Chapter 14
“And Grandma? Where is she?” Crystal asked.
Jenny frowned at Crystal, then shrugged. “You should be worried about yourself.”
“Where is she?” Ashton asked, his tone angrier than ever.
“I don’t know,” Jenny snapped. “I told her to run as far and as fast as she could, but she’s not very …
” Jenny shrugged. “No offense, but she’s not very smart.
She’s not very cognizant of the larger picture.
And she’s been running a con for so long that she doesn’t know what’s going on in her life anymore. ”
Ashton snorted. “But you know, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do.”
“Care to share where Grandma is?” Ashton asked.
“Well, I think she’s probably holed up in a hotel, trying to figure out what happened to her life.
She’s alternating between grief and ranting and raving about her circumstances,” she added, with a shrug.
“I’ve been watching her take advantage of that old man for years, then him coming up with excuses for her behavior, while this place was going to pieces around me.
I started to doubt that I would ever get the opportunity to enjoy that peaceful retirement they promised me,” she shared.
“After Max passed away,” she added, as tears choked the back of her throat, “I realized that, if I didn’t do something to save myself, I would lose everything.”
Ashton just sighed and shook his head at her. “You do know that you’re losing everything now anyway, right?”
She gave him a bitter smile. “You aren’t in control anymore.”
“At least, according to you, I’m not.”
“I have the gun, so I have the control now,” she snapped. “Your grandfather used to always say that whoever holds the weapons in life are the ones who make the decisions for everybody else. He certainly proved that time and time again.”
“Did you really hate him so much?” Crystal asked, staring at her. “Was he really so awful that you had to do that to him and just leave him to die?”
“I really hated doing that,” she said. “And I didn’t plan any of that.
It just seemed like an opportunity that came up in the moment.
” She sighed, looking at Crystal. “You’re young and na?ve, but you’ll learn.
Sometimes opportunities come, and you just make the best of them in the moment.
I get that, for you, everything is all about having the life you want.
You were planning on moving out, weren’t you? ”
“I was because I was giving up on this guy ever coming back,” she admitted, as Jenny’s gaze went from Crystal to Ashton and back again.
Jenny laughed. “Well, hell, I didn’t see that coming.”
Ashton shrugged. “We connected before I left, six years ago, but then I had my accident, and life was not very kind to me from that point onward. I didn’t want her waiting on me, when I could potentially not end up in very good shape.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make though,” Jenny snapped, frowning at him.
“As Crystal has also told me,” he noted, with a happy smile. “So we very much want to have the life that we had planned.” He eyed Jenny. “That you’re holding a gun on us, plus the fact that our grandmother is lost and confused, not even sure what she’s supposed to be doing, is another big issue.”
Jenny shrugged. “Well, Johanna’s a user and an abuser, so I don’t have any sympathy for her.”
“Maybe not,” Crystal noted, “but are you really prepared to take us out, to murder us in cold blood, when we’ve done nothing to you?”
Jenny stared at her, then shook her head. “But, if I don’t, there’s no freedom for me either.” She tilted her head as she studied them. “It’s a good idea, the two of you together. It never even occurred to me. Not even once. Did your grandpa know?”
“To a certain extent, yes,” Crystal replied. “He was the one who kept telling me to stick around. Ashton was just more stubborn than any of them.”
Ashton smiled. “Meanwhile Grandpa was busy telling me that I needed to get back on my feet. That Crystal wasn’t finding any good men, so she was still waiting for me.”
Jenny shook her head. “Of course he was. And, from his perspective, I can see that was probably something he really, really wanted.”
Ashton didn’t say anything.
Crystal watched as he studied every move Jenny made, knowing that the upset old woman, rifle and all, was no match for all that Ashton had been through.
Crystal just hoped to God that nobody would get hurt.
Crystal sighed. “You know, Jenny, no good endings, no happy endings can come out of this, right?”
“I know,” Jenny conceded. “So, I’m looking to see what the biggest, happiest ending could possibly be for me,” she shared, staring at them. “And the only thing I can think of is that I need to leave.”
“With the money that you stole from Grandpa’s accounts?” Ashton asked.
Jenny flashed an angry look at Ashton. “Like the promise of a home that he stole from me? What do you expect me to do, Ashton? I am way past the age of working full-time, way past the age of everybody ordering me around. And I’ve changed, I admit it.”
