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How could my heart break when it was already broken? “Dad, please—”
“I said what I said, girl. Listen to your father.”
Damn it. “You’re a millionaire hundreds of times over. When are you going to realize you have enough?”
“Never. Nothing I have willeverbe enough. Nothing fills the void of everything I’ve already lost.”
“You mean Mom.” I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling that loss we shared, and dug deep for strength. “Listen to me, Marvin. I know you went to meet someone at Tamarack Meeting Hall, and you obviously didn’t want to be seen. I think you know who did this to you, but for some reason you’re not telling me who they are, so okay. Fine.I’llbe the one to tell you who they are. They’re the fucker who gouged one of your eyes out. That sonofabitch partially blinded youfor life, yet you’re not coughing up their name? They don’t deserve to be protected. They don’t deserve shit from you. Oh, and one other thing—until the authorities capture whoever this is, every law enforcement agency that wants a piece of you and HEG is going to be climbing all over you until it feels like you’re living through a colonoscopy that never ends, so that’s another reason to help me find who did this. If you have any hope of getting back to the life you had before this whole mess started, you’ll give me a name.”
“Gouged my eye out? What…?” Again he reached for the bandages, desperation and horror filling his expression while this time seemingly every alarm in the whole damn hospital went off. In a heartbeat a wave of medical staff flooded in while my father yelled incoherently, trying to tear off the bandages covering his mutilated eye. I retreated out the door, sick, horrified, and knowing that I had to bring this nightmare to an end.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Press Conference
“…and hopefully, with the surgery Mr. Steadfast will have this Thursday, we’ll be able to stabilize the orbital bone,” Dr. Abrams was saying to a solemnly quiet press pool that stretched all the way back to glass walls overlooking a courtyard, and beyond that the hospital’s parking lot. “Once that area fully heals and the swelling goes down, he will then have the option of being fitted with a prosthetic eye. As for the rest of the facial fractures, we have a saying here—tackle the worst, first. For instance, Mr. Steadfast’s nose was so badly broken he can no longer easily breathe through it, so he’ll have to undergo a procedure called a septorhinoplasty. This surgery is going to rebuild the septum that was basically caved in. That’s going to be taken care of on Thursday as well.”
The moment he stopped talking, a wall of questions hit us like a tidal wave. Fritzi, with more aggression than I would have ever imagined, gave a microphone to a journalist on the aisle.
“Doug Sutton,Chicago Tribune,” said the earnest-looking reporter who held a notebook in front of him like a shield. “Once Truman Steadfast regained consciousness, did he give any details about his attacker—who it was, if he recognized them? Maybe a former follower who wants their family fortune back?”
Hidden under the table, my hands balled into fists while Dr. Abrams cleared his throat.
“Mr. Steadfast has suffered a significant closed TBI—traumatic brain injury. As such, the patient can’t remember the attack or much of the day leading up to the attack. This type of retrograde amnesia is normal in cases of TBI, and since the patient is still in very poor health we’re not going to push it at this point. All that matters from a medical standpoint right now is that he continues to improve. If and when Mr. Steadfast ever remembers anything, that will be a matter for the police.”
“So it’s possible he could come up with a name and face tomorrow?”
Jesus, this guy was really trying to paint a bull’s eye on my father’s back, I thought, trying not to glare him out of existence.
Dr. Abrams sighed. “Possible? Sure, it’s possible, in the same way it’s possible that someone in this room will get struck by lightning tomorrow. But is it probable? I can’t really say. As a neurologist, I’ve personally witnessed very few memories completely return, because our brains are a lot like computers. We’ve got different storage space for long-ago memories, versus memories that just happened. The new memories are like temporary files that haven’t been saved. If your power goes out—or in this case, if someone beats you until you lose consciousness—those temporary files might be gone forever. Hopefully they’ve just been misfiled and will show up eventually, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they never return. Next question?”
Fritzi turned to a woman with a white-blonde pixie cut and handed over the microphone. “Zenni Greer,Chicago Pulse. This question is for Eden Steadfast. Ms. Steadfast, you left the House of Enlightened Greatness and public life three years ago. Will you be stepping in to head up HEG now that your father is incapacitated, and apparently has a long way to go in his recovery? Also, I have a follow-up question.”
