The Hunt Chronicles: Volume 1 (7 page)

“He’s probably lying
low at his restaurant sleeping off some of the booze.  I’m sure he’ll be
home soon.  You just take care of yourself for now,” I said.

“Make sure Cheryl is
okay too, will you?”  I nodded and left.

When I shut
Maddie’s
door, the mysterious grandfather clock called out
the one o’clock hour.  I headed up the stairs to see two of the three
remaining
McCunes
.

Before I knocked on
Richard’s door, I pressed my ear to it.  Sniffles and whispers floated
around the room behind it, and for a split second, a feeling of
perhaps this
isn’t the best time
swept over me.  It was gone as fast as it had
come, and I knocked three times.  A blubbering “Come in!” screamed at me,
and so I did.  I couldn’t tell by all the crying who had actually invited
me in, but I guess it didn’t matter.

Little brother and
big sister sat hugging each other on the Richard’s bed.  I walked inside
after shutting the door.  “Take a seat,” Richard said and pointed to the
desk and chair behind me.  The desk and chair were both covered in
mountains of paperwork, but it was far from messy.  Richard was an
accountant by then.  In fact, the bed was the only non-accounting related
piece of matter in the room.  Several calculators littered the desk and
table tops.  Books on tax laws and other financial topics filled a
bookshelf on the far wall.  Two filing cabinets stood, sentry-like, next
to the door through which I had just entered.  Richard had taken me to see
his office downtown once during my last visits.  I honestly don’t know why
he even bothered renting an office.  It looked like he took care of all of
his business from his gigantic bedroom.

I grabbed the small
pile of papers sitting on the chair and carefully shifted them to the
floor.  I wheeled the chair around and sat in it, looking into four very
sad eyes.

“Richard, I’d like
to speak to you in private if that’s okay.”  He looked at Cheryl and she
nodded.  She hugged him tight and got up.  She opened the door and
then turned back to us.

“Mr. Hunt?  If
you don’t mind, could you please join me in my room after you’re done?”

“Of course,” I said,
feeling like the live-in shrink.  She smiled somewhere underneath the
tears and frizzy hair and left.  I turned back to Richard.

Though we were both
sitting, his broad shoulders made him seem like he was hovering over the
bed.  It was unsettling to see such a man cry, yet there it was.  “I
spoke with
Maddie
just now.  Is there something
you’d like to tell me, Richard?”  He brushed the tears away with the backs
of his hands.  The sobs tapered off.

“Like what?”

“Well, like how you
were feeling last night about one in the morning.”

“Ah,” he said. 
“So she told you.”

“There isn’t much
Maddie
or I can keep from each other for long,” I
said.  “Talk to me, Richard.”

“I was angry,” he
finally admitted.  “Damn angry.”

“At
your father?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”  Richard’s
eyes said he knew the answer, but his mouth didn’t know how to form the words
right away.  He spoke slowly.

“Because…because of
the way he is.  Because of the way he treated us, all of us.”

“You mean you and
Cheryl and Donald?”

“Not
just us, but the others too.
 
Nona and Thomas and all the rest.
  He said they
were all lazy good-for-nothings who had to be kept in line.  People here
seem to have it good from outside that gate.  Those people out there have
no idea what it’s like in here.  Sure, you go downtown to The Rust Bucket
and get your drinks on the house because your father is The Man.  Or maybe
you want your nails done, or your hair done, or you want a massage. 
That’s okay too, because your dad is The Man.  But what do you do when The
Man threatens to pull the plug on the essentials unless you did it all his
way?  What do you do, Reevan?”  He was speaking incoherently.  I
couldn’t follow him from one sentence to the next.  It was like his mouth
was vomiting every thought that was in his head.

“Richard, slow
down.  What do you mean?”

“He had us,
Reevan.  Dad
owned
all of us.  What were we supposed to
do?”  A familiar voice echoed in my head. 
What will we do,
Thomas?  Where will we go?  We’ve been here so long…what will we do?
 
