The Masked Truth(25)

I’m being sarcastic, but he nods. “Good idea. They’re long gone, and this gives us a safe opportunity to test how to deal with it.”

I shake my head and climb over the desk.





CHAPTER 11


Aimee is dead. Aimee, Gideon, Maria, and if we don’t get to a phone Lorenzo will join them, if he hasn’t already. I don’t think about that. About the likelihood that no matter how fast we move, it’ll be too late for Lorenzo. I have to keep telling myself that we can save someone. Because I didn’t save Maria or Gideon. Or, now, Aimee.

The sight of Aimee’s body does not send me tumbling back into the horror of the Porters’ murders, possibly because I’m too busy keeping my dinner down. Gray shot her in the chest the first time, but it seems that a random shot to the chest doesn’t instantly kill. Like the Porters.

They had names. Claire and David. Does it make it easier to lump them together as “the Porters”? Maybe. I don’t know.

Is it okay to make it easier? Or is that hiding? I don’t want to hide—really, really don’t want to hide—but I do want to be okay. When I hid under the bed, I was doing both, hiding and “being okay,” except in the end I wasn’t okay, was I? I’m alive, though, and that’s more than they got, so I should be grateful.

Round and round we go, guilt nipping at my heels with every step I try to take toward “being okay,” which means maybe I never will be, and I should have talked about that more with Aimee. And now she’s dead, and I shouldn’t think that, shouldn’t think how her death affects me, because that’s wrong, wrong, wrong. Like thinking that I’m sad the Porters are dead because it means I’ll never get to babysit Darla again.

But all that—all that thinking, the endless thinking—it comes later, after we’re past Aimee, because when I see her, I can’t think anything. Can’t form thought, really. Because when the chest shot didn’t kill her, Gray …

I’ve heard the term before. I can even remember the first time. Dad was playing poker with three coworkers. His regular monthly game, always at our house, because “You’ve got a nice house, Jim. A normal house. Hell, you’ve got a normal life too. Good wife. Nice kids.” I remember them saying that, or variations thereof, and I never quite understood what it meant, but I think now it was exactly what they said: that we seemed normal.

We were normal—it wasn’t a facade. My parents loved each other and they loved us, and we weren’t rich, but if I wanted something and it was a reasonable request, I got it. Not an extraordinary family in any way. Very ordinary, except, maybe, not so ordinary after all, because you don’t get that nearly as often as you should, and maybe that’s what I’m paying now, the price for normal, first my dad and then the Porters and now this.

It’s like being home-schooled, never mingling with other kids, never building up your immunity to the sniffles and sneezes that everyone else takes for granted, and then you go out in the world and a common cold knocks you flat on your back. Maybe my oh-so-normal life meant I wasn’t ready for trauma, that I wasn’t—as I joked to Lorenzo—inoculated against it.

The poker game … I crept down that night after a bad dream. They were talking, and I sat on the step to listen, because it was stuff about police work that Dad never brought home. They were discussing a crime scene—a suicide—and how the man’s brains were splattered on the wall, and it was then, as they said those words, that Dad spotted me on the step. He raced over with “You shouldn’t be down here, baby,” and I said, “What does that mean? Brains splattered on the wall?” and the look on his face, the horror that I’d overheard, wiped away fast as he scooped me up and said, “It’s just an expression,” and “Hey, guys, Riley’s down here, okay?” and they stopped talking, and he said, “Come on in and get some chips, and then we’ll take you back up to bed.”

Brains splattered on the wall.

It’s just an expression.

I’d heard it a dozen times since then. In a TV show, back when I could watch cop shows, before they only reminded me of my dad, every shot making me see him in front of it, the gun firing, Dad flying back, me wondering exactly how it happened—because no one tells you exactly how it happened—how long did he live, was he in pain, was someone with him? I really hope someone was with him.

Brains splattered on the wall. I’d read the line in books too, because even after Dad died, I could read those scenes—they were just words on a page, no sound, no image to trigger thoughts of my father, of the bullet hitting him.

Was someone with you, Dad? Did they hold your hand when you died?

I’d even heard kids at school say it, when a boy shot himself.

Brains splattered on the wall.

It’s just an expression.

Only it’s not. Not just an expression, Dad, but I know why you said that, because the truth … the truth …

When the bullet to Aimee’s chest didn’t kill her, Gray shot her in the head. In the forehead, a perfect hole between her wide brown eyes. And I see the wall. I see …

Brains splattered on the wall.

And it’s not just an expression.

I’m staring at it, and I hear my biology teacher’s voice, me madly scribbling the notes I would review again and again until the words were emblazoned in my memory.