Bury Me(70)

“Shhhh, it’s okay. Everything’s okay now. Don’t look at him—just look at me,” he whispers soothingly.

It’s suddenly easy to make the tears fall because I’m upset and frustrated. I don’t want to stop looking at Tanner’s dead body. I want to stare at it and laugh at it and maybe kick it in the stomach just because I can.

“It’s so much worse than we ever thought, Nolan. I managed to get past him and I grabbed the piece of wood he dropped. I didn’t mean to do it, I swear. He was going to kill me! Oh God, he was going to kill me!” I cry, pressing my face into his chest, finally being able to smile now that my face is hidden.

Nolan rubs my back, moving both of us away from the hole and out of the room. I sigh in relief that he did exactly what I hoped he’d do, instead of going to the edge of the hole and looking down.

“I’m getting you out of here,” he tells me as we make our way through the basement and up the stairs. “I’ll call the police as soon as we get upstairs. You can tell me everything while we wait for them. I need to check on my mother, but I don’t want to leave you.”

When we get to the top of the stairs, I move out of his arms and slide my hands into his.

“I’ll be fine now that I’m up here, I promise,” I reassure him, swiping away my tears and putting on a brave face, knowing I’d make a great actress in Hollywood. “I’ll call the police while you go check on your mother.”

He hesitates and stares down at me, his face filled with worry.

“Nolan, I’m okay now, I swear. I would never forgive myself if you stayed here and something happened to your mother,” I tell him with a perfect sad shake of my head.

“I don’t even know how long I’ve left her alone. She’ll probably need to eat and take her medicine, and then I’ll need to sit with her until she falls asleep to make sure she digests everything okay,” he explains.

“It’s fine. It will take the police a while to get all the way out here anyway. I’ll go upstairs and rest on the couch until they get here. Take your time. I’ll be fine,” I reassure him.

With a quick kiss to my cheek, he turns and races down the hall to the front door. He gives me one last questioning look over his shoulder before he walks out the door.

“Go, I’ll be okay,” I tell him.

As soon as the door closes behind him, I turn and run as fast as I can back down the stairs into the basement.

“You really are an evil genius,” Mavra says with a laugh, pulling me from my memories. “I can’t believe you were able throw a bunch of heavy stones into the hole to keep her weighted down, drag a hose over to it and fill it with enough water to cover the body.”

Turning my head to the right and looking into the kitchen, I smile when I see the old, faded newspaper article held up with a yellow smiley face magnet.

“Brave eighteen-year-old woman endures nightmare and lives to tell the tale,” I say aloud.

My eyesight doesn’t let me see much farther than a few feet in front of me, but I don’t need to see the title of the article to repeat it.

“Now you know why I kept the article all these years,” I tell her, looking away from the fridge and back at my daughter. “It’s not like I could go around telling people I’m an evil genius, so I wanted to make sure I’d always have a reminder.”

I’m treated to another eye-roll from Mavra.

“Even though I’ve read that article so many times over the years, now that I know what really happened, I am completely amazed. You were able to explain away everything so the police wouldn’t convict you of murder, and you gave Nolan something he could believe and something he would understand,” she states. “They all believed you really did have a twin sister and her name was Ravenna, allowing you to move forward using your real name of Tatiana. They even believed she died when you were both five years old from drowning in the lake. And on top of that, with Nolan’s statement confirming your parents’ strange behavior toward you in recent weeks, they even believed that your parents were so distraught over the death of their daughter Ravenna that they spent the next thirteen years trying to turn you into her, pretending like it never happened. Complete with electric shock therapy to make you forget you had a twin.”

I smile, happy that my daughter acknowledges just how much trouble it was to come up with all of that, while at the same time trying to hide my sister’s dead body so it would never be found.