Chapter 9
The sound was deafening.
Daniel and I were out of bed in seconds.
He grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the door.
I grabbed my phone.
The alarm panel said: BACK DOOR.
“Someone’s in the kitchen,” I whispered.
Daniel nodded.
He moved toward the stairs.
I called 911.
Quietly.
“Someone just broke into our house,” I whispered to the operator. “1427 Oakwood Drive. Please hurry.”
We heard footsteps downstairs.
Heavy.
Unsteady.
Then a crash.
Glass breaking.
A woman’s voice.
Slurred.
Angry.
“Daniel?” Margaret shouted. “I know you’re up there. Come down here and talk to me like a man.”
Daniel froze on the stairs.
I moved beside him.
She was drunk.
Or high.
Or both.
I could hear it in her voice.
The unsteady cadence.
The rage that bubbled too close to the surface.
“You think you can ignore me?” she screamed. “You think you can send your lawyer after me? After everything I did for you? I carried you for nine months! I fed you! I clothed you! I worked three jobs when your father died so you could have those stupid baseball lessons! And this is how you repay me?”
Another crash.
The good china.
I heard it shatter against the wall.
“You were supposed to take care of me!” she sobbed. “That was the deal! I give you life, you take care of me when I get old! And now you’re gonna let that whore take it all? That gold-digging little nobody who never gave you anything but mediocre sex and burnt dinners?”
Daniel’s grip on the bat tightened.
“Stay here,” he mouthed to me.
I shook my head.
No way.
We moved down the stairs together.
Margaret was in the middle of the kitchen.
She’d kicked the back door in.
The frame was splintered.
She held an empty wine bottle in one hand.
Her hair was wild.
Her makeup was running.
She looked nothing like the composed woman who’d thrown me out three weeks earlier.
She looked broken.
And dangerous.
She saw us at the bottom of the stairs.
Her eyes locked on Daniel.
“There you are,” she said, smiling through her tears. “My boy. Come give your mother a hug.”
“Drop the bottle, Mom,” Daniel said. His voice was steady. Strong. “The police are on their way.”
She laughed.
It was a terrible sound.
“Police?” she said. “You’re gonna call the police on your own mother? After everything I’ve done for you? After I killed your father for you?”
The room went dead silent.
The bottle slipped in her hand.
She didn’t seem to notice.
Daniel and I stared at her.
“What did you just say?” Daniel whispered.
She swayed on her feet.
The truth came pouring out of her, unstoppered by alcohol and rage and the terrible, wonderful freedom of finally being caught.
“Your father was gonna leave me,” she said, her voice dreamy now. “Gonna take half of everything. Gonna move to Arizona with his secretary. I couldn’t let that happen. Not when everything was finally gonna be yours. Not when I’d worked so hard to build it all for you.”
She took a step toward us.
“The heart pills were so easy,” she said. “Just a few extra in his morning coffee. The doctor said his heart was weak anyway. No one questioned it. No one ever questions a grieving widow. And the insurance money—all seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars—it was yours, Daniel. All for you. I was just holding it. Keeping it safe until you were old enough to appreciate it.”
She looked at me.
Her eyes were dead.
“And then you married her,” she said. “And suddenly everything I worked for—everything I killed for—was gonna go to her. To a stranger. I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t.”
Sirens in the distance.
Getting closer.
Margaret heard them too.
She looked at the wine bottle in her hand.
Then at me.
“If I can’t have it,” she said, “no one can.”
She moved fast.
Faster than I thought possible.
The bottle came up.
She swung it at my head.
Daniel moved faster.
He stepped between us.
The bottle shattered against his shoulder.
Glass went everywhere.
He grunted in pain.
But he didn’t go down.
He grabbed her wrists.
He held her tight.
She screamed.
She kicked.
She bit at his arms.
“You ungrateful little bastard!” she shrieked. “I should’ve killed you when you were small! I should’ve killed both of you!”
The police burst through the front door.
Three officers.
Tasers drawn.
“GET ON THE GROUND!” one shouted.
Daniel released her and stepped back.
He held his bleeding shoulder.
Margaret stood in the middle of the kitchen, surrounded by broken glass, chest heaving.
She looked at the officers.
At her son bleeding on the floor.
At me, standing behind him, alive.
And for the first time, she realized it was truly over.
The mask fell away.
The grieving widow.
The loving mother.
The refined lady who drank tea and wore pearls.
All of it gone.
Leaving only what she’d always been underneath.
A small, mean, terrified woman who’d destroyed everyone she’d ever claimed to love.
She didn’t fight when the officers cuffed her.
She didn’t scream.
She didn’t say anything at all.
She just walked out with them.
Head held high.
As if she were leaving a party, not a crime scene.
And as the squad car pulled away, Daniel collapsed into my arms.
The paramedics came.
They stitched his shoulder.
Eight stitches.
“Lucky it didn’t hit an artery,” one said.
Lucky.
I held Daniel while they worked.
He didn’t cry.
He didn’t speak.
He just stared at the broken back door.
And I knew.
May you like
The boy who’d loved his mother unconditionally was gone forever.
And the man who’d taken his place would never be the same.
