Murder For Hire
Page 25
"Oh?"
She leaned closer as though wanting to share a secret. The gesture was somewhat comical since there was glass between us.
"I didn't kill your father."
This old song again? I was not impressed.
"Then who did?" I countered.
"You did," she replied calmly, to my utter shock. Of course, she’d made such claims in the past as well, but this was the first time I felt uneasy hearing her say that.
"You're lying," I said, fighting to stay composed.
She gestured with her hand. "Look where I am, Dean. What gain could I have from lying now?"
"Pleasure of tormenting me," I replied instantly. She always loved that.
"True," she allowed. "But I'm telling you the truth."
"No, you're not."
She looked at me long and hard before replying, "You really don't remember anything?" There was a distinct frown on her face.
"Remember what?" I asked, refusing to accept anything she was saying. This was simply one of her latest manipulations. Life in prison must be pretty dull.
"You weren't in a fugue state when you did it."
"Stop lying, Melissa. It won't work."
Regardless of my words, though, I remained sitting when I should have simply walked away.
"Let me tell you what happened after you retired to your room," she offered.
Despite everything, I was curious. Then something else occurred to me. "Why are you doing this?"
"Because I want you to live with the knowledge of killing your father like I have to live with my kills."
In other words, she was completely crazy. That wasn't what I said, though. "Enlighten me then."
"After you left, your father left as well. Not before ordering me to leave the house. On my way to my room to pack, I went to yours."
"Why?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. To fight some more."
"And did we?"
"At first, we started blaming each other for what happened, then you tried to throw me out knowing your seizure was about to kick in. And I decided to do something I never did before, to trust you."
"Excuse me?"
"Yes, I suggested that you should kill your father and use the amnesia that always follows the seizures to forget everything. It was the ultimate escape."
I could only stare at her. This couldn't be true. "And what did I say to you?"
"That I was crazy and should leave before you decided to use the illness to kill me."
That did sound like me.
"While I packed, figuring out my next move, debating whether I should simply do it myself and frame you, I guessed you changed your mind because suddenly, I could hear your father screaming."
My heart raced like crazy as she told her tale. She was telling lies. I couldn't fathom why, but every word coming from her mouth was false. I couldn't do that, kill my father. Are you sure? a small voice inside my head asked.
"If you knew all of that, then why didn't you say anything to the police?" I challenged, finding a big flaw in her narrative.
"Because it worked for me if you killed him. Once I discovered you covered in blood, I assumed you ran out of time and started seizing before managing to escape and clean up. I was wrong."
"What?"
"You both planted and got rid of evidence, making me look like the real culprit. Great job, Dean. You got me good." She almost sounded impressed saying that.
"You have only yourself to blame since you made sure I had the episode in the first place, showing those sex tapes to my father."
Her smile was humorless. "Yes, I wanted you to have a seizure and kill him, but you sure did turn it around on me."
I started shaking my head even before she finished speaking. "I don't believe you, Melissa. This is yet another lie."
She shrugged, unconcerned. "If you don't believe me, find the missing SD cards."
And then I remembered Melissa telling the cops how there was missing footage of my being the killer, but nobody could find them. At the time, I thought nothing of it, assuming Melissa was simply trying to save her own skin, but now I wondered.
"This was great, but I have to go now. I hope you rot in here for a long, long time." I was prepared to leave, but she stopped me.
She looked pleadingly at me. "Dean, can I ask a favor of you?"
I simply looked at her.
"I will take the fall for Carson, but please do something for me."
"What?" I asked, having no intention of complying.
"Go to Carson's and my room, find the broken board underneath my bed, and get rid of everything."
She sounded sad saying that, and I couldn't fathom why. Without agreeing or saying anything else, I walked away.
Unnerved with what I'd heard. my mind tormented me with Melissa's words, playing them on repeat as I went straight to my father's house in search of evidence.
I tore the entire place apart only to remember how if it were true and I'd hidden the SD cards, then there was only one place I would hide them. I went to my mother's favorite room, the library, and picked her favorite book. Behind it was a small plastic bag.
Oh, no.
I found the stash of mini-SD cards. Before going back to my room to see what was on them using my computer, I went to the master bedroom. There was no chance in hell I could move the massive bed, so I tried to crawl underneath it. As expected, I found a loosened board and managed to pull it off. Inside a small cavity were all kinds of things.
Collecting all of it, I went to my room and dumped everything on the bed. What are you doing, Dean? I questioned.
Felling like I was in a daze, I started going through her buried treasure. As it turned out, Melissa liked to keep small souvenirs from her kills. There were more than four items there, much more. She’d killed a lot more people over twenty years. More than a dozen husbands had fallen prey to her ploy. Oh, my fucking God.
Yet I couldn't linger on the fact that she was an even bigger monster than anyone suspected because it was time for me to face the music, see if I was a monster in my own right. I took the cards that presumably contained footage from the night of my father's murder, and firing up my laptop, I started scrolling through them. It was hard watching the entire scene unveil.
Once again, I relived the entire fight with my father, saw the beating of Melissa. Afterward, once I left, things settled, just as I remembered. Unfortunately, the night didn't stop there. As Melissa said, she came to visit me in my room. This time, she didn't bother staying away from the cameras.
This doesn't mean anything, I tried to calm myself, looking at the other cameras, other angles. At some point right before my seizure, the videos revealed me going to the kitchen.
Oh, no. I knew what that meant. Afterward, I visited my father's study to eject each of the cards of the relevant cameras, replacing them with old ones from the security archive and a corrupted one in my father's bedroom.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This couldn't be real, yet it was. Oh, my, God. I started to shake, watching myself make all the necessary arrangements for killing my father.
"I did it," I said with calmness that came with such strong clarity.
I had premeditatedly killed my father and used my illness as a cover, like Melisa said I had. More to the point, I had successfully managed to frame Melissa. And I did that before knowing she was a black widow.
I was horrified with myself. I could feel during that last fight with my father how something inside of me broke, yet I couldn't fathom what made me agree to Melissa's plan, with a few modifications, of course. What had possessed me to act in such a way?
Freedom.
I remembered Melissa’s words saying she wanted me to live with the knowledge of what I'd done. As I destroyed all the evidence, hers and mine, I wondered how I would achieve that without being haunted forever.
The answer was as simple as it was tragic.
I couldn't.
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Murder For Hire