Behind the Lie, page 24
Another thought fought its way through the scurriers at the back and emerged, poking blindly forward. “Are you really me speaking to myself?”
Her sister smiled. “Now that would be a trip, wouldn’t it? Make sure to remember everything I say. You’ll want to report it to your therapist later.” She laughed and flipped to her stomach, kicked one leg at the knee, flexing a tender, white foot, the red nail polish glinting like poppy petals. “If I were you, I’d leave this place.” She turned on her side, propped her head on her hand. “Why haven’t you? They’re not shackling you or handcuffing you. Don’t tell me you’re a scaredy cat. You always were such a timid kid. Kind of cute sometimes, but I never understood why you were.”
Holly grabbed onto a willow branch and pulled herself to her feet. The world spun. She squinched her eyes, waited it out. When she opened her eyes, the grass by her feet was wet and dented but bare of sister or ghost.
She was alone.
She walked along the shore, nothing new to her—just like old times—over lawn and sand. Twice she had to wade into the water to go around fallen trees and rocks. She soon came back to where she started, and her suspicion was confirmed. The lake house stood on an island, and the only way out was to swim or row. The motorboat, the only one she could see, bobbed across the water off the mainland.
“Come on, Holly.” The voice startled her, and she jumped, yelping helplessly.
How did Vera sneak up behind her? She hadn’t heard a thing.
“It’s not time to go home yet,” Vera said, leading her toward the house.
“When can I go home?”
“Soon. Never. In a year.” Vera laughed softly, pushed her into the hallway, guided her up the stairs and to a tiny room, more of a cell, with a twin bed wedged against a wall and nothing else. It was an improvement over the closet, so Holly didn’t fight. She was tired anyway, crazy tired, barely able to stand upright.
“There you go.” Vera helped her sit, then lie down. From a pocket she removed a syringe and jabbed Holly’s inner arm, depressing the plunger so quickly Holly hardly had time to react.
“What are you doing to me?” Holly asked, even as a knifelike cold raced from the point of injection to her hand, up her arm, across the shoulders, south to her heart and belly and sex, up to her head.
Vera smiled, perfect lips stretching over perfect teeth, her eyes the palest, crystal blue.
“Why are your eyes that color?” Holly asked. Weren’t they brown just yesterday? She was sure they were brown, amber, like Abigail’s.
“What color did you think they were?”
“Brown,” Holly said, slurring. “Like toffee candy.”
“Mmm, sounds good. But no, dear. My eyes were always blue.” She snapped her fingers. “But you know what? I wore contacts. Just for you.” She ran her hand over her hair. “I’m going to let this boring color grow out too. You know I’m a blonde, right? Natural.” She winked.
“Abigail,” Holly said, “what do you mean? You’re a brunette. Just like me.”
Vera snorted. “Good one.” Patted Holly’s cheek. “Night night.”
And suddenly it was night, though surely it had been morning only a few hours ago.
Holly awoke with the moonrise, its weak light painfully blinding to her sensitive eyes. Abigail was waiting for her, sitting wetly at the foot of the bed.
“Is it you?” Holly asked.
“Who do you think I am?”
“Are you Vera?”
“No, dummy. The bitch is gone out. Come on, get up. I need to show you something.”
Swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, Holly got up, feet on the icy floor. She felt grainy, hungry, ill. She needed the toilet.
“Okay, fine, go pee. I’ll wait.”
So it wasn’t Vera after all. If the girl staring at her with large, dark eyes was a figment of her imagination, she certainly would know what was happening inside her body. The bathroom was down a long hallway, and Holly passed five doors—shut, darkness and silence behind them.
“Are we good now?” Abigail asked at her elbow as she washed her hands.
“Am I going to make any sense of this, ever?” Holly asked.
Her sister sighed. “Perhaps. But you need to work on your getaway plan.”
They walked back into the hallway. “Why do you think they’re drugging me?” Holly asked. “I don’t understand.”
