Chapter 55
“This is a mistake,” Carson warns you.
“You might be correct,” you admit, “but it’s the right thing to do.”
He lets out a long sigh. God, he is sexy when he’s exasperated—but given what you went through, it seems likely that hooking up is off the table tonight. “There’s a phone in the sitting room. I’ll take you there.”
Carson leads you to another room, which you guess is the sitting room.
It contains a mahogany desk with a cordless phone resting on it.
While you pick up the receiver and type in the three digits, Carson wanders out of the room.
For whatever reason, he does not want to be present for this call.
You wonder if he has some legal problems himself and would prefer to avoid the police.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
You hesitate. Even though you’ve had time to think about what you’re going to say, now that you’re faced with the operator, your mouth goes dry. “Um, I have an emergency.”
“Yes…?”
“I was at a dinner party and this… well, a wolf came in and ate everyone.”
There’s a long silence on the other end of the line. “Is this a joke?”
“No,” you say quickly. “It’s not a joke. It was… well, the wolf didn’t actually eat everyone. He just mauled most of them. But either way, everyone is dead.”
Another long silence. Geez, is it really so hard to believe that a wolf came in and ate like a dozen people?
The operator finally connects you to the police, and you have to repeat the entire story, meeting equal amounts of disbelief. But you eventually convince them it’s not an elaborate prank, and they say they’re sending over a car right away.
After you hang up, the house seems so silent. Too silent. You peek your head outside the sitting room door, and find the hallway to be empty. “Carson?”
No answer.
You step outside, scanning left and right. But there’s no sign of Carson anywhere.
“Carson?” you call out again.
There’s only silence. Could he have left? He did say it was a mistake to call the police. It seems that he does not want to be present when they arrive.
You return to the sitting room to wait. About half an hour later, you hear the doorbell ring. When you answer the door, there are two officers standing in front of you. You let them in.
“Thank God you’re here!” you say. “As I said on the phone, I was working as a waitress at this dinner party, and then this wolf got loose and ended up killing everyone.”
The two officers exchange looks. “Would you please show us the bodies?”
You lead them inside. As they follow you, you get a bad feeling that Carson might have been right. Maybe calling the police was a mistake. But this is the choice you made, and it’s too late to choose otherwise.
You bring the officers to the room where all the carnage took place. Both of them let out audible gasps when they see all the dead bodies. It is only after several seconds have passed that one of them recovers enough to speak to you.
“Sloan Morrison,” he says. “You are under arrest for murder.”
What?
How could they possibly think that you’re the one who killed all these people?
You don’t even have fangs or claws! But now they’re snapping handcuffs on your wrists and leading you out of the house to their police car.
As they load you into the police car, you hear several more sets of sirens in the distance.
Mr. Wentworth, unsurprisingly, had a lot of powerful friends who want to see someone pay for his murder. The trial is short and frustrating, and at the end of it, you are sentenced to 16 life terms in prison.
On the plus side, at least you don’t have to worry about the rent ever again.
THE END
Want to try for a different ending? Turn back to Chapter 1 (page 1)!