Lies That Bind Us(73)

Waiter boy.

The kid who worked at the Taverna Diogenes. The one who had mooned around Melissa in between waiting on us and leading tourists on snorkeling trips around the bay.

Manos.

I remembered now. But we hadn’t seen him that last day. I was almost sure of it. We had gone to the restaurant for our last meal, expecting the sponges he had promised, but he hadn’t been there. It was one of the various little disappointments and frustrations of our last hours, and Melissa had sulked through the meal, then complained of a headache and gone to bed.

I read the page quickly. The translation was wooden, clunky, but its core required no subtlety. On the last day of our trip, Manos Veranikis, son of Maria, proprietor of the Taverna Diogenes, had been killed in a freak diving accident.





Chapter Twenty-Nine

I hadn’t realized my hand had bled enough to leave a trail, and I can’t see to know if that trail will lead to my hiding place. I watch unblinkingly as he sweeps the flashlight beam across the ground from the open cell over the threshold to the tunnel, conscious of the way my right hand is quietly exploring the ground for a rock or hunk of discarded machinery that I might use as a weapon if the worst happens.

He hesitates and then slowly, inexorably, he pans the light toward me, creeping foot by foot along the railway line. If there is a speck of drying crimson there, he will spot it long before my useless eyes find it. The light is fifteen feet away. Ten. Five.

It stops and snaps abruptly back. It finds the drop he saw first, then begins to trace the tunnel in the opposite direction, the way I went first before doubling back when I felt the track descending.

My heart leaps. If my hand bled just enough for a few spatters before stopping, it might lead him the wrong way.

He begins to walk the line, his pace quickening, and I risk another look. In the darkness of the tunnel, with the tank on his back and his slow, careful movement, it’s like we’re underwater, not on the Daedalus reef but in some deeper, lightless place, like a wreck. He takes another step away from me. Apparently he has found the trail he was hunting, and I think wildly of Ariadne’s thread spooling out behind me. But he’s wrong. He’s going the wrong way, and I have to bite down a shout of defiance and triumph. He moves off farther, and I hear the wrenching of another heavy door.

This is not the way he had come in. When he first came down he appeared in the tunnel quite suddenly, not with the long lead-in I would have seen and heard if he had come from all the way down there, and that means that the stairs he used are close to the cell. One of the doors I had taken for another prison. It has to be.

I swallow, fighting my own indecision, knowing he might come back at any moment, knowing that he will soon realize the trail he is following has dried up, knowing that I have to go. Now.

I come up out of my wooden, joint-aching crouch and begin to pad quickly along the track till the curve straightens out, then I set my heels against it and take three long strides toward where I think the wall should be, right hand out in front of me, fingers splayed. When I hit solid stone, I take three strides back to the track, move a few feet farther down, and repeat the process, all the while straining to hear the sound of the man in the mask coming back.

On the third attempt I find the door. Fumblingly, my hand locates the latch and presses it. It gives with barely a sound, and the door pulls open. Beyond it, lit by a soft gray bleed from somewhere above, is a staircase.

It is the closest thing to light I have seen for hours, and it works like a beacon on my mind as I step into the stairwell and start to climb.

I’m getting out. I’m escaping. He’ll realize his mistake and come back, but it will be too late. I’ll be long gone . . .

But where will I be? I had thought I was under the villa where we had been staying, but this tunnel, the railway line doesn’t fit with that. I climb, reaching as I do so in my mind for the last thing I remember before waking up in the cell, and it comes with startling, horrifying clarity.

I see the body on the living room floor, the back of his head bloody, the blood I can still smell on my own ravaged hands.

I can’t remember hitting him. Just looking down at him.

And then I’m in a much older memory of darkness and blood, one touched also with gas and oil and with the scent of hot, friction-burned metal.

Mom? Gabby?

And now I know why I’ve been thinking about my sister so much. After all these years and in this, of all places. It’s not just because Gabby was where my lies began. It’s because I killed her.





Chapter Thirty

I stared at my phone, processing what I was reading. Manos Veranikis—Mel’s waiter boy—had been swimming off the stone outcrop just west of the Minos hotel’s private beach, where he sometimes took snorkelers. He was gathering sponges to sell, diving from the rocks. He was by himself, which he shouldn’t have been, so there was no one to raise the alarm when he apparently hit his head and lost consciousness. He drowned, and his body washed ashore later that evening.

Sponges. Jesus.

I saw again his mother’s face in the restaurant, the recognition of Melissa and the sudden, irrational fury. Maria blamed Melissa for her son’s death, and now I understood why. We had gone to the Diogenes on our last night, but he hadn’t been there. Mel was disappointed because he had promised us sponges. I saw him in my mind’s eye, miming the basketball-size one he had planned to bring her.