Читать книгу Just Try to Stop Me - Gregg Olsen - Страница 19

CHAPTER TEN

It was the middle of summer, and eastern Washington was on full blast, preheat. It had been six days straight of egg-frying-on-the-asphalt weather. In fact, a couple of kids made the news by actually frying two eggs on the hood of a cop car parked outside the precinct. That hot.

But not as hot as Brenda.

She wore a cropped top and cutoffs that she’d made from Levi 501s. Her hair was different then, a coppery color with blond streaks. On anyone else, it would have looked ridiculous, but not on Brenda. She somehow managed to find a way to attract attention and still appear as if she wasn’t even trying.

Both parents noticed that their son behaved differently around this new girlfriend. Different than he had been around others. He’d always been a gentleman when it came to how he treated girls. With Brenda, he was even more attentive. Almost too much. She was only sixteen, but it was clear she’d mastered the art of getting a man to do whatever she wanted him to do.

“Joey won’t take me to a concert at the Gorge that I want to go to,” she said as she sucked Pepsi through a straw.

“Don’t have the dough right now,” he said.

“Dan says he wants to take me.”

“Then go with him,” Joe said.

“But, baby, I want to go with you. It would be zero fun without you.”

“I don’t have the money.”

“You have a birthday coming up,” she said, looking over at Elise Nevins.

A little startled, Elise answered. “Yes, you do. I think tickets to the show would be a great gift, don’t you?”

Joe stared at his feet. “Pretty expensive, Mom.”

“You only turn eighteen once,” Brenda persisted.

A few minutes later, Brenda and Brad were alone in the living room. Mother and son were in the kitchen. Brenda sat in the sofa directly across from the recliner where Brad took his place.

“So hot out there,” she said.

“A scorcher,” he said.

“I thought you guys had air-conditioning,” Brenda said.

“We do.”

“Feels hot in here.”

“Set at a constant seventy-four,” Brad answered. “Could be cooler, but we don’t want the power company to get every last dime we have.”

She sipped her Pepsi and moved her legs under her on the sofa. In doing so, she allowed a flash of her vagina to show. She wore no underwear. The fabric that held her cutoffs together was like a twist of yarn.

“That’s better,” she said. “More comfortable now.”

Her eyes locked on his.

You did that on purpose, Brad thought.

* * *

“You think she flashed you intentionally?” Kendall asked.

“No women does so unintentionally,” Brad said. “I’m not saying that a woman wearing sexy clothes is an open invitation for some guy to stare at her. Say something to her. But, Detective, you have to know what I mean. There was something about the way she moved her legs, splitting them slightly apart and holding that pose just long enough to make sure I got a good look. It wasn’t anything I’d never seen before. I’ve had my share. But here’s the real deal, she was showing me what she had—not because she wanted me to get all jacked about her hotness—but because she wanted me to see what my son was getting.”

Kendall was unsure how to respond to that. She’d never pegged Brenda’s former father-in-law as a narcissist, but here he was making it all about him.

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“Because of what she did next.”

Kendall narrowed her gaze. “Which was?”

“She told me.”

“What did she say?”

“I’ll never forget it.”

* * *

After dinner, after Elise had given an early birthday check to Joe, Brad found himself alone with Brenda in the kitchen cleaning up while mother and son sat in the living room talking.

“I saw the way you looked at me,” Brenda said. Her voice was low, only loud enough for Brad to hear.

Brad bristled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You want my pussy,” she said. “Well, you can’t have it. It’s for your son. If you look at me that way one more time, I’ll tell him. I swear that I will. I won’t be victimized by a lecherous old man.”

Brad tried to keep his cool. It wasn’t easy.

“You’ve got it all wrong, and you’re really pissing me off,” he said.

She looked at him like he was nothing.

“You get pissed off when you don’t get what you want, right? I get that. Boy, do I. My dad’s like that too. But I will tell you one thing for sure. I will never let anyone stop me from what I want. I want your Joe, and if you judge me, push me, tell me anything I don’t want to hear, I’ll make sure you never see him again.”

Brad could feel his face warm, but he didn’t want to make a scene.

“Where is this coming from? What happened to you to make you such a paranoid mess?”

Brenda’s eyes sparkled. She loved the confrontation. It was like having sex in a public place. She had to be quiet. She didn’t want anyone but Brad to hear.

“I saw the way you looked at me,” she said one more time.

