Lies We Bury(79)

Thirty-Two

A car alarm howls somewhere on the street, triggered by the reverb from the gunshot. My legs are frozen. Numb. I lift a finger to my cheek. Red comes away. A pool of blood stemming from Chet’s torso touches my sneaker. I blink hard, taking in the scene, expecting the edges to blur and remind me that I’m dreaming another nightmare. But everything remains crisp.

Chet is dead—the demon who made me, in more ways than one, who kept me and my family prisoners, and who died believing he could make up for it. Somewhere not so deep inside me, gratification glimmers, content that he’ll never have the chance.

“You weren’t supposed to come here,” Jenessa says, her tone flat.

I take in her brittle mien, the stiff ridge of her upper lip, the gun, and don’t reply. Blood drops splatter her blue shirt, blowback from shooting Chet from behind. My own shirt feels thick, warmer than it should. I look down; the same gruesome pinwheel pattern covers my chest.

“Sit down,” she commands.

I step over Chet’s body in a daze, careful not to track blood in Nora’s—Jenessa’s?—house. Shock twines through my system as I pat my chest, confirm the bullet didn’t travel through Chet’s sternum and into my own.

I stumble to a couch cushion. Slide to the back of the seat. Jenessa’s face is not one I recognize. Disgust hardens the features I always thought beautiful, if demanding.

After a silent moment, she begins to pace. Walks from one end of the cramped room to the other, then turns and retraces her steps. Her head sways from side to side, and the long black hair she so loves swishes behind her. Back and forth. Back and forth. It’s mesmerizing. Allowing me to completely check out from this situation and the danger ready to consume me with its barbed tongue.

She whirls to face me. “You’re not supposed to be here. Chet wasn’t supposed to be here. Did you two talk beforehand? Did you coordinate this when you visited him in prison?”

I shake my head, my mouth still uncooperative. Light shines through closed shutter slats behind me, making the water glass gleam. A pair of steel scissors lies beyond it.

Jenessa shifts her weight to one foot and tucks the gun beneath her elbow. “I contacted him, too, you know.”

I don’t say anything, too scared to move.

She nods, pursing her lips together. “Yup. I asked him for tips, tricks, ideas on how to lure people or kidnap them—all hypothetically, of course, so the warden would allow my letter to go through—but he wouldn’t give up the goods. He replied to me with some load of crap about me getting help and him seeing the error of his ways. I wanted to go to him in person, to get the real deal from him, but I couldn’t risk my plan being linked back to him. His coming here was probably an attempt to reason with me, given that I used Nora’s address on the letters. I guess I won’t ever know.” She glares at his body. “He deserved to die years ago.”

“What happened to Nora?” I clear my throat—try to work through some of the fear billowing up as bile. Make sense of everything that’s happening. My shoulder aches, and I recall how badly I slipped and fell yesterday at Four Alarm. Was that yesterday?

“You killed Nora,” I whisper, unwanted tears filling my eyes. “Why hurt her, after everything we survived?”

Jenessa cocks the gun, then uncocks it. Cocks, then uncocks. She stares at me, as though debating killing me right here and now. “What about me, Marissa—or Claire or whatever you’re calling yourself these days? What about what she put me through?”

“I know she wasn’t a great mom. She had her problems, but she loved you—”

“Do you know how I spent my tenth birthday?” Her jaw works back and forth waiting for a response. “Do you?”

I shake my head.

“She sent me to score drugs for her. Somewhere over the river. Antidepressants, oxycodone, and the same lithium that Chet used to give Rosemary to put in our food and keep us subdued. She said she’d developed a taste for it and couldn’t function without it. Know how I spent my eighth birthday, the year after we got out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Alone. I was alone, as a child, in her apartment, while she blew what was left of her settlement money at the casinos.” She spits the words, glaring at me, as if I, too, am to blame. “When I got older, she made me pose for men. Take photos in lingerie and post them online in cybersex chat rooms. I was fourteen.”

“That’s awful. I’m so sorry,” I say slowly and try to remember what I was doing then, why I didn’t help. At fourteen, I was dealing with my own self-disgust, surfing the internet archives—likely too self-involved to realize anything was wrong with her. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“And be placed in the foster system? No, I don’t think so.”

“Jenessa, why didn’t you tell . . . us? You could have come and lived with us—”

“She never would have allowed it. She knew that’s what I wanted all along. She told me over and over that if I did tell, she would clean up her act, and then I’d be returned to her, and it would be worse. She told me how Chet raped her at least once a week, and taking photos for men was nothing in comparison when we needed the money. I confronted her about it, about the abuse she inflicted on me, at the beginning of this year. We were arguing, and my gun went off. It was an accident. I only meant to scare her, to torment her a bit the way that she tormented me for years.” She pauses. “I sobbed for an hour in this room.”