If the voices had been visible, they would have looked like a mass of tangled knots being hurled back and forth across the table. The louder that I became, the more that all the others raised their voices as well. Until finally, I just gave up and went silent.
And as soon as I fell silent, so did all of the others.
I looked at each one of them in turn, aware that I was inside of a dream and trying to figure out what the message was that was being relayed. Was I supposed to be listening to everyone? Was I supposed to stay quiet? Whatever this dream was supposed to be telling me, it was only confusing me more. I turned to Michael who was sitting right next to me at the table. When I opened my mouth to get ready to ask him something, everyone at the table opened their mouths as well. I looked around without speaking at everyone’s hanging jaws, and the moment that the first sound started to come from my throat, it started in theirs too. So, I closed my mouth to be silent again.
I didn’t want to get wrapped back up in that verbal knot anymore.
I heard a tapping sound and looked back over at Michael whose finger was hitting against the top of the table, right next to a few words that looked as if they had been scratched into the wood. Words that had already been echoed to me by my best friend, my confidante, and a man I missed more than my own mother some days.
“Listen only to yourself.”
And when I looked back up into Michael’s eyes, I smiled.
With all of them smiling at me in return.
5
In the middle of the night, my few moments of restless sleep were interrupted by a crashing sound that shattered the silence in the bedroom and left a reverberating echo inside my skull. All four of us sat straight up in the bed and my heart was pounding furiously from waking up so quickly from a deep sleep.
“What is it?” I asked in a whisper as the noise continued and the sound became a clearer indication of a scuffle or commotion.
Adam was the first to the door, with Michael right behind him, with Rob standing near me as we followed them outside of the bedroom carefully and quietly.
“I told you to stay out of this,” Naomi’s voice screamed from inside of my uncle’s bedroom.
As soon as I heard her voice, I froze. Rob grabbed me by the hand to make sure that I stayed still and stayed quiet as Adam and Michael crept closer down the hall toward Mark’s bedroom.
Then, we all heard Mark’s voice. “That money doesn’t belong to you, Naomi. It was Paula’s and she wanted her daughter to have it. You and Paula were so close; why would you want to go against your sister’s dying wish? What do you even need all that money for? I’ll take care of you, if you want. I’ll make sure that you have everything that you need and that you never need to worry about money. You don’t need to keep trying to steal from Lisette.”
“I don’t want your money,” she snarled at him. “I don’t want any money touched by a man’s hands.”
He snickered. “I’m not just a man, Naomi. I’m your brother. Whatever disillusioned notions you have about men don’t apply to me. We’re family.”
“Now see,” Naomi’s voice said as it turned several shades darker and more manic. “That’s just like a man to assume that the woman is the disillusioned one. Maybe you’re the one who is disillusioned. Maybe you should have realized that you needed to stand down and stay out of my way. Maybe you’re the one who doesn’t understand what’s really going on, Mark.”
She bit through his name almost as if she wanted to bite his head off with her own teeth.
“Then tell me,” he said with audible frustration. “Tell me what it is that you think is going on.”
She hissed her next words. “I’m getting the money that should have been mine,” she said. “Because I will put it to better use than either you or Lisette would. She’ll let the men who follow her like puppies influence her judgement. She might even let you influence her judgement. I won’t make the same mistake, though. I’m here for the money, Mark. That’s what’s going on.”
The next sound that I heard was the sickening sound of me being mistaken about everything; mistaken about having come here, about letting my uncle try to help me, and about what Naomi was truly capable of. The sound of the gunshot was so fast that I didn’t even have time to react, but the sound of Mark’s groan lasted much longer.
Michael, Adam, and Rob immediately ran into my uncle’s bedroom, leaving me standing in the hallway alone trying to decide whether I should run after them or stay here so that I didn’t do anything else stupid to put them in harm’s way.
After a split-second decision, I ran into the room behind them.
The scene that played out before me was nothing short of everything that I had tried to avoid with my attempt to come here alone. But I couldn’t have been more grateful that the guys were all here with me. My uncle’s body was draped over the floor as a pool of blood crawled along the ground around him as if it were a red shadow. Michael, Adam, and Rob were all wrestling with Naomi until they were able to wrangle the gun from her hand and restrain her. She didn’t know we were here. She wasn’t expecting the three of them to rush her. She looked frantic and confused as her head whipped around to look at each of them. Michael stuck the handgun in his back pocket while Adam and Rob held onto Naomi, who was trying to scream, and bite, and kick her way out of their grasp.
Unfortunately for her, they were a lot stronger than she was and there was no way that she was getting free from their hold or hurting anyone else.
I ran to kneel down beside my uncle and lifted his head into my lap as Michael put pressure on his wound. But the bullet had hit the left side of his chest, and by the amount of blood that was seeping from his body, it was obvious that Naomi had struck his heart.
Her aim couldn’t have been more perfect for a fatal shot.
“Mark,” I said as tears welled in my eyes for someone that I barely knew. “You gotta hang on for me, okay?”
I cried because I was so tired of losing people, even if I hadn’t gotten the chance to know my uncle yet. I still wanted to, and those decisions were being ripped away from me by selfish people who had nothing better to do than profit off the backs of others. I was so sick of people taking the things that were mine and hurting the people that I cared about.
I looked at his pained face and heard him struggling to breathe as his eyes became wider and more full of fear. I glanced at Michael and I could tell by his expression that there was nothing we could do. Within the next minute or two, my uncle would be dead.
But Mark still reached up and grabbed my hand. “Lisette,” he strained, “Follow Paula’s wishes. Do what your mother wanted to see done. She gave her life in order to protect you and everyone that needed protection. Honor her.”
The last two words he spewed out were laced with blood that dripped down his chin. As soon as he had pushed himself to relay his last thought in this world, Mark died. Right there in my lap as I held his head against my thigh, he died.
And it was all Naomi’s fault.
“We should just kill her,” Rob said. “We should kill her right now and be done with this. She deserves to be killed, and then we would be free of her.”
For a minute, I agreed with Rob. I hated Naomi. She killed my uncle, she nearly killed the man I love more than anyone in the world, and she tormented the other men that I care about. She wants to steal my mother’s dying wish so that I cannot fulfill it, and I hate her for all of it. But Mark’s words rang in my head so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything aside from what he said.
Honor her.
He gave his life for this too. He protected my mother’s inheritance, and her journal, all this time just to make sure that I received the chance to choose what to do with my mother’s wish. As much as I agreed with Rob and wanted to pull that gun out of Michael’s back pocket and shoot her squarely between the eyes, I couldn’t.
The only thing that was going to make this right was if I could make sure that all of this loss was not in vain.
