Chapter Twenty-Nine

Collin

It was dark when I woke up with a pounding head and a bellyful of regret.

Moaning into the darkness, I struggled to get to the edge of the bed, hoping against hope that I could put my feet down on the floor and the rest of the world would cooperate, and that my knee wouldn’t give way.

It was at this moment that I wished I had allowed Jesse to install those little government listening devices in the house. The tiny speaker that you could call out to and turn on lights or listen to music or it would answer questions, it would have been helpful in that moment to turn on lights and figure out what time and what day it was. As far as I knew, it could be early morning, and my body had woken me up like it always did at four.

Toes on the wood, I tried to put some weight on them and promptly fell out of the bed, grasping desperately at the blankets and essentially lowering myself at fifty percent speed. I groaned on the ground for a moment before rolling again to get to my knees. It wasn’t easy. I felt like something had crawled in my mouth and died. I also felt like all my bones had been filled with lead while I was sleeping.

Eventually, I made it to the restroom and got myself at least somewhat functional again. Splashing water in my face, I woke up a bit and made my way to the bed to find my phone. Checking the time, I realized it was only eleven p.m. Something in my memory told me that was important, but for the life of me, at the moment, I couldn’t think of what that was.

There was a vague food smell coming from downstairs, and though my stomach felt like it was full of rocks that were currently on fire, I figured getting a little bit of food in me might help the dizziness go away. I was still wearing my jeans, which didn’t bode well for how I’d gotten into bed, so I went ahead and changed into a pair of sweatpants and headed downstairs.

My head was thundering as I made it into the living room, and the bright lights seemed blinding at first. When I finally got a chance to focus on the room in front of me, I saw my brothers sitting in a semi-circle, along with Amber and Charlotte. In a surprise, Dwayne was there, sitting near Logan.

Weirdly, Owen was missing.

“Ah, hell, is this some kind of intervention?”

“More or less,” Jesse said, standing and bringing me a piping hot cup of coffee. “Get this in you and sit down.”

“Guys, I might drink to excess once a decade. How come I get an intervention?”

“It’s not about the alcohol,” Luke said. “Though today was an especially egregious situation, especially for you, but it’s not the alcohol.”

“Then what is it?”

Luke looked to Amber and shrugged.

“Do you remember having a conversation with me before you fell asleep?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Not really. Oh God, I didn’t say anything lascivious or anything, did I?”

“No,” she laughed, “nothing like that. You were telling me about what is going on with Brandy. And what happened to you when you were gone in the military.”

“Ah.”

“This situation has gone on long enough,” Luke said. “We need, all of us, to get to the bottom of it.”

“Dwayne?” I asked.

“Dude, it wasn’t me. Owen called and said they knew but wanted clarity and asked if I could come over.”

“I see,” I said. “Well, what did I tell you, exactly?”

“We can get to that,” Logan said, piping in. “We don’t need the military story just yet. We need to get to the bottom of the Brandy situation.”

“Ah, yeah, all right,” I said. “I guess I strung you guys along yesterday without much clarity.”

“Exactly,” Jesse said. “We didn’t mind coming home early to help you out, but then none of us knew what it was all about. Just that you needed us and that there was someone that was a problem. And something about a camera.”

I sighed. It was time to come clean, I guessed.

I told them about how Brandy and I had started dating, about how it was a whirlwind, and how we’d ended up in the office of her shop. About the camera that was filming us, and how the producer claimed he knew nothing about where it came from.

“So he saw footage from it, though?”

“He said it showed up in his cloud,” I said. “I don’t know how much I believe of that.”

Luke was quiet, his arms crossed over his chest and almost lying down in the chair, his legs spread far out. It was a thinking pose of his. I recognized it from other times when people were telling him a story and he was deciding what he wanted to do about it.

“Well, I think I can speak for everyone here and say we don’t think any less or different of you, okay?” Jesse said. “We just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“That’s the thing. Brandy broke up with me when we didn’t get the camera back. She blames herself for it and thinks she’s no good.”

There was an uneasy look between Luke, Jesse, and Logan that I picked up on, even in my hungover state.

“What?” I asked.

“Something is up with Brandy,” Logan said. “She went to work today, but… things were weird there.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Is she okay?”

