Dark August

by Katie Tallo

  I can’t. I’ll go to jail. I didn’t try to stop him. I couldn’t save any of them.

  Like you couldn’t save Charlie?

  Rory looks like he’s been gut punched.

  Shan.

  Shannon looks into the darkness surrounding them.

  It should have been you, not him.

  Rory stares at her. Sees the hate in her eyes when she looks back at him. The disgust. He covers his face with his hands. A broken man. A man whose fantasies have been shattered. He can’t look at her any longer. It’s too agonizing. Can’t face who he’s become in her eyes. He sobs. Then Shannon makes a strange sound. He opens his eyes.

  Shannon is inexplicably lifted off her feet. Her body arches back over the open car door. She’s choking. There’s a leather belt around her neck pulling her back hard. Shannon’s arms thrash behind her. She punches and gasps. Fights so hard her elbow smashes the car window.

  Rory stumbles a few steps back. Eyes wide. He moves away from her. Hand over his mouth as he watches. And does nothing. Then there’s a hideous snapping sound like a branch breaking. It’s her neck. Shannon’s lifeless body wilts to the ground where she lands in a crumpled heap on her knees, head tilted to one side. Her face is vacant. Her eyes wide. Rory drops to his knees. Cradles her wobbly neck in his hands. Sobs and moans. Behind him a figure appears. Dez. He’s looping his belt back into his pants.

  Find that fuckin’ video. I gotta go bury the old man’s body.

  Rory stops crying and looks up at Dez with the slobbery face of an abandoned child.

  What? No, you can’t go.

  Dez ignores him and grabs the car keys from Rory’s hand and walks away. Rory blubbers.

  You, you can’t leave me out here, Dezzie.

  Figure it out, Benchwarmer.

  A car engine starts. Headlights streak across Rory’s back. He sits there awhile, holding Shannon’s lifeless head in his hands. Then he leans toward her and kisses her mouth. Picks her up in both arms, piles her body into the front seat of her car. Fastens her seat belt around her. He searches her pockets. Finds her cell phone. He stands up and dials. Puts on a phony voice.

  There’s been an accident. A car went into the lake out at Bruce Pit. Send help.

  He hangs up and pockets the phone. He wipes the tears from his cheeks and takes a deep breath. He reaches across Shannon and turns on the ignition. That’s when he spots the camera on the dashboard. He looks straight into the lens. Lifts the sweater covering the camera.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Rory picks up the camera. The view swings toward the back seat, then he turns it off. Everything goes black. But just before the video cut off, Gus is sure she glimpsed something else. She rewinds the tape and presses play. Rory picks up the camera and swings it toward himself. As he does, Gus presses pause. The image freezes. She did see something. A small hand clinging to the seat behind Shannon. Her own eight-year-old hand.

  She can smell his aftershave. Old Spice.

  The past crashes like a tidal wave into her tranquilized brain.

  Her mother is driving. Only her head’s bent sideways like she’s sleeping. Gus looks out the back window. Uncle Rory is standing at the top of a hill. They’re going too fast. Water slams the front windshield. The car floats. Then begins to sink. Gus pounds on the back window. Rory spots her and starts to run down the hill. She scrambles over the seat, shaking her mother’s shoulders.

  Mama. Mama. Wake up.

  44

  Tommy

  GUS IS DRAGGED BACK TO THE HERE AND NOW BY THE sound of crunching gravel in Rory’s driveway. A car door slams, then another. Still dazed, she scans the room. Spots her phone under the dining room table. Wills herself to her feet. She can hear voices outside. Her legs are wobbly. She glances through to the kitchen and sees two men coming up the back steps of the porch. Before they catch sight of her, she ducks. Gus crawls under the dining room table just as Desmond and Rory enter the house.

  “She’s in there.”

  Dez comes into the den first. Nothing like the feeble creature she met by the pool. He moves with a swift lurching stride that belies his mutilated form. More monster than man. He snarls, “The fuck she is.”

  Rory dekes around Dez and stares at the empty sofa. The static on the TV. He races into the back bedroom. Checks closets, the bathroom. Dez leans against the dining room table. Rory emerges from the hall utterly baffled. Eyes flitting to Gus behind Desmond’s legs.

  “I swear on my life, Dezzie, I gave her a boatload of pills.”

