Page 37 of Brenna, Brat

“A bomb,” Nicola’s husband Jude interrupted. “Someone threw a bomb into your workplace, and this is crazy. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he told Campbell. “If you’re attracting danger like that, I can’t have you in my house with my wife and daughter.”

I jumped to my feet. “I’ll remember this,” I told him. “I’ll remember that when someone needed help, you gave him the boot instead of offering a hand! You just showed your true—”

“I understand,” Campbell said. He stood and offered his hand instead, and he and Jude shook. “I wasn’t thinking very clearly when I followed Brenna over here.” He looked over at me. “I was worried.”

“Yes, it was my idea to come,” I continued furiously, “because I had thought that we could depend on my family, but now I see—”

“You should stay, I’ll go,” he told me, and I said no way.

“I’m leaving with you,” I answered. “I don’t want to spend one more second here with this Judas.”

“Brenna!” Nicola snapped, but I wasn’t interested. She had made her choice, and so had I. I swiveled and left, and I hoped that she was happy that she’d married a person like that.

“You didn’t have to leave your sister and you didn’t have to fight with her about me,” Campbell told me when we were outside. He was looking up and down the street as he spoke, like he was checking for danger.

“I’m not going to sit there and listen to someone badmouth you,” I answered. “We’ll go to my apartment instead.”

“No way. Your brother in law was one hundred percent correct. I can’t put you in danger.”

“I’m sure that whole fire incident wasn’t even about you!” I insisted. “Dion has been getting threats for weeks, really awful, anonymous texts. And someone has been calling the gallery and saying weird stuff into the phone when I answer, which means the person knows where he works. It’s either a woman he screwed, literally, or her boyfriend, brother, husband, or other representative wanting vengeance. There’s even a history of arson there! Once, one of the artists set a garbage can on fire.”

He seemed intrigued.

“But I know that she’s in Caracas, so it couldn’t be her. It might be one of Alecta’s clients, though,” I continued.

“A disgruntled patron of the arts?”

“A disgruntled patron of her drugs,” I corrected. “Maybe I didn’t mention to you that she’s a dealer, but she could have shorted a customer or it could have been that the quality of her product was bad.”

“No, you didn’t mention that your boss is a drug dealer!” he said, and for some reason, he sounded highly annoyed. Like it had been ok for Jude to throw him onto the street, but Alecta’s secondary business was an issue?

“She hardly ever did it in the gallery,” I stated, and that was true because she had hardly ever been in the gallery at all—and whenI thought about the old building, I felt a wave of nostalgia and loss. “I can’t believe it’s gone,” I sighed. “Alecta’s mom Chic owns the property but she’s never seemed very interested in it, and I don’t think she’ll try to rebuild. I don’t think that Alecta will start up somewhere else, either. She didn’t care about it, not really, and she sure doesn’t care about me or even about Dion. He’s her nephew.”

“Yeah, when she took off running down the street instead of sticking around to see if we had escaped and survived, I got the feeling that employee safety wasn’t a big concern,” he answered. “It’s a concern for me, Brenna.”

I knew that, because he’d immediately called everyone in his family to warn them and he’d called his lawyer, too. They were going to try to keep his name out of the investigation but it was almost a sure thing that someone would mention that the son of the recently disgraced multi-millionaire might have been the target of a firebomber.

“I’m sorry you were pulled into it,” I said.

“Me? I mean you!” he answered. “You could have died today. Shit.” He covered his eyes for a moment and then looked at the atrocity parked in the street, the vehicle which had once been a finely tuned example of German engineering. “I have to go drop off that car.”

“Good, we’ll do that,” I said briskly. You always felt better when you could successfully complete a task. “I’ll follow you to the dealership.”

“No, you’ll go home,” he ordered, but it turned out that neither he, Nicola, or Jude was the boss of me. I, Brenna, was the only boss and I decided that I was going to follow him, so there. He had to go slowly due to his missing door so it was easy to keep up.

He had watched me coming behind him and when we arrived, he shook his head before he went inside the service center. I stayed in my car with his borrowed sunglasses over my eyes, sniffing my hair at times and reviewing what had happened. Was it really possible that just a few hours before, I had been close to death in an inferno? It played through my mind slowly, how the door had opened and I’d seen something fly into the gallery, something on fire. I had heard Dion scream and I remembered jerking my body into motion to get us to safety. I’d grabbed Campbell and my purse, then drove into Dion with my shoulder like a football player to make him move. I could almost feel the metal key in the back door bite into my palm again, as I’d turned it to let us into the alley. After the previous garbage fire back there, when I’d struggled to get outside to extinguish it, I had taken to putting the key in the lock as one of my opening procedures. It was an item on the checklist that I’d hung in the employee breakroom/Alecta’s office, which was now gone.

The scene started over from the beginning, just like it was one of the prehistoric murder videos that we’d exhibited. I saw the front door fly open, an object hurtled in, and suddenly there had been flames…I’d described it all to the police, too, and to the fire investigators who had come to the scene. I’d happily provided them with Alecta’s home address, the place where shewas probably sitting in the dark since she’d run off and left us at the burning gallery. The front door had opened, the fire had started…I sat in the car and lived it again and again.

At least I wasn’t startled when Campbell arrived at my parking spot; I had watched him walk out of the dealership and make his way over, frowning and shaking his head.

“I thought I told you to go home,” he said as he opened the passenger door.

“I didn’t want to. How long before your car is fixed?”

“Too long,” he said. “What are you still doing here?”

“I’m waiting for you, obviously! I thought you might be upset since you were just almost killed right after your car was stolen, you lost your job, came to distrust your sister, and found out that your father is a fraud!”

---