Girl One(58)

“Exactly. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I figure she changed her mind. Do you know why she set the fire instead of using the gun? So it would be easier to pin it on me. She’d heard me yelling at Bellanger about hellfire. The whole world had heard it. With a fire, you don’t have to worry about fingerprints or who bought the gun. I never gave her an answer, but she found a way to pin the whole thing on me.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, trying to make it sound true.

Ricky Peters opened his palm flat, as if showing me he had nothing, even as his eyes glittered dully against me, mocking. I knew he was enjoying this.

“Why do you think I ended up here? All the evidence points to me. I threatened to take that man’s life, and I truly did want him gone. I’ve never denied that. I was on the compound the night of the fire. I left behind evidence. There was gasoline found at my apartment. I was forced to take a new plea deal. Fifty years behind bars, and I waived the right to appeal. It was the best I could do. If I went against your mother without physical proof, and that courtroom looked at me the way you’re looking at me, I’d have been facing the chair. So I did what I could.”

I breathed in, breathed out. My mother with a gun. My mother with a match. The wild look in her eyes as we ran, that freedom, that thrill.

“Do you want to know what gets me through the lonely nights? Maybe I didn’t convince the whole world that Dr. Bellanger was an evil man,” Ricky said. “But I convinced your mother. And now look: His work was lost. Nobody else managed to step into his shoes. For a while, life was restored to the way it should be, just men and women creating families together. Or I thought so, until you showed up in the news.” I felt that deep-seated hatred beneath the surface, cold and unyielding, always there.

“You’re upset that I’m trying to restore what Bellanger achieved at the Homestead,” I said. “Is that why you had my mother attacked?”

He didn’t even blink. “We just covered this. I’m not the bad guy here.”

By now some of the other visitors were trickling away, the guards’ stares drawing a tighter lasso around the room. “Bonnie Clarkson,” I said, and his expression shifted. “That attack was in your name. A little girl left scarred.”

Ricky’s face stayed closed off.

There was the sudden pull at the back of my skull, an almost overwhelming desire to draw the information out of him. To reach inside him and extract it by force, have that control over this man who still saw me as a threat to his own power. But we were surrounded by strangers and witnesses. “Somebody’s been following me and the other Homestead survivors,” I said instead. “A man in a maroon sedan. Friend of yours?”

“You can’t use me as a scapegoat for the rest of your life,” Ricky said.

Fine. Enough. Leaning forward, I sought out his gaze and locked eyes with him, feeling his sudden stillness. The dizziness swelled and crested more quickly this time, like it was a muscle I’d been training. “Tell me if you had anything to do with my mother’s disappearance,” I said into the receiver, and imagined the words traveling that brief distance, striking his eardrum, sending the fine vibrations and electric signals crawling up the auditory nerve and landing in his brain. “Tell me,” I repeated, “if you did anything to my mother.”

His face twitched with a quick muscle flinch, like he was trying to shake away a bad memory and couldn’t. His mouth dropped open. “No,” he said, like a sleepwalker. “I didn’t do it. I know nothing about it.”

“Tell me if you set the fire that killed Bellanger,” I said. The dizziness made me clutch the edge of the chair.

“I didn’t set the fire.”

I absorbed the shock quietly. So everything I’d known about my origin story was a lie. It felt like my DNA was untwisting in response, taking me apart. I hesitated for just a moment. “Tell me,” I said slowly, “tell me if my mother threatened Bellanger the evening of the fire.”

“She did,” Ricky said. “She spoke to me just like I told you. I’ll always remember the look in her eyes. That long, dark hair.” He lifted a finger, sketched a line up and down, up and down, as if he were stroking my hair through the plastic.

The visiting time was almost over. To an outside observer, Ricky and I were doing nothing wrong—just two people talking, like any other pair in this room. But I felt conspicuous, wild, reckless.

“Do you know who’s after my mother now?” I asked, and realized too late that I’d phrased it all wrong, a question and not a command. The dizziness fell away, and Ricky began turning his head, responding to the guard’s announcement. Our connection wavered and I was scrambling, ordinary again.

The prisoners were rising. People were hanging up phones, gathering their things, preparing to walk away. I tried to catch Ricky’s eye, but he kept his head lowered. “Sixteen years, Josephine,” he whispered into the phone. “The first plea deal. The deal I turned down. Do you know what my idealism cost me? I could be a free man today. When your mother set that fire, she hurt a lot of people. A lot of people. More than you know.”

“What does that even mean?”

Still, he wouldn’t look at me. “Think it through slowly, Girl One.” Then he was walking away, absorbed back into the bloodstream of jumpsuits as if he’d never been here at all.