Fracture

25. Dylan

CHAPTER 25

DYLAN

The crowd of reporters outside the garage catches me off guard. My head is swimming slightly, a lack of sleep and an unhealthy excess of fucking all night leaving me with the worst sort of hangover. I just want to be back in bed with Stella and Levi, but one of us needed to head in to meet with the accountant, and I volunteered.

Now I wish I’d just rescheduled the meeting and stayed in bed.

The throng rushes at me as I take off my helmet, cameras flashing and phones outstretched.

“Dylan, do you have any comments on Gloria’s statements?” Is one of the questions I hear amongst the hyper chatter they throw my way.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I run a hand over my head and attempt to make my way to the garage, bumping into the bodies blocking my way. “Can you all please move? I don’t have time for this right now.”

“Dylan, how long were you aware of Harold Langford’s abuse?” Another displaced voice, a question thrown over the heads of the reporters around me.

“No comment.” I shove against the crushing bodies. “Now get out of my way.”

“How long had you and Gloria been involved?”

That one has me stopping short. I turn to try and find the voice who just threw the question my way, the question I must have misheard,

“What did you say?” I ask, my eyes trying to find the person. All the reporters follow my gaze, and a man with cropped brown hair in a blue shirt raises his hand.

“Yes, Dylan, here, Larry Jones, Sonoma County Informer. Gloria Langford and you, how long had that relationship been going on?”

My eyebrows shoot up. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Gloria’s interview, last night, she revealed-”

“She didn’t reveal shit,” I interject, and wave a hand. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Dylan, is that why you killed Harold Langford?”

“I-I didn’t…” I shake my head and turn to the garage. “Get the fuck off my property.”

“Dylan! Dylan!” The voices all rise as I start to push my way back to the garage.

“Fuck off or I’ll call the cops!”

I make it to the garage and slam the door behind me. It’s quiet and dark inside, being a Sunday morning. I wish someone else was here, noise and light and the banter of the mechanics to lift my mood, just a little.

What the fuck has Gloria done now?

I head for the office and look up the number for our lawyer. Her bright voice sounds when I reach her voicemail, and I leave a message for her to call me as soon as possible.

I hesitate, looking down at my phone, and take a deep breath. Then I search Gloria’s interview.

There she is, perched on a blue armchair, legs folded demurely. Her hands are clasped on her lap, and she’s not wearing as much make-up as she usually does. Her hair is swept back in the signature chignon, and she’s dressed in a black skirt suit. Pearls lie around her throat. She’s every bit the picture of the grieving widow, her eyes sad, her lips downturned and quivering slightly as she gazes at the pleasant looking older woman opposite her.

Gloria Fenton-Langford is a fucking good actress.

“So, Gloria,” the woman says, smiling warmly, “You said when you agreed to this interview with us, that the world deserved to know exactly what kind of man Harold Langford was. What did you mean by that?”

Gloria’s throat bobs as she swallows, and she sniffles lightly. “I needed everyone to understand things about him, about the way he was, and why the things that happened, happened.”

The woman frowns and nods. “You mean the night he died?”

“Yes, but also… Before that.” The dramatic pause is so perfectly put that I can’t help but roll my eyes.

If I didn’t want to fucking kill her, I’d almost be impressed.

I lean against the edge of the desk, bouncing my foot while Gloria talks endlessly about how Harold scared her, how he was a powerful man, how he’d transformed from the sweet, doting husband to a monster who barely let her leave the house.

Lie after lie spills out of the mouth of this privileged bitch, and the interviewer eats it all up, nodding with maternal understanding, reaching across to offer Gloria a bright white handkerchief and to pat her knee a few times.

It’s sickening, a display so well-rehearsed it’s practically scripted.

“Gloria, you also told us that someone very close to you saved you, and that the truth of your husband’s death had never been revealed, to protect this young man.” The interviewer raises her eyebrows as Gloria sniffles and presses the handkerchief to her dry and tearless eye.

Gloria nods. “It’s been so hard to keep this secret, but no one would have understood.”

My blood starts to chill, and I straighten up from the desk. What in the fuck is she talking about?

“What would no one have understood, Gloria?”

“He was so young, he was my son’s best friend.” She eyes the interviewer shyly. “Who would have understood that we were in love.”

The floor drops out from under me. She can’t be talking about me. There’s no way she’s talking about me. There was never a single moment I was alone in a room with Gloria, let alone any fucking indication that she even liked me. I was the dirty immigrant kid, the freak, the corrupting force in her son’s life. She hated me, glaring at me over the edge of her martini glass at any party the Fenton-Langfords ever held.

But now, the interviewer expresses perfectly timed surprise, a lift of her eyebrows and a parting of her perfectly made up lips, and Gloria nods when the camera lands back on her.

“Is that why Harold attacked Dylan that night?” The interviewer’s voice sounds as the camera remains fixed on Gloria’s face, and she keeps nodding.

“Yes.” She says after a while, her voice a hoarse whisper.

