From the shrub covered ridge where she was lying, Danielle watched the ducks swim on the pond. Then she turned her eyes to a group of grey ducklings standing in a line by the side of the banks. Just like the shooting gallery in a carnival, she thought to herself. Slowly she turned her BB gun, aimed it at the row of ducklings and squinted into the scope.
She pressed the trigger and the group immediately scattered in panic. Except for one. Danielle craned her neck and saw a single wing fluttering on the grass. She smirked then ran down the slope to a bicycle that was leaning against a tree. She rode it hard down the dirt trail which linked the scrubs to the path that crossed the farm.
Nobody was home yet, she saw, and she carried the gun back to her brother’s room and put it exactly where she found it. Then she went back to her room and picked up a book to read.
The front door slammed and Dennis stomped up the staircase. He stopped in front of Danielle’s bedroom door and drummed on it with his fist. Then he chortled and walked away. After throwing his schoolbag on the bed, he picked up his BB gun and ran out to the back of the barn, where he shot soda cans and beer bottles laid out in a row.
He didn’t hear his parents’ truck crunching its way up the drive. He didn’t hear his dad came up to him. But he felt the hand that fell on his shoulder. He looked up, startled. Then his eyes glazed. “Dad,” he said.
“Hi, sport. How was your day?”
“Uneventful,” he said a little carefully, for it was a new word he had learned in school.
His dad, Larry, raised an eyebrow. “Uneventful eh. My day was a little eventful.”
Dennis looked down at his hand, gripping the barrel of the gun hard. “You had trouble at work.”
“Not quite,” he said, and it was then that they heard the crunch of gravel driving up to their farmhouse. Larry kept his hand on Dennis’s shoulder as they walked back to the house to see who it was.
Behind the wheels of a rusting blue wagon was Mrs Jamison, their neighbor. The stout grey-haired lady came out of the truck with a creak and a bang then made her way to them. “This is too much, Larry,” she said, “This cannot be allowed.”
“What’s wrong?” Larry asked.
Mrs Jamison dangled and shook a green paint-spattered duckling in front of his face. “This,” she said, “Your boy did this.”
“Did you see him do it?” Larry asked, his arm reaching down and wrapping Dennis’s shoulders and chest in a protective manner.
“No. But I know it is him. He is a psycho.”
“You can’t just come to my house and blame my son without proof.”
“What is that then?” she said and pointed to the gun in Dennis’s hands.
Larry looked down with a frown, but before he could ask the question, Dennis said, “It was Danielle. It must have been her. I was in school this morning.”
Mrs Jamison stared at him quietly, as though trying to decide what to say to him, yet finding no right words. Then she looked to Larry, and on seeing the scrunched up flushed face, she decided to say nothing. Dennis persisted, “I swear it must have been Danielle. Why am I taking the blame for everything she is doing? How come you never tell her off?”
Mrs Jamison nodded and said to Larry, “You need to do something about this,” then she turned back to her car and drove off.
Larry patted Dennis on the shoulder. “Let’s go back into the house, sport.”
Dennis took a step away. “You blame me too, don’t you? Danielle is always right, Danielle is always good. She gets good grades in school and she never gets into trouble. That’s what you keep saying.” His chest began to pant with a rage he could not hold back. He shouted, “It’s always my fault!” and stormed into the house, up to his bedroom.
Larry entered the house quietly and found his wife Clara standing in the foyer, sobbing and looking up the stairs.
He said, “Dr Mac did say that this will happen.”
“But it’s been a month now,” Clara said, “and things are getting from bad to worse. He smashed the school headmaster’s window when he put him in detention, he spray-painted rude words in the boys’ changing room, he put thumb tacks into his classmates’ shoes and he even peed into Ruth’s handbag. And he blames them all on his sister.” She wiped her face with a sleeve.
Larry embraced her and said with a sob, “Would you rather he remember that Danielle drowned because he played a bad joke on her? Like Dr Mac said, he is doing all this to keep her alive in his mind, so he won’t have to face the fact that she drowned because of something he did.”
Outside, dusk began to cover the land in a warm glow and upstairs, Dennis began to plot what he would do to Danielle to make her pay for what she did.
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