It was Saturday. Rory had actually planned his trip around arriving on Friday and then confronting his father on Saturday. The man would be home on Saturday if he followed the same pattern he had fifteen years earlier, and he wasn’t a man to alter course once he’d set sail.
By the same token, his mother used to do the week’s shopping on Saturdays. That’s when most of the women in town shopped, and she liked to spend the day shopping and meeting up with her chums to have lunch.
This meant his father should be home alone, which is what Rory wanted.
Rory was up early. It was his habit to run five miles a day, and he hadn’t during the trip. Now he had the chance, and he took it, telling Cary he was going. Cary grunted, barely waking, and rolled over. He was asleep again before Rory and Morris were out the door.
Rory would have liked to have run up the Madison Street hill for old times’ sake, and he thought he’d perhaps still have that chance. It would depend on how long they needed to stay in the area.
It was still cool enough that he kept his tee shirt on. The town was hilly, but Rory well remembered this and actually preferred running where he got a full workout; the hills helped provide that. It didn’t seem to matter much to Morris. He trotted along like usual, showing no effort at all.
Rory came back, showered, got everyone’s breakfast order and left to pick up the food. When he returned, he had breakfast in his room with Cary. Maud and Trace and Cary had wanted a McDonald’s breakfast special, whatever that was. Rory had coffee and toast that he made in the room.
When he was done, he reminded everyone to stay out of sight. “Morris will stay here with you. I don’t know how long I’ll be but think I’ll be back sometime after lunch. For that, I’ve given Wyatt money and you can order in whatever you want. So, see you whenever.” And he was gone.
Rory’s emotions were running high, which was very unusual for him. He rarely showed emotions on the surface and wouldn’t now. But he was feeling them.
He pulled into the driveway of the house he’d grown up in. Never before had he driven there, and so never before had he pulled into the driveway and parked. This felt strange, a mixture of first times and the past coming back.
He sat for a moment, feelings rushing back and over him. He just looked at the house, then reached under the front seat and removed the package Harper had given him before he’d left L.A. He opened it and removed the Glock and shoulder holster from the wrappings. He took off his light jacket and put the holster on—the first time he’d ever worn one—and slid the pistol into the holster after checking that it was loaded and locked. Then he shrugged back into his jacket.
He walked up to the front door and rang the bell. He waited, and then the door opened.
His father was 15 years older than he’d been when Rory had last seen him. He’d always been a large man, tall and sturdy. Imposing. Now he looked physically the same, though his hair was a mixture of gray and white, and the lines on his face were more pronounced. He still stood with no slouch, and his eyes were still intense.
“Father,” Rory said, his voice flat, and then fell silent.
His father looked him over for a moment, then said curtly, “What do you want?
You’re not welcome here.”
“No, I don’t expect I am. But we need to talk, and doing it inside where we’ll have some privacy would be better, as you’ll agree when you learn why I’m here. Let’s move this inside.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? You’re not telling me what’s what in my own house. Beat it. I want nothing to do with you.” He started to close the door.
“Okay,” Rory said as the door was shutting. He moved as if to turn, letting the jacket fall open on its own accord. “Remind me where the county DA is located. It’s been a while, and I’m not sure I ever knew where his office was.”
The door hadn’t entirely shut. Now it opened wider again. His father’s eyes were pinned to the gun Rory was wearing.
“What the fuck you talking about?” There was an ominous force behind the question.
“Still playing the intimidation game? Won’t work, Dad. You know, it doesn’t feel right calling you that. When were you ever my dad? Calling you Reggie makes a mockery of this. I just won’t use a name. If I somehow need one, I guess ‘Asshole’ will work.”
The door remained open. Reginald’s eyes were staring lasers at Rory. Rory returned the look unemotionally, though he was having to hold himself in check. He’d have liked nothing better than to step forward and slug the man.
Finally: “What do you want?”
“To go inside and sit down and discuss something with you. Or not. Close the door and
I’ll discuss it with someone else. I’m doing you a favor. You certainly don’t
deserve one, but I’m helping someone else, and you’re involved, which means I have
to be nicer to you than I would otherwise.”
Reginald hesitated, then stepped away from the door into the house. Rory followed him. Reginald took him to his study, where he sat behind his desk. It was a large room, a man’s room with books on the walls, a couple of hunting pictures, drinks displayed on a counter, and a high-quality Middle Eastern rug on the floor.
There were two wooden, straight-back chairs in front of the desk. Rory looked around and spotted an upholstered one in a conversational setting near the French doors. He dragged it over to the desk and sat in it.
“My original plan, when thinking about coming back here, was to pay you back for the years you tormented me. A little vengeance, if you will. But events have caused me to change my mind. Now I’ve come to give you a chance to save yourself that you have no right to expect from me. I’m going to allow you to continue your lavish lifestyle. Better than public humiliation and a cell with a roommate with a taste for old white ass.”
