Our Little Secret(59)
Freddy, for his part, must surely have been trying to help me when they first thought up the plan. If my mother’s intentions always had a slant of self-interest—some kind of vindication—his were always true. But here, now, with Novak closing in, he’s reverted to his Machiavellian self: Freddy the businessman, vise-like in a pinch. He might have been acting on my behalf at Elbow Lake, but the statement he’s written today is a sellout, nothing more than a wriggle of desperation. He knows I can’t prove him a liar and I’ll never forgive him for it, or forget.
And beneath everything piled up on top of me, big-eyed and quiet in the wreckage, is Olive. Her sweetness when I slept next to her; the way she tried so hard to give me her mother’s necklace as a gift. Only she really noticed how sad I was, what I needed most. And I’ll never be allowed to see her again.
chapter
* * *
28
Novak returns to the room alone. He sits down in his chair without speaking, staring across the table at Tate and me as he readjusts the chain of his pocket watch and primps the cuff links in his sleeves.
“Anything else?” he says after a long silence. He’s roostered and smug with triumph.
“You’ve got it wrong,” Tate tells him. “Your case isn’t as watertight as you’d like to believe.”
“See you in court, Tate.” He stands. “It’s over, Ms. Petitjean. Our story has its ending.”
My eyes feel raw and puffy.
“You’ve talked a lot about the years you’ve spent with Mr. Parker; God knows we’re all aware it’s the greatest love affair of the century. But I have to say we’ve gotten to know each other well in the past couple of days. Haven’t we? Perhaps we can be pen pals? You can send me postcards from jail.” He straightens, buttoning the front of his jacket, and doesn’t look back as he walks away.
After a few seconds, Tate stands and lifts the strap of his bag over his head and around his chest like a bike courier. He moves near the door and puts his hands in his pockets.
“I really hate that guy.” He shrugs. “Look, I have to get going here. Let’s try and stay positive. Eat the food they bring you. Stay hydrated. Whatever happened today and whatever Novak thinks, it’s not the end of the story, so no dark thoughts, okay?”
I put my chin on the table, and my eyes feel heavy as they brim with tears.
“It’ll be my word against Mom’s.”
“Yep. Hers and Freddy Montgomery’s.” He sucks the hair beneath his lower lip. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Are you scared?”
“I don’t know what I am.”
My heart feels listless, as if inside my chest there’s a drummer who’s had enough of the beat.
“I’m gonna go now. It’ll be okay,” he says, then ambles out.
Soon they’ll take me out of this room and put me into an even smaller one. I wonder if it’ll have a window. Shards of late-afternoon amber light spear in from outside, cutting the wall into pieces.
Everything in my life is gone now but sadness. Perhaps that’s all I’ve ever really had for company. Mom, HP, Freddy, Dad, even Ezra—they all abandoned me one way or another. I’ve become a ghost story that HP will whisper to himself in the dark. I wonder what he will tell Olive about me, in the future. The steps the two of them take in daylight won’t ever be quite as certain, and I never would have wished that for them. It’s not what I pictured at all. This whole thing began in loneliness and it wasn’t meant to end in it. Oh, Saskia. The universe came for her just as I said it would, but nobody listened to my warnings. But there’s irony at every turn, because here we are at the very end, and Saskia’s still taking everything I have.
THE URGE TO DESTROY IS CREATIVE. If only they would shine their flashlight at the actual monster. Everyone in this building has me pegged as the psychopath, the one who destroyed the lives of others. Don’t they know that everybody has the urge to destroy? It’s simply a sliding scale. Put a crowd of a hundred people in a room and wait. Eventually the psychopaths will emerge, and I’m telling you now, they won’t be who you first suspected and there’ll always be more than one. Watch the successful people who push to the front; keep an eye on the hierarchy as it establishes itself. Take Freddy, for example: if I’m a psychopath, then so is he, so is Mom, and do you really think Novak isn’t? Deep inside the fibers of everyone’s brain, where the real stories are told, there’s always dark intent. And Novak said it himself—he wants me in jail, he wants to see me suffer.
But they’ve grappled me into a box now and they’ll spend the remainder of my time here hoping the lid stays on tight. It’s okay. I know how they feel. I’ve been battling demons for so long. No one wants to see the truth: wrong, right, guilty, innocent, honest, dishonest; with the right set of circumstances, we’re all capable of anything.
Just as I’m scraping at the rusted window clasp, scrabbling fingerprints down the glass of the pane, Novak pushes the door open.
“We’re moving you.” He bends back out of the doorway to nod at someone down the hall and give them a thumbs-up. Then he ducks back in. “What did you just say?”
“I didn’t speak.”