Page 110 of The Woman Who Couldn't Scream
While he waited, he brought up his investigation into the business account discrepancies and once again examined the evidence.
The phone rang.
Rose answered. Naturally, she didn’t ask if he was ill or had been in an accident or been named in a paternity suit. No, not dear Aunt Rose. In her quavering voice, she said, “Dear! Did you discover what’s wrong with our spreadsheets?”
Yes. The businesses are being hacked.He’d known that already, but he’d held off giving them the information until he tracked the perpetrator or at least discovered the reason for it. As of about fifteen minutes ago, he was pretty sure he knew everything there was to know. But he ignored Rose’s question, and said, “I’m calling about the past.”
“The past.” Her voice got sharp and wary. “At this hour?”
“Did you and Albert try to kill Merry Byrd?” To hell with tact; he enjoyed this frontal assault.
“Merry Byrd?” Rose pretended to grope among unsteady memories. “Remind me, who is she again?”
“Have you tried to kill so many people you can’t remember who she is? Merry Byrd. The woman I loved.”
A silence. He could almost hear Rose sorting through her options. “You know with the death of your parents, we took you in. We cared for you, loved you as if you were our own.”
First, she was playing the guilt card. “Thank you, Aunt Rose. That was good of you.”
“You don’t understand this, because you never had a child, but when our beloved boy strayed into danger, we always stepped in to rescue you. Remember when you just turned thirteen, got mad at Albert and wanted to run away? You climbed out of your bedroom window and into the old oak, fell and broke your arm. We immediately cut that oak down.”
He did remember. That had been a beautiful oak, over one hundred years old, its broad branches gloriously flat, the perfect place for a boy to lounge in the summer. He also remembered coming home from the hospital, bruised and battered, his arm in a cast, and hearing the horror of chain saws dismantling the mighty tree.
His fault. He had known it was his fault. Albert and Rose had made sure of that.
“We did that because we loved you and couldn’t bear to see you hurt.”
“You did that to punish me for trying to rebel.”
“We would hardly be good guardians if we allowed you to roam the streets alone. You would have been hurt!”
Looking back, he thought of other manipulations, punishments, revenges on him for behavior unbecoming to their heir. He hadn’t thought of it before, hadn’t considered the ramifications on his own character or realized the swift ruthlessness of their reactions. “So you treated Merry Byrd as if she were a rebellion and eliminated her. As if she were the oak tree.”
“You were acting out of character, spending time at an orphanage—”
“A day care.”
“Coming home with vomit on the shoulder of your best suit. An Armani! You neglected the business. You were losing your edge. We had trained you to know what was important in life—”
“The business.”
“And she was subverting your character. After your infatuation faded, you would have returned to normal. Of course we knew that. But we saved you a lot of wasted time and money.”
Her gall flabbergasted him. “You murdered her.”
“If she didn’t die, it wasn’t murder,” Rose snapped in her take-charge-of-the-boardroom voice.
“Merry would have died if I hadn’t been there.”
“Exactly.” Her voice smoothed again, soothed again. “We made up an excuse to pull you away from the airport. We didn’t want you to get hurt. When we heard you were there… do you know how much anxiety you caused us when you were unconscious for so long?”
He noted her move from justifying attempted homicide to blaming him for being in the blast zone.
She continued, “The doctors told us you would never recover. They said even if you woke up, you’d have brain damage! Do you think we wanted that?”
“I suppose I should be grateful you didn’t press a pillow to my face to save you any trouble.”
Her voice sharpened. “Trouble? You were our only chance to pass the business into responsible hands.”
