Desperate Paths

by E. C. Diskin

  He wasn’t wrong. Her dad had been desperate too.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  DONNY IS GOING TO RUIN that family with this Woods investigation, Wilson thought. John had already lost his wife, his oldest child hated him, and that screenplay would make Brooklyn hate him too.

  Wilson had now visited the Woodses’ neighbor who’d identified the blonde. He was relieved when she shared more. The driver hadn’t been sitting in the shadows watching to see if her victim had died. She’d sat with her headlights on, even opening the door for a second, like she was gonna get out, causing the interior light to go on. It made the description of the driver more credible but made her far less likely to have been the shooter. The ambulance had shut its doors and pulled away, and that’s when the woman in the car took off.

  Wilson thought about Woods’s story—about John putting a gun in Woods’s face, threatening to have him arrested for rape. It was easy to believe that happened. John didn’t walk around shouting racist comments, but his views were clear. There was us and there was them. And John had never been slow to pull a trigger. Only ten years earlier, John had taken a shot at a couple of kids as they ran out of the store after shoplifting. Luckily, no one was hurt, and Wilson convinced him that a security system might be the better way to go.

  But John knew something. He wanted Wilson to protect his family. And if Ginny hadn’t shot Darius . . . Wilson didn’t want to believe John was capable. But if John knew about that screenplay, if Ginny’d told him about it, he mighta done something stupid. Back when Brooklyn was still a baby, Wilson remembered John joking during one of their fishing outings that Bonnie was crazy to want to raise one of those little orphans in Eden. “But that baby,” he’d said, “not even two years old, and she’s stolen my heart for good.”

  Darius had been shot sniper-style. Two shots from the woods through the kitchen window. It sounded familiar, like that conversation all those years ago at John’s dinner table about the violence against clinics. John had spoken about how effective that sniper-style shooting of the clinic doctor had been.

  Ginny was trying to convince everyone that John was losing it. If she’d been on Darius’s street and then went to John’s, maybe she suspected John as the shooter.

  Wilson felt helpless. Donny was probably questioning Ginny right now. A lifetime of being the man in charge, and now everything was beyond his control. He had to talk to John. He had to find out exactly what happened that night. It was the only way he could help any of them.

  It was nearly dinnertime. John was getting out of the hospital today. Wilson grabbed his keys and headed for the door.

  Ginny sat on the rocks with the sun barely peeking through the distant horizon and looked up at the clearing sky, the moon already visible. She’d intended to go straight home after leaving the station, but when she thought of Simon, of what lay ahead, she had needed a moment, or a couple of hours, and the storm had come and gone while she’d been inside the station.

  Sunset viewing was a popular attraction in the Garden but, fortunately, the rain had thinned the crowd. The only people she’d passed on the trail were headed toward the parking lot.

  The sky was now a smear of gray clouds encased in pink. She tried to remember that she was small, her problems a mere speck of dust in the grand scheme. But the way that young officer raised his brow as she confessed secrets and lies, the way he minimized what happened between her and the pastor, it felt like a prelude to what lay ahead.

  She leaned back on her arms and let her head fall back. She looked up at the dim flecks of light, all those stars, those secrets, getting ready to come out.

  It was past dinnertime, she suddenly realized. She grabbed her phone. Simon had called twenty minutes ago. How had she not heard the phone ring? And here she was, not with a bottle this time, she realized, but still avoiding reality.

  She hit the buttons on the screen to call home, to let him know she was on the way, but of course, there was no signal. There was never a signal deep in these woods. She had to go.

  “Hi,” she suddenly heard someone say. She turned. Gary was walking toward her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. Her thoughts returned to where she’d last seen him, coming out of that interrogation room at the station, avoiding her eyes.

  “We have to talk.” He was getting closer, blocking the path between the rocks and safe ground.

  She scrambled to her feet, as if he were a wild animal, capable of anything. She was just a few feet from a hundred-foot drop, and he’d obviously followed her here from the police station in Eden. There was no other way he could have known where she’d be.