“I have an idea.”
“What?”
“Jeez, you’re not twelve anymore, Hol. Use your noggin once in a while.” Abigail stepped up to one of the closed doors and turned the knob. The door opened, and she went in.
Holly paused for only a moment before following.
There were six hospital beds in the room, two rows of three. Each bed contained a person. Each person was laced through and through with needles, tubes, wiring. Fluorescents lit each bed, barely illuminating the machines working on behalf of the bodies.
An alarm beeped to her left, and she recoiled, grabbed for the door. The person in the leftmost bed sat up, his eyes wide and staring. He was skeletal, clearly undernourished, and now the others sat up too, all of them turning their waxy faces toward her as if they were sunflowers and she the sun.
Somebody was running up the stairs, and Abigail grabbed her wrist, pulled her out of the room and down the hall to the narrow door of her cell. She managed to jump inside and shut the door just as whoever had been summoned by the alarm made it to the landing. And only then, as she slid along the door to the floor, her hands pressed tight against her mouth to muffle her labored breathing, did she realize that all the people in those beds were very young—not one of them older than fifteen or sixteen.
CHAPTER
41
Laney
LANEY KEPT THE car quiet as she drove—no radio, no chatter. She wanted no distractions for Oliver. She wanted him deeply immersed in his thoughts. About a half hour in, she asked, “What did her text say?”
His shoulders hunched higher.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone you knew where she was? Is she safe?”
He grunted.
She rolled down the window, and the heat barreled into the car, stuffing it with oppressive mugginess. Oliver endured for a few minutes, then turned to her. “Do you mind?” he asked, pointing to the windows.
“If you tell me what the hell happened.”
His legs twitched, as if he’d had to fight the impulse to jump out of a car plunging forward at seventy miles per hour.
She said, “It’s not just between you and Holly anymore. Whatever is going on affects other people. Badly. I’m not calling the cops yet, because all this”—she waved at the road—“is conjecture. I have no idea what’s at the other end. But I’m telling you right now that the moment I get a hairy feeling about wherever we’re going, I’m calling the police. So if there’s anything you might want me to know beforehand, tell me.” She sensed his bemusement and elaborated. “How involved are you?”
He wiped his face with his hand, and she rolled up the windows, kicked the AC down a few degrees.
“That’s a very interesting question,” he said, as the car began to cool. “How involved am I. I guess if you’re going to give it a long overview, I’ve been involved with Holly for twenty years. That’s one way to look at it.”
A quick glance told her he was red-faced, bitter mouthed. “And the short overview?” she prodded.
The silence hung between them, as heavy in its way as the humid air had been a few minutes ago.
“The short overview is that I lost my job. Fired. For stealing company trade secrets.” He shrugged slowly. “There’s no solid proof I took anything.”
So what had he been doing? Pretending to go to work every day? Laney quashed the impulse to drown him with questions and put on her investigator hat. One question at a time. “Did you take it?”
He snorted. “No, Laney. I did not suddenly wake up one morning and decide to undo ten years of research and career advancement by stealing my own formulas.”
“So …”
“Holly stole. From me. She stole from me.”
His voice was so flat, so low, so desperately hurt that Laney was overwhelmed with the urge to pull over and hug him. But that would have been weird, so she kept driving, swallowing past the empathetic lump in her throat. She kept her mouth clamped shut because he was opening up now, and she would not jeopardize that.
He said, “They came to me first, you know. The Volkins. Vera tried to seduce me. Like in some bad eighties spy movie. They offered me stupid money for my research.”
Laney switched lanes and exited onto a smaller rural highway. The Thruway’s noise receded, and foliage, lush and heavy, surrounded them left and right.
“Why didn’t you accept?” But what she was really asking was why did Holly accept when he hadn’t. She didn’t think money swayed everyone, but she’d had plenty of bitter experience to understand it swayed many. Given enough in the balance, it swayed most. What was the difference in the balance sheet between Holly and Oliver?