“Don’t you get it?  None of us could leave, Reevan.  We’re like
prisoners, even still now that he’s dead.  Dad owned more than half of
Donald’s restaurant, a lot
more than half.  He scared Cheryl into
staying by threatening her with poverty for the rest of her life.”

“And you,” I asked,
putting a hand on his shoulder.

“All of my business
is in this town, and dad was the one thing holding it all together. 
Without Wilson McCune, I’d go belly up.  Dad was just a mean, selfish old
man with too much money.  Sills was right…we are all suspects.”

It began to make
sense.  Wilson was a rich, powerful man, but he was also old and
enfeebled.  With Clara gone, he must have started wondering what would
happen if his kids got too brave, got too successful, or got too married, and
left him.  Wilson was brazen and tough, and the only way to keep that up
into your seventies was to keep folks around who supported the image. 
Richard was right; they were hostages.  With one stroke of his pen Wilson
McCune could have ruined all of his children, and so they stayed to live the
life he carved out, because it was better than nothing.

Well, it used to be
better.  Apparently someone in this house had had enough.

“So,
what now?”

“Well, I guess we’ll
get our inheritance.  He never threatened to screw us over unless we
crossed him.  Donald will probably get control of his restaurant. 
Cheryl may be able to marry that
Norville
guy as long
as dad didn’t stipulate that Cheryl only gets her money if she steers clear of
him.  Whatever she chooses, she’ll either marry a rich man or become a
very rich single woman.  As for me, I honestly don’t know.  I would
like to stay here, in this town at least, although who knows what’ll happen
after word
gets
out.  No one wants to have their
taxes done by a murderer, you know?  And those that don’t leave because of
that will probably just say ‘hey, your daddy is dead, and you don’t scare us
anymore.’”

“I don’t think
that’ll happen, Richard.  You’re good at what you do and people know
it.  You’ll be fine.”  I realized that I was promising him a happy
life before I even got last night’s story out of him.  I had to know, and
I was tired of stalling.  “I want to know about last night, Richard. 
What did you do after you got
Maddie
to bed?”

“Well,” he said with
a sigh as he stared at his toes, “I started towards dad’s room but stopped
before I got to the kitchen.  Nona was inside cleaning, I guess.  I
realized I had just blown off most of my steam when I told
Maddie
what I just told you.  Plus, I didn’t want to go over it all again with
Nona if she asked me what I was doing up.  So, I turned around and came up
the main staircase and back to bed.  That was that.”  I sat there,
scratching my chin for a moment.  Richard’s situation had come to a tidy
abrupt halt last night, and I wondered if I could accept that as the truth.
 I decided I would, at least temporarily, and got up.  Richard got up
with me and hugged me.  I patted his back and then headed for the door.

I stood there, door
knob in hand, thinking about what Richard had just said about how Wilson kept
the people here so long they didn’t want to leave or were too scared to follow
through with it.  I was a little confused in the cases of Nona and
Thomas.  “Richard?  How have the others been living here? 
Nona, I mean, and Thomas?”
  Richard smirked.

“I wouldn’t bet
they’ve been very happy at all.  Those two and
Maddie
got the brunt of everything dad had to give.  Only
Maddie
had the guts to give it back to him the last few years.  I think he kept
her around because she reminded him of my mother.  Whatever the reason for
keeping her, he was constantly threatening to throw Thomas and Nona out on
their asses.”

“Why would either of
them be threatened at all?  They’re both adults, and they’ve been here for
a long time.  Surely they each have enough money piled away to get places
of their own and start real lives.  There must be other people in this
country who need a cook and a butler.  Hell, they could work in Donald’s
restaurant as a chef and waiter if they had to, right?”

“I doubt it,
Reevan.  As long as dad was around, those two weren’t going
anywhere.  He’s blackballed employees before.  No, there only chance
was to stay here and keep him as happy as possible until
he
…”
he trailed off, then looked at his shoes. 