He paused so the old man would have time to assimilate what he’d just said before continuing, to feel the mood of the conversation, the animosity Rory was throwing at him.
“I’ll tell you what I want. Then I’ll tell you why you’ll give it to me. This should be easy for you; you only have to say one word all the time I’m here. That word is, ‘okay’.”
Rory paused. He could see Reginald was interested, though he didn’t look worried. Yet he’d let Rory in. That certainly meant the threat of involving the DA had hit a nerve, so there were things the man didn’t want out in the open—and particularly out in the open in the district attorney’s office. Rory had known there were. Still, his father’s silence confirmed the fact.
Rory smiled. He’d given himself about a fifty-fifty chance of this working. Now, with his father’s silence, it was seventy-thirty.
“I’m going to have to start a long time ago. Back when I was small. Back when you decided it was best to make me feel worthless day after day, year after year. I’ve given this more thought than just about anything in my life. I figured it out. There had to be some reason you were so persistently malicious, so venomous to me. It was unnatural, and while you’ve never been a sociable person—you have an over-the-top narcissistic personality—you took it to extremes with me. There had to be a reason. It took a long time, but eventually I figured it out.”
“Do we need this? I couldn’t care less what you figured out or thought of me. Get to the point and then get out of here.”
Rory shook his head. “We both know you’re an asshole. You don’t need to keep proving it.” Then he was quiet for a moment.
He stared at his father and then sat back, just holding him with his eyes. When he continued, it was as if the last exchange had never occurred. “There had to be a reason. Had to be. And it took me years, but I worked it out, finally. It had to do with why you’re rich.”
That made an impact. Rory could see it on his father’s face. Reginald remained silent.
“I wondered about that, too. But when I figured out your cruelty, in the end I saw your reason. See, when I was young—five, six, seven—you were a god to me. A huge, powerful, all-knowing man, and then you had this house built—like a castle, the biggest one in town. All the new housing being built, here and in neighboring towns, you built it. Your company. You ran the whole thing, had many people in town working for you. I saw how they behaved when they met you in town. To me, it was like you were a king and deserved a palace, and then, you built one. You were everything to me, and I followed you around all the time, wanting to be near you.
“Then you turned on me. Why? It almost killed me. It made me go into a shell that I didn’t come out of it completely till I was in my twenties and far from here. But during those young years, I wanted to figure out what was wrong with me, why you hated me so much. I never could.
“I kept working on it, and later on I did figure it out. But it started when I was eight. By then I’d seen how normal adult men acted, and I could compare them to you. You needed to be in charge, to be the best, the smartest, the richest, the most admired and feared man in town. Your ego demanded that. I know now that you had no moral compass. I didn’t know what that was then and only realized that later, but when I did, it made things clear.
“But I did see what you were like, I did see you do small things, like leaving insulting tips in restaurants or none at all. Like forcing shops and services in town to charge less than their usual prices for things you bought on threats from you that you’d have their stores boycotted if they didn’t give you preferred treatment. I saw how all this made you feel even more powerful.
“People in town all hated you, but you interpreted that as respect.”
“Are you about done? I’ve had about all I can take of this.”
Rory smiled. “Nowhere near. I’m just getting to what changed the tide, why instead of a god, I started seeing you for what you were. It was when I was nearly nine I realized that, and that made me remember what I’d seen you do earlier. Just after that your attitude towards me had become so hostile.”
“What had you seen?”
“You always closed your door when people came to see you and you took them into your office. But there was one time when you didn’t close it all the way, and I was curious. I saw the man in your office. He was asking you to do something. I didn’t know what it was, but you said no, and then he gave you some money, and the two of you shook hands. He left, and you put the money in your safe, and then took down one of those ledgers you keep behind locked glass on that shelf and wrote something down.
“Then you looked up and caught me looking at you. You came unglued and shouted at me, really vicious, and sent me to my room, not to come out till the next day when you’d left for work.
“But after that, you were never nice to me again. I eventually figured out why. It was because you knew I’d seen you doing something you didn’t want witnessed. You were afraid I’d tell someone. You only cared about yourself, and I was an unacceptable threat. You had to make sure I couldn’t harm you, and to do that, first you had to make me afraid of you so your control was total.
“I’d hung around you all the time when admiring you. Now you put a stop to that by being mean and belittling. You let everyone in town know I was an extreme disappointment, and I needed strict discipline. Why? So if I did tell what I’d seen, you could just say I was trying to get you in trouble because you were hard on me and so I was making up stories as childish revenge.
