Chapter Seventy-Four Aubrey
Chapter Seventy-Four
Aubrey
I stood at the edge of the pond on the back of Gramps’s property and inhaled the scent of incoming snow in the crisp air.
The once pristine area bore the tire tracks from law enforcement vehicles. Torn-up slabs of earth and a slick of drying mud
and hard ground now ushered guests to the watery edge. Carefully placed rocks that once outlined the water had been overturned,
sitting now in stacks. Out of place.
This is where the nightmare started and ended.
The memories I’d clung to for years spilled through me now. Everyone still had the timeline wrong. The horror didn’t come
and go in an afternoon fifteen years ago. It was a confluence of events that occurred over two days. It took more than twenty-four
hours for my mom to reach the tipping point and my family to disintegrate.
My gaze shifted to the dock. Noah loved to sit there, dangling his feet off the edge. Staying out until the sun dipped and the fireflies appeared. He’d dive and propel his body through the water. Start at one side, then pop up on the other.
It had been warmer than usual that day. Mom and Dad spent all the night before fighting. She shook a bracelet in his face.
I assumed it was Hanna’s and always blamed her for the beginning of the end, but now I knew it linked to Marni. The dual betrayal
clearly devastated Mom. She wasn’t just furious. She was hurt. That was new. The other women ticked her off. Marni’s lack
of loyalty probably pushed Mom off the edge.
She drove away and didn’t come back until the next day. Dad’s job was to watch Noah. At eight, he liked to jump off things
and play with the stove. Two events that ended in near disaster more than once. I wanted all of them to shut up and leave
me alone. I didn’t even know Mom hadn’t come back home when I headed to Gramps’s house the next morning. This house with its
vintage charm and impressive history. With the pond.
I’d walked along the outside wall. Then I ran, burning the sound of their voices out of my head. When I stopped, breathless
and still pissed off, I saw him. Noah. He should have been asleep or watching television, but he’d followed me. He was crouching
on the dock, staring at something in the water. He wasn’t supposed to be near the water alone. He wasn’t supposed to be there,
annoying me. Ready to ask questions. Wanting to do stuff.
Then he fell. Splashed and yelled. He could swim, so the panic didn’t make sense. The water was freezing, which might explain
it.
He tried to grab the boards to the dock and lift himself out, but something tugged at him. A stick or rock. I never knew but
it held him in the water. Sucked him under.
I watched Noah bob up and down. Watched him sputter and yell.
Watched his hands wave in the air. Watched him go under and not come up again.
I waited to feel . . . something. The way his voice sort of wound down to nothing intrigued me but that was it.
I knew on some level, at least to my parents, this would be bad.
He drowned while Dad sipped coffee and read his books. Distracted, as always, Dad must have assumed Noah was in his room.
I went back home but before I could say anything Mom showed up screaming. Her anger from the bracelet debacle still burned.
She asked about Noah and his breakfast and when Dad didn’t have an answer, she exploded into a riot of more screaming and
throwing things. I contacted Lukas to come over and help with Mom, but Lukas had other ideas.
Hours later, Mom killed Dad while I had sex with Lukas.
It sounded like Lukas killed Mom in her own bedroom but not out of revenge or self-defense. He’d gotten caught, the one thing
his precious image could not tolerate.
He never touched Noah, but who would believe him now? It didn’t hurt to add one more murder to his list.
According to law enforcement and ever-shifting public opinion, I was a victim in this sad tale. The police believed Gramps
hid me to protect me from the killer and from Lukas’s depravity, then I stayed tucked away because I promised I would. Until
he died when I took the risk and demanded answers.
That’s the story I’d tell everyone forever. The self-created reality that allowed me to reenter life as Aubrey Tanner. The
version where I was the sole and innocent survivor in a family disaster.
No one needed to know that when I went downstairs after being with Lukas I saw a bloody shirt on the floor. Thinking Mom and Dad had gotten a little rough during the fight, I grabbed it. Brought it with me when I went back to Xavier’s house to get rid of it.
Seeing Noah’s body floating in the pond stopped me. It should have been submerged. I rushed to weigh it down and pushed him
under. He died there. Mom and Dad never knew. The decision to make the pond Noah’s grave fell to me.
Time passed. I’m not sure how much. When I saw Gramps in the distance, he was holding his cell and walking around his car.
He stopped and glanced over my head to the pond as I got closer to him. If he’d seen what happened to Noah he never said.
The bloody shirt in my hands distracted him. He grabbed it and shook it in my face.
This is your father’s. What did you do?
Then he slapped me. The burning sensation ran from just under my eye to my jaw. He yelled and acted like he wanted me to fight
back. His fingers wrapped around my throat and squeezed. I didn’t call out or fight him. I planned his death. He might have
guessed because his eyes widened as he stepped back. I plotted and stared as the air ran out of him.
If I killed him I could easily kill you.
Aubrey, who did you kill?
That was my one mistake. My slipup. Dad’s murder provided cover for my reference to Noah, and the damage was done. Gramps
truly believed I killed Dad and bragged about it to scare him.
Gramps walked away from me. I waited in his house for his return. In the passageway behind his library. The same one Lukas used to go after Hanna and Jeremy. The police stumbled around, talking to Xavier back then while I crouched there, hiding and ready to spring.
The whole family went missing. That’s the tale Gramps told. He skipped the part about his driving back and forth between the
houses. About how he and Lukas used a wheelbarrow to move things. People. My dead parents.
That was my leverage against Gramps. I saw what he did. The acts that made him look guilty.
The next morning Gramps found me and we made a deal. He thought the terms saved me, but they really saved him because I stopped
plotting his demise. He wouldn’t turn me in for what he thought I did. I wouldn’t turn him in for what he actually did. Only
money would bind us from now on.
He sacrificed me. Abandoned me. Little did he know he also dumped Mom, the woman he’d grown to hate, without any reverence
or fanfare in the same pond with Noah, the one grandchild he adored.
Isabel and Lukas were rewarded with vehicles. That’s what moving, hiding, and burying my family was worth.
Stella, Marni, and Hanna came in and out of the house. None of them helped Dad or tried to stop Mom. They messed with evidence.
They kept their mouths shut. I decided to let them live anyway.
You’re welcome, ladies.
The wind blew across the pond’s surface, creating ripples. Water lapped at the edge where Gramps last told me to get out of
his sight.
The final days started here. It was fitting the story ended here.
I willingly relinquished the Tanner legacy. The deadly crown now belonged to someone else. Someone supposedly noble and decent.
Someone with a fat, new bank account and a mother who might step in and rescue him from the fate of the Tanner males who’d
gone before him.
Good luck, Jeremy.