  “Don’t,” he said, throwing his hand up in silent protest as she tried to move away from the edge. That’s when she noticed the small bottle. “What did you tell the sheriff?” he demanded, stepping closer.

  She froze.

  “Please . . . don’t tell me you talked about us.” Drunkenness and desperation dripped from each word.

  “I told them the truth,” she said quietly. “I’m done running from the truth, Gary.”

  “Did you tell Simon yet?”

  “That’s next.”

  “Don’t do it, Ginny.” He was shaking his head emphatically. “It’s a mistake.”

  She took another step toward him, the only way to distance herself from the edge.

  “Stop!” he yelled. The panic in his plea startled her. “You don’t get to ruin me after everything I’ve done for you. I’ll tell them you confessed to shooting Darius. I’ll tell them that you love your family and you were afraid of losing them because of our affair. You’ll go to prison, Ginny. Attempted murder. You’ll lose those kids.”

  There was no real evidence connecting her to Darius’s shooting, and she’d already explained why someone saw her at his house. And she’d told the police about Gary. He couldn’t be credible after everything he’d done. Could he? That young officer seemed to find nothing about her story all that shocking or disturbing, but before she left, the sheriff told her he had evidence of other misconduct. He’d asked her if she’d consider testifying against Gary. Another loaded suggestion. She’d be putting their entire history on trial. Simon deserved the truth, but all those salacious details in public . . . “I don’t know if I can,” she’d finally said.

  She took another step toward Gary. “No one will believe you. I loved Darius. I’ve already told Brooklyn and Darius what happened last Sunday.”

  He took another step toward her, blocking her way out. “Did you tell the police your theory about John?”

  She didn’t answer. She finally pushed against his body, knocking him off balance. “Just leave me alone,” she said, passing him and stepping away from the edge. She was done listening to him.

  He said nothing as she distanced herself farther and got to safety. The silence was unnerving as darkness descended. She turned back. He was facing the canopy of treetops.

  “Your dad didn’t do it, Ginny,” he pronounced theatrically, raising his voice above the chorus of crickets rising from the forest floor below.

  He turned back, looking at her now. “I was with your dad on Mother’s Day.”

  “That’s a lie. I saw you at church.”

  “Later. He called me. He asked me to come to the house.”

  “Why would he call you?”

  “Because he needed to talk. It’s what I do. I counsel people when they need help.” His tone had softened, like she just needed a gentle reminder of his goodness. “And I was the only one who knew the truth. I was there the day you gave birth. He was despondent, Ginny. It was Mother’s Day, his first one without Bonnie in more than forty years. And he’d heard about Darius’s screenplay at the store. When I got there, he was soaking wet, sitting at the table, his gun in front of him.”

  None of this changed what John did. Ginny didn’t care why he did it.

  “But he didn’t go to Darius’s house. He’d been standing outside in the garden in the downpour. He was cry
ing. He was suicidal, Ginny. Missing his wife, now terrified that the only daughter he had left would find out the truth and hate him for it if Darius wrote about you in that script.

  “I told him not to worry. I said that Bonnie was still with him in spirit, and that the movie hadn’t even been made yet, that maybe it never would be. He needed to take one day at a time and face the future when it came. I took the gun. I didn’t want him to hurt himself. I sat with him for an hour, cleaned up the floor, and finally convinced him to change out of those wet clothes. He had some tea and felt better. I left.”

  Ginny didn’t know what to think. She searched the endless landscape, considering his story. After everything her dad did, after the horrible things he said to Darius twenty years earlier, it was easy to imagine him raising his gun and trying to finally be rid of him and the truth he’d brought with him. But suicidal? And why wouldn’t Gary have told her about this last Tuesday when she came to see him and shared all that had happened?

  She could believe that her father was a mess over Bonnie’s death, even months later, and that Mother’s Day would have been particularly hard. And she could believe that he would have panicked over the thought of Brooklyn learning the truth. He loved her.

  But if John didn’t shoot Darius, then . . . She returned her gaze to Gary.

