Never Say Never

by Taylor Holloway

  As much as I wanted to talk to Eva and comfort her, I couldn’t. There was a job here for me to do. I barely got Eva and Isaac away from the police and inside before the onslaught began. Through the window in the door, I could see Eva’s eyes widen as the ambulances and police cars drove off and a small army of news vans immediately took their place like buzzards closing in on a kill after the lions ate their fill. I smiled encouragingly at her, but she just shook her head and walked away.

  I couldn’t think about her right then. It was time to go to work. The front steps of the mansion were as good a place as any for a press conference. Too bad I’d have to wing it. I straightened my tie and blinked into the lights and cameras that were hastily set up around me. The faces of the reporters were all familiar ones. They knew they’d get a statement of some kind out of me if I was standing around, so they swarmed up immediately like landfill raccoons on trash day.

  “The Durant family is incredibly shocked and deeply saddened to learn about the death of a former employee. The body was discovered this afternoon by a gardener. The family would like to extend their sincerest condolences to this man’s family, and requests privacy in the coming days. The Durants are committed to fully cooperating with law enforcement during the investigation, but out of respect for the family of this individual, we have no information to disclose at this time.”

  As soon as I finished the formal statement, reporters starting hurling questions at me. As usual, they ignored the fact part about having no information to disclose.

  “What time was the body found?”

  “Who was he?”

  “How long has he been dead?”

  “How long has he been missing?”

  “Did anyone report him as being missing?”

  “Do the police suspect foul play?”

  “What job did the employee have?”

  “Who in the Durant family interacted with the dead man?”

  “Will the family conduct their own investigation?”

  “When will you answer more questions?”

  “Can we speak with the person who found the body?”

  And on and on. You would think they’d understand a simple statement like the one I’d delivered, but for some reason they just kept asking questions like I might slip up and answer one. Eventually, the questions began to shift from factual to speculative to ridiculous.

  “Is it true that the man was suspected of stealing from the family?”

  “Can you address rumors that the deceased was fired earlier that day?”

  “What do you have to say to critics of the family who say the Durant’s regularly make staff just disappear if they displease them?”

  “Where were Richard and Alexander Jr. when the murder is thought to have occurred? Are they suspects?”

  By the time I was finished answering—or, in most cases not answering—the onslaught of press and gossip-mongers, twilight had passed into darkness. Exhausted and hoarse from shutting down rumors, I headed inside to talk to Eva and immediately ran into Richard and Alexander Jr. The two sons of the Durant dynasty had been lurking just inside and eavesdropping.

  “Good job,” Alexander told me approvingly, clapping me on the back. “Grade A legal bullshit diffusion Charlie. If press conferences were an endurance sport you’d win Olympic gold.”

  Richard, the less boisterous of the pair, still smiled broadly and nodded in agreement. “You definitely earned your hourly rate today. It seems we dodged that bad publicity bullet for the most part. Did you figure out who called the cops?”

  I’d been considering how I’d handle this inevitable question. In ordinary circumstances, Richard would want Eva fired. There was no way I’d allow that even if it wasn’t Eva who’d called in the body. I also had to give him the truthful answer. Otherwise he’d figure it out himself and make the situation that much worse.

  “No one called the police. Eva, your dads nurse, called 911. She discovered the gardener on the ground having a full-blown anxiety attack. He’d uncovered the body and it wasn’t immediately even clear the guy was even dead. Police didn’t show up until later.”

  No lies. Just carefully spinning the truth in the best light possible.

  Richard harrumphed. He could hardly complain. I could tell he wanted to though.

  “I suppose it was inevitable anyway.” His admission looked like it cost him a great deal. “Are the police at least the helpful type?”

  I grimaced. I very much preferred when Richard avoided directly alluding to the fact that he bribed law enforcement personnel, and his choice of euphemisms could be somewhat lacking.

  “No.”

  “I’ll fix that,” he said as much to himself as me, and I tried to forget what I was hearing. “The chief of police owes me a favor. For all intents and purposes, you’re now in charge of the investigation Charlie. I’ll make sure the new detectives pay you a call tomorrow to bring you up to speed. Get to the bottom of this right away.”

  I nodded wearily. My job had just become infinitely more difficult.

  22

  Eva

  Rita ambushed us as soon as Charlie ushered Isaac and me inside.

  “What were you thinking!” she said to me, pulling us both by the arm and into a sitting room just off the main entrance. Meredith, Paul, and Thomas were all in there too. Everyone must have been waiting for us. They all started talking at once.

  “Huh?” I managed, looking from one pair of eyes to another in disbelief and confusion. I was still totally shell-shocked by the events of the preceding few hours. I wished Charlie was with me and not out there. And I wished everyone would stop talking. Everyone looked upset and I just wasn’t sure I had the energy or the brain cells to deal with anyone being angry at me.

  “You shouldn’t have called the police, Eva,” Isaac said in a quiet voice. Everyone else fell silent in an instant. Poor Isaac still looked pretty green, but being away from the all the hubbub and action seemed to be helping calm him down at last. His voice was finally steady, and he was able to meet my eyes without blinking away tears.