How odd? 
I thought to myself. 
What could keep two
adults hostage in this glittering prison?  What could scare them so much
that they would stay to do a nasty old man’s bidding for the rest of his life?

With that, I
left.  I did want to speak with
Maddie
about
those two
right
away.  I started down the stairs
but only made it two or three steps before I heard Cheryl call my name.  I
turned and looked towards her room, which was further down the hall from
Richard’s.  I had forgotten all about her and rushed back up, watching her
wiggle her finger.  The sooner I was done giving her a shoulder on which to
cry, the sooner I’d get back to
Maddie
.

I reached Cheryl’s
room and went in.  I sat on her bed and watched her shut the door. 
She looked up and down the hallway a few times before she did.  When she
turned around to look at me, I realized she had probably stopped crying when
she left Richard’s room.  She looked more nervous than sad.

She was still in her
pajamas.  Her robe twirled around as she moved gracefully around her
room.  She finally sat next to me and looked into my eyes.  Her eyes
told me that she was in tune with everything in that house.  She looked
stoic, just as
Maddie
had looked a while before, but
still nervous underneath.  She was about to spill the beans, and I would
be happy to scoop them up. “I have to tell someone or else I’ll explode. 
I can’t take it anymore.”

“What is it?”

“Well, it happened
last night after I left you and Nona in the kitchen.”  Just then, the
keenness in her eyes disappeared and was replaced with an expression of untainted
disbelief.

“A little after
one-thirty last night, I heard Donald come home.  I ran downstairs to meet
him at the door.  First I made sure he was okay.  Then I yelled at
him for making us all worry.  He said he was sorry, and I caught a whiff
of his breath.  I nearly hit the floor.

“I walked him to the
kitchen and got him some water.  He started mumbling and raising his
voice, which I’m sure you heard.  I calmed him down and asked him what he
was trying to say.  He said he had been thinking a lot about daddy. 
Said he was going to force daddy to come to that big event he planned. 
You
remember,
the one with all of dad’s friends and
the other blue-bloods?  He said he’d pull the batteries right out of dad’s
chair and push him up the road to the restaurant if he had too.  I kept
trying to calm him down.  He kept going on and on about how dad can’t do
this and he shouldn’t do that; it was all I could do to get him into his room.

“I finally got him
up the stairs and into his bed. I pulled off his shirt and shoes and he started
to doze off as soon as his head hit the pillow.  But he…he…”  She
began to get teary eyed and trail off.  I pulled her back abruptly.

“But
what?”

“He said he was tired
of dad running our lives.  He said he knew what he had to do.”  I sat
next to Cheryl for what felt like eternity.  My mouth went dry, and my
head started to pound and tingle.  Cheryl had just told me what could be
summed up as her brother’s confession, or motive, or state of mind or whatever
a district attorney felt like calling it.  Bottom line:  Donald
McCune was better off not coming home.

“Were those his
exact words?”

“Yes, if you leave
out all of
the swears
.  He was so angry and so
drunk.  He could have done anything last night.  After I left him, I
went back to my room.  A few minutes later, I heard his door open and I
heard him walk by.  I thought maybe he was going to the bathroom or to get
some more water.  He was probably hungry too.  Anyway, I thought all
of that talk was just him blowing off the booze.  I figured I’d find him
this morning somewhere with his head in his arms.  This morning, I went
right into his room to see him, but he wasn’t there.  He wasn’t in the kitchen
either.  And dad was dead.”

I left Cheryl with a
promise that I would not tell anyone anything until I was completely sure of
Donald’s situation.  She stood with me and kissed me on the cheek. 
She thanked me for listening.    I looked towards her night
stand attempting to see the clock that sat there, but an uneaten sandwich lay
blocking my view.  I grabbed her right hand in mine and rubbed the back of
it, trying to comfort her, telling her that booze can make even the brightest
men awfully loud and stupid.