“The thing is, you were still you, and when you decided to bring me down, crush my spirit, you weren’t going to go about it with half measures. You were going to really crush me. That’s how your personality worked. Everything to the max. Everything to prove to yourself you could accomplish anything. So you tried, and I learned to keep a straight face and not show any emotion, and that made you double your efforts. I didn’t have a pleasant childhood. I went into a shell that took me years to come out of entirely.”
Reginald had been fidgeting, and now stood up abruptly. “So what?” he said, and it was more of a shout that anything. “Even if any of that were true, so what? It’s past history. I’ve had enough of this. Get out of here, and don’t come back.”
Rory stared at him for a moment, then said, “Sit down. We’re not nearly done here. Now we’re getting to the part where you’re going to say okay to me.”
Reginald remained on his feet for several moments. When Rory stayed seated, just staring at him, he realized how silly he looked, just standing. He needed to sit down again; the longer he stood, the more impotent he appeared. Still, he remained on his feet long enough to make it appear he was sitting only of his own volition. When he was seated, Rory continued.
“For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me when you turned against me, but I never could figure out what, and it hurt badly. But slowly, I began to think that maybe the problem was you, not me. I remembered the money changing hands, and your attitude towards me changing right after that. So, I got curious. Why were men coming to the house, never staying long, and your office door was always closed? Was there something secret going on? Was more money changing hands? Should the door have been closed the time it wasn’t when I’d seen what I’d seen, and then you’d got so mad at me and things had changed so drastically? I started to think maybe what I’d seen was you doing something wrong, something illegal, and you knew I’d seen it.
“I had to know what it was. It wasn’t just curiosity; I felt that if I could prove you were doing something illegal, that would explain why you’d done what you had to me: taken away my confidence and at the same time minimized me as a threat.
“If I could prove you were a bad man, a crook, I’d reclaim some of myself, regain some personal confidence and integrity. I couldn’t have put it in those terms back then. But I wanted to prove to myself I wasn’t as bad and worthless as you were trying to make me think I was.
“So when you left one day, I investigated. I got the key I knew you hid in your desk and opened the shelf with the ledgers. I looked at them, and they were all a bunch of numbers and dates and names. And the numbers all had dollar signs in front of them.”
Rory smiled. Reginald merely stared at him, no emotions showing.
“The numbers in the ledgers were gobbledygook to me, just gibberish. But I was eight. And you had become my nemesis. There were several books; I see you have quite a few more now. It has to be mostly ego making you keep them. Most crooks keep password protected records on a computer. You’re old fashioned and probably feel pride, looking up at those books, seeing the proof of how much smarter you are than everyone else.
“But back then, there were only a few. I knew they were important; why lock them up otherwise? So I was very bad. I took out the third book and tore out about fifteen pages. I replaced them with fifteen sheets of paper. That was awfully brave of me, but realistically, there was no evidence I’d been the one who’d done it. And I wanted something that showed you were crooked. Because that’s what I decided. Getting cash from someone who wore a suit and tie? Chatting with him about things I didn’t understand but sounded wrong? The tone of voice you both used? Shaking hands with him, which you’d never do with a renter? No, I thought you were up to no good, and I wanted proof.”
Rory stopped. He’d been talking for a while and his throat was dry. He wasn’t about to ask for a glass of water. What he was about to do was get one for himself.
“Because I need you to believe what I’ve just told you, I’m going to insist you have proof. We have a ways to go yet. I’m going to get something to drink. While I’m out of the room doing that, you need to look at your ledgers. The third one from the beginning, specifically. We’ll be discussing what’s going to come of all this, so it’s important you know what I’ve been saying is true. No reason to waste time with denials.
“I can see I have your attention now. By the way, when I was looking through your desk twenty-something years ago, I saw a pistol there. A Walther PDP. I didn’t know one gun from another then. I do now. I’ve shot thousands of rounds from a gun similar to that. If the idea percolates that shooting me when I come back would be a swell idea, you might want to rethink it.
“Two reasons. One, I’m better with a gun than you are, much better, and two, everything I just said to you is in writing and with my attorney along with those fifteen pages I stole from you. You really don’t want to add murder to what you’ll be going down for. Going down if you don’t cooperate. Wouldn’t even do you any good to burn those books; you’ve left plenty of evidence in your wake. Anyway, I told you I was doing you a favor and you’d be okay. You might want to learn what I have in mind.”
So saying, Rory got up and walked out. He’d grown up in that house and knew his way around. Little had changed except for a new refrigerator. He grabbed a bottle of water from it and took it back into Reginald’s office. Reginald didn’t appear to have moved.
