Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
HAVEN
EARLIER – THE HOTEL
‘Hey, it’s me,’ I say after calling Joel and hearing his voice at the other end of the line.
‘Is everything okay?’ he asks, and I assume he is still under the impression that I think he was going for a walk when he left this hotel room, rather than what he has really been doing.
‘Not really,’ I admit. ‘Your brother is here.’
‘What?’ Joel cries.
‘I know you were meeting him downstairs in the bar for a drink,’ I say. ‘But I don’t care about that. We’ve got more important things to deal with. Can you come back to the room so we can talk?’
‘Erm, okay,’ Joel says, and then I hang up before nodding at Scott.
‘He’s on his way,’ I say, not that Scott replies.
He goes into the bathroom and closes the door, and I wonder if he is going to be sick.
I certainly feel nauseous after all he has told me, so I could forgive him for feeling the need to vomit.
But he emerges a few moments later, still looking pale, but with no evidence of having been sick.
I guess he just needed a few moments to compose himself.
I hope he got them because the knock at the hotel room door tells us both that Joel is here.
‘What’s going on?’ Joel asks nervously, and he’s probably imagining all sorts of awful scenarios.
Maybe he’s even imagining that me and his older brother are somehow romantically involved with each other and this is the part where I choose Scott over him.
But while that would be bad, it’s not as bad as what is really going on here.
‘You need to sit down and listen to your brother,’ I say, taking hold of Joel’s hand before nodding. ‘It’s going to be hard, but it’s really important that you do.’
Joel looks at Scott, and while I know their sibling bond is a strong one, it’s about to be tested in a way it never has been before. What is about to happen in these next five minutes will push the brothers’ relationship to the brink.
‘What is this?’ Joel asks again.
‘Seriously, sit down first,’ Scott says, and he takes a seat on the bed before motioning for his brother to join him.
Joel looks at me, and I nod, and then he finally takes a seat. I do the same, sitting in the wooden chair that accompanies the desk in here, and now that we are all comfortable, it’s unfortunately time to get uncomfortable.
‘Mum killed Grandma,’ Scott says to Joel in what must surely be a contender for one of the shortest but craziest sentences ever spoken in human history.
As to be expected, Joel looks like it is the most ludicrous thing he’s ever heard.
But then Scott explains what he explained to me.
About how he was there just after their grandmother had died.
How he saw the way his mother was in the immediate aftermath.
How he is so certain their mother is lying about what really happened because she is the reason Valerie fell down the stairs.
What he doesn’t need to go into as much detail about with Joel is their mother’s history of behavioural issues and how her anger, frustration and general bitterness at how her life turned out gave her the motivation to kill her own mother to inherit a fortune and change her circumstances forever.
When it’s all been said, Joel looks like I must have looked after I heard it.
Except for one very key detail.
He believes it a lot quicker than I did.
‘I knew she was hiding something,’ Joel says, not crying as I thought he might, but simply staring blankly at the carpeted floor.
‘I obviously had no idea it was something as horrible as this, but I could tell there was something she wasn’t telling us about Grandma.
I just figured it might have been about how the two of them had been arguing recently and they hadn’t been on the best of terms before Grandma died.
They were always arguing, weren’t they?’
Scott nods.
‘Mum would moan about something, and Grandma would say that she didn’t appreciate how lucky she was, and then Mum would get annoyed,’ Joel explains to me.
‘It was so common we barely even acknowledged it anymore. I don’t think we had a family meal where Mum didn’t get annoyed at Grandma for something. ’
It’s that fact, that sad but relevant experience, that seems to be allowing Joel to see that what his brother has just said is not just possible, but very, very plausible.
‘I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,’ Joel says next, showing that while he can believe his mother is capable of murder, he isn’t sure we are capable of making sure she is punished for it.
‘I have an idea,’ I say then, speaking up once I’m sure the siblings have finished their difficult conversation.
Scott and Joel look at me, both brothers needing guidance in this heavy, hard moment. So it’s up to me to try and give it to them.