CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“I told your stupid ass this stuff still some good,” they could hear Hershel say to his wife as Vince and Ricki and George and Milo entered from the only door that wasn’t blown off its hinges at the Richardson’s still-devastated home: the back door.
Hershel and Mamie Richardson were in the kitchen pulling down can goods out of the cupboards when they walked in.
Hershel immediately took issue with their presence. “Who gave you the authority to just walk into my home?” he asked them.
“I did,” Ricki said. “Your daughter.”
They could tell Hershel didn’t like her defiance, but he decided to let it go in front of company. “What do you want?” he asked. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t come to town.”
“Me?” Ricki was stunned.
“You’re blaming Rasheda for everything that’s happened?” Vince was stunned too.
“I’m calling a spade a spade, that’s all. Take it or leave it.”
Ricki couldn’t stand the sight of him. “Daddy, we know everything,” she said, “so don’t even lie anymore.”
Hershel and Mamie both looked at her. “What is your fool ass talking about?” Hershel asked her derisively. “Who you calling a liar?”
But Ricki refused to let her anger get in the way of finding the truth. She and Vince discussed it on the drive over. She maintained her cool. “We know Althea McDonald hid the fact that the Richardson DNA found at Dr. Proctor’s crime scene came from a male Richardson, not a female.”
“Yeah it did. Davey,” said Hershel. “That’s why they arrested him. Soon as he recovers from his injuries he’ll be released into their custody. Don’t you know anything?”
“I know Davey didn’t kill Dr. Proctor. I know that!”
“How you know that?” Mamie asked her daughter.
“Because I know my brother. And just like Erica couldn’t have killed Dr. Proctor, Davey couldn’t have either.”
“Girl get on from ‘round here!” Hershel said angrily. “Erica killed that doctor. He wouldn’t marry her so she killed him.”
“It couldn’t have been Erica, Daddy. Your girlfriend gave it away.”
For the first time, Vince saw some life in Mamie’s eyes. “What girlfriend?” she asked.
“Althea McDonald. She asked JoJo to kill Erica in her jail cell because they were cousins and she figured he wouldn’t rat her out. But he told me it was Al just before some thugs she hired killed JoJo.”
Mamie looked at Hershel. “You told me that was over with,” she said with passion in her voice.
“It is over,” said Hershel. “Ricki just making stuff up.”
“You said you wasn’t seeing that woman anymore, you bastard!”
Hershel slapped Mamie hard across the face, causing her head to jerk sideways. “Who do you think you’re talking to, woman?!”
Ricki was about to go to her father and defend her mother, but Vince held her back. They needed facts. And anger always brought out the truth.
“You told me it was over,” Mamie said again, holding the side of her face. “You told me you stopped seeing that hussy. You told me you stopped that foolishness.”
“I lied, okay? I lied! What you gonna do about it?”
“Why did you do it, Mr. Richardson?” Vince asked him, to keep his anger going.
Hershel looked at Vince and then at Milo and George. It was as if he knew he was cornered. And his defiance took over. “What you gonna do about it?” he asked Vince.
“Why did you do it?” Vince asked him again.
“I did it because he knew.”
Ricki frowned. “Dr. Proctor? What did Dr. Proctor know?”
“That Erica’s stupid ass managed to get herself pregnant again.”
“She was pregnant again?” asked Ricki. That was news to her. “She was pregnant with Dr. Proctor’s baby yet again?”
“Not with Dr. Proctor’s baby,” said Mamie. “With your father’s baby. Yet again!” she yelled at Hershel.
Everybody in that room stopped all movement. None, however, was as shocked as Ricki. “What are you saying? Are you telling me that Daddy . . . That Daddy?”
“He been messing with her since she was ten years old. You was long gone when he first started. He wouldn’t bother her when you were around.”
“What about when you were around?” a still-shocked Ricki asked.
“I told him to stop messing with her, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”
“You told him to stop?” Ricki couldn’t believe it. “That’s all you did?”
“That’s all I could do,” Mamie said. “I wasn’t getting into it with that maniac.”
While they all were looking at Mamie with disbelief on their faces, Hershel had pulled out his gun. “Everybody hands up! Especially you,” he said to Milo. “Drop your weapon.”
Everybody put their hands in the air. Milo, who had his phone in his hand, pulled out his gun with his other hand and sat it on the floor. He knew they needed answers before the shooting started. Besides, he had another one up his sleeve.
“So you raped your own child and then put the blame on that doctor?” asked Vince.
“It worked the first time. Nobody said nothing. And he gave her that abortion without my consent because he knew he was fooling with that fast-tail child too. It could have been his baby too.”
“It was yours,” said Mamie. “She had just started messing with Dr. Proctor. It was your baby and you knew it. But how could you do it?” Mamie asked him with pain in her voice. “How could you still be having an affair with that floozie?”
Ricki and Vince were dumbstruck. Mamie seemed more concerned about her husband cheating on her than he was about her daughter being raped repeatedly by him.
But that was exactly what Mamie was concerned about. Hershel and that Assistant DA. “You told me it was over,” she was pleading with him. “You told me you’d never touch that woman again. But you lied to me? You lied?”
And before anybody realized anything, Mamie snatched that gun from the hand of her unsuspecting husband and shot him before he could say another word. She shot him repeatedly. Even after Hershel had dropped dead, she kept shooting. She nearly emptied the chamber on him.
And Ricki wasn’t trying to stop her either. Had she had that gun, she just might have emptied it too.
Only Mamie didn’t empty it. She had a few rounds left. And she pointed that gun at Ricki. That was when Vince snatched Ricki and put her behind him, and that was when Milo pulled that small, semi-automatic Kel-Tec P32 out of his sleeve.
“Like I told you long ago,” Mamie said to her daughter, “I can’t live with him.” Then she shook her head. “And I can’t live without him,” she added. And then she turned that gun on herself, put it in her mouth, and fired.
She fell on top of her husband as if she was joining the trash heap.
Vince turned and looked at Ricki. He was terrified for her to have witnessed her mother and her father’s deaths. “Oh Rasheda,” he said with anguish in his voice.
But Ricki didn’t have anguish in her voice.
“They never gave a damn about anybody but themselves,” she said.
“She knew what he was doing to my little sister, but she stayed with him anyway? She told him to stop, she said. Like that was saying something. But she sat back and let it go on and on and on?”
“Now we’ve got to convince the cops of exactly what transpired in this house today,” said George. “Because she and he both said a mouthful.”
“I have it on audio,” said Ricki. “I turned on my phone before we walked through that door.”
George smiled. Vince wasn’t surprised.
“And I have it on audio and video,” said Milo as he waved his phone around. “I don’t trust law enforcement in this town either. I’ll send copies to all of you before I turn it over to them.”
George sighed relief. “That’s why you’re our security chief,” he said as he patted him on his back. “Good work, Milo.”
But Vince was still worried about Ricki. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Me?” Ricki was still staring at her parents. “I can’t mourn either one of them. I mourn my sister. I’m glad for my brother. But those two? Never.”
Then she exhaled. “They’re the reason why I will never, and I mean ever,” she reiterated, “bring a child into this crazy world. Never.”
As Milo called 911, she turned and walked out of what she’d always viewed as that Godforsaken house.
Vince, still stunned by her words that she would never bring a child into this world when he had recently decided that he wanted plenty of children with her as their mother, hurried out behind her.
But Ricki wasn’t backing down. She would never bring a child into this sick, rotten world.