Rory sat down and drank half the bottle, then recapped it. “Okay, we’re getting there. I took those pages and kept them. When I was older and knew a little more about a lot of things, I took them to a staff accountant working where I was. You were very clear about the money: how much there was, where it came from, what you did with it. It was clear evidence of graft and bribery. Money came in; money went out. With dates and names. What they amount to on their own could get you jail time. But what’s even worse for you is, I’d be amazed if any of it was ever reported to the IRS. Naughty, naughty. You and Al Capone. Tax fraud. Hah!”
Reginald moved his head so they were no longer staring at each other eye to eye.
“So, where do we go from here? My original idea was to indulge in the vengeance my eight-year-old self wanted. That was beguiling. And it was in my mind up to only a week ago. But things have happened since then, and I’m in a different place now. So, I’m going to leave the choice of what I do up to you. You get to call the shots. You won’t like either choice I’ll give you, but that’s life in the fast lane.
“There’s Plan A and Plan B; you get to choose which one. Would you like to hear
what those two plans are?”
Rory wanted to see if Reginald, who’d been silent throughout, was engaged. He was. He hesitated, not wanting to seem to be admitting to anything, but Rory’s gaze was relentless, and finally Reginald nodded.
“All right. The first option is, I lay all that I have at the feet of the DA. You’re arrested, tried for malfeasances shown in those ledgers and your other illegal activites which a little digging by the DA’s office will uncover, then referred to the IRS for tax evasion. You’ll be disgraced, tried and sentenced and incarcerated. Mother will continue to live a quiet life here, now absent the browbeating or criticism from you, and spend her final years happier than the ones leading up to this. Your years won’t be nearly so happy.
“That’s Plan A. I like it for several reasons, the main one being you stole much of my childhood happiness from me and, for years, my feeling of self-worth. I’d like to pay you back for that. Choose Plan A, and I’ll be doing just that.”
He stared hard at Reginald. Reginald didn’t know because he wasn’t meeting Rory’s eyes. He seemed to have shrunk a little while sitting in his chair, perhaps picturing the bleak future Rory had just laid out for him.
“Plan B. This is the one I expect you’ll choose because it’ll be the more palatable choice. Not good, you won’t like it, but palatable. This is what it entails. Your wife’s sister will come live with you. She’ll be a companion for my mother. And she’ll be living here in this house as someone to keep an eye on you. She’ll be sending me frequent emails. I’ll want to know how you’re treating her and my mother.
“There’ll be no more put-downs, degradation, name calling, disparagements, mind games, nastiness. You’ll be pleasant to both of them. I don’t care if you spend time with them or not. Leave them entirely alone if you want. Move out if you want. But any and all contact with them will be socially acceptable contact.
“You’ll be paying Aunt Maud a salary for watching your behavior. You’ll be giving my mother enough money each month to live comfortably on and be responsive to any extra she asks for.
“I’ll be hiring someone to watch over the situation here; I worry you might have an accident befall either or both women. It’ll be someone local who doesn’t like you. I have more money than I could possibly spend in a lifetime. This is a good use for some of it.”
He took a moment to watch his father’s face. Then he moved on.
“Just one more thing. You’ll approve a flag being put on your bank account and with your stockbroker. I get to see all account activity. Deposits and withdrawals, cash or stock movements. I also have to approve any reduction of your principal in any account by over fifteen percent. You will be unable to do that without my signing off on it. I don’t care what you do with your money, but I don’t want you or your money suddenly disappearing. I can’t stop you physically from running when I’m miles from here but can stop you from taking your money with you.
“But that’s it. Plan B. You stay out of jail. Other than that and having another woman in the house and having to be genial to them both, you’ll hardly feel it. Your graft and tax evasion stays out of the hands of legal authorities. You stay living here or somewhere else in this town. Either way, I’ll be able to keep track of you. You’ll hate that. Good.
“Now’s when you get to speak your one word. Plan B?”
He stopped at waited. When his father didn’t respond, he said, “Okay. Plan A. I’ll be going now.”
He stood, and his father said, “Okay.”
Rory remained standing. “There’s just one thing left for me to do. I haven’t spoken to Mother. I will do that today. If she agrees, then you and I will go to a lawyer in town and he’ll draw up the financial agreement and you’ll sign it. That will implement the monetary part of Plan B, and Maud will move in tomorrow.
“However, it’s possible my mother might realize what control she has of her life when I explain all this to her. She might rather you go to jail and be free at that point to live with her sister without you around. If that’s the case, well, you’ll have brought that on yourself.
“But now, I’m going to go find her. That should be easy. This is a small town and there can’t be too many places to look. It’ll probably take me less than fifteen minutes to locate her. Then we’ll talk, and if she approves, you and I will have a deal. After that, hopefully, I’ll never set eyes on you again.”
He took a moment to pin Reginald with his eyes again, then turned and walked out.