The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [117]
Nance said all this really fast, and it was too much for Suzi to take in at once. But Suzi kept thinking, She wanted me to be a religious freak? That’s why she invited me to church? She scooted as far away from Nance as she could get, scooted until she was smashed up against the arm of the couch.
“But see what I ended up doing,” Nance said. “By trying to get revenge, I hurt lots of people. People I care about.” She turned and smiled a suck-up smile at Suzi, but Suzi just made a disgusted face, an expression Mykaila had perfected.
“What did I tell you?” her mother said to her father. “I told you she was one of Dad’s subjects. Maybe you’ll believe me next time.” Her mother, once again, was focusing on the wrong thing.
Her father smoothed his hand down over his face as if he were trying to iron the frown off it, but it didn’t work. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Suzi stood up and limped over to the ottoman and lowered herself down next to Ava, the only person in the room, in the world, who had no pretense, who wasn’t hiding anything, who was always exactly like she appeared to be. She laid her head on Ava’s shoulder, smelling the medicinal acne stuff, the most wonderful smell in the world. Please, please don’t move away from me, Ava. And instead of scooching away, Ava draped an arm awkwardly around Suzi’s shoulder. There was an uneasy silence. Suzi tore her gaze away from Nance’s profile and turned it, once again, on her granddad, the accused murderer, who sat there, with a slightly puzzled expression, on the other side of the woman who’d planned to murder him.
“Did you hear that, Granddad?” Suzi burst out. “Nance wants to kill you! Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Wanted,” Nance said. “I wanted to kill him.”
Granddad said, “Why would you want to do that?”
“You know why,” Nance snapped at him.
He shook his head. “Can’t say as I do.”
“I’ve told him, many times,” Nance said, “but he always forgets.”
“How were you going to kill him?” Ava asked. Leave it to her to focus on the method! How Aspergery. But now that she’d asked, Suzi really wanted to know, too.
Nance sighed. “Never could decide.”
“So you’re not going to kill him,” said her mother, to the aspiring murderer. “We don’t have to worry about that, do we? My God.” She sounded ready to cry. “We’ve got enough to worry about.”
“Oh, no, no,” Nance said. “I gave that idea up long ago. I love all of you. I truly do. I just wanted to come clean ’cause I’m hoping to keep you from doing the same sort of stupid things I did. By hurting your kids I’d hoped to hurt you and Dr. Spriggs, but it all backfired. Please promise me you won’t try to get revenge on Buff. Enough people have been hurt.”
“I never would’ve guessed it,” her mother said. “You seemed so nice.”
“Nice!” her father spat out. “Not hardly. And I’m not promising anything about not getting even.”
“Well,” Nance said to her father. “Maybe there’s some soul-searching you need to do.” She fixed him with a stern look, and he flushed. Her father, the man with a restraining order against him, the one who wanted to strangle two men with his bare hands.
Suzi lifted her head from Ava’s shoulder. “What about Otis?” Suzi asked, realizing that Otis had been left out of the equation. “What were you going to do to him?”
“He’s doing enough on his own,” Nance said, but stunned as they all were, nobody asked her to elaborate.
“Mom,” Ava said. “Travis’s birthday party is on Friday. At Alligator Point. He wants me to ride down early with him, on Thursday night. So we’ll beat the storm.”
“Go to the beach when a hurricane’s coming,” Mom said. “What kind of sense does that make?