Chapter 20 Reed
REED
Something Wendell said to Hank—I mean, Dax?—loops in my head.
I do know everything.
If I weren’t tied up and terrified, maybe I’d have seen this sooner, but the pieces click into place one at a time.
If Wendell Blitz knew about Dax’s plan, and if what Erin said about my background check is true—that the Blitzes insisted she hire me for this job—then there’s reason to believe he’s aware of who I am and who my mom is.
There’s reason to believe that, much like Dax, I’m only in his house because he wants me to be in his house.
This should be big news, but it’s drowned out by the sharp blade still teetering at my Adam’s apple. One swift perpendicular slice, and I am as good as gone. Dax a.k.a Hank brought me to orgasm, and now he might send me straight to my maker.
None of it was supposed to go down this way.
“Do it,” Wendell says impassively.
Befuddlement fills the room. Did I hear him correctly?
There’s no way Wendell Blitz would allow me to be murdered in his vacation home on camera for him to see. No human being lacks the basic empathy to be so cavalier about a young life.
Well, some do. But not my dad.
My dad.
Around the age of twelve, I gave up imagining what my dad might be like, from his looks down to his hobbies. By fifteen, I’d resolved myself to the blatant lie that I had no dad. That my mom, like the Virgin Mary, had me through some sort of immaculate conception.
It was easier that way. To compartmentalize. To move forward.
It also allowed me to explore my kinks with less baggage piled up in the trunk of my mental car. A smoother ride, less weighed down.
Now, my two worlds have collided. My childhood self, who longed for a father figure and now has confirmation of one existing, and my sexual self, who found many Daddies in the bedroom, including the one standing before me.
The unknown caller.
Only he’s not the unknown caller. He’s not even Hank Richards. According to Wendell Blitz, the man in the ski mask who has me tied up as leverage is Dax Sharp.
Not only has this man ruined me, but he’s lied to me. Not that I should be surprised. I feel like a fool for not seeing the obvious earlier.
“Excuse me?” Dax asks.
“I don’t believe my microphone cut out,” Wendell says.
“You’re telling me that you would rather see your son die than lose a minuscule fraction of your wealth?” he asks. Which perhaps is more telling than anything. Maybe whatever is in that safe isn’t so minuscule.
Still, Wendell must take what Dax said as a hypothetical question because he doesn’t respond. I’m not even certain he blinks. If this were a game of cards, he’d be winning by a mile with a stone-cold poker face like that.
“I don’t have a son,” Wendell says. His eyes don’t leave Dax’s face, don’t swing to me. It’s almost like Wendell is a vampire confronted with a mirror, and he’s unwilling to face the empty space where he should be. My stomach plummets.
Maybe that’s what I am to him.
A reflection of a past he doesn’t want to see.
“I have a paternity test here with results that say otherwise,” Dax says, jaw tight and words pointed.
“If I had a dollar for every person who has claimed relation to me, I’d be—”
“A billionaire,” Dax cuts him off. “You already are one, so let’s cut the crap. The results I’ve seen are ninety-nine percent conclusive. Congratulations, it’s a boy.”
Dax turns the point of the knife up toward my face. I keep my eyes on the phone screen, so I don’t panic more than I already am. The irony of that one percent of uncertainty isn’t lost on me when Wendell exists somewhere above the one percent.
Wendell narrows his eyes, then shakes his head. “The fact remains that I have no son.”
“Reed took your toothbrush head, sent it to a lab, and it came back positive. How are you going to deny the resemblance?” he asks. Slowly, he glides the point of the knife up my jaw, around my ear, and then beneath my eye, which is the same color and shape as Wendell’s.
“I’m not denying anything. As I said, I don’t touch theories.
I live by facts,” Wendell says, cool and collected.
“As Reed may well remember, during the onboarding process, he was asked to provide a copy of his Social Security card and his birth certificate. While not common, it is legal for US employers to ask for this to verify employment eligibility. On his birth certificate, the father’s name line listed one word.
Do you know what that word was? Unknown. The fact remains that I have no son.”
My chest collapses in on itself. I had grown to accept living without a father. How was I expected to go on when I knew I had one who actively didn’t care that I existed? He’d rather have me die than give in to petty blackmail.
Dax’s expression darkens even further beneath his already black mask. “How would you refute the paternity test in a court of law? I’ll send the results to you.”
“No need. I believe you,” Wendell says. “I just don’t accept them because even a court of law would tell you that, legally, I have no son.”
“Accept them or not, the facts are the facts. I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but you won’t win it. We could take this to the press and tell the world,” Dax says.
The word we wobbles in the air. Are we—Dax and I—playing for the same team now? That’s news to me. And I’m not sure I want to be drafted to the losing side. Dax is nothing but a pile of threats and lies. I have no faith that he can pull through.
“I don’t play games, just like I don’t spew theories.
The facts I have at my disposal are these: a sample of genetic material, which could or could not have come from a toothbrush I may or may not have used, was taken and tested without my consent for the paternity of a man who has been stalking me for the past three months,” Wendell says.
Dax’s gaze pings down to my face. I go even more ashen than I already am.
After my mom died and I found her box of Wendell Blitz memorabilia, I fell down a rabbit hole.
A deep, dark pit of obsession swallowed me up.
I spent all day, every day, trying to piece together why my mother had Wendell Blitz clippings, photos, and T-shirts I’d never seen her look at or wear.
It was a mystery, and I liked solving those.
At least I liked them better than wallowing in my own loneliness and misery, wondering if I was destined to become like my mother. A sad, solitary drunkard with no love and no prospects. Twenty-three is too young to give up on yourself, but that’s where I was.
“I have people who keep close track of my stalkers, same as I have people who keep track of my disgruntled employees,” Wendell says.
