J.M.J.
A/N: Thank you so much for continuing to read this story! Thank you especially Highflyer, max2013, EvergreenDreamweaver, BMSH, Cherylann Rivers, and Caranath for your reviews since I posted chapter 6!
Chapter VII
The Last Link
The scene was almost exactly the same as seven months earlier when Joe had done this the first time. The biggest difference was that that time, he had worked himself up so much that he had felt sick, but this time, apart from a rapid heartbeat and an instinct to be on guard, he was calm and collected. He'd been planning exactly what he wanted to say to Terry Shanth. Of course, he still had no idea what his old enemy wanted to talk to him about, but that didn't matter. He had his own message he'd been meaning to deliver, and the mysterious summons just made it seem like the time had come.
Joe was seated on one side of the glass partition, waiting for Terry to be led in to the other. Terry was still in the infirmary, as Joe had been told, but he was so insistent on wanting to see Joe and his condition was improved enough that the prison doctor had given permission for the meeting to take place, although given the young men's past, it was going to have to happen in the normal visiting room rather than any possibility of it taking place in the infirmary. That was fine with Joe. This was going to be hard enough through glass.
A minute or two later, a door opened, and Terry entered with a guard following him. Joe couldn't help shuddering at the sight of the man who had done him and everyone he loved so much harm, but he didn't look away. He kept his eyes resolutely on Terry, whose face was haggard and pale and whose wrists were still wrapped in bandages. Terry sat down across from Joe and stared at him with an odd expression. It wasn't the hate-filled glare that Joe had been expecting, but whatever it was, it was still unnerving.
Terry continued to stare for several minutes. Joe had intended to let Terry say whatever he had to say first, but as Terry continued to stare and say nothing, Joe became uncomfortable and cleared his throat.
"I heard you wanted to talk to me?"
There was still no answer from Terry.
Joe shifted in his seat. "I guess what I actually heard was that you wanted to see me. I assumed that meant you wanted to talk, too."
Another beat of silence followed. Then Terry asked, "Why did you come?"
Joe gave a tiny shake of his head and wrinkled his brows. "I just said – I was told that you wanted to talk to me."
"But why would that make you come?" Terry peered at him through the glass, and Joe could see an earnest expression in his eyes.
"I thought it must be important." Joe licked his lips which suddenly felt very dry. Terry still had him fixed in that intense stare, and Joe found he couldn't bear it any longer. He had to lower his eyes. "Besides, there was something I wanted to tell you, and after – after what happened to you, I realized I might have a limited number of chances to get it said after all."
"You mean, after what I did." Terry paused for a moment. "Well, you don't have to worry about any repeat tries. I haven't been out of sight of at least one guard for a single second since it happened. It's disgusting."
"It's for your own good," Joe found himself saying.
Terry scoffed at that. "My own good. What would be good for me would be to get out of here, no matter what it takes."
Joe almost began to argue, but he gave up before he did. It wouldn't be any use trying to convince Terry. That he had been unbalanced had been obvious for years; maybe a professional could get through to him eventually, but Joe certainly couldn't in the few minutes he would be here. He decided it was best to go back to the original question. "So, I don't think you asked me here just so you could complain about the arrangements. There must be something you wanted to tell me or maybe ask me?"
At that question, Terry finally averted his gaze, and Joe could breathe a little easier. "There was, but I changed my mind. Go away."
Joe sighed. "You know, I did come a long way at your request. You might as well tell me what you wanted, even if it something as predictable as telling me you hate my guts or something, which I already know."
Terry lowered his eyes and his entire head until all Joe could see was his curly, red hair, which already had a few gray strands running through it. He had his face buried in his hands and was trembling. He had set the receiver that allowed him and Joe to talk down, and so Joe couldn't hear his sobs, but he could see easily that Terry was crying.
Bawling was more like it, Joe thought. There wasn't anything he could do until Terry decided to pick up the receiver again. Terry's tears didn't impress him. After all, Joe was the one who had been hurt by Terry, not the other way around. What did Terry have to cry about?
Anger was mounting up in Joe at the injustice and humiliation of this situation. Had Terry asked him here to try to make him feel sorry for helping put him in prison? This monster who had tried so hard to destroy Joe and his entire family and the Drews, who might as well be family, not to mention any of Joe's friends who had happened to get in the way, most notably Iola? He'd never feel sorry for that. The only thing he was sorry about was that he hadn't put him there sooner.
Joe rubbed one eye. This wasn't the reason he had come all this way. If he wanted to boil in his own fury over everything Terry had done, he could do that just as well at home. What he wanted was to get past that before – before he could ever turn into something like Terry.
