by Maisy Morgan
Mary nodded. “I try to limit Tripp’s time online, but…” Mary trailed off. “I should probably try to look at these kids’ social media pages.”
“Oh, no, don’t start snooping on his friends now too,” Ella May warned.
“No, not for that,” Mary said, laughing slightly. “I meant for the case that Preston is working. I think I could figure out what sort of relationships these families have based off their interactions online.”
“Oh, well, that’s probably a good idea,” Ella May said, laughing.
Mary pulled out her phone and went and sat down on the little pink chairs in the corner. Ella May pulled up a stool behind the counter to rest her old back, and she worked the counter as customers slipped in and out looking for sweets that day. Mary, on the other hand, worked on her phone snooping around on Bradley, Kara, Stacey, and Becky’s social media pages. She started with Bradley, sifting through old posts of his, and a pattern quickly emerged.
I swear one of these days I’m going to sock my old man in the face
Anyone else’s dads drive them f-in nuts!?!
I swear, I’m going to break his neck
It was the same—scattered about on the boy’s social media pages alongside silly memes and shared links about the school’s sports teams. The last comment about breaking ‘his’ neck was filled with comments by friends wanting to know who he was talking about, and he confirmed in the comments that he and his dad had ‘gotten into it.’
This is very disturbing, Mary thought, feeling quite alarmed by some of Bradley’s rants about his dad. Most of them were quite old. Perhaps he and his dad had gone through a rough patch? The sheer violence of some of the things Bradley had posted made her wonder, though, if perhaps Bradley might have had something to do with what happened to his dad. This bothered her severely. Bradley seemed like a good kid, but he was clearly full of rage towards his father.
She wasn’t able to find anything other than those three posts, so she moved on to Stacey’s pages. Much like Becky’s pages had been filled with pictures, so were Stacey’s. There were a lot of selfies like her younger sister’s pages, but Stacey liked to post photos of other people occasionally—mostly Kara or Bradley. There was one picture of Stacey and Bradley smiling brightly at her phone camera that actually seemed quite sweet. It was warm and loving, and it was clear these two had been together for a very long time. However, she noticed something in this picture on Bradley’s chin. A large, horrendous-looking bruise that looked like it could possibly be from a punch.
She typed in Bradley’s name in the search bar, looking specifically for pictures of him. There was one from the summer of him in his swimsuit, smiling casually. Bruises on his arms that resembled a hand—she could make out finger marks. Another one of him and his friends standing around, and he was always the only one with long sleeves even though, based on the way his friends were dressed, it was too hot for it.
Mary felt sick to her stomach. It was around the time she was looking at one picture that she could swear Bradley was wearing a bit of makeup on his face, an older photo, that Preston entered into the shop. He smiled. “Hey, Mary. Thought I’d pop in and snag me another one of your sugar cookies.”
Mary couldn’t even smile at him, and he noticed her solemn expression. “Everything okay?” he asked her.
“I think Bradley’s dad was beating him,” Mary said, and this made Preston cringe.
“Are you sure?” he asked, and Mary showed him the old posts she had found and some of the pictures. The one of him by the pool with the obvious hand marks on him seemed to make Preston especially concerned.
“Look at this one,” Preston said, handing the phone back to Mary. “He’s got marks around his neck. We need to go talk to Jaden.”
Mary stood upright, and Ella May gleefully gave her a thumbs up to let her know she would watch the shop. Mary and Preston headed out, and Preston called Jaden on the way to let her know they were coming by. They pulled up in front of the house, and Mary saw Bradley’s truck in the driveway. “Looks like Bradley decided to stay out of school again today,” Mary said.
“Has he been home all week?” Preston asked as they exited the car.
“Tripp told me he went to school yesterday,” Mary reminded him. “I don’t blame him for wanting to stay out, though. I would if it had been me in his situation. I wouldn’t want people asking me too many questions. Tripp told me everyone at school has been talking about what happened.”
