Chapter 7 #2
When she returned, red still showed in her cheeks, and she sat stiffly at one end of the sectional. Jem sat at the other end, and after a moment, Tean sank down next to him.
“What do you want to ask?”
“I’m sorry we have to do this—” Tean began.
“Just ask your questions, please.”
“The kids?” Jem asked, tipping his head toward the hall.
A hint of stubbornness hardened Lucy’s mouth, like she might insist on getting down to business.
But then her shoulders softened, and she rubbed her face.
“Fielding is upset; he doesn’t really understand what’s happening, although I’ve tried to explain, and he doesn’t like being cooped up with ‘the little kids.’ He’s ten years old.
All he knows is that the police took his dad, and his big brother won’t come out of his room.
The kids stayed home from school today, but I can’t do that forever, and it’s going to be worse—” She had to stop, and she hugged herself as she drew in another breath.
“I don’t even know what they’ll say to them.
Whatever hurts the most, I guess. That’s how it usually is. ”
“And Daniel?” Jem asked.
She shook her head. Then she cleared her throat. “I didn’t have anything to do with—with what happened.” She leaned forward, picked up a football from where it had been abandoned on an ottoman, and held it against her stomach, arms wrapped tight. “I didn’t kill Brennon.”
Tean nodded. “We know.”
“No,” Jem said. “We don’t.” Tean opened his mouth, but Jem put a hand on Tean’s knee and kept speaking. “So, start at the beginning. Tell us what happened.”
Lucy’s gaze fixed on Jem’s hand, which was still resting on Tean’s knee. Slowly, her gaze came up, and awareness flickered in her eyes.
“From the beginning,” Jem said quietly.
“I don’t know when it started,” Lucy said.
“What Brennon was doing?”
Lucy swallowed. “That’s all I could think about last night.
Not about Ammon. Not if he was okay or if he was—” She raked her nails over the pebbled surface of the ball, and they made a soft, unpleasant ticking.
“How did I miss it? How could this have been happening and I didn’t know?
Didn’t have any idea? He’s my son.” The word was so thick in her mouth that it was almost unintelligible, and she started to cry again.
She shook her head, but this time, the tears didn’t stop, and when she finally continued to speak, the words were clotted and uneven.
“Daniel has always struggled with his mental health. You know.” This last bit was directed at Tean, who nodded slightly.
“He’s hurt himself. Tried to—tried to kill himself.
We tried medication. Prozac. Lexapro. Zoloft.
Celexa. We tried combinations. Cymbalta.
The doctor wanted to start him on lithium, and we had this medicine cabinet full of drugs that hadn’t done anything but make him quiet, and—and then a miracle happened.
” She squeezed her eyes shut and ran her hand across her cheeks.
“What?” Jem asked.
“Ammon gave him a blessing, and Daniel got better.”
It was another Mormon thing Jem had picked up from casual exposure during his time in care—men in the church gave blessings by putting their hands on your head and saying they were giving a blessing. Sometimes if you were sick. Sometimes for other reasons.
Frowning, Tean leaned forward. “Ammon and Brennon.”
Lucy nodded, still wiping her eyes.
Tean must have seen the confusion on Jem’s face because he said, “If it’s a blessing for the sick, they always have two men. One of them anoints, and the other seals the blessing.”
“Brennon is—was—the Young Men president,” Lucy said.
“It’s a calling,” Tean said. “That’s the term for responsibilities in the church.
So, he would have been in charge of organizing activities, lessons, that kind of stuff for the boys twelve to eighteen.
There used to be a lot of overlap with the Boy Scouts program, but I think there’s less of it now. ”
Jem nodded, but what he said was “They put this guy in charge of the teenage boys?”
“Everybody loved Brennon!” Lucy’s voice was sharp. “It’s not like anybody knew. Do you think we’d have been okay with it if we knew?”
“What was he like?” Tean asked.
She was silent for a moment. “Charming. Funny. Personable. He and Audra—God, everyone wanted to be their friends. They’ve got this beautiful house. Their kids are…different.” And then, in a tight voice, she said, “Oh God.”
“They gave Daniel a blessing,” Tean prompted.
Lucy sat there, raking her fingernails over the football again, that soft ticking sound making the hair stand up on the back of Jem’s neck.
“It didn’t happen all at once. But Daniel started going to Mutual because Brennon would pick him up.
And then Daniel started hanging out with boys from church.
