“I TOLD YOU HE WAS GOING TO DO THAT. Didn’t I?” Corinne Curry said. Her lips were trembling with rage.
“Yes, you did.” Daniel Curry stood toe-to-toe with his nephew in the middle of the Currys’ hotel room, no less infuriated by Gunner’s insolence than his wife. “You lied to us, Aaron. You played us for two old fools. But I tell you what—it’ll be the last time.”
“Uncle—”
“If you go out to that hospital again without our permission, I’ll have you thrown in jail. So help me God, I mean it.”
“It’s not my lies you should be worrying about. It’s hers. Zina hasn’t told the truth about a damn thing to anybody—me, you, the police—since she came out of that coma. And I’m sick of it. I wasn’t going to wait any longer for her to come correct.”
“You don’t know what’s correct!” Corinne said, both hands balled into fists at her sides. “And neither does she.”
“You’re wrong. She does know. And now, I think I might know, as well.” He turned to his uncle. “Are either of you interested in hearing it?”
Corinne wanted no part of what Gunner had to say, but her husband overruled her. He had been riding Gunner to find the truth behind their son’s death since he and his wife stepped off the plane at LAX three days ago, and now that Gunner thought he knew it, Daniel Curry could hardly turn a deaf ear. So Gunner sat Del’s parents down and told them how he thought it had all played out, a mixed bag of what he knew to be fact and what he yet could only surmise. It was a pathetic and lurid story of a man caught in a downward spiral on all sides: the wife he obliviously neglected and forced, at least momentarily, into the arms of another man; and the pair’s daughter, a self-absorbed woman-child who, stung by her parents’ constant interference in her sex life, somehow learned of her mother’s infidelity and became so enraged by the hypocrisy of it that she sought to rub her mother’s nose in it at the point of a gun. A gun that eventually went off, as guns were so prone to do, in terrible and unpredictable ways.
At least once, Corinne Curry tried to put a stop to Gunner’s account—“No, no, no,” her head swiveling from side to side in denial—but Daniel Curry shut her down with a look, paving the way for Gunner to make it through to the end. He took it all in without having uttered a single word himself. Wringing the life from a white handkerchief clutched in his right hand, Del’s father had no greater desire to believe what he was hearing than his wife, but this was the puzzle he had charged his nephew with piecing together, and he was bound to receive it with an open mind.
“So you’re saying Noelle and Zina were shot in a fight over the gun, and then Del used it on himself? Why would he do that?” Daniel Curry asked.
“The struggle for the gun started with him. Noelle was dead and it probably looked as if Zina was, too. He thought he’d just lost the two most important people in his life and that he was the one responsible.”
“But he wasn’t responsible!”
“No, of course not. But, in his mind, Noelle’s adultery and Zina’s affair with Hopp were both a direct result of his failure as a husband and a father, respectively, so what happened in that house was ultimately on him.”
“That’s plain foolishness,” Corinne said.
“Of course it is. But that’s how Del would have seen it, nonetheless.”
“And this man Buddy that Noelle was seeing?” Del’s father asked. “What about him?”
“I still haven’t identified him, and I’m not sure there’d be any point in my continuing to try. Because he played no part in what happened at Zina’s home Monday, whoever he is, and from all indications, he and Noelle were together on only the one occasion. He’s a sleeping dog. We should probably let him lie.”
“Yes, but—”
“Zina likely knows who he is and I suspect she’ll let us all know, too, eventually. There’s nothing to be gained by giving him a name now other than to have one more person to share some part of the blame for all this.”
They all fell silent for a moment, Gunner feeling suddenly and thoroughly exhausted. Del’s mother returned to shaking her head, the movement muted this time as she wiped tears from both eyes. Her husband, meanwhile, continued to strangle the handkerchief clutched in his hand, fingers biting down on the cloth to exorcise the anger he was desperately trying to contain.
“Glenn Hopp,” Daniel Curry said, bringing them all back to the present.
“Yes,” his wife said bitterly. “Are we supposed to treat him like a ‘sleeping dog,’ too?”
“Well, he’s certainly less innocent than the other,” Gunner said. “In fact, you could argue he bears more responsibility for Del’s and Noelle’s deaths than Del did himself. But there’d be no way to prove that in court, and there’s nothing illegal about what he did, in any case. Sleeping with a man’s office assistant and his adult daughter, both, may be highly unethical, but there’s no law against it, no matter how much damage he causes.”
“We could sue,” Del’s father said.
“Yes, Uncle. You could try. But based on what? Most of what I’ve just told you is conjecture. I’m fairly confident it’s accurate, but the reality is, we’ll never know what’s true until Zina gives a full account of what happened, and there’s no guarantee she ever will. Especially if she thinks the truth will interfere with her future relationship with Hopp.”
“‘Future relationship’? You don’t mean to say the child expects to go on seeing him?” Corinne Curry asked.
“I’m afraid that’s how it sounded to me at the hospital an hour ago. As far as Zina’s concerned, Hopp didn’t cause her to do what she did Monday—Noelle did. Noelle’s the villain here, not Glenn Hopp.”
The thought was appalling, even to him. Zina had lured her mother into a trap. Whether she planned to use the gun or not was almost immaterial; her intent was to point a loaded weapon at Noelle and let whatever happened, happen. All because she didn’t want to be told who to sleep with by a woman who was herself an adulteress. An adulteress whose infidelity had come at the expense of Zina’s beloved father.
Had Del not shown up without his daughter’s invitation at her crib Monday—either by chance or at the urging of his wife—perhaps things would have turned out much differently. But as it was, both of Zina’s parents were dead today, and the events leading up to their deaths could be traced straight back to her decision to draw an unarmed woman into a heated argument while she herself was armed to the teeth.
Again, silence was threatening to overwhelm them when Corinne Curry stood up from the hotel sofa and said, “We have to go. Zina’s waiting for us.”
Her husband and nephew both turned to give her the same look of disbelief.
“Corinne. I can’t. Not right now,” Daniel Curry said. Pleading.
“You can and you will. We must. No matter what she’s done, the child’s still our granddaughter, and you and I are all she’s got left.”
“You go. Let Aaron take you.”
“We’re both going.”
“No!” Gunner’s uncle erupted, and for a moment Gunner thought he might have to put himself between Daniel Curry and his wife to keep him from taking her in hand. “Not tonight. If I go to that hospital tonight, I don’t know—I don’t know what….” He dared not speak the rest. He shook his head, determined, and one more time, told Corinne, “You go.”
But his wife had lost her tongue.
Gunner rose to his own, unsteady feet. There was nothing for him to do but what he most wanted to avoid. “Come on, Miss Corinne. I’ll take you.”