  Rita’s face was not angry, I realized after a moment. She was scared. They were all scared. I didn’t understand.

  “I had to call. You were having a panic attack.” I’d never had the unfortunate honor of declaring someone dead until today. As the licensed health professional on site, I’d been better equipped than the paramedics to make the call, although the situation was hardly ambiguous. Once I failed to locate any semblance of a pulse, and coupled with the smell, it was fairly obvious that the man was dead at the scene.

  Rita and Paul exchanged a worried glance.

  “We aren’t supposed to call the police,” Rita explained after a moment when I continued to stare at her. “Richard and Alexander Jr. hate the police.”

  “Sure, I read the employment agreement, too,” I replied with a frown. Charlie had said the same thing about not calling the police. My answer to Rita was the same as my answer to him: “But there was a dead body. It would have been wrong not to call.” In reality, I had completely forgotten about the page and half devoted to confidentiality and notification of emergency situations in my employment agreement, and I certainly couldn’t remember any of what it said. If I had agreed not to call the police, I had completely forgotten. And honestly, how could that be enforceable? I don’t really have a mind for legal mumbo jumbo, but denying an employee access to emergency services sounded decidedly illegal and just plain dumb.

  “Was it really Stephen?” Rita asked after a moment. She was asking me, but her eyes were focused on the ground.

  “I don’t know. I never met him. Plus, the body was… not in good shape.” I didn’t want to go into detail about the bloated, purple face. I knew that image would be sticking with me forever. As would the smell.

  “Isaac, did it look like him?” Paul asked. “Did it look like Stephen?”

  Isaac looked like just thinking about the memory was making him ill again.

  “I don�
�t know. It didn’t really look like him. It didn’t really look like anyone anymore. It was… awful. I guess it could have been him.”

  He sat down on one of the sofas and put his head between his knees. He was no longer crying or panicking, but he looked about a decade older than he had this afternoon. I wondered if I looked as bad as he did. Probably so. Thomas offered to get him a glass of water, but he refused. Isaac clearly didn’t have faith in his ability to keep anything down yet. The silence stretched between the five of us. Outside, the roar of police, fire department, and paramedic activity could still be clearly heard, even through the thick walls of the mansion. There was a whole army of people out there to deal with the one body and the possible crime scene.

  “Richard and Alexander Jr. are both here,” Rita said eventually. “They’re angry.”

  “I don’t care,” I heard my voice saying in a heated tone. It was way ahead of my brain, but I was beyond worrying about pissing off Rita, let alone the Durants. “I really don’t. If I get fired over responding appropriately to a dead body, then fine. I’ll explain it to my future employers and everything will be ok.”

  “We were all walking right by his body for weeks,” Thomas added into the vacuum of quiet that followed my pronouncement. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m glad the police are involved. Something really messed up is going on. I don’t want any of this to be managed to the advantage of the Durant family. I want to figure out what really happened to Stephen. He was a nice guy.”

  I smiled thinly at Thomas. At least he was on my side and thought I’d done the right thing.

  “Eva, you obviously did the right thing,” Meredith said as if reading my mind. She’d been silent this entire time. “We’re just worried about you. They might fire you.”

  “It’s like I said. I don’t care.” The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that it was true. “You guys know I like Charlie a lot, but I feel like the police need to be involved.”

  “Maybe it isn’t Stephen,” Rita offered weakly. “Maybe it’s some homeless person or something. And he fell and froze…”

  “When was the last time a homeless person wandered all the way out to the Waterloo suburbs and made it within a few feet of this house?” Thomas asked bluntly. His voice was as incredulous as the rest of our faces. “It might be anybody, but I think we all need to brace ourselves for the very real possibility that Stephen’s dead.”

  “What was he like?” I asked my assembled coworkers. “I’m the only one of you that never met him.”

  “He was really nice,” Meredith said first. “He helped me when I got the flu last fall.”

  “I liked working with him,” Thomas added. “We didn’t get along as well as you and me, but he was a pretty good nurse.”

  “Of all the nurses that worked here before you Eva, he was probably the one we all got along with the best,” Rita said. Paul and Isaac nodded. “When he left we were shocked. But then again, working with Mr. Durant is hard. We figured he’d just reached his limit and wanted out.”

  “None of you talked to him after he said he was leaving, right?”

  They all shook their heads one by one.

  “I would’ve been happy to drive him to the airport or into town or something,” Paul said after a second. “We got along really well, me and Stephen. We played dominoes a lot.”

  The entire situation was sickening. I knew that there would be more questions to ask and answer. I knew there would be an investigation. I even knew I might get fired because I’d done the right thing and violated my employment agreement to report what I was becoming increasingly sure was a murder.

  First Edith, and now this. I thought about telling my coworkers then about Edith, but another, deeply disturbing thought rendered me mute. What if the two deaths were connected? And what if one of my coworkers was involved?

  I looked over them each in turn, trying to imagine any one of them as a murderer. Rita was a sweet lady in her fifties who took care of all of us and couldn’t hurt a fly. Paul was like our household dad to Rita’s mom. Thomas and Meredith were rapidly becoming my best friends. And Isaac had discovered the body. That, coupled with his violently ill reaction pretty much ruled him out.