“Imagine my surprise when my security detail pinged Reed Thompson, son of Mindy Thompson, a name I hadn’t heard in almost twenty-five years, as the blond-haired, blue-eyed twentysomething tailing me to my recent speaking engagements. ”
My eyes grow wider, hungry for any scrap of validation Wendell might throw my way, which makes me feel small and wretched. Especially considering all the questions I have for him that he clearly won’t answer now that he knows the obsessive lengths I covered to get him alone.
“So you admit that you knew Reed’s mom?” Dax asks.
“You don’t forget your very first stalker,” Wendell says with a nauseating smirk. “The gene must run in the family.”
I take a shuddering inhale.
“Fuckin’ hell, you’re a jackass,” Dax spits.
“And you’re an angel with a hunting knife to a young man’s throat?” Wendell asks in contest.
“That’s not true. My mom wasn’t a stalker. Don’t talk about her like that,” I say, though it comes out weak. The croaking puff of a nearly dead dragon. No fire, all smoke.
“I don’t know how many times I need to keep telling you this. I live by and relay the facts. Would you like to hear them?” he asks, but it’s clear he doesn’t care which way I answer. He checks his watch and then launches into a speech.
“Right out of college, I worked as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. I understood that bringing the product to the consumer through ease and immediate access was a strong way to increase sales,” he says as if this information isn’t well-documented in his long-winded book.
“It was miserable work, driving all over Wyoming with boxes of hardbound books rattling around in my trunk and a paper map open on the passenger seat. One night, I’d made it through the neighborhoods I was supposed to get to when I cruised past a trailer park.
I was nowhere near my sales quota for the month, and I thought if anybody needed a little education brought into their homes, it was the people sitting on broken lawn chairs holding beers in front of their homes mounted on cinderblocks. ”
A big part of me wants to yell at him to shut up. His detailed confirmation that he’s my father will only make his rejection sting more. But I can’t bring myself to speak again, and Dax has gone still.
“By the time I knocked on the trailer your mother was in, I was almost in the red for the day, having narrowly escaped being robbed by a teenager with a switchblade who had nothing better to do than target the well-dressed guy using big, fancy words his pops didn’t understand.
” Wendell lets out this little self-serving laugh.
“I was rattled when Mindy opened the door in a pair of shorts and a tank top rolled up past her belly button. Her blond hair was wild, hanging down around her shoulders. She took one look at the encyclopedia, laughed in my face, then practically pulled me inside. She poured me a drink because she said I ‘looked like I could use it.’”
That was my mom, all right. Always forcing a drink into the hand of any other adult in her immediate vicinity.
I think it was her way of disguising her own vices.
If everyone around her was drinking, then there was nothing odd about her never-empty glass, cup, or can.
She was just going along with the group. She was just letting some steam off.
“One drink turned to three—for her, anyway—and before I knew it, we were on the bed, and she was undoing my shirt. I’d had a hell of a day.
It wasn’t until we were through that I stood and noticed the picture frame on the bedside table.
A wedding photo of a man and a woman who looked to be Mindy’s age, but the woman was not Mindy,” he says, judgment apparent in his speech.
“I didn’t think much of it when she showed up in a nearby neighborhood a few days later, asking to buy an encyclopedia, though I suppose I should’ve when I asked her what letter she wanted and she said, ‘All of them. Don’t cheat me now.
’” He laughed again, and this time the sound worms beneath my skin, makes me want to scratch my nails down his plump cheeks.
“But then she kept showing up—at bars, restaurants, towns nowhere near where we first met—until she finally told me she was pregnant, that she was certain it was mine, and that we should get married. I told her I was young and going places and would never be a family man. She got really mad and said all this crazy stuff, that I’d poured her second and third drinks, that I’d suggested we move to the bed, that I hadn’t listened when she’d told me she wasn’t that kind of woman.
She said she’d go to the police and tell them what I’d done to her.
The next day, I quit my job with the encyclopedia company, went down and filed a restraining order against her, and used what I had in my savings to start what would become Arrow Mart many years later.
“In a way, I suppose I have your mother to thank for that, but I was not then, nor am I now, a family man. I have no children. That’s all there is to say,” he concludes, blank-faced.
As if those memories churned up no emotion for him.
No regret. No shame. Maybe he’s not capable of feeling those anymore.
I fear that if he were in this room right now and my hands weren’t bound, I’d have them wrapped around his scrawny neck until his eyes bulged out of their sockets and his skin turned purple.
My mom was an alcoholic, and when she drank, she was impulsive, which could get her into trouble.
Because the more she drank, the more vulnerable she became, and the more vulnerable she became, the more people—specifically men—could take advantage of her.
I’d seen how her cad boyfriends sometimes treated her.
They were half the reason I spent most of my high school and college life lifting weights.
So I could protect her if things got out of hand.
I always wanted to believe my dad was a good man. The good man who couldn’t handle her mood swings and her illness, who sent her chasing after all the wrong guys. Now I know he’s just another in a long line of weak, sad men who used her.
I shake my head, unhelpful tears obscuring my vision. “If you think I’m going to be quiet about any of this, you’re wrong.”
“Take it to the media, I sue you. Try the test again, I sue you. I’m expected to check in for my speech any moment. I’d call the cops, but they’re useless. I don’t want the press, and you don’t want the charges,” he says.
“So what? That’s it then?” I ask, searching for empathy, but I’m not sure he even knows what that is. This is not a man I want to know.
He stares into the camera, not at the screen, seemingly ignoring me entirely. “Dax, you have until sunrise to get the hell off my property, or I have far less pleasant ways of expelling you by force. We’re finished here.”
The call ends, and the knowledge that my dad doesn’t care whether I live or die floods me like a fast-acting poison.