  He raised his brows, as if he’d been waiting for her to realize the truth. “I left John and started back to Harrisburg,” he said, “and then I glanced over at his gun on the passenger seat. It occurred to me that I could help. I pulled off, found the address on my phone, and parked around the corner on the other side of the woods that butted up to the house. It was still raining and getting dark. I stood there, watching, and he came into view. Darius had the power to ruin too many lives, Ginny. Yours, John’s, Brooklyn’s, Simon’s, your kids’.”

  “Yours,” Ginny said.

  “Yes, mine too. He had to be stopped.”

  Ginny was dizzy with rage, her fingers curling into fists, as she imagined Gary in the woods, in the rain, shooting at Darius like a hunter.

  “I went back to John’s afterward. He was sitting in his living room chair, staring out into the dark night. I told him I was just checking on him. I said everything would be okay and I wiped off the prints and put the gun on his desk and left. It was just moments later that you arrived.”

  Ginny opened and closed her hands, hardly able to process what she was hearing, and yet, it made sense. Her dad had been sitting in the living room chair. The gun had been on his desk in the study. How else did Gary know? Regret and guilt rippled through her body. This horror of a man had tried to kill Darius. Because of her. It was her fault. She’d never stood up to him. She’d even allowed Gary to console her after she found out what happened to Darius, after she found her dad and jumped to the wrong conclusion. And no one knew the truth.

  She’d told Brooklyn and Darius that John did it.

  She lunged at him. It was a blinding rage. He was going to get away with it. He’d deny this conversation. John didn’t even remember the evening.

  Gary stumbled as she came at him, pounding her fists against his chest, but he threw both arms around her as the liquor bottle he’d been holding dropped from his hands and tumbled over the edge.

  “No!” she cried, thrashing against his hold. “Please!” Gary tried to killed Darius and he would get away with it. He could just toss her over this ledge, along with her accusations against him. He’d get away with everything. The wild animals below would probably ravage her remains before anyone discovered her. No one even knew where she was.

  Brooklyn took a long shower until the hot water ran cold. The air felt heavy with the residue of her fight with Dad. They had never argued like that in her entire life. She felt ripped open.

  When she came out of the bathroom, her bedroom had darkened, the sun now moving toward the horizon. She’d called him a monster. He’d held her close for so many years, squeezed her hard, loved her. The affection was always brief, his stoicism never far from the surface. But he’d tucked her into bed, read her stories, taught her to drive. He did love her.

  Her phone pinged as she got dressed. The only word she saw when she opened the new email was the only one that mattered. Congratulations.

  She got the role. She’d landed the lead in a movie. For just a moment, everything else faded into the background, and she was swept up in the idea that her dream was actually coming true. She looked at that poster of New York, her city of dreams. She had to tell someone. She had to tell her dad. She looked at the closed door between them. He was the only dad she’d ever known.

  She threw on a shirt and some sweats and headed for the stairs. But when she descended the first step, someone was shouting from inside his study. “I oughta kill you right now!” She froze.

  She knew that voice. The door was ajar. The anger from inside that room wafted into the hall, rising up the steps, wrapping itself around her body like a chokehold. That’s when she heard the crash.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  BROOKLYN STOPPED ON THE SECOND stair when she heard the crash, terrified. She now knew of her father’s violent streak. “Get out of my house!” he yelled.

  “You’re not going to get away with this.” It was Martin Woods, another victim of Dad’s violence, yelling about all that her dad had taken from him. She wanted to run down there, but she couldn’t imagine bursting into that room, standing between the two men.

  Suddenly, Martin was in the doorway, his back to the stairs, a baseball bat in one hand. “Sheriff Wilson can’t protect you anymore,” he shouted. “No one shoots my boy and gets away with it.”

  “Get out!” John yelled.

  Martin threw the bat to the floor as he barreled out the front door and down the porch stairs. The screen door smacked against the frame behind him. Brooklyn took another step toward the suddenly silent room. A faint click, then a second click wafted into the hall. She knew those sounds. His gun. He’d checked the chamber, cocked the trigger. Dad! She raced down a few more steps.