Of course she did. “Thank you for the question, Ms. Greer. To be honest, public life is the reason my father is lying in a hospital bed, at least as far as I’m concerned. For two decades I’ve watched this sweet, compassionate man pour his heart into helping people find their own personal greatness. Whether it was through HEG or simply someone on the street, my father does all he can to make the lives of the people he meets better. To step into his shoes…” I changed my face, letting the tears I’d been suppressing rise to the surface in a rush of genuine distress and grief. “I could never step into his shoes, Ms. Greer. I’m not worthy. No one is. Tru Steadfast is simply too good of a person, an impossible act to follow and, quite frankly, my own personal hero.”There, I thought at my faceless stalker while wiping at the wetness under my eyes.Choke on that and a bag of dicks, motherfucker.
The reporter glanced down at her notepad. “What about the charities sponsored by HEG? All the New Hope Teen Shelters that help at-risk teens here in Chicago and other metropolitan areas in surrounding states? Are they at risk of closing?”
“If they do, and that’s a very bigif, there’s only one person who can be blamed for that—the cowardly, subhuman…thing…that did this to my father.” I again changed my face to one of contempt, and I didn’t even have to struggle to make it happen. Contempt was just the tip of the iceberg for what I felt for this bastard. “And make no mistake, he is athing, not an actual man. That much is clear from his actions, don’t you think? I mean, no real man would ever pounce on an innocent older guy like my poor father. Honestly, how spineless do you have to be to victimize someone like that? The way I see it, the sooner the authorities can put this cowardly thing in a cage where he belongs, the better off the world will be.”
The microphone got passed to someone in the front row. “Gil Hofstetter, WKLG News, Ms. Steadfast. What if the person who attacked your father is someone who felt duped by your father’s church, the House of Enlightened Greatness?”
I could feel the killing ice in my stare even as I struggled to keep my expression neutral. “Oh dear, Mr. Hofstetter, how embarrassing for you. You’re not a strong believer in researching a subject before publicly speaking about it, are you? But you are a fan of hypotheticals—I mean, you must be, since you asked me a what-if question when most of your colleagues know that’s a professional no-no. But I’ll try to make you comfortable by asking you a hypothetical in return, in the hope of covering up your lack of professionalism. Ready? What if you’d done your due diligence in covering Truman Steadfast’s recovery here at the hospital, and researched his basic background? Answer—you would have discovered right away Truman Steadfast would never dream of stepping into the religious realm. If you’d bothered to do your job the way others clearly have done at this presser, you would have known that my father is not religious, though he is very spiritual. And his house—specifically never referred to as achurch—is open to literally anyone, regardless of who or what they worship, or if they even worship at all. Unlike the cowardly little monster that attacked him, my father’s heart is full of love and acceptance for all.”
“Uh, I misspoke,” Gil Hofstetter cut in when I could have gone on. “But you have to admit the question remains.”
“The what-if question? The hypothetical? That question?” I badly wanted to smile, but the way I was feeling it would only show my need for murder, rather than the tension-ravaged, tearful daughter I needed everyone to see. “If the attacker had wanted money, the offices would have been broken into, but there was nothing like that. Like I said, you would know that if you’d done your research. But hey, if you want to keep pushing your hypothetical, I’d like to show you how useless they are in your profession, Mr. Hofstetter. For instance, what if there were an ambitious journalist who hadn’t yet made it big, mainly because he’s lazy and sloppy but he believes he’s entitled to greatness, so he chooses to create a sensational story by attacking a local philanthropist just so he could report on it? Wouldn’t that be quite the story? And by the way, where were you three nights ago, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Um, okay, next question.” Fritzi snatched the microphone away from a slack-jawed Gil Hofstetter before hustling over to the opposite side of the room.
“Craig Leung, AP. I actually did do quite a lot of research before coming here, Ms. Steadfast,” he said with a wry glance toward Gil Hofstetter, whose face, ears and neck had turned an alarming shade of red. “Thanks to that research, I found out that you left the House of Enlightened Greatness three years ago without warning. Why did you leave?”
“That’s an excellent question, and I thank you for it, Mr. Leung,” I said with calm gratitude, while internally everything in me screamed in full-tilt panic. What could I tell him? Anything but the truth, obviously. “I don’t suppose you heard my answer earlier in the presser that I’m not worthy of filling my father’s shoes?”
Craig Leung nodded. “I did.”
I changed my face to an expression of what I hoped was rueful self-deprecation. “I meant that in every way. I have a very different personality than my father’s. He’s at his most comfortable in a room full of people. I’m at my most comfortable with a few friends and loved ones quietly discussing the latest books we’ve read or movies we’ve seen. Living life in the spotlight became untenable for a private person like me.”
“So you really have no plans to keep HEG going, when in fact HEG’s internal statistics show that while your father’s popularity has slipped dramatically from the time you left, anything related to you—videos you did while at HEG or your old podcasts—still have high click-through rates?”
