Chapter 7 - The Unmasking
The temperature in the conference room seemed to plummet twenty degrees in a single second.
Dale stared at Arthur, a nervous, confused laugh escaping his throat. "What? Arthur, what kind of sick joke is this?"
"It's no joke, Dale," Arthur said calmly.
Arthur raised his hand and tapped twice on the double-glazed glass of the observation room.
The heavy wooden doors swung open.
I walked into the room, flanked by Sheriff Buford and two armed state troopers.
My mother gasped, dropping her water glass onto the carpet, where it shattered into dozens of wet fragments. She scrambled backward in her chair, her face draining of every drop of color until she looked like a ghost.
Brooke dropped her phone, her mouth hanging open in complete, stunned silence.
And my father... my father froze. The pen slipped from his fingers, rolling across the polished mahogany table and landing at my feet.
"K-Katie?" Dale stammered, his eyes bulging out of his head. "Katie?! You're... you're alive?!"
"Disappointed?" I asked, stopping at the head of the table, leaning forward with both hands flat on the wood. "Sorry to ruin your payday, Dad. I know how much you were looking forward to that three million."
"Katie! Oh, thank God!" Denise suddenly shrieked, leaping out of her chair and rushing toward me with open arms, putting on a dramatic show of motherly hysteria. "You're safe! Our prayers were answered! We thought you were swept away in the creek!"
"Don't touch me," I said, my voice dangerously low.
Denise froze in her tracks, her fake tears instantly vanishing as she saw the sheer, unadulterated hatred burning in my eyes.
"You left me," I said, looking from my mother to my father, then to Brooke. "You put a fifty-five-pound dog in the back seat, strapped his crate in with seatbelts, and told me to walk into a catastrophic flash flood at four in the morning."
"Katie, listen to me," Dale stammered, standing up slowly, raising his hands in a placating gesture. "It was chaos! The water was rising! We panicked! Brooke was having an anxiety attack, the dog was losing his mind—we thought you were right behind us in the sedan!"
"The sedan with the dead transmission?" I countered coldly. "The sedan you spent two hours pulling out of the barn with a tractor this morning?"
Dale’s jaw dropped. His eyes darted nervously to Sheriff Buford. "What... what are you talking about?"
Sheriff Buford stepped forward, pulling out a heavy manila folder filled with Frank’s crystal-clear photographs and setting them down directly over the paper Dale had just signed.
"We have you on video, Dale," Buford said, his voice dripping with profound disgust. "We have high-resolution telephoto photographs of you dragging that dead car down to Cibolo Creek, smashing the driver's window with a crowbar, and shoving it into the surge."
Denise gasped, turning her head sharply to look at her husband. "Dale... you said you were going to check the water meters!"
"Shut up, Denise!" Dale roared, his calm facade completely shattering into violent, terrified rage. He glared at me, his eyes filled with pure venom. "You ungrateful little brat! After everything we gave you! Everything we sacrificed for you!"
"You sacrificed nothing for me!" I screamed back, the emotion I had buried all morning exploding out of me like a volcano. "You stole from me! You took out a two-million-dollar insurance policy on my life three months ago! You tried to let the river kill me so you could pay off your failed contracting debts and give Brooke a brand-new life!"
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Brooke shrank back into her chair, covering her face as she began to sob hysterically.
"Dale Miller, Denise Miller," Sheriff Buford commanded, pulling two pairs of heavy steel handcuffs from his belt. "You are under arrest for attempted murder, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud, filing a false police report, and evidence tampering. You have the right to remain silent."
