by Hart, Rebel
He grows quiet again. I try to open myself up to this possibility that Emmett isn’t behind all of this. Could Bridgett or Theo have drugged me? Maybe to make another attempt at pinning Malcolm’s murder on me or something worse?
“You swear you’re not the one who put something in my drink?” I ask. My voice cracks from the dryness in my mouth and I wish more than anything I had some water. I spot a bottle in the drink holder up front.
Emmett’s eyes catch mine in the rearview mirror. He sees what I’m staring at and picks up the water bottle, offering it to me in the back seat.
“I would never do that,” he says firmly.
I grab at the bottle and frantically twist off the cap before chugging it down. Some of it spills out of the corner of my still partially numb mouth and drips down my neck.
“Theo’s one and only goal was to come back for everything he feels the Elites stole from him,” he suggests. “He went from being one of the main guys behind Jameson Automobiles, having almost as many shares in the company as my father, to having nothing. No job, no money. They ran him off to the other side of the country and then they made sure to rip you and your mom away from him too.”
“Yeah,” I nod, thinking we can definitely agree on that much. I relish in the lingering cool feeling in my throat from the water and start to wonder where Emmett is taking me. “Where are we going anyway?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I needed to see you and talk to you. I tried to come back and find you, but you were passed out. I just knew I needed to get you away from the school and whoever did this to you.”
“And what’s your plan now?” He shakes his head cluelessly. “Keep going,” I add. “If I’m going to be trapped in here with you, you might as well finish your idea of what’s really going on here.” My voice is dripping with bitterness, causing him to hesitate as he continues staring me down in the rearview mirror, darting his eyes back and forth rapidly between me and the road. “Emmett, I want to believe you,” I say softly. And it’s true. Every piece of my heart would rather believe his version of things. “But I can’t until you start making more sense of this.”
“He tried to start this new car manufacturing company, right?” he continues. “But how was it ever going to be a success if everyone within range of the Elites still hated him?”
I stare out into the trees flying past the window, lighting up under out headlights. “But why offer you a job?” I wonder. “Why bring you into it at all if he didn’t want to share the profits or give you credit for your ideas?”
“All he knew was that he needed to get back into everyone’s good graces,” he suggests. “First, with you and your family. Then Jameson. Bringing me into it obviously won me over, and it helped win your mom and stepdad over. The only person it didn’t convince was you.” A wave of sadness washes over his face. “I’m so sorry, Ophelia. We should have listened to you. You were the only voice of reason the whole time.”
The sincere regret in his voice hits up against my heart, begging me to fall back into the trap of believing him. It’s starting to work, but I’m so afraid of caving in and regretting it all later when I realize Theo was the one telling the truth. And there’s still so much that doesn’t add up.
“If he did win us all over…why frame you? Or me for that matter? And when that didn’t work, why drug me?” As I fire off questions, some of it starts to click into place. “To win the town of Jameson back over,” I mumble to myself.
“Huh?” he grunts.
“Maybe if everyone felt sorry for him…”
“He could rise back to the top. People might support his company,” Emmett finishes my sentence for me. “A man grieving the death of his daughter. People might pity him and with no one left in town who remembers the old Elites’ grievances against him…what could stop him from winning everyone back over?”
I go through it all again like a checklist. A timeline of events in my throbbing head. First Theo comes back into town and strikes this deal with Emmett to get rid of Thomas. Everything becomes up for grabs. The Elites are weakened. The future of Jameson Automobiles is uncertain. He uses it as a window to sneak back into our lives, building the foundation of Jameson’s new competitor as he goes. He gets his hands on Emmett’s expertise and ideas while worming his way back into our family.
“Family,” I blurt out before I even fully realize why it’s important. “Family!” I yell again, even more confident than before. “Theo didn’t just lose Jameson Automobiles. He lost me and my mom. Maybe he really was trying to come between my mom and Brendan the whole time. If he got us back, and started a successful company, he’d feel like everything was made right again.”