Oh, he knew he could. That was how Terry had started out – angry about an injustice. True, he had been nursed on this anger and the hate that naturally accompanied it practically from infancy while Joe had not, but if anything, that only made Terry's position a little less horrible. What chance did he ever have of being anything better than what he was? If he had any shred of decency – Joe had certainly never witnessed one in him – that would have been practically a miracle. But even if Joe had been taught better than that his entire life, he still had it in him to be as vengeful as Terry was. He'd already seen it once. The night he had captured Terry, he would have beaten him to death with his bare hands if Ned Nickerson hadn't stopped him. He owed Ned a debt that he could never repay, unless it was by making sure Ned's efforts weren't in vain.
A voice inside Joe whispered that he couldn't have ever been as bad as Terry. Even if he had killed Terry – and Terry's murders and attempted murders were more than enough to make such a deed understandable, if not entirely justified – he wouldn't have gone after Terry's innocent family members or friends, as Terry had done. No, no, he was being much too hard on himself, even thinking of the possibility that he could have been anything like Terry, who was so utterly despicable and depraved.
If Joe had been in the mood, he could have laughed at that argument that some part of him was trying to make. He'd been in the detective business a long time, and he knew that no one was born a robber or a smuggler or, most especially, a murderer. Even Terry hadn't been born that way; he had just become that way. No doubt, there had been some now-distant time when Terry wouldn't have killed anyone, but somewhere along the line, building up small crimes until they became big ones or allowing small amounts of hatred to grow to massive ones, he had found he could and would kill and even found a perverse pleasure in it. No, Joe knew well enough that if Ned hadn't stopped him from beating Terry to death all those years ago, he would have begun to hesitate less about using more violence than he needed to against the criminals he pursued, until he would have killed again, and not in self-defense. It was still a path he was in danger of taking, albeit much more slowly, if he couldn't resolve his conflict with Terry, if he let himself hate Terry any longer.
Joe didn't know how long he had been lost in thought, but he was pulled out of it when he saw Terry pick up the receiver again.
"This is all your fault." Terry's voice still caught with sobs. "Yours, your father's, your brother's, Carson Drew's, Nancy Drew's. You all – Why? If Fenton Hardy and Carson Drew would have just let my dad alone, none of this would have happened."
Joe tightened his jaw. He wasn't going to argue. It wouldn't do any good. Terry was beyond reason. But – "Your father murdered several people. Dad and Carson had to stop him."
"He didn't have to kill him."
Joe closed his eyes, fury at the insinuation rising up in him. The case had taken place almost twenty-three years earlier, when Fenton had still been an officer on the NYPD. Carson Drew, just out of law school and interning with the DA in that city, had been asked to assist with the investigation of a murder. One murder soon grew into several, and the two men, along with Fenton's partner at the time, Mitchell Johnson, had discovered that the murderers were two brothers, Cliff and Dan Moriare. In the final showdown when they had captured Dan, Cliff, who was Terry's father, had gotten the drop on Fenton and Johnson. He had killed Johnson in cold blood right in front of Fenton, who had managed to escape. Determined not to let Cliff escape, Fenton had faced him one last time and been forced to kill him in self-defense. How Terry managed to twist that into a crime to be avenged, Joe didn't understand.
"Is that all?" Joe asked. "Is that all you wanted to tell me? Remind me one more time that it's everyone's fault but your own that you're in here? Because if it is, I really don't want to hear it again. So, I'll say my piece and be on my way."
Terry remained silent. That was fine. Joe could do this better without him talking.
"I know what you're trying to do," Joe said. "You're trying to make all this easier on yourself. You're trying to make yourself our victim so that you don't have to sit there for the next fifty or sixty years knowing that you're here because you were wrong. If you can just prove to yourself that my family and the Drews and I hate you and have persecuted you unfairly, then you can go on feeling justified in what you did to us. I'm not going to give you that satisfaction."
He paused for breath, and Terry merely glared at him. For a moment, the words froze on Joe's lips, something making him unwilling to say what he knew he had to.
Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he continued, "Well, I don't hate you. I'm glad you didn't die. And I forgive you."
Terry continued to stare at him, but now his glare was replaced by such a dumbfounded expression that Joe might have laughed. He might have laughed about anything just now, though. It was such a relief to have his message delivered, unwilling as he had been to give it at first. It was done now, and he felt much lighter for it. After all, a grudge was a heavy burden to carry, and Joe had never realized how heavy until he had managed to shrug it off.
He didn't say another word, and Terry was too shocked and confused to say anything more. Joe stood up slowly and left the room. As the heavy door clanged shut behind him, it almost seemed like it was the sound of the last link of the chain that Terry had been holding him by all these years bursting apart.