She was getting hoarse from all the talking.
“I changed after I lost Max,” she stated, “and, for a little bit, I wondered about connecting with Oliver, but he wasn’t the same.
He wasn’t my Max. They were similar. God, they were similar,” she muttered.
“Yet it wasn’t the same. And he couldn’t love me like Max did.
And that was, … that’s the thing I miss the most.”
“Of course,” Ashton agreed. “And there is nothing quite like that loss.”
She sniffled and nodded. Then she glared at him. “And yet everybody was happy to take that away from us.”
“No,” Ashton whispered, “nobody took it away from you. However, life is not easy, and, when you lose the love of your life to cancer, nobody is to blame. I also don’t believe that this world is out to make us suffer either.
Yet it’s still hard to recover from lost loves, losing a limb, financial hardships. I get it. I get it all.”
“Yeah,” she muttered, “you get it. But it doesn’t matter now. I still did what I did. And there’s no happy ending for me.”
“You have to tell us where Grandma is,” Crystal repeated.
Ashton added, “And I’ve got another question for you. Do you know where Sean is?”
She winced and glared at Ashton. “He’s here.”
“And what were you going to do with him?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I didn’t think that far ahead. Grabbing Alexander was something I didn’t expect to do either,” she noted. “And then, when I did, I didn’t know how to make peace with any of it.”
Crystal cried out, “Stop with the victim card. Where is Sean? Is he okay? Why is he here? What does he have to do with any of this?”
“I don’t think he looks very good,” Jenny muttered. “I should have stuck it out longer, Ashton, knowing you were coming back. But Alexander told me that Johanna had taken everything and that there was just no money anymore.”
“And he was right, she did,” Ashton confirmed. “As you know, I’ve been trying rather hard to make things right. Given enough time, I could have paid back all of Grandma’s theft.”
Jenny nodded slowly. “But I didn’t give you time, did I?”
“No, you didn’t,” he said.
“And, for that, I’m very sorry because the outcome now is something that I don’t know how to deal with.” Jenny frowned at him, her shoulders slumping.
He sighed. “You know this can’t go on.”
“I know,” she admitted. As she moved back a step, toward the door, he lunged suddenly, ripping the shotgun from her hands.
She glared at him, then stared down at the floor, resignation on her face. “Why don’t you just shoot me?” she whispered. “It would be the easiest all around.”
“I can’t do that,” he stated firmly. “No easy outs for you.”
“No,” she muttered, “instead I’m going to jail for however long because of this.”
“Well, first, we need a few more answers,” he said, holding the shotgun against his leg.
“Like what?”
“Like why the hell did you go after Sean?”
She frowned at him, grimacing. “Your grandmother and I were sitting in the park, near the coffee shop in town, making plans for her to escape,” she began.
“Sean came out of the wooded area nearby, on his walking sticks, with his dog. I thought surely he didn’t hear us.
Even if he did, surely he didn’t really understand what was going on, but when I stood up to leave, he crossed my path, muttering something to me about creating problems, about starting things I had no business getting into.
I just looked at him, and I knew. I just knew that he understood what I’d done, what I’d set in motion. ” She shook her head.
“I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried to talk to him, and he did listen.
Then he told me how he’d spent a long time understanding people, and the ones he didn’t see coming were the most dangerous.
He made a couple other comments, and that was enough for me to realize that, if he stuck around, he would be another big issue. ”
“Where is he?” Ashton asked.
Jenny stared at him, her jaw clenching.
“If you killed him,” Ashton noted, trying hard to not say anything he would regret, “there are no options going forward. That I can tell you.”
“He’s alive … maybe.” Jenny sighed. “He’s alive,” she repeated, her voice cracking, “not necessarily because of me, but more because I didn’t know what else to do with him.”
“He’s been missing for several days,” Crystal pointed out. “We need to find him soon.”
Jenny shrugged, turning to Ashton. “When you came after the dog, I just … I didn’t even know what to say.
” She stared down at Khan, with both Piper and Joe flanking him now.
An odd stillness in their postures as if understanding something serious was going on but unsure what to do about it.
“Sean doesn’t even know that I’m the one responsible. ”
Crystal asked her, “Is that what you’re looking for? Confession? Some way to pay for all the pain you’ve caused? All the heartache?”
“I didn’t mean it, … not any of it,” Jenny muttered.