“But you wouldn’t budge,” he reminds me.
I wonder if it could really be true. Theo had gotten as much as he could out of his relationship with Emmett, so he could have used Malcolm’s murder to get rid of him. It not only left him with all of his designs, it gave him a window to get into my head. When that still didn’t work, maybe he did plant that evidence on the car, trying to take me down too. Maybe he panicked when Emmett was bailed out, not knowing who would have stepped in to help him.
If anyone would have defended Emmett’s innocence, it would have been me. With me gone, Theo wouldn’t have had to worry about Emmett anymore, whether the charges stuck or not. Everyone else would have thought he was guilty. He had the most motive for killing Malcolm after all. Not only would killing me have secured Emmett’s fate no matter what the courts decided, it would have given him sympathy from my mom and possibly the rest of the town.
Theo already managed to drive at least a little bit of a wedge between my mom and Brendan. If something tragic like my death happened, would it bring my mom and Theo back together?
I feel myself giving into it all more and more. I feel a whimper in my chest, all of my rattling fears and anxieties. I don’t know who to believe. I study Emmett from the backseat, or what I can see of him anyway. I focus in on all of our times together, trying to convince myself that he could be telling the truth. I remember his smell, the feeling is his skin, and the sound of his voice against my ear. I love him, so I have to believe him, right?
Then I remember the crashing, crumbling feeling that came with Theo’s side of the story in my backyard. All of that made perfect sense too and I felt so stupid for not seeing it sooner. I ask myself what I really know. I know next to nothing about Theo, really, beyond my suspicions of him being a lying, manipulative snake. But Emmett…I’ve seen Emmett’s destruction firsthand and I’ve been the victim of it more than once.
If Emmett was really bad, how could he have gone without hurting me for so long? He has made every possible effort to prove himself to me ever since he was freed from his father. It’d make sense that all the violence and rage stemmed from the pressure of the Elites, just like he said it did. And even his own family doubted his ability to do the necessary evil required of whoever ran Jameson, both the company and the town.
“What do you think, Ophelia?” he asks suddenly. “We can try to prove this. I can try to find something to make you believe me, but I don’t want to let you go until I know you’ll at least give me a chance.”
Won’t let me go. The words trigger another flood of memories. The other day when he almost didn’t stop when I asked him to. The car. Being trapped in it with him.
“What were you going to do?” I ask, my throat closing up as I start to cry.
“What do you mean?”
“When I first came here,” I sob. “That time I grabbed the steering wheel and we crashed into the light post. What were you going to do? You had those things in your backseat. The rope, the gloves. None of the other Elites were around. If I hadn’t crashed the car…what would you have done to me?”
I collapse back down against the seat, completely overwhelmed with uncertainty and fear. All the trauma of Jameson and everything Emmett has done to me. My shame of believing in him and trying to let myself love him. He’s rambling
off an explanation from the front seat, but I can’t even hear him. My brain shuts down and won’t take in a single word of it.
“Do you hear me!?” he pleads. “Ophelia! Do you hear me!?”
“Just stop,” I whisper, clutching my ears and pulling at my hair. I don’t know if I’m talking to him or myself. I just know I’m tired and feel like I can’t take another second of this. He keeps calling out for me, begging me to listen. Begging me to believe him. “Stop!” I scream again.
A set of headlights slice into my piercing scream. They back at us through all of the mirrors in the car, blinding us. I hear Emmett swear followed by the jolting crash of something ramming into the back of the car. We swerve, but he straightens out and tries to drive faster. Then another crash, and another. Until finally, the car flies off the road.
28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The crash snaps me from my state of shock, and I am suddenly impossibly alert. I shoot straight up and see Emmett shaking his head.
“You’re bleeding,” I announce as I notice the red stream coming down his forehead. My voice is frighteningly calm, almost sounding foreign to me.
