Lies That Bind Us(82)

“What did you say?”

“Manos,” I say again. It sounds soft in my mouth, like a prayer. “The waiter from the Diogenes. The boy who died. That’s what Simon was asking me about. I think he asked Gretchen about it too because you told her once, when you first met. In a bar. He wanted to know if she had told anyone else . . .”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Melissa shoots back, but she’s on the defensive now and I don’t believe her. “Manos? What does that have to do with us?”

“Simon was angry,” I say, lining up the remaining pieces till the picture comes together. “That day, our last day, five years ago. He was mad. I didn’t know why because I never saw you in the cave with Brad, but he was. He was sick of your flirtations and whatever else they turned into. He was angry, and he took the Jet Ski out. I remember seeing him bouncing along the waves. He was going so fast. And then he went round the cove. Where the boy was diving for sponges.”

“That’s enough,” says Melissa. “Stop talking now, or I swear to God, Jan . . .”

I see it all like the picture in Marcus’s slide show, and I remember that last morning, Simon’s grimness when he took the Jet Ski out and his fury when he brought it back, running it up through the shallows and onto the rocky shingle.

Fury, and deliberation.

He had wrecked it on purpose, and the only reason to do that was because he was looking to cover up damage the Jet Ski had already sustained . . .

God.

The truth hits me cold and clear as the night air from the shattered window upstairs.

“Simon hit him, didn’t he?” I say. “Ran him over. By accident, perhaps, but . . . well, he didn’t help him. He left Manos there to drown, and then Simon came back to the hotel and ran the Jet Ski aground so that no one would see the damage he’d done to it when he hit the boy.”

“You’re insane,” she says. “Delusional.”

“And you thought I’d seen,” I add, realizing. “You thought I knew, that I told someone.”

Something happens in her face, a narrowing and tightening, as she stills, listening.

“It wasn’t just the name in the leaves, was it?” I say. “It started before the trip. Someone sent you something.” As soon as I said it I realized the full horror of that truth. “Oh my God. It’s why the trip happened! You probably had no intention of following up on all that 1999 stuff, did you? There wasn’t going to be a real reunion. But then someone wrote to you. Yes? A letter maybe. Or an e-mail from some untraceable account. You wanted us back here to find out who it was, so the 1999 party became a real thing. What did they ask for, money?”

“You’re making this up,” she says, her voice flat, hollow.

“You know I’m not.”

Marcus is watching us, like he is out in the darkened house of a theater, gazing up at the stage.

“Maybe Simon didn’t tell you right away,” I say. “About Manos. You don’t have to take the blame for any of this or cover for him. He was the one on the Jet Ski, not you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. If it had happened I would have known. I would have seen it. I was with him the whole time.”

“No, you weren’t.”

It is Marcus. We stare at him in stunned silence, and I think again of the theater, as if he is in the audience but has stood up in the middle of a key scene and joined in.

“What?” says Melissa, thrown, all her righteous fury draining away.

“I was on the headland,” he says. “Jan and me . . . we weren’t getting along so I went for a walk. Bird watching, if you can believe that. I had binoculars.”

“No,” says Melissa. “No!”

“Yes,” he replies. He speaks quietly, simply, like he is explaining something hard to a slow student. “I didn’t see the thing itself, but I saw which way Simon took the Jet Ski. And I thought it was weird later, when he said he’d gone the other way round the bay, and I remembered seeing him fiddling with the nose of the thing before he got in range of the beach, like it was already damaged—before he ran it aground. I didn’t know about the dead boy—Manos, I mean—not till recently. You asked me to put together the slide show of the trip, remember?” he said to Melissa. “And I wanted to add the names of places, little maps and stuff, you know? So I looked up the restaurant online. The Diogenes. Found the story about the waiter, realized he died the same day as when Simon took the Jet Ski out . . .”

“No,” says Melissa again. “That’s not proof of anything.”

“And I thought about how he ran the Jet Ski aground and how pissed he had been in the cave, and how that boy waiter had annoyed him, and I wondered . . .”

“Why didn’t you say?” I demand, almost as horrified by him as I had been of her.

He sags, and for a second his eyes close, then he shakes his head and shrugs, like he is shifting the weight of the globe itself off his shoulders.

“I didn’t know anything,” he says. “It just felt . . . weird. Coincidences. But the police had ruled it an accident, and I didn’t really know so . . . I just wanted to get a reaction, see if there was more to it . . .”

“It’s not true,” says Melissa.