He’d go on camping trips. He wanted to play on the church basketball team.
” Her nails stopped. “Now, I wonder— I don’t even know if there were camping trips.
I don’t know if he ever went to a friend’s house.
For all I know, every time he walked out of here, he was lying to my face.
But he was doing so much better. He was so…
happy. I don’t think I ever wondered why Brennon was taking such an interest in him.
It all seemed so natural. That was Brennon’s job, to take care of those boys.
To help them. He was the answer to our prayers. ”
“When did you find out what was—what Brennon was doing?”
“Daniel failed a test. Pre-calc. So, no phone. That was our rule: no phone if you can’t keep your grades up.
And then Ammon walked into his room to get him for dinner, and Daniel was on his phone, texting someone, which was impossible because Ammon had locked up the phone in his desk.
I wasn’t home, so I only know what Ammon told me.
Daniel tried to—” Something like disbelief colored her voice.
“Daniel tried to hit him. When Ammon went to take the phone, Daniel tried to fight him. He did hit him; Ammon showed me the bruises that night.” She had to swallow again. “Ammon said it was like he went crazy.”
“The phone?” Jem said.
“Ammon said it was a burner. You know, the kind you can buy at a gas station, and you reload with a card. There were messages on there. Pictures.” She closed her eyes; Jem wondered what she was seeing, what nightmares she was playing back for herself on a screen only she could see.
“You could see Brennon in some of them.”
“Christ,” Jem said under his breath.
“Ammon was furious. That’s not even the right word. It was—it was scary. Ammon and I have had our fights—” And now her eyes flicked open, and her gaze locked on Tean. “But I’ve never seen him like that. Never seen him so out of control.”
Her words from a moment before echoed, unspoken, in the air: like he went crazy.
“I got home as he was leaving—storming out of the house, the door hanging open behind him. I tried talking to him; I don’t think he even heard me. I could tell something was wrong, so I went after him, but he started running, and I—I couldn’t keep up.”
“Brennon lives nearby?”
“Two streets over.”
When Jem raised his eyebrows at this, Tean said, “Wards—congregations—are geographic, so in Utah, where you have a high density of Latter-day Saints, they tend to be fairly small, in terms of the area they cover.”
“Just a few blocks,” Lucy confirmed. She was clutching the football again, and when she adjusted her grip, the diamond on her wedding band flashed.
“When I got there, he was on top of Brennon, hitting him. No, that’s not—” Her breath caught in her throat.
“They were on the ground. On the walk. Right in front of the house. Ammon was on top of him, and Brennon was screaming, and I thought—”
Jem shifted. An old spring chimed, and then the sound died away. In a low voice, he asked, “What did you think?”
She licked her lips, and her gaze, when she met Jem’s, was strangely defensive. “I thought Ammon was going to kill him.”
“But he didn’t.”
From farther back in the house came an excited shout—a pre-teen sound. Lucy flinched, then seemed to realize what she had done. “No,” she said. “He didn’t.”
“What happened?” Tean asked.
“One of the neighbors pulled Ammon off him, and then more people started coming out of their houses. Ammon tried to—to get to Brennon again, but by then, there were more men out there, and they kept them apart. Someone called the police.” She didn’t shrug, not exactly, but it was there in her voice. “Ammon and I came home.”
Jem said, “But he didn’t say anything?”
“Oh yes. He was shouting. Screaming. He must have started before Brennon even opened the door because I could hear him while I was still trying to catch up.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know.” Her mouth twisted. “He said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ He said it over and over.”
A door down the hall opened, and another excited whoop echoed toward them.
A moment later, a boy who might have been ten or eleven sprinted into the living room.
His blond hair stuck up on one side, and he had the same thin, fine nose as Lucy.
“Mom, I killed this guy on Fortnite, it was so epic, he wasn’t even looking and—” He stopped when he saw Jem, and his expression changed to the transparent wariness of a child.
Then his gaze moved past him, and he said, “Oh, hi, Uncle Tean.”
“Hi, Fielding. Long time no see. This is my friend Jem.”
Fielding’s gaze returned to Jem with that same guardedness as before, only now with interest. The hair was darker than Ammon’s, but hints of the man were there in the shape of his face, in his chin.
A good-looking kid, no question. The kind that other kids probably gravitated to, and teachers liked no matter how he behaved.
Jem had known a number of guys like that in his life. Some of them in Decker.
