The Reckoning of the Offended

Chapter 6

The lady cleaning the window in the restaurant stopped as she saw Carol's Camaro pull up to the sidewalk. She opened the squeaky door and walked over to the car. "How can I help you, detective?" the lady asked as politely as she could, trying not to let Carol hear the annoyance and menace in her voice.

"These symbols. What do they mean? And answer honestly otherwise you'll end up in a cell for the night." Carol demanded, her leg jigging up and down on the brake pedal. 

"Well, the fire symbol stands for divinity. The plant symbol stands for false love. The wind symbol stands for someone being uncontrollable and unpredictable. The water symbol stands for hope. There you go. You know now. The person who deals with symbols is Charles Mallory, he will help you if you bribe him with something. He used to be Teddy Scarlet's best friend." The lady snarled at Carol; her small yellow teeth visible for a whole minute. Carol stuck up her middle finger as she drove away, knowing it was childish and immature but did it anyway.

As she reached the address the lady gave her, she pulled up outside an old, dilapidated mansion. The door had already fallen off its hinges; the windows were cracked and dirty; the plaster crumbled and the stairs to the porch creaked as Carol's weight was pushed onto them. Walking through the doorway, Carol realized that the outside of the house was misleading and deceptive. The living room had a black leather couch, a TV and a small wooden coffee table that had been knocked over. The kitchen was small and had an oven, a dishwasher, a microwave, and a broken fridge that let out steam every time you opened it. Carol wandered upstairs to find three bedrooms. One was decorated with Disney characters and had a cot. "This must be for a baby!" Carol thought. She opened the door to the next one. This room had a single bed but had black colored walls; rock band posters and comics all over the floor. She crept in and discovered a boy no older than eighteen hiding under the bed. "What is your name? And what are you doing under there?" Carol asked as nicely as she could, hiding her shock and sorrow beneath a carefully constructed mask she had perfected over the years at work as a detective. 

"My name is Charles Mallory, but my friends call me Charlie. I heard some banging and then a gunshot downstairs, so I hid under here to protect myself. Just in time too as a strange man walked into my room holding a gun and looking for something. He muttered my name and said "Charles, if you don't come out of hiding, I'll have to shoot you and I need you, you see, to tell me some symbols and what they represent." I did not come out and he left. I am scared now, detective. He is going to come back for me, I know it," the young boy cried, tears running down his handsome face.

The detective reassured him and asked him to repeat the details again to her so she could note them down in her notepad like a spof would at school. As soon as she had, she took Charles to her mother's house so her mother could protect him from any outside threats. You see readers, Carol's mother was a retired police officer and was quite fierce when faced with a felon with muscles and a smart brain. In fact, Carol's father (who was called Carl) was an ex-criminal who was placed in jail after a failed robbery. Carol's mother was called Cherry and she had straight black hair, narrow green eyes and always wore her police badge with pride even though she was retired. Today, she was wearing a blue polo top, black jeans and leather ankle boots that were a deep shade of brown. Carol rolled her eyes at this getup as she spotted her mother's badge, glinting in the sunlight like a diamond in the middle of the ocean. Her mother smiled at Carol but as Charles appeared behind her, her smile turned into a frown. "What's the frown for, mother?" Carol quizzed.

"Is that... Charles Mallory? If so, what is my grandson doing here?"

"Wait, Charles is your grandson?! But I do not have a son."

"You have a brother. His name is Teddy. We put him up for adoption as he had an evil obsession with killing baby animals. We gave him to the Scarlets, our best friends at the time to raise him like a proper gentleman. I wonder how that turned out before he died." Cherry says, mystified and lost in her train of thoughts.

Carol's mouth hung open in shock and amazement. Teddy Scarlet was her brother?! Wow, no wonder she'd had a great bond with him in her childhood years. She remembered the time they went hunting for frogspawn in their early teens together and Teddy fell into the muddy river below the bridge that they stood on. Cherry, mistaking Carol's shock as happiness, whistled to herself as she headed back inside, Charles following close behind his grandmother. After a few shakes of her head, Carol quickly ran after them, annoyed that her mother hadn't told her this valuable piece of information earlier on in her life.

"So can Charles stay with you a while?" Carol hissed through her teeth, trying to remember to play nice and remembering that Charles was her nephew now, the heels of her boots clacking on the marble floorboards beneath her feet.

"Of course, he can," Cherry cooed as if Charles was still a toddler who was well-behaved. Charles rolled his eyes and quickly dodged a kiss blown at him from his grandmother. Cherry's smile quickly dulled but lit up again as Charles mouthed an apology at her. Carol walked over and clicked on the radio, Avril Lavigne blasting through the speakers and filling the silent space.

"Great! I've got to go," Carol exclaimed as her phone pinged with a new notification. She quickly glanced at it and saw Meredith's name pop up on her phone in neon blue writing. Carol walked out and slammed the front door as hard as she could. 'It's better if I take my anger out on the door rather than Charles or my mother,' she thought. She jumped in her Camaro and revved the engine. The roar could be heard for miles around. The car shot forward and didn't stop until she arrived at the new crime scene where Carol heard the sirens before she had even parked.