Lies That Bind Us(48)

“What do you suppose Mel told Gretchen?” said Marcus, almost to himself.

“What do you mean?”

“She might be delusional about just how close she and Mel really are,” he replied. “But she really knows us, have you noticed? All kinds of little things. Personal history. How I take my coffee! She had it all ready for me this morning, and when I asked how she knew I took it . . .”

“Black with one sugar,” I inserted.

“She just gives me this knowing smile and says, ‘Oh, I’m an expert on all Mel’s little buddies.’ It kind of freaked me out.”

“That is weird,” I said.

“It’s like she’s been studying us in preparation for coming, while we know nothing about her. We just asked, and we still know nothing about her. She went to school with Mel years ago and they met in a bar after college? It’s bizarre. And did you see how she reacted when Brad . . .”

“Also weird.”

“Granted, but when he asked what Mel and Simon had been fighting about, she freaked, like she’d given something away. It’s fucking strange. She comes to a reunion for people she doesn’t know. A reunion, for fuck’s sake. What’s that all about?”

I was starting to giggle again. His hushed earnestness, combined with the fact that he was saying things I had been thinking, seemed incredibly funny.

And you were pleased that he wasn’t as charmed by her as you thought.

That too.

“She even looks a bit like Mel,” Marcus went on. “Have you noticed? I’ve mistaken them for each other twice. Twice!”

“I don’t think she can help that,” I said, cutting the girl a little slack. It felt good to be her defender while Marcus took aim. “It’s not as if she dresses like her or something.”

“Oh my God!” said Marcus, delighted and horrified. “How weird would that be?”

We laughed some more and for a warm, bright moment it was like we had gone back more than 1999 days and it was, as it had once been, the two of us against the world, together.

“Come on,” I said, getting up and offering my hand. “Bedtime.”

I realized my mistake as soon as I saw his face.

“I didn’t mean—” I said, but he cut me off, grinning and nodding and not quite looking me in the eye, so I pulled my hand away before he could take it.

“Of course,” he said. “I know. Sleep time.”



I lay awake much longer than I expected to, so I heard the sound of someone moving in the corridor, a strange, stealthy movement that set old boards creaking, then silencing, then creaking again. I kept still, trying to determine whether the sound was coming from the hallway outside my door or the floor below.

Yours. Pretty sure.

Which meant what? That Marcus—the only other person with a third-floor tower room—had decided to go to the bathroom or gone down to make himself a sandwich, or . . .

That Gretchen had come up to apologize some more? Or he was paying her a visit . . .

No. I didn’t believe it. I got up and stood motionless by the door but was suddenly so tired that I felt wobbly and light-headed. After a minute or two, standing there, listening to nothing, I forgot why I was there, and when I remembered again, I decided that I had been asleep after all and had dreamed the creaking of the floorboards. I went to the window and peered out and down, though I didn’t know what I was looking for, and my gaze found the gate at the end of the drive. It was open. Not thrown wide and fastened back like it would be to let a car in. Just cracked in the middle, as if someone had slipped through on foot.

The doors and windows were all locked downstairs. There was no alarm system, but the house was secure. It had once been a kind of fortress, after all.

Still . . .

I made a mental note to mention it to Simon. Maybe there was something wrong with the latch. He’d want to look at it.

I shuddered, feeling suddenly and inexplicably unnerved by the depth of the darkness around the house, the lack of street lamps or the familiar ambient glow I was used to in Charlotte, even when the lights were out. I took it for granted. Without it, up here in the mountains where the only light was the moon and stars overhead, the darkness felt strangely ancient, primal, a darkness that led the mind to invent monsters. It filled the great window like a pool.

I didn’t like it. It made me feel scared, exposed.

I stumbled quickly back to bed and pulled the covers up around me like a shield, my head thick and throbbing from all the wine, though why it had kicked in so abruptly then, I had no idea.





Chapter Nineteen

He will be back soon. I know it—and I will not be able to tell him what he wants to hear. I try to make a picture of the fragments he has given me. At first I thought he wanted to hear about something I did, but now I think differently. He thinks I saw something and then did something bad in response.

Naughty.

It was a strange word and thinking about it again raises the hairs on my neck as his voice had done, that singsong tone of his . . .

It wasn’t me who had done something bad. It was him. But I had found out about it and then—afterward—had been naughty. What had I done or tried to do?

Blackmail.

Yes. That felt right. That would be naughty, wouldn’t it? He did something, and I caught him and tried to milk him for it . . .