He shakes his head again, and lightly touches his fingers to the gash on his forehead. We both jump as his car door flies up, revealing a figure crouching down in the darkness. Before I can see who it is, a bright light flashes right in our eyes. I wince and look away, only turning back when my car door flies open too.
Then I see the all too familiar sight of a gun barrel pointing straight at me. Before I can react, a hand reaches towards me. I squirm for the door, but a searing pain burns into my scalp. Another familiar feeling. My hair being pulled. I’m drug from the car. I kick, but my throat is still too dry, preventing me from screaming even though that’s exactly what I’m doing on the inside.
I’m shoved forward into the darkness. I want to run, but I feel the cold pistol push into the back of my head. Then Emmett is shoved next to me.
“Start walking,” a man’s voice demands from behind. It’s familiar, but disguised by an eerie, primal rage.
We shuffle forward into the night, barely able to see where we’re walking. The man shines his light onto our path, but it’s shaky and hard to follow. Then it starts to rain, and as the light bounces off of the drops that fall into our eyes, it’s even more impossible to see where we’re going. We walk like that for what feels like a mile before finally being pushed up to a tall, chain-link fence lined with barbed wire across the top.
The man’s hand reaches around me, pulling at an opening near the top of the fence. He forces it down and shoves me through. I quickly decide that I’ll try to run as soon as I’m on the other side, but I’m hit with the fear of being shot for trying. The instinctual hesitation causes me to trip. I fall flat into the muddy ground, sinking down into the wet earth with a big splash that covers me in thick, dark sludge. I feel a sharp, cold pain to my shin as it catches on the fence.
I scream as I’m lifted back up into the air, being pulled by my hair again which is now drenched from the pouring rain. Once I’m forced all the way over to the other side of the fence, Emmett’s body crashes into me from behind, nearly knocking me over again. I try to turn around and make an attempt at identifying our assailant, but his bright light, along with the downpour and the pitch-black night, keeps me from being able to see his face.
Big tire tracks begin disappearing from the ground as they rapidly fill up with water, turning to slush as we’re pushed through them. Our feet sink more and more with each step, causing us to stumble every few feet. We come to rows of broken-down vehicles with dirty windows and raised hoods with exposed wires and hoses poking out of the rusted engines. I feel hard pieces of debris that litter the ground beneath my shoe, but they all sink into the mud and puddles as we traipse through.
We’re pushed on through the vanishing roads that weave through mounds of scrap. The man keeps shoving the gun back into our skulls every so often to remind us of the threat. My sense of smell heightens with my lack of sight. The drenched air is filled with wet earth, motor oil, grease, gas, and rusting metal. There’s a pungent smokey taste seeping onto my tongue from the polluted smell.
Emmett hisses and winces suddenly, holding up his hand to reveal another bloody gash from something he’s scraped up against in the darkness. The man doesn’t let us top, and everything around us continues flooding at an alarming rate.
I take another step forward and shriek at the emptiness beneath my foot. I nearly topple forward and am saved at the last minute by a quick tug to the back of my hoodie. I’m flung back just enough to keep from sliding off the edge of a steep drop that overlooks a pit of rusty, shredded cars. The sharp, twisted metal gleams, and I immediately know that if I had fallen, I would have died in the razor-sharp sea of crushed vehicles. I whimper through my labored breaths as I watch the floodwaters rise around the cars. Whoever goes down there is either impaled or drowns. And as more water rushes past, forming a mudslide, I feel dangerously close to sliding in.
“Turn around,” the voice growls.
We slowly turn. Theo stands there staring back at Emmett with flaring nostrils, but his face softens when he looks at me.
“Ophelia!” he shouts, seeming surprised. We stare back at him blankly, unsure of what to do next. “I…I’m so sorry! I thought…I thought you were Bridgett.”
“Bridgett!?” I exclaim in confusion.
“When I saw a girl in the backseat of Emmett’s car, I thought for sure it had to be Bridgett!” he explains. “If I had known it was you…I would have never…Come here,” he reaches his hand out suddenly. “Come here to me.”
