“How’d you…”
“I thought a tall guy like you would, you know”—she looked at the screen and squinted—“have some size to you or something. I guess I was wrong.” She shrugged.
The bound fury showed signs of loosening. His face was flush red, and sweat was beginning to seep onto his brow.
“Cat got your tongue, Del? Can’t find a woman your age, so you have to hump my best friend?” Her guess had been that he was so controlled that once the fury was unleashed, the pendulum would swing completely in the opposite direction. Passivity would give way to action. Warmth would quickly blend into rage. Control would find its match in abandon.
The situation into which she was thrusting him, she hoped, would be overwhelming to him. She was banking on the belief that he would snap, once threatened with publication of the fact that he was molesting a minor, had burned down her father’s house, and had written a smear article about him in the newspaper.
The loud moans from the video made the scene surreal. His composure was striking to her. He was remaining calm in the face of irrefutable evidence.
“She that good, Del?” she said, looking at the video and then turning from the hideous image.
Then it happened. He moved across that line, and she could see the rage burning in his eyes. “You die, all this dies with you. It will look like a suicide. The forlorn daughter kills herself after reading the article destroying her father’s fabled reputation.” The pistol was firm in his hand as he pointed it at her face from a distance of about five feet. She backed away, keeping the pool table between them. Worse, his voice was still measured and calm. Controlled and decisive.
“Not so, Lenard. My friend at the Charlotte Observer has all your videos and a bunch of other e-mails, too. Maybe you know her?”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You’ll find out soon enough. You should know her from your work at the newspaper.” She checked her watch again.
“Turn off the video, Amanda!” he screamed. There it was. He was losing control now. He continued moving toward her and she kept moving away from him, resulting in a ridiculous bit of circling the pool table. “What’s so funny? I came here to help you!”
“Chill out, Del.”
“Shut up!”
“Hey, just because you’re having a bad day doesn’t mean you have to project that onto me. I mean, you’re probably only looking at thirty or forty years in prison. And the good part is”—she threw her hands out as if in a welcoming gesture—“you get to be someone’s prison bitch.”
He lunged at her across the table, swiping the pistol at her face.
She laughed. “You’re supposed to use it to shoot people, not hit them with it, you coward. All this time pretending to be the good teacher, and now everyone will know you as the child molester. The arsonist. The attempted murderer. Thanks for burning down my dad’s house, you son of a bitch. And then you try to kill an innocent woman?”
Amanda recounted the crimes visited upon her life in recent days. The destruction of her father’s house and his carefully stored memories. The assault on Riley Dwyer. The framing of Jake. It was as if she was the point man in a combat patrol, and the enemy was silently disabling everyone around her so that when she turned around to get a head count, there was no one left. She was alone in her struggle. Her epiphany was that it had always been this way.
He stopped circling and stood still. A chill shot up her spine as if along an electrical current propelled through copper wires. Calm settled over him like a morning fog.
“What are you talking about, Amanda? I didn’t do those things.”
Amanda thought to herself that he sounded more like a mental patient calmly denying reality. It seemed he was trying to convince himself more than her. Why would he deny it?
The front door swung open, and Melanie Garrett entered the foyer.
CHAPTER 74
“What are you doing, Amanda?”
Melanie Garrett walked carefully into the foyer, her steps pinging hollow against the strained noises of Dagus giving commands on the video upstairs. She watched her mother stop with one foot on the first step up from the foyer. She sniffed. “What’s that smell?” But it was more a question to herself than one she was seeking an answer to at the moment.
Before Amanda had a chance to respond, her mother was at the mid-landing of the stairway, one hand atop the beveled handrail. As if pulled by a string, she continued until she was standing on the second floor, the steps immediately to her back, the railing with her hand still upon it to her right, and the drama of Dagus’s shaking hand holding a pistol aimed at her only child directly to her front.
“Len, what are you doing? What are you doing with my gun?”
“Amanda seems to think that I’ve done some bad things, Melanie. Why don’t you tell her what’s really going on?”
“Lenard here wanted to come here and hook up with me for sex, Mama,” Amanda whimpered and then changed the tone of her voice. “What do you know about all of that?” Her tenor was sharp and judgmental.
“What are you talking about Amanda? Now, Len, put down the pistol.” Melanie’s voice quivered as she spoke.
Amanda stared at her mother. She was wearing a cotton knit short-sleeve sweater with green and orange rain forest designs of palm trees, banana leaves, monkeys, and other animals stitched into the pattern. Bright orange Capri pants stopped a few inches above Bruno sandals. A pumpkin-colored sandstone necklace circled her neck like orange Chiclets. She had clipped her hair back, not her most flattering look. If the light hit her mother at certain angles, her plastic surgery scars, however faint, were visible.
“Mama, this crazy bastard had sex with Brianna. See,” she said, pointing at the television. “He burned down my daddy’s house, beat up Riley Dwyer, and then he went and wrote that terrible article about him.”
“What are you talking about?” Her mother’s question seemed sincere. “The house was an accident, Amanda. Your shrink was mugged. And the article is mostly true, and Brianna’s a whore. So, why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here with your teacher?”
“What am I doing? He came here to rape me, and now he’s got a gun on me. And you suggested I talk to him!”
“Shut up! Shut up, both of you!” Amanda had momentarily switched off Dagus, but now she became fully aware that he had escalated out of control.
“Okay, okay! Enough!” Melanie screamed. She saw Dagus flinch and tighten his grip on the pistol. His breathing was heavy and rapid, as if he were nearly hyperventilating.
“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” His voice was tinny and awkward. His bizarre quoting of Shakespeare at this moment, and particularly a quote about death, was unnerving.
She saw her mother freeze. The severity of the situation had finally registered with her, it seemed. But Amanda remained cool and focused, just like her father would have.
I’m a part of you… you’re a part of me too.
Her mother’s face was in clear focus. The skin stretched taut against the cheekbones, eyebrows arched a bit too high, the nose sloped with a small lift at the end, freckles dotted either smooth, sanded cheek.
Disregarding Dagus’s insanity for the moment, she zeroed in on her mother, and began saying what she had been waiting to say. “Well, I checked, Mama, through my attorney, and you forgot one thing. You of all people. And then you confirmed it in the car yesterday.” She shook her head and made a “tsk, tsk” sound.