Or. . . just a total nobody with no link to the case. FFS y’all sound more paranoid than me and I think the government invented Sandy Hook and Covid!!!
BurntheBookBurnerz:
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PreyAllDay:
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Chapter Thirty-Six
It was late evening, and I had fallen asleep in my chair, an open copy ofThe Monster of Florenceresting on my chest. It had been an upsetting day, and I was exhausted.
It had been a shock to find out that Ruth, the person I had trusted with my story, had been lying to my face. It was an intense betrayal, and one that I hadn’t seen coming even after years of being let down by people. I knew it hadn’t been kind to taunt her and that she might never speak to me again, but I was caught off guard, and so furious that I’d just wanted to punish her.
Suddenly, I heard shouting outside, a lot of it. This was unheard of at the Grove, where residents might get a little testy over a substandard tiramisu or a canceled Zumba Gold class, but never truly heated. I hauled myself up using my walker and shuffled over to the window, hooking my fingers around the curtain and peeling it back to see what was happening.
It was dark but the lights spilling out from the other windows illuminated a figure, a man standing outside my apartment. His back was to me, but I could see he was wearing a baseball hat and a hooded sweatshirt.
My hands trembled. There really was a lurker. The staff hadn’t just been trying to scare me. I felt a sudden bolt of fear that I had forgotten to lock the door, that he would turn around and deftly slide it open, his eyes never leaving my own, knowing that he would have seconds, maybe minutes, to do whatever he pleased with me. I fumbled for the door handle, my arthritic hands shaking with effort, and found that it was locked.
Another shout and my eyes were blinded by a dazzling light, the silhouette of the man briefly outlined against my door. Was there something familiar about him? The man broke into a run as flashlight beams bounced wildly around him. It was clear that he was heading for the trees to evade the security guards, who were trying to hunt him down.
I stood frozen with fear. I felt certain that at any moment, the man would be back, hammering at my door, wild-eyed and desperate to get at me. The lock would be no match for someone so determined, and eventually the guards would go home, while this man would stay and wait for however long it took. These fears were confirmed when I saw that one by one, after an hour of searching the forest, the guards all emerged empty-handed.
Well, whoever he was, he knew where I was now. I let the curtain drop and checked once more that the doors were securely fastened. I didn’t know who would come for me first, the state of Florida or him.
The next morning, my phone rang. It was my lawyer on the line. I answered, feeling leaden and tense after a night spent sat up in my armchair, too afraid to go to bed, too afraid to look behind the curtains again, in case I saw the man standing there.
“Yes?” I grumbled, taking a sip from a stale cup of water on my coffee table.
“I have some news. You know that I’ve pushed hard to keep you out of prison during the preliminaries; how I’ve argued that you’re in too fragile a condition,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And you know that once you plead guilty, you will go to prison to await sentencing?”
“Obviously,” I said. “And then I’ll be sentenced to jail for the rest of my life.” I was trying to stay rational, to focus on the words and not the meaning of what I was saying.
“Well, it’s time. They want you in court tomorrow. It’s a. . . scheduling thing.”
I felt cold. A long, slow shiver spread across my skin. I always knew it would end like this, from the first moment I picked up that phone and confessed. All the things that had happened along the way—the podcast with Ruth, my moment in the public eye, the chance to show my family the truth of who I was—those were all diversions on the road tohere. Something that had been set into motion ninety years ago, on a dust-scarred patch of prairie, was finally coming to an end.
“So, this is my last night of freedom?” I asked, although being on house arrest in a seniors’ home wasn’t my exact definition of freedom.
“Yes. If you have any nice bottles of wine, I’d recommend opening them. And tomorrow, I’ll be right by your side, supporting you in any way that I can.”
“Right, smoke ’em if you got ’em. Okay, well I’ve got some calls to make. Bye,” I said woodenly, before hanging up, the phone wobbling in my hand.
I sat in the chair for a few minutes, suddenly aware that the moment that had been out there waiting for me for decades had finally arrived. It was the end. It felt sad and frustrating, but inevitable. I wondered if that was how the people I’d poisoned felt. I’d never really considered it, what they thought about when they knew it was almost over. Things just always felt more real when they happened to me.
Slowly, numbly, I picked up the phone and dialed Ruth. I felt like I needed to talk to her; our last meeting had been so terrible. She answered after a few rings. I could tell that she had been sleeping.
“Hello?” she asked, her voice as husky as a teenage boy’s.
“I just wanted to tell you that I’ll be pleading guilty tomorrow and then I’ll be going to prison afterwards. So, you can put that information in your podcast.”
There was a long silence. People really don’t know how to respond to ‘I’m going to prison for the rest of my life tomorrow.’ No Hallmark card for that one.