The Lies They Tell(67)
A confession as they’d danced, mistaken for grief. “How awful for you.” Eventually, more words came to her. “How did you even find him?”
“Offer enough money, you can find someone to do anything. Something like this . . . you can’t leave a digital trail, bank transfers. The police will find it. You have to be meticulous. I can be that.” He picked something up from the magazine rack—a tube of lip gloss with a sparkly label. Cassidy’s. “He’d done time while he was living in Illinois. Manslaughter. I told him what I wanted. He should’ve been able to do it.”
It took Pearl a second to find her voice again. “You must’ve let him in. While your family was at the club that night, before you left to go up north. He was already in the house.” That was why Dad never saw any footprints by the fence, why the home protection system never went off until it detected smoke.
“He was supposed to kill the watchman. It was the best way to let the fire burn, to destroy everything. But he didn’t.”
Because Dad was Yancey’s friend. He’d been coming around the Sanfords’ house for years, since Evan was a kid. Whatever atrocities Evan had been willing to commit inside the house, when he’d recognized Dad, he hadn’t pulled the trigger. Pearl shut her eyes for a moment, released a trembling breath. “God. They were your family.”
Tristan stopped walking the lip gloss through his fingers, dropping it back among the New Yorkers and Architectural Digests. “They weren’t.” He turned to her. “David and Sloane Garrison were self-serving hypocrites who treated their children like trophies. I was always the one David chose. To crush. To try to break down.” He exhaled slowly, through a clenched jaw. “Cassidy was their automaton. Joseph was their pet. All I wanted was to be free of them.”
A gust of wind slatted rain against the portholes. The stained-glass lamp swayed on its chain, casting red and yellow dapples of light across the teak paneling. “Are you free now?” He didn’t answer her. She was sweating slightly, taking slow steps toward the cabin door. “That’s not what I see. I think it’s tearing you apart. I think that’s the real reason you didn’t leave town. You couldn’t stand to leave what you did. You’re grieving.” She shook her head, disbelieving. “You never expected to feel anything, did you?”
Tristan’s fingers curled, released. He closed half the distance, tension spooling between them. “Stop moving. Don’t make me hurt you more than I have to.”
She hesitated, swallowing an acid taste. “You’re going to have to.”
Pearl ran. He was faster, agile, blocking the path to the door, making her wheel around—she shoved over a storage container, strewing the contents in his path. The only place left was the head.
She ran inside, slid the catch home, spun to face the tiny room, full of a sickening understanding of things already done, scenes played out. As if in slow motion, she went for the cupboards under the sink—there must be a weapon, something Cassidy hadn’t thought of—then screamed as the door was slammed from the outside.
It took only two hard kicks. The gold catch—weakened from last time—exploded. Pearl lunged forward, going nowhere, only wanting to escape his hands. But he had her, grabbing her hair and shirt, heaving her forward into porcelain and a gradual, yielding darkness.
Twenty-Four
THE RAIN WOKE her, pattering against the awning overhead. She blinked, gazed at a miasma of gray and shadow. Her stomach rolled, and she turned her face against the ground, waiting for the need to be sick to pass.
It did, though her mind was still clouded as she sat up. Being upright expanded the ache, thrumming through her head, sending bolts of pain down her neck into her shoulders. Pearl dropped back on one hand, dazed.
Tristan was there, at the mast, the hood up on his raincoat. He was refitting the sails, preparing to change course. She lay on the deck of the cockpit, her bag tossed beside her. Spots of blood, still tacky, splattered the front of her sweatshirt. She reached up, found the throbbing, matted place where her head had connected with the shower stall. He must’ve carried her here. She thought again of her bag, the only belonging she’d brought on board. The only evidence. It seemed so clear: she was about to go overboard. Unconscious.
Heart pounding, Pearl dropped into a crawl, leaving the cockpit and making her way, elbow by knee, along the deck. The storm had darkened the day almost to night, rain coming down at an angle. The deck was slippery; there wasn’t much to keep her from going over the edge. The metal railing had gaps wide enough for her body to easily slide through into the waves below, unseen, unheard. Lost.
She dropped onto her belly as she passed below where he worked at the mast, gritting her teeth as the nausea came back, the blurred vision. She didn’t dare think any further than rounding the curve to the pulpit, reaching it, clinging onto the railing there. There must be a lifeboat somewhere on board—in fact, she was almost sure she’d seen one, bright yellow, the inflatable kind that folded into a storage valise—but where it was or how she’d get to it now was beyond her.
She heard him move, the squeak of rubber soles on the deck. Pearl lay her head down, squeezing her eyes shut, waiting for him to say he could see her. Nothing. He must be on his way back to the cockpit. He’d realize she was missing in a second. She crawled on, finally reaching the bow and clinging to the railing, spray striking her face.