“She’s okay,” Luke said. “We’ve got an eye on her.”

“How?”

“Owen,” Jesse said. “He’s tailing her.”

“Owen knew something was wrong,” Logan said. “He said Brandy seemed to flip a switch, and it didn’t make sense. He wanted to make sure she wasn’t just distancing herself from Collin because she was planning on doing something stupid to get the camera back.”

“Like meeting them in the middle of the night,” Luke said.

A text message came in, blinging on everyone’s phone but mine. Half a dozen eyes went down to the phones in their hands and then looked at each other.

“What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

“Owen has been keeping an eye on her all evening,” Luke said. “Apparently, the film crew was back, which kept him from going in or getting too close. But it also meant no one else approached her.”

“Film crew?” I asked. “But she fired them.”

“They were definitely there,” Charlotte said. “I saw them when we passed. They were interviewing people outside. It was a whole spectacle.”

“Apparently they had a kitchen fire,” Logan said. “Nothing major, but we got a call to come and check it out anyway. Just a grease fire, but it was apparently started by Madie herself.”

“Madie was there?” I asked. “She couldn’t have been. She was at the house when I brought Brandy back.”

“She was there this afternoon,” Logan said. “I confirmed it myself. I talked to the responding guys. Madie, Basil, and Becky were all there with the film crew.”

“But she fired them,” I said.

Luke shrugged and sat up. “Moving away from that for a second… Is it possible, in any way, that Eugene is behind this?”

“Possible, but not likely,” I said. “I mean, I’d never put anything past the Andersons, but this doesn’t feel like them. They aren’t the blackmail type. They are the bully type. They are the assault type. They are the take money for ‘protection’ type. But blackmail is too complicated for their little brains.”

“I admit, it seems too technological for them,” Jesse said. “Handling a hidden camera, placing it, streaming it to another device, loading it to jump drives… it’s too much.”

He had a point. Eugene Anderson was a lot of things, but technologically literate was not one of them. This was a man I’d seen with my own two eyes have trouble getting a weather app to open on his phone when he had the weather docked on his home screen. I’d seen him not able to figure out how to use his cruiser’s laptop. I’d seen him stop at Foley’s last pay phone rather than use a cell as recent as two years ago.

A hidden camera blackmail job seemed out of his depth.

“As far as I know, he’s clean,” Logan said. “I mean, from anything like this. I’m texting a friend of mine from the Rangers now, he’ll check into it, but I haven’t heard anything like that out of him. Like you said, this is a bit out of his range as far as complications go. He’s an idiot.”

“So who does that leave?” I asked. “Just the producer, right?”

“Unless Eugene or Arnold is behind this, I’d say that’s the best bet. You didn’t upset anyone else, did you?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“Hello?” Luke said into his phone, drawing all our attention back to him. “Yeah. All right. We’ll get moving here in a second. Uh huh. Just keep calling me. I don’t care how many times you call, just keep calling. There’s no reason for that, no, you’re right. Yeah, he’s up. You want to talk to him?”

Who? I mouthed.

Owen, Luke mouthed back.

“Oh.”

“All right, bubba,” Logan continued. “Stay safe. Stay out of easy eyesight. We’ll be on the move shortly.”

“What was that?” I asked as Logan hung up the phone.

“Owen went to shadow Brandy,” Luke said. “Apparently, Brandy is on the move.”

“And she’s not going home,” Logan said. “She’s heading up Twenty, heading toward Odessa. I have a feeling she’s not going to the grocery store.”

“He can’t follow her, she’ll see him,” I said. “It’s a straight road.”

“He’s driving my car,” Charlotte said. “She doesn’t know my car, and it’s a generic sedan anyway. It looks like everyone else. If he’s careful, she will have no idea.”

“So what now?” I asked.

“I have an idea,” Amber said. “But you’re all going to have to trust me.”

There was a quiet in the room for a moment, and I decided to be the one to break it.

“Out of everyone in this room, I think I might trust you the most, sis,” I said.

Logan shot me a glare, but there was humor behind it, and Amber’s face flushed, and the faintest twinkle of water appeared in the corner of her eye.

“Good,” she said, clearly trying to gather herself. “Then listen up.”