  Dez moves on Rory fast. He grabs his collar and slaps his face hard three times. Rory’s lip splits. Blood trickles down his quivering chin.

  “Dezzie, forget about the girl. We don’t need her anymore. I didn’t tell ya before ’cause I wanted it to be a surprise, but I found it. It was in her purse. I got your money for ya, Dezzie.”

  Her brain screaming for her to stay put, Gus tries not to move a muscle. Wills herself to sink into the floorboards, disappear. Turn to stone. Anything but remain crouched under a table in full view of Dez if he turns around. Dez lets go of Rory’s collar. Doesn’t turn. Rory holds his attention.

  “I hid it for safekeeping.”

  Rory darts over to the bookcase of trophies and yearbooks. He searches in between the yearbooks, tumbling several to the floor. Dez sighs impatiently.

  “You never could do nothing right. Couldn’t even pop a woody when I was done with June. Never been nothing but a benchwarmer.”

  A split second after he utters those words, blood sprays the hardwood floor at Dez’s feet. His knees buckle then he corkscrews to the floor. Body twisting. Head smacking against the hardwood. Facing Gus. Seeing her for the first time. Eyes perplexed. Sputtering dark liquid from his deformed mouth. Like an upended turtle, Dez flaps about, trying to get up.

  Rory softly places the gun on the coffee table. Rose’s gun. The gun he’d taken from Gus and tucked in his belt. He picks up the championship trophy and walks over to Dez. Then he smashes it down on his childhood friend’s skull. Over and over. Until Dez’s mutilated head is nothing but a mound of brains. Blood stipples Rory’s face and the front of his police uniform. He licks his split lip. Then matter-of-factly, he flicks off bits of brain matter dripping from the trophy as if this is something he does every day. His eyes are blank. He speaks to Gus without looking at her.

  “You can come out now.”

  Gus lets out the breath she’s been holding for what feels like forever. Her head is clear. Shocked back to sobriety. Completely untranquilized. She crawls out from under the table, keeping it between her and Rory. Eyes Rose’s gun behind him on the coffee table. Rory places the trophy back on the bookcase, then he turns to face her.

  She nods toward the static buzzing on the TV.

  “I found the tape. The one you marked Shan.”

  He looks over at the TV. Into the static. Narrows his bloodshot eyes as if he’s trying to see beyond the waves of black and white rippling across the screen. The color drains from his cheeks. His mouth drops open and he slumps down onto the sofa. His eyes dart back and forth, and then Rory starts pounding his fists into his forehead. Gus doesn’t move for fear she’ll trigger his madness to spill across the room toward her. He pounds and rocks and stammers.

  “I pulled you out of that lake, got you home, put you in your bed, safe and sound. That’s what Uncle Rory did. All I’ve been trying to do is protect you, Little Monet. But you started nosing around and Dezzie wouldn’t let up about the video. He wanted to know if you had it, what you knew, and who you talked to.”

  Gus inches along the table toward the kitchen. Rory’s manic.

  “But it was that bloody money that drove him off the deep end. He’d kept his eye on that Halladay girl for seven long years, then he started playing daddy just to get his cut. He played the long game and lost. Lost his dignity. Lost his face. He wasn’t gonna stop till he got every last cent. And you led him right to that list. A list with your name on it.”

&n
bsp; Rory stares at the static on the TV. Then he looks up at Gus for the first time since sinking onto the sofa.

  “Shan set me up. She was trying to get me to confess. I burned that camera of hers out back in the fire pit. After I made that copy. I thought I might need it one day. In case them two tried to pin it all on me. But you saw. Dezzie’s the one who killed her. Not me. It was all Dezzie.”

  Gus is at the far end of the table. Ready to run. His eyes are pleading for forgiveness. His soft belly quivers as he breathes hard. She meets his gaze and in a split second, all of what Uncle Rory was falls away and Gus sees the real Rory. A pathetic, spineless nothing of a man. He’s desperate to see a glimmer of sympathy in her eyes, but all she can give him is utter disgust. The same look her mother gave him just before she was killed.

  “Fuck you, Uncle Rory.”

  He picks up Rose’s gun. A chill runs down her spine. He cradles the gun for a moment, then waves it at the TV.

  “That was our first kiss. Me and Shan. I watch it sometimes when I’m missing her.”