“Poor kid,” Preston said. “If his dad was beating him, it’s no wonder he was acting so conflicted about the whole thing.”
“I hope we’re wrong,” Mary said. “But then again, that would explain those divorce papers. Maybe Jaden was hoping if he could keep all their money and property so long as she got custody of Bradley that it would keep him safe.”
“That’s true,” Preston said. “I forgot about the divorce papers for a second there. This sort of thing gets to me. Child abuse, I mean. I have a hard time feeling sympathy for people like that, but it’s still my job to find out what happened to Ken even if this turns out to be true.”
Mary sighed. “Yeah… it’s kind of a bitter moment for me too…”
Preston rang the doorbell, and after a moment, Jaden answered. “Officer Preston, Mary,” she said, opening the door. “Come on in.”
They entered the house, and Jaden scurried into the kitchen. “Tea?” she asked.
“I would love some,” Mary said, and Jaden got to work on making some tea.
“How is Bradley doing?” Preston asked.
“He’s upstairs,” Jaden said. “Hiding out in his room. I don’t know what to do. I can’t get him to talk to me about all of this. I can’t imagine how he is feeling. I just don’t know what to do…” Jaden poured them all some tea, and the three of them settled down at her little breakfast nook in the kitchen to talk.
Chapter Eighteen
“So, what can I do for you?” Jaden asked. “Have you found anything? Do you know who killed my husband?”
“Unfortunately, we haven’t—not yet,” Preston said, and Jaden slumped a bit in her seat. “We’re still working diligently on your husband’s case, Jaden, but some new information has come into our hands that we need to speak with you about.”
“Whatever you need,” she said.
“We need to talk to you about the divorce papers you tried to shred at the office,” Preston said, and Jaden looked quite alarmed by this.
“Divorce papers…” she said as though she was needing a moment for it to register with her what they were asking about.
“We know you were planning on divorcing Ken. We found the papers, and we put them back together. All you were asking for is custody of Bradley, and you were willing to leave everything else to him,” Mary said. “Why didn’t you tell us about the divorce?”
“I didn’t think it mattered,” Jaden said. “I never sent the papers to Ken. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t know I had been seeing a lawyer, and I had changed my mind. I had meant to shred that paperwork a long time ago, but I didn’t. I didn’t want you to see it and think that there was something going on that wasn’t really there. No one knew about the papers except for my lawyer and me.”
“Were you two having marriage problems?” Preston asked.
“Nothing we couldn’t figure out together,” she said, sounding resentful towards them. “But that is my business. I’m not going to sit here and talk to you about that sort of thing—it’s quite private.”
Preston and Mary sat quietly, waiting to see if Jaden had more to say on the matter, but she merely stared back at them, unmoving. “Okay, then let's talk about the buy-out,” Preston said. “We know that Darren and Bob were planning on buying you and your husband out of the construction company.”
“That is simply not true,” Jaden said firmly.
“Their kids seem to think otherwise,” Mary said.
Jaden glared at Mary. “They were not going to buy us out of the company
. Unless this was something they were planning behind our backs, of course.”
“You… you’re lying,” Mary said, calling her out.
This infuriated Jaden. “I don’t know anything about it—I told you!”
“Fine,” Preston said, growing irritated. “You don’t want to talk about your divorce papers. You don’t want to talk about the buy-out. Let’s talk about the real elephant in the room then. Let’s talk about the fact that Ken was beating Bradley.”
Jaden’s face turned red, and she looked furious. “How… how dare you come in here… I just lost the man, and you want to come in here accusing him…” She stood up, nearly knocking her chair over in the process. “You need to go!”
“Before you overreact,” Preston said, standing up as well, “we found photographic evidence of abuse taking place in this house. We know someone was beating him.” Preston looked at her accusingly. “So, you better tell me the truth right now. Was it Ken? Because if it wasn’t him, that means his abuser is still lurking around.” He stared at her.