“Why would I? It’s my work. My research. I have a good salary. What they were offering me came with a lengthy prison sentence if I got caught. I laughed them off and forgot about them until a month later fucking Vera shows up at our house for dinner.” He leaned his temple against the window. “I thought she was going to keep trying to get to me, and all along she was already in with Holly. I was absolutely convinced she was only there because of me.”
The car passed through a tunnel and emerged on the other side hugging a cliff, the trees along the road sparse and the sunlight strobing against their eyes so that Laney had to squint and decelerate.
“Believe it or not, I only realized what had happened when Holly came to visit me that first time. I could see right away something was up. And then after, when I came back to the lab, I saw she’d taken some of the samples I’d locked away.” He shifted and dropped his head back, stared at the ceiling inches above him. “I wanted her to tell me, but I couldn’t ask her. I thought if she was going to ruin me, then let it be.” He pressed his fingertips into his eyelids. When he spoke next, his voice was rougher, harder. “I failed her once. I said to myself, maybe this is payback. Or a test. Every day she acted like nothing happened. Every day I willed her to come to me of her own accord. The more time passed, the less I cared about my work. About anything.”
“Jesus, Oliver. You should have confronted her if you knew. For fuck’s sake.”
He nodded. “Have you ever been betrayed?”
The question was a twist to her guts, her face warming in answer. “Yes.” Too many times.
“And did you ever confront the person?”
She shook her head. “Never got the chance.”
He cut his eyes at her without turning his head. “Right. Well, I tried to cover her tracks. After the first time, whenever she came, I made sure to leave fakes lying around. They beat me the first time, but all the rest of the stuff she took was nothing. Saline with some vitamins thrown in.”
Laney turned onto a one-lane road, taking them away from the cliff’s edge and into the woods.
“When did they fire you?”
“Last week. Apparently, somebody saw her come out of the lab the first time she visited. They said she looked shifty. And then the vials were missing. It was bad. Of course, I swore up and down it wasn’t me. Or her. I nearly came to blows with a guy over it. But yeah. They let me go.”
Last week was when Jack Boswell resurrected the hacked surveillance footage. Laney slowed even further, the road becoming rugged, more serpentine. She wanted to say something soothing, but nothing came to mind.
“But why did Holly do it?” she finally asked.
Still limp against the seat, Oliver turned his face toward her. “Because she thought I didn’t love her enough.”
“What? Nobody does that because they’re not loved enough!”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t loved enough. I said because she thought I didn’t.” He sighed. “If she’d been happy with me, she’d never have done this to me. Not for anything. Or anyone.” He shifted and looked at the wall of green outside. “If she’d loved me or trusted me enough, she would have come to me for money. If it was about money.”
Laney wanted to bring up the financial troubles but then changed her mind. What did she know, anyway? When did anybody ever love her enough to hide her trespasses? And why were they talking love all of a sudden? She ground her teeth in irritation. What did that have to do with anything?
“So why did she shoot Volkin?”
Oliver snorted. “She didn’t.”
“What?” Laney stole a look at him but had to concentrate on the curving road ahead. “Why is Step telling everyone she did?”
With a note that sounded a lot like satisfaction, Oliver said, “Because it’s no fun admitting your own wife shot you in the ass.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Vera shot him.”
“Well, why the hell didn’t you tell the police that, Oliver? I mean, what the fuck?”
“Because, Laney, I had a lot on my mind. Okay? I didn’t really feel like chatting with anyone. Is that fucking okay with you?”
“Jesus, no, Oliver. Not really. Not really okay. Were you ever going to tell the cops it was Vera?”
“Yes!” The word resonated inside her small car, and she gripped the steering wheel harder.
“Okay. All right. Why? Why did she shoot him?”
He folded his arms over his chest and glowered at the windshield.
“Oliver?”
“Because Volkin was going to kill me. He came close.”
