couldn’t they have
figured it out that she didn’t write it?”
    Doyle laughed again and put a DVD in his
computer. “O’Reilly didn’t just write the poem, she threw the vase and designed
the tree. She was accused of being a fraud as well as cheating. They objected
to the ‘paper’ she’d used, and then when that didn’t fly, they said she was
saying someone else’s work was hers. The media blitz was to prove she did it
all.”
    The video started out with a picture of
a potter’s wheel. He’d not had the occasion to use one, but he’d seen them when
he’d been in law school. When a little girl walked up to it and sat behind it,
it took him several seconds to realize it was the woman he’d seen.
    Daniel watched in stunned silence as she
starting pulling the pot. He couldn’t believe it when she had to stand up