Every Single Secret(76)

He’d been isolated from other people, but he hadn’t been held prisoner, not technically. He’d been allowed to roam the grounds, hike into the forest and up the mountain to the overlook. He’d been educated in a broad range of subjects and encouraged to expand his knowledge with books. It wasn’t the confinement that was the problem—plenty of kids were raised in apartments tinier than this one in cities all over the world. It was that he’d been considered a specimen. An object to be observed rather than loved.

If he’d started out an anomaly, a peculiarity of human DNA, at the end he became a freak. Or, at least, that must’ve been how he felt. Just standing in the dingy apartment at Baskens, even I felt like an alien.

Heath had shown me his old bedroom—the one I had thought was the Siefferts’, that was papered in the brown roses. And then through the grass-cloth-papered sitting room. We were in the far room now, and I glanced at Cerny, standing by the chalkboard. I thought of Glenys—Cecelia—out in the rain, stiffening in the wet leaves.

“Where are the police?” I hissed at Heath, acutely aware of the knife in my boot.

“Don’t freak out. They’re on their way. In the meantime, just listen to what he has to say.”

I caught my reflection in the huge mirror over the sideboard. I looked so different now than earlier. Pale and lifeless.

I turned to Cerny. “Tell me about Cecelia.”

“She was my assistant, for many years. We had a brief dalliance, but there was a disagreement—”

Heath snorted. “She was in love with you. And you treated her like shit.”

“It was a mutual decision to part ways. She moved out west. Found a position at another institute, doing research on attachment disorders. And I opened the Baskens Institute.”

“She disappeared, like that, from both of your lives? Then showed up in time for this heartwarming family reunion?”

“I let her know Heath was coming home,” he said. “To try to untangle the past so he could move forward with his future. She came back because she wanted closure, just like I did. Just like Heath. Cecelia was always troubled by what we did. She never got over it.” He nodded at Heath. “She never got over losing him.”

I folded my arms. “Is that why you had to kill her? Because she loved Heath more than you?”

He smiled. “I’ll admit, when she returned to Baskens, I found that I . . . I still had a certain fondness for her. We had a reunion, of sorts. Those were her clothes, of course, that you found in my room.”

Heath looked sharply at me.

“But I assure you, Cecelia’s death was a result of her own actions. She was a troubled woman. Watch the tapes, Daphne. You’ll see.”

I looked down at the iPad. Opened the next file.

Heath’s boyhood unfolded before me. I watched him scream and run. Bang doors, throw lamps, books, and plates. He slammed his head against walls and floors. Toppled chairs, upended tables, urinated in every corner of every room.

There were calm moments too—when he ate or read or did schoolwork. He built birdhouses. On a canvas drop cloth spread on the living-room floor, hammering, sanding, and painting quietly. In these interludes, he appeared focused and relatively content. It looked like he worked on the birdhouses for countless hours.

Cerny cleared his throat. “The birdhouses were one of the primary rewards we used when Heath brushed his teeth or ate his lunch or bathed himself without oppositional behavior. Unfortunately, at some point along the way, he unearthed my old pellet gun and began to use the birds for target practice, shooting them right out of the houses. Needless to say, we had to find another reward.”

Heath had moved closer to the mirror and was staring into it. I wanted to ask him if he’d found that pellet gun again. If—sometime when I was up on the mountain or in the house and couldn’t hear the sound of the shots—he’d taken it to the birds I’d found yesterday. I wondered if he’d gathered them up later, in the weak morning light, dew drenched and cold, and flung them somewhere in the woods. If he’d burned them.

I turned away from him and opened the next file.

Music was the other reward Cerny and Cecelia offered Heath. Cecelia had an old-fashioned boom box, and, in the later years, an iPod attached to a speaker. She usually played music at Heath’s solitary mealtimes, in the dining room, but sometimes she did it at night in his bedroom. As he would settle himself in bed (alone, no kiss, no tuck-in), the room would fill with the strains of Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald. And Frank Sinatra, of course. Lots and lots of the Chairman of the Board.

“I take it you don’t appreciate fish for dinner,” Dr. Cerny’s voice suddenly rang out from the iPad, tinny but clear.

The time stamp at the bottom of the screen showed 9:36 p.m., and the brown floral walls were doused in shadow. They were gathered in the bedroom—Cerny, Cecelia, and what looked to be a young-teen Heath. Heath was sitting in bed, his knees drawn up under the covers. Cerny stood, arms folded, in one corner of the room, Cecelia in another.

Heath didn’t answer Cerny, and Cecelia shifted her weight. There was a strange feeling in the room. Something electric and dangerous even I could feel, just viewing the tape. I glanced at Heath, remembering how strange he’d acted when Reggie Teague had told us our first meal at Baskens would be fish.

On the tape, Heath spoke. “I warned you,” he said, his adolescent voice cracking. Goose bumps broke out on my arms.