“I didn’t look,” he said.

“Right now you’re thinking about my pussy,” she said.

She’s nuts.

“I’m not.”

Joe appeared in the kitchen.

“What are you two talking about? Looks intense.” He smiled, his disarming Joe-smile.

Brenda wrapped her arms around her boyfriend. “Your dad was just telling me that he hopes we have fun at the concert.”

“It’ll be awesome,” Joe said, smiling happily.

“Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Mom. I’m going to take Bren home now.”

“So nice to finally meet you, Brenda,” Elise said.

“Yeah, real nice,” Brad said.

* * *

For the next hour Brad Nevins seethed. He drank a couple of beers and let the TV flicker some sports coverage in his face, though he really didn’t—couldn’t—pay attention and would have been at a loss to tell anyone the sport he was watching, let alone the score.

“Joey,” he said, when his son returned, “I need to talk to you about Brenda.”

“Dad,” Joe said, “let’s not.”

“We need to.”

Joe pushed back. “No, we don’t.”

“You’re getting into something here that’s not quite right. I’m not sure how to say it.”

“Look, Dad, I know what you did. She told me. It’s OK. I understand. I’m not mad at you.”

“At me? What for?”

“You know. For taking a look. She’s beautiful. It happens all the time. Whenever we go out, some guy comes up to her, comes on to her. Tries to get a peek. She’s hot. But I don’t care. She’s mine.”

Brad was dumbfounded. His son was mesmerized by the girl. To fight him would only push him closer to her. Even so, he just couldn’t let it go.

“I never took a look,” he said. “She practically did the splits in front of me with no panties on.”

Joe gave his dad a look.

“Don’t go there. She’s not like that. She’s classy.”

* * *

“Detective,” Brad Nevins said to Kendall Stark, “there was nothing classy about Brenda. She took an incident and twisted it around to serve whatever it was she was after. The concert tickets, I guess. I think that’s why she did that. She knew I didn’t want to pay for those tickets. I wanted something more practical for his birthday. College money. Elise, on the other hand, just wanted to make our boy happy.”

“Moms do that,” Kendall said.

Brad looked over at a family portrait on a side table. “Of course they do,” he said. “But I’ll tell you one thing, and I want you to make a note of this in your notebook. Dads don’t hit on their son’s girlfriends. They don’t. I don’t.”

Kendall fished for a notebook, though she didn’t really need one.

“She did it to you, is that what you’re saying?” she asked.

He took off his glasses and looked at Kendall. “Yeah,” he said. “And I know what you’re thinking. You don’t think a girl that young could be that manipulative and, honestly, that scary kind of devious? Well I know of one who can. And she’s the reason you’re sitting right here, right now.”

They talked some more about those early days with Brenda hanging around, trying to keep her extra-sharp claws embedded deeply in Joe’s back. It was a rocky relationship. By the time Joe had graduated from high school and was college bound, he’d sworn off Brenda for the last time.

“Elise coached me on this. Told me not to drag the girl through the mud because by then I hated the sight of her. Told me that ‘love is strange’ and we’d best be careful in case she came back into his life.”

“Right,” Kendall said, “which she did.”

“Yeah. Boy, did she ever. Joey was finishing up his degree at the University of Washington when he came home and said not only had they gotten back together, they were going to get married.”

“That was a shock, wasn’t it?” Kendall asked.

“Damn straight. Completely. We didn’t even know they were seeing each other. I guess it’s because he knew that I couldn’t stand her. From the very beginning, from that very first day, I understood she was going to be a major problem. I just didn’t know how big.”

“He was in love with her,” Kendall said.

He exhaled. “Even better. She said she was pregnant.”

“But she wasn’t,” Kendall said. “Was she?”

“No. I don’t think so. After the rush-to-the-church wedding—which we paid for because her family wouldn’t have a thing to do with her—she miscarried the so-called baby. Said it happened at home. Didn’t even see a doctor. Who does that? Elise was crushed by the loss of her grandbaby. It reopened all the old wounds from losing our two before Joe. I think Brenda played on that. Worked my wife real hard.”

Brad offered to make a sandwich for Kendall. She declined, saying it was too much trouble, but she’d be glad to buy him lunch if there was a place nearby.

“Hello Deli is pretty good,” he said. “And if we’re lucky, Chelsea will be working.”

Kendall didn’t need a last name to know who Chelsea was.