My Loving Family Paid to Destroy Me novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: The Floor
Two of my father's men moved at once.
They came off the back wall fast, with their hands out, and met Hank halfway down the center aisle.
Hank did not stop walking.
"Sir," said the first man. "This is a private event."
"I was invited," said Hank.
"By who?"
"By the guest of honor."
A rumpled gray suit stepped out of the crowd by the bar, and a badge appeared in the detective's hand.
"Let him through," he said, loud enough for the first six tables to hear. "He's a witness, and I'm the police."
My father's men looked at the stage.
My father said nothing.
They stepped aside.
Hank climbed the steps.
He took the microphone from my hand, and he looked out at the four hundred faces, and he cleared his throat.
"My name is Hank Rudd," he said. "I'm the man who held Nolan Thayer in a cellar for five years."
The room made a sound.
"Sit down, Rudd," said the family lawyer, at my elbow. "This man is a confessed felon. He is mentally unwell. Security."
"I've had a rough week," said Hank. "Somebody burned my truck. Let me finish."
Nobody moved.
"On the night he was taken, Howard Thayer paid me ten thousand dollars cash in a parking lot to kill his son."
The sound this time was louder.
A woman screamed, and then stopped herself.
"I didn't do it," Hank said. "And I never spent his money. It sat in a coffee can under my barn floor for five years. The detective dug it up this morning, with the band still on it."
He turned his head and looked at Laurel.
She was standing in the front row.
I had not seen her stand.
"I never hit his face," Hank said. "She made me swear to it. I put a doctor and a book under the door. That was her, every bit, and not one cent of it was his."
He pointed at my father.
"His was the envelope."
My father laughed.
It was a soft, rich, wounded laugh, and I heard how well he had practiced it.
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