“You know this for sure?”

“I believe it to be so.” A single tear strays down Gloria’s cheek, and where she squeezed that from, I have no idea. “That night, Dylan and I had… Well, we’d…”

The bitch fucking blushes .

I feel sick. I swear to fuck I’m going to throw up on my damn feet.

“You’d made love?” The interviewer asks, and Gloria’s gaze drops to her lap as she nods.

I nearly hurl my phone across the room. “Fucking bitch,” I hiss at the screen. “You fucking lying bitch .”

“Was that the first time?” The interviewer asks, and Gloria nods again, lifting her chin, her eyes sparkling.

“It was… It probably sounds terrible, but he made me feel… My goodness, I’m sorry.” Her gaze flashes off camera, and she puts a hand to her forehead. “I’m so embarrassed to admit this, but having a young man like that worship a woman like me, made me feel so special and like I was beautiful, and not just someone’s mother or an old woman.”

The room starts to spin. I throw the phone down on the desk and lean heavily on my hands, staring down at the screen that holds Gloria’s fucking face. She seems to come to life as she recounts this relationship that had bloomed between us, this sick twisted fantasy that she’s dreamed up.

“Now Gloria, we’d been led to believe that Dylan was in a relationship with your stepdaughter, Stella. Is that not true?”

“No, it is true.” Gloria’s smile drops at the mention of Stella’s name, in a way that can’t hide her disdain. “At least, that’s what he let her believe, because there was no way we could be open about it, admit to it. He wanted to protect my integrity.”

“So, he was lying to Stella?”

Gloria swallows hard, and her eyes flash uncertainly off camera for just a split second. She has to reel this back in somehow, to make her look like the wounded party and not some greedy cougar who stole her stepdaughter’s boyfriend.

“Dylan cared for Stella, like a sister,” Gloria lilts softly. “He didn’t know how to let her down gently. The last thing either of us wanted to do was hurt Stella. She’d been through enough, being abandoned by her mother at such a young age.”

My rage is incandescent. I can practically taste it, searing acid at the back of my throat. This fucking, dirty ass bitch. My hands curl into fists, imagining snapping that privileged ivory neck. She’s going to fucking pay for this shit.

The interviewer leans back and clasps her hands over her knee. “So, when you said that you believe your relationship with Dylan was what led to the altercation resulting in your husband’s death, what do you believe happened?”

Gloria takes a shaky breath, her eyes fluttering briefly to her knees as she smooths her skirt over them. “That night, after Dylan and I had… After we’d been together, Harold came home early from a meeting. Dylan’s bike was still parked in the drive.”

“He caught the two of you?”

Gloria lifts her chin. “No, I think Dylan was doing the honorable thing, and telling Harold the truth. That we wanted to be together.”

The video stops playing, the bar at the bottom showing that this part is done, and I search through the list to find part 2. It’s not there.

Fuck, fuck, what else did she say?

Then I see Part Two airs tonight. I slam my fist into the table.

God fucking dammit. What is this bitch playing at?

I pull up a number on my phone, and it rings twice before a groggy male voice answers.

“What?”

“I need a trace, Flea.”

“On who?” The tapping of a keyboard sounds in the background.

“Gloria Fenton-Langford.”

More tapping, and the man clears his throat. “This bitch is going to be expensive.”

“I didn't expect anything less,” I say with a cynical laugh. “Name your price.”

“Twenty-thousand.”

“What’s a hacker living in his mom’s basement going to do with twenty k?” I’m teasing him, he knows I’m good for it. I’m going to pay this kid who just got out of prison, and do it gladly. But irritating him is kind of fun.

Flea sighs audibly. “My parole says I have to be here, so the least I can do is make this shit hole comfortable. Now, we on?”

“Sure.” I chew my lip, a strange feeling settling into my gut. “And one more, too.”

“Who else you need to follow around, huh?”

“Oswald Perlmann.”

Flea makes a choking sound. “The senator?”

“Yeah, that one.”

Flea puffs out a breath, and there’s more clicking in the background as he types furiously. “You know that one’s gonna be extra.”

“I’ll give you fifty thousand.”

Flea laughs out loud, a gravelly sound that echoes down the line. “For that much, I’ll tap his phone and send you everything on it.”

“Do that. I want it all by tonight.”

“Consider it done, amigo. Anything else I can help you with?”

“No, that’s it.”

“Good.” The line goes dead as Flea hangs up.

I spin the phone on the table for a moment. I don’t know why I asked for Flea to trace Oswald, and I sure as fuck can’t explain what would be on his phone. But the way Gloria’s eyes kept flickering off camera, as though someone was standing there…

Maybe I’m being paranoid.

But then I remember that Stella had told me that Oswald and Gloria had come to her with that plea bargain, the agreement that she wouldn’t come and see us, and that her letters would be monitored.

Oswald has something to do with this, and while my sleep-deprived brain can’t sort through it all right now, there’s more at play than anyone is letting on.