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Gertrude headed out, angry with Joe for staying out late and undoubtedly getting Frank into some trouble. Her heart dropped ten feet when she heard Joe and Frank talking – about her!
"She WHAT?" Frank screamed.
"She hit me!" Joe said. "Honest."
"I believe you, I just can't believe Auntie G. that's so unlike her."
"Yeah," he said. "I'm sorry, Frank…"
"I've heard enough!" Gertrude snapped, walking up to them. "I can't believe you'd lie about me like that!"
"I'm not lying," Joe said. "I told Frank everything, Gertrude. He knows."
"DeMint," she snapped. She balanced a gun in her hands and Frank gasped. She was mentally unstable.
"You SOBS –" she started to say, but then quickly changed tactics as she heard someone walking up the path.
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Fenton rolled out of bed and his father-son instinct told him that he should be worried about his sons. He glanced in the boy's bedrooms. They weren't back yet, and it was nearly one o'clock – an hour past their curfew!
Gertrude was supposed to alert me if they weren't back. Well, Frank said he was going to the park. Maybe they're there. He grabbed his gun and went off after them. He knew he was being paranoid, but with his job you could never be to sure.
He walked along the path before he saw them: His sons and a woman. Walking closer, he saw that the woman was his sister, Gertrude.
My god! He thought.
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Gertrude grabbed Frank by the shoulders and placed the gun nervously right at his head. He was spoken up quite a bit, not sure why his aunt was aiming a gun right at his face!
"Gertrude, think what you're doing," Fenton pleaded, having no idea of what was going on. "Speaking of which, what is going on?" he asked.
"Nothing! None of your damn business," Gertrude said.
Oh, damn it, Fenton thought. She forgot to take her meds today. I wonder how often that's been going on… "Gertrude, did you forget to take your meds?"
"No," she said, lying through her teeth.
She did, Fenton thought angrily. He held the gun right at his sister, whose gun was going back and forth from Frank and Joe. It was the only way she could think to keep them both under wraps.
"Meds?" Frank asked.
"Meds?" Joe echoed.
"Gertrude has a disease," explained Fenton. "I can't really go into all the details, but if she doesn't take her medicine, she gets… well, like this."
"That explains a lot," Joe thought.
"Shut up!" Gertrude said, placing the pistol at Frank's side. He'd been held hostage twenty times in the last year.
None of them were by his aunt. None of them were by an unstable person.
And he was terrified.
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Fenton dialed the police and spoke quietly into the phone so Gertrude couldn't hear. Soon they arrived with backup, and Laura arrived with her medicine.
We just have to get her away from Frank long enough to take her medicine…
Frank screamed when Gertrude shot him in the arm. It started to bleed rapidly, and he didn't know what to think. He winced in pain and then everything went dark…
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The second Fenton saw Gertrude shoot his son, he yelled "GO GREEN" to the sniper who was hidden carefully in the tree. He shot her in the arm and she toppled over.
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SIX MONTHS LATER
All was going well in the Hardy family. Joe was the happy-go-lucky boy he always had been; Frank had recovered from his shot, and Gertrude was in a mental health institution.
Everything was going well, and Fenton hoped it would, for a very long time.