Watch Me Die by Goldberg Lee

Author:Goldberg, Lee [Goldberg, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Adventures in Television
Published: 2011-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

It took her about twenty minutes to lay out the whole story, fighting tears as she remembered it all again, the hope and the happiness and then the pain.

And while she spoke, I wanted to pull out one of the pictures I had of Lauren, to see if the expression on her face, the look in her eye, would slowly reveal their meanings to me as I learned more about her.

The story began about twenty years ago.

Mona and Brock Harper lived in a big house in Bellevue, across the lake from Seattle. He was a lawyer in the shipping industry and frequently entertained clients in his home, from private dinners with a few individuals to large banquets and garden parties.

The Harpers were always looking for dependable domestic help, but they went through maids almost as fast as they went through cocktail napkins. One day, a young woman answered their advertisement for a cleaning lady. She was conscientious, worked fast and efficiently, and clearly had experience. Her name was Lauren, and although she said she was eighteen, Mrs. Harper wasn’t fooled.

Still, good cleaning women were hard to find, and not only that, but Lauren was polite, well-mannered, and a perfect hostess when called upon to serve guests at the Harpers’ many social gatherings.

Lauren was also bright and inquisitive. More than once Mr. Harper found her in the library, after her work was done, reading from his leather-bound collection of classic literature, something he’d never done. The books were bought by their decorator, strictly for show. But it pleased Mrs. Harper that Lauren was finding the décor useful. It revealed the maid had intelligence and a desire to better herself.

Mrs. Harper decided to save her.

One night, on his wife’s orders, Mr. Harper followed Lauren after she finished work and discovered that Lauren was an orphan, living in a squalid Seattle tenement with a bunch of “runaways, junkies, whores, and radicals.” As far as I know, he didn’t become a private eye after that. I guess he didn’t get the same thrill out of surveillance that I did.

They immediately brought Lauren back to their home, offering her a job as a live-in housekeeper. Lauren settled into the maid’s quarters off the laundry room and continued her exemplary work. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper tried to try and find out something about their secretive, but dependable, housekeeper, but to no avail. After a month or two, the Harpers sat Lauren down and told her if she was going to live in their home, she would have to trust them as they had trusted her. She had to tell them the truth about herself.

So, she did.

Lauren admitted that she was only fifteen, and that she was a runaway, but that no one was, or ever would be, looking for her. She said her mother was a junkie who “sold her body,” as Mrs. Harper put it, for drugs and money. Lauren didn’t know who her father was. The man her mother lived with for years was

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