They drove in silence for a mile, and then Laney said, “Jesus.” She glanced at him again. “Who set the fire? I’m afraid to ask, but now that we’re talking and all.”
“I did.”
She nodded. At least this made some kind of sense. “And you drove into your own house because?”
He lowered his head and pressed his palm against his brows. “I don’t know, Laney. I think I went crazy that night. I wanted to destroy everything. I wanted to—” His voice wavered, and he clamped his mouth shut.
“Okay. I know.”
“You know?” Acidic again.
“I was a cop in the city, remember? Listen, the things people do when they’re pushed beyond endurance. I mean. I get it. I’ve seen it.”
He snorted again. “Well. Anyway. Anyway, Vera shot him. If it makes any difference, I don’t think she meant to kill him. I’m not even sure she meant to hurt him, really. It was the only way she could get him off me.” He leaned his temple against the glass. “Don’t think I haven’t entertained the thought that she saved my life.”
Laney made another turn and emerged into a clearing, then slammed on the brakes. She was less than twenty feet from water’s edge, a green lake spreading before them like polished malachite, reflecting a sallow sky. And in the middle of this lake an island, like an illustration from a children’s book. Except the emerald mound before them was scored with treads and the ancient house standing in the center of it was peeling and bent, the roof overgrown with vines and the doors splintered.
Laney threw open her door, stepping out into air that buzzed with insects and shimmered with vapor. There was an overturned gurney on the island’s lawn, a wheelchair half in the water, bobbing gently in the waves. It looked absolutely, thoroughly abandoned.
A heat of disappointment burned through her, and she turned, ready to get back into her car, when, amplified by water and the humidity hanging like a scrim over the lake, she heard the creak of a door hinge and the slap of foot on stone step.
CHAPTER
42
Holly
HOLLY JERKED TO her feet and lunged to the window, gripping the splintered sill to keep from falling. She was weak and so tired she’d passed beyond any normal concept of tired and into a kind of disembodiment. Alone again—no ghost or hallucination to keep her company—she tried to open the window, but it was locked or painted shut and wouldn’t budge.
The motorboat sat on the island’s lawn now, and a man had climbed (fallen) out of it, was limping up the lawn toward the house with a crutch. A smaller figure stumbled out of the boat, also fell into the water, righted herself and ran ahead of him, then doubled back to help, but he shook her off. In that instant, as he angled his face and the porch light blazed awake, Holly recognized Step and recoiled, moving away from the window. Her first thought was to hide until she understood that of course he knew she was there and hiding meant nothing.
Slowly, she crept back to the window and looked down. He stood before the porch stairs, his entire body bent in on itself, swaying. His grunt as he placed a foot on the first riser and dragged himself to the next carried all the way to her window. And despite everything, despite everything he was and did, despite the fact that he’d nearly killed Oliver, she wanted to help him. At this moment he was a person in need, in pain, and she turned toward the door, opened it, and headed into the hallway without thinking.
“Man, what is wrong with you?” Abigail was with her again, a wet, cold presence by her side. “You’re going to help him up the stairs? Really?”
Holly stopped.
“You know,” Abigail said, “you should have gone into nursing. Why didn’t you?” She snapped her fingers. “Was it because you’re certifiably insane?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Holly walked to the stairs and paused, listening. “I was only insane temporarily. Because of you.”
A wet movement against her shoulder told her Abigail shrugged.
Now there were footsteps beneath them, and voices, three of them. Holly held her breath and listened. Step’s hoarse baritone sawed through the night’s quiet, drowning a girl’s high-pitched jabbering, and through it Vera’s grave tones.
“What’s he saying?”
“Shhh!” Holly swatted thin air. Her sister was gone again.
Holly’s thoughts came clearer, as if the fear and anxiety coursing through her blood scraped away the fog, taking Abigail with them. The trio moved closer to the stairs and their words gained meaning, and the meaning forced Holly backward into the dark.
