Hidden Threat (53 page)

“
I’m not Del Dangurs!” he screamed.

Backing slowly to the entertainment center, she lifted the remote out of her kangaroo pocket and pressed
play
.

Dagus moved to the side of the table, holding the pistol in his hand. He stopped abruptly as the image of he and Brianna was projected across the giant screen.

“
Gotta love these jumbotrons, you know. I thought this might help us sort some things out. Now why did you decide to meet me here tonight? Thought you were getting some of this action?”

“
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

The Cliffs at Keowee, South Carolina

“
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.

“
Your attorney?” Melanie scoffed, and it came off as a high-pitched laugh.

The thunderous boom of the pistol deafened her for a brief moment, but she was surprised at how calm she remained. Where had he aimed the pistol?

“
Now do I have your attention!”

“
Lenard, you’re losing it, baby.” He was around the table and on her in a rapid movement that surprised even Amanda. She felt his sinewy arm crook around her neck and the cold steel of the Peacemaker against her temple. As he pulled her against his body, she reached into her hoodie pocket and retrieved her lighter. The movement was inconspicuous and therefore not noticed by her mother or Dagus, who were focused on one another.

“
Shut your mouth, Amanda.” She felt him fumble with the pistol a bit, as if the weight of it might be tiring his arm.

“
Len,” Melanie said carefully and slowly. “We can all get out of this. We can pretend nothing has happened. Just put the gun down.”

Amanda was surprised at how calm her mother seemed, though she could hear the fear in her voice. But of what was she afraid? For whom was she scared? And why would she want to pretend that nothing was happening? A madman had a gun to her head! That was what hurt most of all at that moment, that her mother appeared not to care.

“
Yeah, Lenard, just give her the pistol back, you coward. You won’t use it anyway.”

“
Amanda Garrett! You let me handle this, young lady.”

“
Please, Mom, don’t you think it’s a bit late to be trying to discipline me?” She paused then leaned over her shoulder, separating the pistol from her temple. “You looking forward to taking it up the ass in prison, Lenard?”

She felt him clench against her. “I swear to God I will kill her, Melanie, if you try to take me down. I’ve got the goods on you two, you know.” He started to shuffle her along the pool table toward the staircase. “Now move away. I’m taking her as insurance.”

Insurance. There was that word.

“
Ooh, sweet,” Amanda said. “Insurance. Make you think of anything, Mom?” She spun the wheel once on the lighter and the flame jumped out brilliantly.

“
This is out of control. What in the hell are you talking about?”

“
What’s with the lighter? Get rid of that!” Dagus challenged Amanda, lamely attempting to move the pistol from her head to ineffectively swat at the lighter, while retaining his grip on her neck.

She moved her arm and wrestled against Dagus as she flipped the small switch that would hold the butane aperture on the lighter open so that it would burn without the force of her thumb. Dagus had almost moved her to the top step that would lead them down the staircase.

“
Wait, one second, Lenard.” She was pronouncing the name in a way that she knew would upset him, piss him off. She was mocking him. “I need to say something to my mother before you take me to your place and try to do to me what you did to Brianna and any number of other underage girls.”

She could feel him trembling against her. She sensed that he was confused, teetering on the brink of something, perhaps reaching a tipping point.

“
That ought to add another twenty years to your sentence. Rape of a minor. Hey, I’ve got an idea, why don’t you just put that pistol in your mouth and end your miserable life right now? What would you say? Some
Romeo and Juliet
? Parting is such sweet sorrow? Or how about some
Macbeth
? Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death?”

Feeling the momentum, she could sense that she was inside his thoughts staring at the confusion ripping his deranged mind apart like demons. “Go ahead, just do us all a favor, you shithead, and kill yourself. Stick it in your mouth now. Isn’t that what you said to Brianna, ‘Stick it in your mouth’? Go ahead, stick it in your mouth.”

“
Amanda, stop it!”

“
You stop it, Mother! You show me what you love more, this house or me.” She held the lighter high over her head as if at a rock concert.

“
Get rid of that lighter!” her mother screamed, swatting at her hand. She connected with Amanda’s and the lighter broke free, bounced once off the railing and then fell toward the foyer. The flame cast an eerie ball of light, which caused shadows to dance rapidly on the walls of the foyer below. Landing with a slight thud, flame erupted as the lighter fluid she had poured into the thick Persian rug accelerated the fire instantly across its twelve-foot expanse.

“
Nooo!” Melanie Garrett leaned over the railing, her face a contorted death mask, haunting and pained.

“
What are you thinking about, Mother?” she screamed above the roaring fire. “Did we forget to insure the house? Oh my, after years of making me go to the doctor so you can make a few bucks off Dad’s insurance, how can you forget to do something as simple as insuring the house?”