“M… me?” Jaden wailed. “I would never lay my hands on my son!”
“Then you better calm down and start talking right now,” Preston warned. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to your husband. To do that, we need to understand what we’re dealing with.”
“Jaden,” Mary said in a very calm, soothing tone. “We just want to help. We are trying to find out what happened, and if Ken was abusing Bradley, that’s a whole other level of possible motives we need to look into.”
Jaden glared at Mary. “My husband was a good man, and—”
“He was a creep!” a voice called from the entryway into the kitchen. Bradley was standing there, looking almost sick. “Why don’t you just come out and say it, Mom?”
“Go back to your room,” Jaden said, but her voice was weak and unsure, lacking any sort of authority.
“No!” Bradley snapped, looking like he was going to explode. “Dad hit me! All the time! Every day! He’s gone now, and I’m glad he’s dead!”
Jaden stood quite still, fiddling with her fingers for a moment. “I know,” she said airily.
Mary looked across the room at Bradley, who was still standing in the doorway, panting a bit. He had finally said it, and Mary was almost certain that this was a slight relief to him to have it out in the open. He exhaled heavily, and the tension seemed to fall off him. This release, though, brought its own form of chaos. Tears started streaming down Bradley’s face, and he looked humiliated by this. Jaden started to come towards him. “Don’t touch me,” Bradley snarled, and when she ignored this, he reached over to the counter, grabbing what looked like some sort of small, decorative cookie jar. He flung it across the room, and it flew past Jaden’s head and shattered against the far wall.
“Bradley!” Jaden yelped.
“Hey, easy, kid,” Preston said in a firm, commanding tone that made Bradley flinch. “All of you—living room!”
Without much more to say to Preston, they all slowly slipped into the living room and away from the shattered mess. “I’ll clean it up,” Mary said, locating a broom in a hall closet. She swept the shattered jar up and tossed the ceramic shards into the trash can, shaking her head. By the time she had rejoined everyone else in the living room, she could see that Bradley had calmed down significantly and was allowing his mother to sit next to him on the couch. The woman was holding her son’s hand.
Bradley was frantically wiping his face with his free hand, trying his best to hide the fact that he had been crying. Mary sat down in the empty chair near the footstool that Preston had settled down on. Preston looked calm and soothing, and he spoke gently to Jaden and Bradley both.
“Listen,” Preston said. “I’m sorry for all of this to come out this way. But we have to talk about this.”
“I’m sorry I threw the jar,” Bradley said.
“It’s all right, honey,” Jaden said, crying a bit herself now. “This is hard, I know.”
Bradley kept glancing towards Mary, looking embarrassed.
“Tell us what was really going on, Jaden,” Preston said.
“It’s just what you think,” Jaden said. “Ken was a violent man. He hid it well. He had unnaturally high expectations for Bradley, and every little thing would just set him off. It started getting worse.”
“He almost killed me once,” Bradley said, and his free hand instinctually went up to his neck. “He strangled me. He usually would just hit me a few times, but this one time he got so mad… I had failed a class… and he just…” Bradley bit his bottom lip.
“That’s when I finally contacted a lawyer,” Jaden said. “Had him write up the papers. I didn’t change my mind like I said. I was ready to leave. And Darren and Bob found out about the whole thing—about the divorce, I mean. They didn’t know Ken was beating Bradley.”
“Is that where the buyout came into play?” Preston asked.
“Yes,” Jaden said. “When they found out about the divorce, they said they were worried about losing me as their designer. They approached me, told me they wanted to buy Ken out. They were going to buy him out, offer him some good money to get rid of him. Then… well, they offered me his shares at the company.”
“They were willing to stab their partner in the back for one of their designers?” Preston asked.