“Hi,” the boy said, but he draped himself over the back of the sofa to press his shoulder against his mom’s.
Jem gave a little wave. “Nice to meet you.”
“I asked you to stay in your room,” Lucy said.
“I was just telling you—”
“I know. Stay with Eben and Sarah until I come get you.”
The boy gave a groan, slid off the sofa, and stomped down the hall. A moment later, the door thudded shut.
“Nice kid,” Jem said.
Something new rose to the surface in Lucy’s expression, something that had lain hidden until that moment of contact with her child.
“I want to tell you something. I’m glad Brennon is dead.
I’m happy. He deserved to die, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m sad or act like this is a tragedy.
” She drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry for Audra.
I’m sorry for their kids. It’s a horrible, horrible thing they have to go through.
But he did it to them. Do you know what it’s like, to find out someone is—” She fumbled the word.
“—abusing your child? Molesting him? It’s like—those words aren’t even words.
They’re things that happen to someone else’s child.
Someone was hurting Daniel. Someone was touching him—”She broke off.
“I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad he’s dead.
Since the minute Ammon told me what happened, all I’ve been able to think about is what that man did to our son, and I wanted him to die.
And then he did. I don’t care who did it.
I don’t want them to face justice. If it were up to me, they’d get an award. ”
Tean nodded slowly.
“When did this happen?” Jem asked.
“Saturday.”
“And after that?”
“After that,” she said, “the police came. Ammon told them everything. He showed them the phone, the burner, and they took it. They talked about arresting him, but I think they were trying to scare him; they didn’t want him going after Brennon again.
They tried to talk to Daniel, but he wouldn’t say anything. ”
“He wouldn’t talk to them?” Tean asked.
“He sat there and stared at them. Wouldn’t say a word.
I tried to—I told him he needed to talk to them.
That whatever had happened, it wasn’t his fault, and we still loved him.
And Ammon—Ammon got angrier and angrier.
The police finally left, and Ammon—” She ran her fingers along the seam of one of the sofa cushions, gathering crumbs and dust, sweeping them into a neat little pile.
“He was angry. At Brennon, I think, but it came out at Daniel. They fought. And then Ammon and I fought. And then I left.”
“Where did you go?” Jem said.
“I know what you’re thinking. I’m a terrible mother, how could I leave? But Ammon gets to run off whenever he likes—” And then she stopped. She was still looking down at the little pile of crumbs she’d made, but Jem could have drawn a line from her to Tean with his eyes closed.
Tean looked frozen, his hands closed into fists so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
It was just chance, Jem knew, that when he looked at that blown-up wedding photo, with Ammon and Lucy young and happy and hopeful, Tean’s reflection hovered over them in the glass.
“Where did you go?” he asked again.
“My mother’s.”
“And how long were you there?”
“I came home Wednesday night.”
“Where was Ammon?” Tean asked.
“Here.”
“With the kids?”
“Yes, with the kids. He’s their father.” She said it like she’d scored another point, and Tean looked away.
“No other adults?” Jem asked. “Nobody came over to help him? His parents, maybe?”
“I don’t know. No. I don’t think so.”
“So, there’s no way to know if Ammon went out at night. Say, after the kids went to bed.”
“I stopped trying to control where Ammon spent his nights a long time ago.”
Tean lurched to his feet. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry,” he mumbled to Jem. And then, again, to Lucy, “I’m sorry.”
A moment later, the storm door was rattling shut behind him.
Lucy’s eyes came up and found Jem’s. Tears. And a challenge. And bittersweet victory.
“I bet you’ve been waiting for that a long time,” Jem said.
“He knew what he was doing.”
Jem nodded slowly. “I want to talk to Daniel.”
“He won’t talk to you. He won’t talk to anyone.”
“We’ll see.”
She stared back, and the challenge lingered in her gaze.
But then she stood. The football rolled off her lap and thumped hollowly against the floor, and her steps moved toward the back of the house.
A tap on a door. The murmur of her voice—a question, and then more forcefully, an order.
The door moved in its frame with the familiar sound of a lock catching. This time, Lucy said, “Open this door!”
Seconds passed.
More footsteps.
And the sound of a door opening.
“Daniel? Daniel. Daniel!”
Jem was halfway to his feet when Lucy ran into the living room, mouth hanging open, face gray. “He’s gone,” she said. “Daniel’s gone.”