  Augusta’s body shudders violently. Fear and loathing rip at her stomach as she tries to will him to shoot himself. Instead, Rory tosses her his car keys. She catches them.

  “Go. Get far away from here while you can. Once Tommy finds out what’s happened, he’ll come for the both of us.”

  There’s a sudden pop like a firecracker.

  A fierce jerk of Rory’s head sends a chunk of his hair floating to the sofa. Gus stares as a stream of blood flows from under his hairline and travels down the side of his face. He tries to stand, but a second pop rips a hole right through his neck. His tongue sticks out, eyes spasm as he pitches over the coffee table. Dead before he hits the floor.

  The shots came from the kitchen. Gus flattens herself against the dining room wall. The kitchen floor groans. He’s in the house. She searches for a way out. The window in the den. Visible from the kitchen. She’ll never make it. She needs a weapon. Spots Rose’s gun on the sofa where Rory dropped it. Too far. She’s cornered. She looks down at the car keys in her hand. Better than nothing. She grasps the key ring, sticking the keys out between her fingers. Holds her fists up in front of her.

  Then Stu appears in the kitchen doorway. Gun raised. He lowers it when he sees her. Relief floods her body. She tosses the keys on the table and runs to him. Wraps her arms around his neck. Pressing her cheek against his solid chest, breathing him in.

  He pulls her arms gently away and surveys the room. He steps toward Rory and that’s when he spots Dez, lying on the far side of the dining table. He inhales sharply, then moves closer and takes a knee beside the bludgeoned lifeless body. Shaking his head as he checks for a pulse in one of Desmond’s wrists. Gus comes up beside him.

  “You don’t know how glad I am to see you, Stu.”

  Then he rests his chin on his knee. He’s breathing heavily. Eyes shut. Gus doesn’t know what’s happening. Why isn’t he calling for backup? Maybe they’re on the way. But he’s not moving. He’s sniffling. Crying. Gus gets a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  “Stu?”

  He stands. Turns to face her. Tears running down his cheeks. She stumbles away from him, pressing herself against a corner cabinet.

  “Who did this to my brother?”

  He chokes on the word brother.

  Suddenly, Augusta sees what was right in front of her eyes this whole time. It all comes flooding back in a terrible onslaught of sights and sounds and smells that barrage her senses like shards of glass slicing through her insides.

  A young rookie holding up a badge that she never got to see up close.

  Wearing a uniform those cops at the diner knew was fake. She’d read their interaction all wrong. They weren’t saying it’s all good that he was on a date. They didn’t know him. She can see now why he was looking down at his uniform. They were telling him the costume looked real. The shirt, the badge, the belt. It’s all good.

  She hears him making the mistake that she didn’t catch.

  Lieutenant Stanton reassigned me to patrol.

  Gus sees the office door at RCMP headquarters bearing the sign that says SERGEANT MARTY STANTON, HEAD OF YOUTH SERVICES.

  He’d slipped up because he didn’t know Stanton. Didn’t know she was a sergeant not a lieutenant. He’s been pretending to be a cop.

  That layabout brother of his.

  Gus flashes to the man who ran off when she was talking to Desmond’s neighbor. Likely the same man whose rock-hard chest she ran into behind Dez’s apartment. The one whose face she never saw, but now remembers smelled of sandalwood soap. Just like the rookie had when she’d gotten close to him out near Elgin the first time they met.

  Gus smells that earthy aroma now on the man who’s just killed Rory. Who’s been following her and faking like he’s a nice guy just to get close to her. Levi sensed it before she did. Sensed his facade crumbling as he got more desperate. That’s why the dog growled at him at the motel. He knew.

  And of course, Rory knew him. She saw the recognition on his face outside the library in Kemptville. But not, as she thought at the time, because he was a fellow cop. He knew him from way back. Augusta sees the little boy in the picture on Rory’s bookcase. Perched between the two older boys on the milk crate, making a peace sign and smiling at the camera. Childhood friends. Brothers.

  Her bones rattle violently as these sights and sounds and scents begin to mix with the faces of Renata, Manny, Ollie, and Levi to form one horrific and vicious deception carefully designed to infiltrate her life, gain her confidence. Her trust. And it worked. She let her guard down. She confided in this man. Trusted him. Left her dog with him.

  Stu isn’t here to save her.