  None of them made good murder suspects. That left the Durant family themselves, the rotating security guys that didn’t work inside the mansion but protected the grounds, or just some random person.

  “Maybe Stephen had enemies we didn’t know about,” I suggested aloud. It wasn’t completely implausible.

  My coworkers looked doubtful.

  “I just can’t believe he’s dead,” Rita said. “He might have had a whole secret life we didn’t know anything about, but he was part of our family. He certainly didn’t deserve to end up buried under a pile of leaves in the cold. No one deserves to go like that. We should have done something differently, prevented this somehow. We should have supported him better. Paid more attention to what he was doing and how he was feeling. Maybe if we had, he’d still be alive.” She shook her head and sat down next to Isaac who put a hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s not your fault, Rita,” Meredith said. “You can’t blame yourself.”

  Thomas nodded. “The police will figure out what happened to Stephen. Then we’ll be able to mourn him properly.”

  Rita seemed unsatisfied, but she sighed and started talking about some time last year when Stephen found a family of raccoons who’d gotten in a broken window and made a nest in a mattress. The whole group soon joined in to share their memories of Stephen and the raccoon family. It sounded adorable, but I couldn’t relate.

  Meredith and Thomas then started sharing other memories about Stephen and I began to edge toward the door. I was a member of the staff, but I’d only been here for a few weeks and I suddenly felt like I didn’t belong. The others needed to mourn Stephen and talk about him.

  I just needed to get away and think things through. I wasn’t sure if I could handle a job with this much stress both on and off the clock. Working in hospitals had been incredibly stressful, but once I walked out the door, the drama stopped. Here in the Durant mansion the craziness just seemed to go on and on. By the time I slipped away, they were all so busy talking about Stephen, that they didn’t notice me go.

  23

  Charlie

  “We need to talk about how you really want to handle this, Richard.” My brain was utterly overwhelmed and overloaded, but I needed answers.

  “I thought I’d made my priorities clear already,” he replied. We were standing in the small kitchen where Richard and Alexander Jr. kept their beer and snacks. For two billionaires, they lived an awful lot like a couple of overgrown frat bros. I saw nothing in their refrigerator that could remotely be described as nutritious.

  “What does this have to do with Edith?” I asked cautiously. “I need to know what you know. Otherwise how am I going to get to the bottom of it?” I knew I was pushing boundaries, but I saw no alternative. Eva could have gotten hurt tonight and I was fresh out of patience.

  Richard grimaced and then opted for sarcasm. “If you knew what I knew, I couldn’t afford you.” He fished couple of beers out of the bottom of the refrigerator and offered me one.

  I shook my head. “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.” Richard popped the top of the beer and tried to step around me to head off into the depths of the mansion, but I blocked his way. Richard and I were about the same height and we stared eye to eye for a tense moment before I continued.

  “It’s not possible for me to do my job if you continue to keep me in the dark.” This whole conversation was starting to feel like a standoff in Western.

  “Wrong. You can only do your job if I keep you in the dark.” Richard seemed vaguely amused with the fact I was finally standing up to him. He had a slight smile on his face and I wanted to smack it off.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” My voice was sharp.

  “It means that although you’re a lot smarter tha
n Lou was, you still need to learn something that he figured out a long time ago: your job is to fix the problems I tell you about, not the problems I don’t.” Richard frowned when he finished speaking. It was clear to me that his indulgence of my attitude was at an end. This was the part of the conversation where I usually nodded and walked away. That wasn’t going to happen tonight.

  “Are you intentionally trying to be cryptic?” I asked irritably. Richard was usually direct, blunt even. This sort of equivocation was frustrating and pointless.

  “I’m trying to tell you to shut up. Is that clear enough for you?” Richard asked, moving forward until I was forced to either step aside or risk him running straight into me. Getting into a physical confrontation with a man in his early sixties was just tacky, so I stepped aside. But I wasn’t done yet.

  “It’s clear. It’s perfectly clear. It’s also unacceptable. I can’t solve a murder for you if you won’t give me access to all the evidence. There’s no way this isn’t connected to your sister somehow.”

  He raised a patronizing eyebrow. “Do you have any evidence to support that?”

  I was beginning to lose my cool. For five years I’d allowed Richard to be his usual, shitty, condescending self. But tonight, I thought that Eva had been killed. The fear and despair that had brought out of me changed everything. I was done being pushed around and bullied by Richard. I needed to be convinced that Eva was safe in the Durant mansion, and that meant I needed Richard to tell me the truth.

  I took a deep breath before answering his question. “Yes. I do have evidence. I have the fact that you knew Edith was murdered before I cleaned up the mess with the medical examiner. I saw your face and it told me that you were the one that initially bribed him to alter the report. You aren’t as great at controlling your tells as you think. You knew she was murdered well before I did. Based on your reaction tonight, you didn’t know Stephen was decomposing fifty feet from your front door. But I bet you know how the two could be linked. You at least know something.”