A Flicker in the Dark(104)

“You know I have to call the police,” I say. “Cooper, I have to call them. You’ve killed people.”

My brother looks at me, his eyelids heavy.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says. “Tyler is dead. Daniel doesn’t have any proof. We can leave the past in the past, Chloe. It can stay there.”

I entertain the thought—the single scenario I haven’t yet considered. I think about standing up, opening the door. Letting Cooper step outside and walk out of my life for good. Letting him get away with it, the way he’s gotten away with it for the last twenty years. I wonder what a secret like this would do to me—knowing that he was out there, somewhere. A monster hidden in plain sight, walking among us. Somebody’s coworker, neighbor. Friend. And then, as if I had stretched out my finger and touched static, I feel a shock run down my spine. I see my mother, the way she had been pushed against the television screen, hanging on to every moment of my father’s trial, every word—until his lawyer, Theodore Gates, had come over, telling her about the deal.

Unless you have anything else I can work with. Anything at all you haven’t told me.

She knew, too. My mother knew. After we got home from the station, after turning in that box, my father must have told her, stopping her in her tracks as I ran up the stairs. But by then, it was too late. The wheels were in motion. The police were coming for him, and so she sat back, let it happen. Held out hope that maybe it wasn’t enough—no murder weapon, no bodies. That maybe he would go free. I remember Cooper and I on the stairs, listening. His fingers digging into my arm, leaving bruises like grapes at the mention of Tara King. Without even realizing it, I had witnessed the moment my mother had made her choice—the moment she had chosen to lie. To live with his secret.

No, I don’t. You know everything.

And that’s when she changed. That slow unravel, it was because of Cooper. She had been living under the same roof as her son, watching as he got away with it. The light had been extinguished from her eyes; she had retreated from the living room to her bedroom, locking herself inside. She hadn’t been able to live with the truth—what her son was, what he did. Her husband in jail, the rocks through the window, and Bert Rhodes in the yard, arms flailing, nails ripping at his own skin. I feel her fingers dancing across my wrist, tapping the blanket as I pointed to those tiles: D then A. I understand now, what she had been trying to say. She had wanted me to go to my dad. She had wanted me to visit him so he could tell me the truth. Because she had understood, listening to me talk about the missing girls, the similarities, the déjà vu—she knew, more than anyone, that the past never stays where we try to keep it, stuffing it deep into the back of a closet and hoping to forget.

I had never wanted to return to Breaux Bridge, never wanted to walk the halls of that house. Never wanted to revisit the memories I had tried to keep stranded in that tiny town. But the memories didn’t stay there, I know that now. My past has been haunting me for my entire life, like a phantom that was never laid to rest, just like those girls.

“I can’t do that,” I say now, looking at Cooper. Shaking my head. “You know I can’t.”

He stares back at me, his fingers curling into a slow fist.

“Don’t do this, Chloe. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“It does,” I say, starting to push my barstool back. But as I begin to stand, Cooper reaches out, his hand gripping my wrist. I look down, his knuckles white as he pinches my skin, hard. And now I know. I know, at last, that Cooper would have done it. He would have killed me, too. Right here, sitting at my kitchen counter. He would have stretched out his hands, clasped them around my throat. He would have looked into my eyes as he squeezed. I don’t doubt that my brother loves me—to whatever extent someone like him can love—but at the end of the day, I am a liability, like Lena. A problem that needs solving.

“You can’t hurt me,” I spit, yanking my arm from his grip. I push my stool back, stand up, and watch as he tries to lunge at me—but instead, he stumbles forward, clumsy. His knees buckling under the sudden pressure of his weight. I watch as he trips on the leg of the barstool, his body crumbling to a heap on the floor. He looks at me, confused, before looking up at the countertop. At his empty glass of wine, that hollow orange bottle.

“Did you—?”

He starts to speak, but then stops again, the effort suddenly too much. I think back to the last time I felt that way, the way Cooper does now—it was that night in the motel room, Tyler pulling on his jeans, ducking into the bathroom. The glass of water he had pushed in my direction, forcing me to drink. The pills that were later found in those very pockets. The pills he had mixed into the water, the same way I had mixed mine into Cooper’s wine, watching as his eyes had gotten so heavy so quickly. The violent yellow bile I had coughed up the next morning.

I don’t bother with a response. Instead, I look up at the ceiling, at the camera in the corner, as small as a pinprick, blinking gently. Recording everything. I raise my hand and gesture for them to come inside now—Detective Thomas, sitting in his car outside with Daniel, phone in his lap. Watching everything, listening to it all.

I look down at my brother again, one last time. The last time it will ever be just us two. It’s hard not to think of the memories—running through the woods behind our house, tripping on the mangled roots erupting from the soil like fossilized snakes. The way he would wipe the blood from my skinned knees, push a strip of gauze tight against my stinging skin. The way he had tied that rope to my ankle as I crawled deep into that hidden cavern, our secret spot—and suddenly, I know that’s where they are. The missing girls, hidden in plain sight. Pushed deep into the darkness, somewhere only we would know.