  “Whoa! Put that down.” She froze again. Someone else was in that room. Her dad wasn’t about to kill himself. It was Darius. A voice she’d only heard in the movies and interviews. He was in her house. He’d been standing in the study, silently, as his father unloaded his rage on hers. But now . . . “What, you gonna shoot me again?” Darius scoffed.

  “This is all your fault,” her dad said. “You made a mess of my girl’s life and now you wanna take Brooklyn too? I don’t think so.”

  She started creeping down the stairs, inexplicably terrified of being heard but knowing she had to stop him. “Get back!” her dad yelled. And then a grunt, bodies colliding—they were fighting for the gun.

  A shot blasted through the air. She instinctively ducked when the gun fired. Her hand was like a vise grip on the stair rail. Breath held, she remained still for a second, waiting to hear their voices again. Instead, she was pummeled by silence. She slowly rose, but her knees began to buckle. She wasn’t sure she could bear to see what had happened in that room.

  Darius Woods suddenly walked out, head down, shaking it slightly, back and forth, as if he couldn’t believe what just happened. She couldn’t move or speak. He went straight for the front door, never noticing her on those steps. The screen door smacked behind him, and she watched him descend the porch stairs, stretching his fingers, shaking out his hand.

  A familiar feeling rose inside her, the flash of heat, her heart exploding, chest walls contracting. She couldn’t breathe. And then she heard the thud.

  Her feet wouldn’t move. The panic was coiling around her neck, choking her airway. Her vision blurred. Then nausea. I’m going to pass out, she thought as she stumbled down the final steps, reaching the floor and collapsing to her knees, gasping, desperate for air. Breathe, goddammit, she silently yelled at herself. There was no time for one of these attacks. “Dad!” she yelled.

  No response.

  She had to calm down. Stop, stop! she silent
ly begged. She let her elbows collapse; her forehead touched the floor. She tapped on her chest. It’s okay. He’s okay. It’s going to be okay. She lifted her head, finally stood, woozy, and stumbled into the room.

  He was on the rug in front of his desk, facedown. “Dad!” He didn’t respond. She fell to her knees, grabbed his arm with one hand, his torso with the other, struggled to roll him over, then finally put her ear to his chest. Nothing. His eyes were closed. His face was red, and there was a small scrape on his cheek. A gash on his forehead, blood oozing. She grabbed his hand, pressing her finger across the inside of his wrist. “Come on! Are you there?” He looked like he was sleeping, just as he had in the hospital. “Dad!” she yelled, finally slapping his face. Nothing happened.

  She scanned his head, his torso. She didn’t understand. Had he been shot? The gash didn’t look too deep. He must have hit the corner of the desk as he fell. Where was the bullet wound? She looked at the gun on the desk, the broken lamp shattered on the floor. The bat in the corner. Martin probably swung at the lamp, enraged by her father’s insults.

  She finally looked up and saw a small hole in the ceiling. The bullet hadn’t struck him.

  She wiped the blood from his face as tears filled her eyes, clouding her vision. She needed to call for help. She put her fingers on his neck, searching for a pulse. Nothing. She pounded his chest. “Come on,” she shouted. “Wake up!” She tried CPR, what little she remembered from high school health class, but nothing mattered. He was gone.

  Collapsing beside him, replaying the last moments, she thought about Martin, that bat, the gun, Darius shaking out his hand as he walked out the door. Had he struck her dad? It was so senseless. If she’d just run into the room. If she’d been there. None of it would have happened.

  She’d been a coward, crouching on those steps, listening, unwilling to stop the argument. She’d had another ridiculous panic attack. And now her father was dead.

  She ran up to her room and grabbed her cell. When the 911 operator came on the line, she spit out the facts, panicked. She gave her address. The woman on the line was too calm, asking too many questions. “Just get here!” she screamed before hanging up. She paced the room and called Ginny. It rang and rang.