  Stu doesn’t exist.

  “Tommy?”

  “Red.”

  “You cut off a man’s fingers. You poisoned Levi.”

  He wipes his runny nose on the back of his hand.

  “Oh my God, he’s just a stupid dog. What about my brother? Look at him.”

  Gus looks down at what’s left of Dez.

  “That monster killed my mother.”

  “Rory strangled her. Dez told me. He saw him do it.”

  “He lied.”

  Tommy flinches at her words.

  “It’s your fault I poisoned your dog. You took off. Dez said it was the only way to get you running back to me. He said it was on me that you got away and it was on me to get you back. I fuckin’ let him down.”

  Tears streak his face. He twitches. Like he’s struggling to hold his shit together.

  “Where is it, Red? Where’s the money?”

  “I burned it.”

  “You’re lying. That post office dude said it was all in bank drafts. Multimillion-dollar bank drafts. You still got it. You told me as much.”

  He raises the gun and points it at her. His hands are shaking so much he has to grasp the gun with both hands.

  “Where’d you hide it?”

  She stares him down, unwavering.

  “You’re the liar.”

  He fires. Just misses her ear. She pees. Her ears ring.

  “That money is my brother’s. He earned it. It’s mine now.”

  Tommy’s jaw clenches. Behind her back, Gus feels for something sharp in the corner cabinet. Fingers touching a heavy gravy boat.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Red.”

  Gus launches the gravy boat at Tommy’s head as hard as she can. He tries to block it. It knocks the gun from his hand and bounces off his jaw before crashing to the floor. A gash explodes from his chin as he stumbles to one knee. He’s dazed. It’s her only chance. Gus grabs the keys off the table and makes a break for the kitchen. Tommy dives for her ankles. Grabs hold. The momentum sends her belly flopping onto the floor. He drags her into the dining room. Flips her over. Gets his hands around her throat. Her tongue feels like it’s popping out of her mouth. She swings her arm at his head with all her strength. He screams and lets go of her neck. Eyes wide, he reaches
for the car key embedded in his cheek. It’s gone right through to the inside of his mouth. He tries to dislodge it. It’s stuck between two teeth.

  Gus squirms out from under him. He yanks out the key. Spits blood and turns to grab her. But stops. Gus has Rose’s gun aimed right at Tommy’s head. He winces as she pulls the trigger and it clicks. Empty.

  Damn it.

  Rory used the last bullet.

  Tommy spots his gun under the dining room table. He goes for it. Gus makes a run for the back door. She gets across the den, through the kitchen entryway, past the fridge, the table, the trash bin. Each stride knowing Tommy’s bullet is about to rip through her back. Gus gets halfway across the kitchen when she sees Stanton in the window of the back door waving for her to get down.

  Gus drops like a stone.

  A gun fires.

  Everything goes deadly quiet. All she can feel is the sting of shattered glass cascading around her head and shoulders. She lies still amid the shards as they prick her skin and bounce off the kitchen floor like freezing rain.

  In the silence, a slow and steady sound grows louder and louder.

  Stronger and stronger.

  Thump-thump, thump-thump.

  It is the steady beat of her heart. Strong and full and alive.

  And it’s not just her blood that courses through her veins as she lies on the cool linoleum.

  It’s Shannon’s.

  Her beautiful, brave mother.

  Augusta breathes deeply.

  Mama. I see now. I see it all.

  45

  Marty

  TOMMY SURVIVED STANTON’S BULLET. THE MEMORY STICK found in Rory’s pocket and the VHS tape from his freezer were both key pieces of evidence at the trial of Tommy William Oaks for the murder of Rory Rump, assault and battery of Oliver Trunk, and the attempted murder of Augusta Monet. The videos clearly detailed the factors that motivated his brother, Desmond, to murder Kep Halladay and Shannon Monet and go after her daughter, Augusta. The videos also implicate Gracie Halladay in her grandfather’s death, but as far as everyone’s concerned, she’s long dead. And the Halladay fortune has disappeared. Augusta showed the police the location of the black Impala in Rory’s garage in the woods. The one Peaches saw across the street the day Ollie was attacked. She ID’d the car and picked out the faces of two of the three men she saw sitting in it earlier that day. Rory and Tommy. She said that she couldn’t identify the third man on account of his face being a total mess. Dez.