“Looks that way,” Jaden said. “I was selfish. I decided for Bradley and me to wait out the divorce a little longer until Darren and Bob could get the paperwork straightened out for the buyout. I wanted us to be secure when we left Ken.” Jaden looked at Bradley with an extreme expression of guilt. “He kept hurting Bradley, and I just kept waiting around…”
“Jaden, did you—”
“I didn’t kill Ken,” she said. “I was in the kitchen when he fell from the roof. I don’t know what happened, but I’m not going to lie—I’m glad he’s gone.”
Bradley’s lip quivered, and he pulled his hand away from his mom. He crossed his arms and rested his arms on his knees, looking down and away from Mary and Preston. “It’s stupid,” Bradley said. “It’s stupid that I even miss him a little bit. He’s nearly killed me before! And I feel safe for the first time in my life, but I… I miss him. I miss him, but I’m glad he’s dead at the same time.”
“I’m so sorry you’ve had to deal with something like this, Bradley,” Mary said.
“It’s all my fault,” Jaden said, crying now as well. “It just… it escalated. The first time he hurt him really bad, he was eight. I wasn’t home. I came home, and Ken had taken Bradley to the hospital over a broken arm, and I believed every lie that came out of Ken’s mouth about it. He snapped our little boy’s arm! And I didn’t do anything about it. He started getting aggressive with Bradley. Shoving mostly for a while. Then I’d see him smack him across the face with an open palm. It just got worse and worse, and then it just became normal.”
“It’s not your fault, Mom,” Bradley said, wiping his face again.
“I’m your mother,” Jaden said. “I’m supposed to protect you, and I just let it happen time and time again. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t see him getting hurt by his father over and over again. But even then, when I finally decided to do something, I waited. I bided my time. I let Bradley suffer.”
“It’s over now,” Preston assured her. “But despite what your husband was, I still have a job to do.”
“I want you to do your job, believe me,” Jaden said. “But Bradley and I have no idea what happened. We really don’t.”
“Let’s put the homicide incident aside for a second,” Preston said, sighing. “I’m going to put you in contact with someone from child services.”
This alarmed Jaden. “What? Why?” she asked.
“Your son was being abused,” Preston said. “I’m required to make sure someone is following up on this.”
“But Ken’s gone!” Jaden exclaimed. “Why would child services need to be contacted?”
“Jaden, there is nothing you need t
o be worried about,” Preston said. “They’ll just come out and talk to Bradley.”
Bradley was staring at Preston, just as concerned as his mother now. “Why?” Bradley asked. “My dad is dead. Why would they need to come and talk to me?” Bradley’s eyes lingered from Preston to Jaden. “Wait, is my mom in trouble? This isn’t her fault!”
“No one is in trouble, Bradley,” Preston assured him. “We just need to make sure everything is okay. I’m going to leave you with my personal contact information.”
Bradley stood up and stormed off. “I’m sorry,” Jaden said under her breath as her son disappeared out of the room.
“This is a lot to have to be dealing with for someone his age,” Preston said. “Losing his dad is hard enough, but what his dad did to him… that doesn’t make this any easier, I’m sure.”
Chapter Nineteen
Tripp had spent most of the day at school in some sort of stupor. Hannah and Draco had been awfully quiet in all of their classes that day, but at least Kara had been rather attentive in the hallways. She always met him by his locker, and they would exchange a few kisses before heading off to class. He didn’t skip class any that day, and he was glad it wasn’t suggested. Bradley hadn’t been there again, but Tripp assumed it was because the one day he had come back, he had been bombarded by his classmates with inappropriate and personal questions. Tripp couldn’t blame him for not wanting to come back to school that day.
They had a test in their introductory to drama class—all about stage directions, history of theater, and other general introductory snip-its that Tripp didn’t particularly care to know but had studied for anyways to maintain his grade. Because of this, he and Draco and Hannah spoke very little, and drama was usually their class in which they spoke nonstop as they all sat together and usually had scenes to practice together for upcoming performance evaluations.