Carter walked over to a couch and sat down next to Kathleen, who was still talking to Mary and Katy. Katy held Eugene in her lap and Ava sat beside her. Eugene was sleeping, but he still was holding hands with his sister.
“What’s the matter, Samuel?” Kathleen asked.
“It’s Freeman,” Carter said. “He’s very unhappy to be at this party. I shouldn’t have talked him into coming.”
“Why is he unhappy?”
“So many people dislike him.”
“Oh, right.”
“I tried to remind him that me and Elliott still care about him, but it didn’t make him feel better. He believes that everybody else on the planet despises him.”
Kathleen said nothing.
“Freeman desperately wants to change the past. But he knows that he can’t. His past always haunts him. And all of these people that give him hate for it are making it much worse.”
“When he finished his rehabilitation, I hoped he would be a much happier person afterwards,” Kathleen said.
Carter shook his head. “It hasn’t at all. All the mistakes that he made are still on record. People still know about them. They will never be forgotten. That thought crushes him.”
“But the two of you are still friends,” Kathleen said.
“That’s true,” Carter said. “But that is really all that he has. That and his wife. If he had nothing…”
Carter could not finish his sentence. The next thought he had was much too ghastly for him to comprehend.
“You’re such a good friend,” Kathleen said. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have so much care and empathy for him.”
“I understand that,” Carter said. “But it still will never change how he feels about himself.”
Carter was now not sure if he would join everyone else in the basement. Freeman’s unhappiness was so upsetting that he was starting to feel unhappy himself. He may see Dennis severely depressed everyday, but at least there were so many people that cared about him. Freeman not only had few people that cared about him, but many people that disliked him.
At that moment, Carter decided to just call it a night. He would tell everyone goodbye, find Dennis, and go home. The party had been good, but the thrill was gone.
He stood up to start saying goodbye to people, but then decided to start with his two friends. They deserved that.
But just as he was about to walk out of the room, Elliott walked in.
“Hey, Frances,” he said. “Where did I buy the trap again? Stewart wanted to know.”
Well, Elliott was standing right there. Carter felt he might as while tell him goodbye there in the living room.
“Hey, Elliott,” Carter said, walking over to him. “I wanted to…”
But right then and there, something happened that nobody at the party would have ever expected that night.
There was a loud sound that sounded like a gun blast.
The instant the sound went off, people in the room panicked. Kathleen and Mary both screamed. Victor Jenkins and his wife both turned white. Katy held her children very close to her, who both started to cry (the gun shot woke Eugene). Nadia, in severe panic, began to shout questions such as: “What was that? Was that a gun? Where is my husband? Where are my girls? Who’s firing a gun?”
Carter and Elliott just stared at each other for a second. And then, Elliott, sounding terrified, said: “That came from the basement.”
Carter took off out of the room. Elliott started shouting: “Don’t Carter! It’s too dangerous!”, but he didn’t listen. He had to see what happened. He had to see if everybody was alright.
Carter ran into the hallway that Elliott had walked out of. He ran through the hall and found an open door. Through the door, there was a wooden staircase that led downward.
Carter ran down the staircase and into the basement. There, he found Stewart, Anderson, Howard, Sullivan, Jenkins, and Cruz. They were all perfectly fine.
“What happened?” Carter shouted.
Everybody pointed to the floor. Nobody said a word.
On the floor lay the dead body of Alan Freeman. A few feet away lay the pistol that had killed him.652Please respect copyright.PENANAndkB5jkHKH