“Don’t do it,” Emmett begs with a deep, commanding voice. “Don’t listen to him, Ophelia. What the hell are you trying to do, Theo!?”
“You,” his voice turns dark again. “You’re the one I wanted. Not her.”
“What’s going on?” I plead, feeling my heart being ripped in two again.
“I can explain everything,” Theo insists. “But I don’t want you to fall. Come to me so I can make sure you’re safe.”
“Don’t, Ophelia!” Emmett yells more urgently.
I start to run towards Theo, thinking that getting away from this slippery edge is the most important thing. I can figure the rest out after that. But as I stare at his face, my old feelings of mistrust bubble up. I look down at the gun in his hand and I’m frozen in fear.
“No,” I decide out loud. “I won’t come to you until you explain all of this. Were you the one who drugged me? And what were you going to do to Emmett out here if I hadn’t been with him?”
“When I heard he was released from jail, I went to the school to see if he’d be there,” he insists. “I pulled up just as his car was driving out of the parking lot, so I followed him. I had no idea you were in the car with him. What do you mean…drugged? Someone drugged you!?”
I nod my head in confirmation, still unsure if I can believe him or not. “Why did you go looking for Emmett? Why did you bring him out here?” I ask again.
His face twists with rage as his gaze turns back to Emmett. “Did you drug her!?” he barks. “Did you try to hurt my beautiful daughter!?”
“Cut it out, Theo!” Emmett cries. “We both know you’re full of shit. Tell her the truth! You’re the one who framed me, aren’t you!? And you were going to frame Ophelia too, weren’t you!? But you panicked when I got released and started to worry that wouldn’t be good enough to cut us out of the picture for good. Admit it!”
“You’re crazy!” Theo laughs before turning back to me. “Ophelia don’t listen to him. You remember everything I said? You remember everything I told him?”
I shiver from the cold rain and start to cry. I repeat his story in my head again. “It was Emmett’s idea to kill his father,” I spout off, telling him what he wants to hear, but I don’t know what to believe anymore.
“That’s right!” his voice is shaky and high-pitched, as if he’s speaking to a scared dog.
He’s desperate but I don’t know if it’s to save himself or to save me.
“But Emmett didn’t kill Malcolm,” I remind myself.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Theo says. “What I do know is that I was not about to let Emmett weasel his way back into your life. I trusted him once and I refuse to do it again. After I saw how hurt you were when I told you the truth, I hated myself for ever pushing you into his arms.”
I think back to our talk on the swing set and almost want it to be the truth. I don’t want to believe that Emmett is truly evil or menacing, but if I’m honest with myself, I don’t want my father to be those things either. Am I only choosing to believe Emmett because of how much I love him? If Theo had been around for me to know and love while I was growing up, would it be easier for me to trust him instead?
I feel overwhelmed again and all I can do is scream. I bury my face in my hands, wishing I could be anywhere but here in this dark, wet nightmare, being torn between these two men. But I am here. And if something doesn’t happen soon, we’re all going to slide off this drop off into the watery pit of shredded metal below. I take a deep breath and try to cling to any ounce of strength left inside so I can calm down enough to figure this out.
“So…what were you going to do?” I ask for the third time, steadying my voice. “Bring Emmett out here and kill him? Shoot him the way you shot Thomas Jameson?”
His face drops, and he suddenly looks crushed. “I have so many regrets,” he starts sobbing suddenly. “I don’t know what to do any more than you do, Ophelia.”
“Shut up, Theo!” Emmett yells, but I hold out my hand to silence him.
“It’s true,” he continues. “I’m a desperate and lost man. I have been ever since the day your mother walked out on me and took you with her.” He stops crying suddenly. His face turns to stone and he looks back over to Emmett. “It’s all your fault. Your fucking Elite family. You’re the ones who destroyed my life! You made me think Lala had cheated on me and it was all a lie!”
