A Ruthless Victim by Nadia Siddiqui (best novels to read for students .txt) 📗

“The car fire burned hot enough to have melted their teeth?” Nathan says incredulously. Of course, he already knows this.

“Apparently. The police said that somebody started the fire, or that they must have driven over something...they never could even pinpoint the location where the fire started; isn’t that some shit? That’s their fucking job, and they couldn’t even do that...I had four teams looking over the case files, and not one of them was a help to me. Not a single fucking one. So they declared them dead, and it was my car, two things that were once living, breathing, beautiful creatures...nothing more than ash piles.”

Nathan lets the silence fill the kitchen as Bradley moves to sit at the surprisingly clean kitchen table, and Nathan pours the both of them cups of black coffee for the heck of it and sits to join Bradley at the table.

“What do you think happened?” Nathan asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I’ve gone over it again and again. I’ve looked at every picture and thought of every single scenario that I can concoct, including lightning strikes and random, spontaneous combustion and nothing matches. All documented cases of both of those things would have left their bodies looking differently; the car wouldn’t have started to melt from the inside out...it simply doesn’t make any sense at all. My wife, she grew up here. It’s the only reason we even bought a house here. She wanted our daughter to have a childhood like her own; she wanted her to grow up in a similar way, and whatever my wife wanted, I was and am more than happy to provide for her. She is….was, my whole world. I didn’t have parents growing up, really so it certainly didn’t matter to me.” Nathan pauses, drinking the scalding hot coffee like he can’t even feel it on his tongue. “She was always going on and on about how safe this town is. How comforted she constantly felt here and that everybody knew who she was, knew our daughter...and while it was an all-new experience for me, I can’t say that it wasn’t charming for a time...so it’s not like somebody would have targeted her in particular. Besides...Emma was only three...she was only three….who would burn a child? Not even monsters stoop that low.”

Nathan wants to disagree because he has seen just how horrible humans can get, but he says nothing. He blows on the top of his coffee before taking a sip. It’s bitter and terrible, and he can’t name the blend for anything. Whatever it is, he never would have bought it for himself.

“What about you, Mr. Kramer,” Nathan starts carefully, as if he is treading on eggshells. He doesn’t believe that Bradley will become violent if he’s offended, but Nathan also isn’t willing to risk having that hot coffee thrown in his face either.

“What do you mean what about me?”

“Is there anybody in your life that would have wanted to hurt them...to hurt you?” This isn’t the line of questioning that the company wanted for him to start down, but he has to know. Nathan knows that vision that he saw of them being kidnapped is real, and he needs to find a way to make the pieces fit together.

“Hurt...me?”

Nathan nods. The look on Mr. Kramer's face is one that Nathan cannot understand; he can’t put an emotion to it. It’s not confusion, and it’s not pain, but more as if he’s straining in the haze of his once spectacular brain to attempt to make all of the pieces fit together. As if this is a brand new angle that he couldn’t have ever imagined having to consider before.

“Maybe.” The word is a whisper as it leaves Kramer’s booze-soaked lips and falls heavy to the table as Nathan waits for him to provide more information, no matter how slow. “Whenever I worked downtown, I wasn’t the most popular fellow. In my line of work that’s not uncommon. You bid for stock buyer accounts and have to strong arm your way to the top. You don’t make friends easily...there was a man who was particularly offended by me. I never cheated my way to anything, mind you, and I got this man fired for cheating, for embezzlement. He was a few years older than me and came from old money. He has shown up over the course of the last few years off and on, just happening to be where I was. It was something that always struck me as odd, but given that he lives downtown and has family out this way, I never really thought too much of it. He had more money than god; it wasn’t like he needed to work in the first place. I never understood why he blamed me personally...well, that’s not true, I was the one who found the little wormhole that the money would fall through into his accounts. I did the right thing...which naturally, he reacted to like an infant.” At this, Bradley almost smiles for half a moment. In that moment, he almost looks like an entirely different person. Not just a skeleton wearing skin but a real person. An echo of the man that Bradley once would have been. “He threw things and screamed; he punched the security guard and stomped on all of the muffins in the break room. It was comical...but then every night for a month, he would be waiting for me by my car after work. Eventually, I had a restraining order placed and then he disappeared mostly. Never even looked at me whenever I saw him those other times...just random...he’s just about the only enemy that I’ve ever had.”

“What was his name?” Nathan asks, pulling out a scrap of paper and making some notes on it, waiting for the name of his alleged enemy before nodding to