“You’re not supposed to be here. You were dead. I watched you die. You were dead. I know, because I made sure of it. I watched the life drain from your shit-stained eyes.” He continued to fight against us while simultaneously attempting to take Drew’s life. “I’ll kill you again to make sure my sweet Emily never ends up with a Crowe.”
The hairs on my arms stood up as I locked eyes with Drew. Understanding cloaked his wild expression while my mom and I continued to struggle to comprehend anything that had happened in the last five minutes. Suddenly, my grandfather’s grip weakened, and he leaned against my mom for support. Within seconds, we were able to get him away from Drew.
After that, time seemed to fast-forward in triple speed.
Drew rolled to the side and clutched his chest, gasping for deep and panicked breaths. I leaned over him and gently rubbed his back to help calm him while trying to grasp what was going on with my grandfather. My mom was frantic. Grandpa was limp, yet his chest moved, so I knew he was still with us, at least for the time being. And Drew seemed to grow more agitated.
Everything was a blur until the emergency services arrived—which felt like hours, though in reality, I was told it had only taken them two minutes to come. Voices echoed as if we were all in a tunnel with everyone’s words melding together as they bounced off the walls. My sight even dimmed, darkness closing in, making it extremely difficult to see anything in my peripheral vision.
I sat on the edge of the couch and mindlessly watched while everyone raced around. The paramedics quickly had my grandfather strapped to a stretcher and loaded in the back of the ambulance, and before I knew it, they’d hauled him off to the hospital. I must’ve been out of it enough that one of the firemen who had attended the emergency brigade flashed a light between my eyes and asked me a few questions. Apparently, I answered correctly because he moved along.
One of the men tended to Drew on the front porch while the other spoke to my frantic mother at the edge of the room. Suddenly, I felt frozen in time, as if life moved on around me while I sat on the couch and stared at Drew through the open front door.
“I’m going up to the hospital to see what’s going on. Do you want to come with me or stay here?” Mom asked with her purse slung over her shoulder. I didn’t even know she’d finished talking to the fireman—and as I thought that, I realized I had no idea the fire truck was even gone.
I glanced outside once again, making sure Drew was still there. He was slumped over with his hands in his hair, his face practically in his lap, but at least he hadn’t gone anywhere.
“McKenna…” Mom snapped, catching my attention once again.
I was stuck in a perpetual daze and couldn’t seem to find my way out. It took me an extra second or two to remember what she’d said only a moment ago, but it finally came to me. “I’ll stay here, make sure he’s okay,” I responded, pointing at Drew’s back.
“All right. Well, call me if you need me. I have no idea how long I’ll be, but I’ll keep you updated along the way. We can sort all of this out when I get back. Okay? I love you.” She kissed my forehead like she had my entire life and then left, leaving the front door wide open.
Slowly, I made my way to the front porch. I took a seat next to Drew and waited for him to show any sign of life. Finally, he sucked in a deep breath, his back hitching and then deflating with his heavy exhale. Then he turned his head to the side to look at me. Still, though, he didn’t speak. It seemed that we both waited for the other to utter the first word.
Unable to wait him out any longer, I broke the silence. “Are you okay?”
He nodded and dropped his attention to the brick step we sat on.
“I’m really sorry about all that. I have no idea what happened.” I swallowed harshly, feeling as though I were walking on shards of glass rather than having a conversation with someone I knew intimately. “He’s been getting worse and worse—not knowing who we are most of the time, thinking I’m my grandmother. But I’ve never seen him show any sort of aggression, especially not the type of violence displayed today.”
Instead of responding, Drew stared blankly off into the distance and shook his head.
“Listen,” I breathed out, turning toward him and holding his bicep with both hands. “I swear, Drew, I didn’t know anything about the deed. I spent the whole time trying to convince you to do more with the resort, so why would I wait until you finally agreed to just turn around and snatch it out from underneath you? It doesn’t make sense.”
He rubbed his eyes with the pads of his thumb and middle finger, and then pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment. With a loud huff, he dropped his hand and resumed staring across the street. “I don’t even know what to make of all this, Kenny.”
Thank God. He called me Kenny. That was enough to make me breathe a sigh of relief. It meant I hadn’t completely lost him, and maybe, just maybe, he believed me about the property. All I needed now was to hear him say those words.
But he didn’t. Instead, he flicked his gaze to the side, met my stare, and asked, “Do you have any idea what this means?”
I shook my head, not having the faintest idea what he was referring to.
“Did you not hear what he said in there? He was choking me, and I still heard him. I heard every word.” He paused for a moment, maybe to see if I’d say anything, and when I didn’t, he shifted on the step, angling himself more toward me until our knees touched. “Your grandfather killed mine. He probably took them all out. He’s the reason my family went missing.”
I began to wonder if I was the one who’d been choked. It was like my mind refused to make sense of anything he said. Everything sounded so farfetched and preposterous. “He’s just an old man, Drew. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He called me Emily, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t make up Emily. She was a real person—someone you apparently look just like. So why would he fabricate everything else? Andrew Crowe was a real person, too, Kenny. Don’t you see? Andrew Crowe was my grandfather. He’s the reason my grandmother opened Black Bird to begin with.”
I really needed to get a grip before I pissed him off and lost him for good. Questions flashed through my mind so fast I couldn’t get one answered before the next one had my head spinning. The most ridiculous of all was the split second I thought that maybe it meant we had the same grandmother. Luckily, I was able to dismiss that before asking it out loud. “Okay, but I thought you said that the Bennett people were the ones responsible.”
“They were.” He furrowed his brow and pulled in a deep breath. I could practically see the wheels turning in his eyes as he slowly let it out, working through the unknowns in his head. “What’s your grandfather’s last name?”
“Tisdale.”
He blinked a few times. “And that’s always been it? He’s never changed it?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Which means it couldn’t have been him.”
“Or we’ve had it wrong this whole time and accused the Bennetts of something they never did. I get that you don’t want to contemplate what it would mean if I’m right, but think about it, Kenny. You’ve said yourself that he was abusive to your grandmother. What makes you think he’s not capable of harming someone else?”