“Granted, but when he asked what Mel and Simon had been fighting about, she freaked, like she’d given something away. It’s fucking strange. She comes to a reunion for people she doesn’t know. A reunion, for fuck’s sake. What’s that all about?”
I was starting to giggle again. His hushed earnestness, combined with the fact that he was saying things I had been thinking, seemed incredibly funny.
And you were pleased that he wasn’t as charmed by her as you thought.
That too.
“She even looks a bit like Mel,” Marcus went on. “Have you noticed? I’ve mistaken them for each other twice. Twice!”
“I don’t think she can help that,” I said, cutting the girl a little slack. It felt good to be her defender while Marcus took aim. “It’s not as if she dresses like her or something.”
“Oh my God!” said Marcus, delighted and horrified. “How weird would that be?”
We laughed some more and for a warm, bright moment it was like we had gone back more than 1999 days and it was, as it had once been, the two of us against the world, together.
“Come on,” I said, getting up and offering my hand. “Bedtime.”
I realized my mistake as soon as I saw his face.
“I didn’t mean—” I said, but he cut me off, grinning and nodding and not quite looking me in the eye, so I pulled my hand away before he could take it.
“Of course,” he said. “I know. Sleep time.”
I lay awake much longer than I expected to, so I heard the sound of someone moving in the corridor, a strange, stealthy movement that set old boards creaking, then silencing, then creaking again. I kept still, trying to determine whether the sound was coming from the hallway outside my door or the floor below.
Yours. Pretty sure.
Which meant what? That Marcus—the only other person with a third-floor tower room—had decided to go to the bathroom or gone down to make himself a sandwich, or . . .
That Gretchen had come up to apologize some more? Or he was paying her a visit . . .
No. I didn’t believe it. I got up and stood motionless by the door but was suddenly so tired that I felt wobbly and light-headed. After a minute or two, standing there, listening to nothing, I forgot why I was there, and when I remembered again, I decided that I had been asleep after all and had dreamed the creaking of the floorboards. I went to the window and peered out and down, though I didn’t know what I was looking for, and my gaze found the gate at the end of the drive. It was open. Not thrown wide and fastened back like it would be to let a car in. Just cracked in the middle, as if someone had slipped through on foot.
The doors and windows were all locked downstairs. There was no alarm system, but the house was secure. It had once been a kind of fortress, after all.
Still . . .
I made a mental note to mention it to Simon. Maybe there was something wrong with the latch. He’d want to look at it.
I shuddered, feeling suddenly and inexplicably unnerved by the depth of the darkness around the house, the lack of street lamps or the familiar ambient glow I was used to in Charlotte, even when the lights were out. I took it for granted. Without it, up here in the mountains where the only light was the moon and stars overhead, the darkness felt strangely ancient, primal, a darkness that led the mind to invent monsters. It filled the great window like a pool.
I didn’t like it. It made me feel scared, exposed.
I stumbled quickly back to bed and pulled the covers up around me like a shield, my head thick and throbbing from all the wine, though why it had kicked in so abruptly then, I had no idea.
Chapter Nineteen
He will be back soon. I know it—and I will not be able to tell him what he wants to hear. I try to make a picture of the fragments he has given me. At first I thought he wanted to hear about something I did, but now I think differently. He thinks I saw something and then did something bad in response.
Naughty.
It was a strange word and thinking about it again raises the hairs on my neck as his voice had done, that singsong tone of his . . .
It wasn’t me who had done something bad. It was him. But I had found out about it and then—afterward—had been naughty. What had I done or tried to do?
Blackmail.
Yes. That felt right. That would be naughty, wouldn’t it? He did something, and I caught him and tried to milk him for it . . .
Except that I didn’t. My momentary elation dies like a sputtering candle, and I feel the full dread of what is going to happen next. He thinks I have tried to hurt him, but I don’t even know enough to negotiate some kind of deal, some way out . . .
I am going to die for someone else’s crime. I am going to be murdered by mistake.
It is almost funny, and if I thought I might be able to convince him of his error, I might still find it in me to laugh. But there is no mercy in that voice, no understanding. He might be giving me one last chance to speak, but he is also toying with me, enjoying my misery, my terror.
He isn’t going to let me live, no matter what I say, no matter what I know or don’t know.
Manos.
The word floats up like driftwood surfacing from some deep, unseen current. It bobs on the surface of my consciousness, rotating in the flood, but I can make nothing of it. It sounds Greek—and familiar, which doesn’t help—and as I try to puzzle it out, a new possibility occurs to me. I have been assuming my captor has the wrong person, that his questions are absurd because he thinks I know something I don’t. But what if I do? Or did? What if I really did stumble upon some crucial truth, the core to everything that is going on, but have forgotten it?
Again the idea strikes me as darkly funny. Dying over something I’ve forgotten is, if anything, worse than dying for something I never knew. Now it’s not just an accident—it’s another study in my dazzling ability to fuck things up.
Manos.
The word continues to spiral on the currents in my head, but it’s already being carried away, and I no longer feel sure that it means anything.
There has to be more I can remember. It is maddening to still have these dark holes in my mind where the last few days have been, though, now that I think of it, the vague amnesia began before I woke up down here, and it affected all of us. We were all tired, listless, forgetful. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but now I wonder if it was more than sun and jet lag and overindulgence.
Drugs?
God knows we were drinking constantly, and anyone had the chance to slip something in our glasses. But that would mean it had been someone there. One of the group . . .
That couldn’t be. Surely. I have decided that my interrogator was not a local, but I haven’t seriously considered the possibility that the person who chained me up here is one of those I was laughing and drinking with only days ago. One of my friends.
Or is that me sidestepping reality again, just another lie?
No, I haven’t put a face to my captor, but then I haven’t tried to, have—in fact—avoided even thinking about it, because a part of me knows that it is at least possible that the face in the dark is one I know all too well. The thought settles on me like snow, freezing me in place, heaping up around me. It is paralyzing. Unhelpful. Instead of dwelling on who my captor is, I need to focus on escape. If I am going to think about him at all, it is to come up with something I can use against him.
I think over our last encounter again.
A scent blew in with him. It lingers in the darkness still, a sharp, familiar smell—gasoline and motor oil—and it takes me back to the tire and lube place beside the Great Deal employee lot. There are other memories too, some much older and too dark to look at . . .
Night and silence and blood and gasoline all combining to hiss, You have been here before . . .
and one memory that is new and fresh: the generator in the basement of the villa.
That’s where I am. I’m sure. When Simon showed me the generator, there had been another door; I saw it quite clearly in my mind, pulled out of forgetfulness by the scent of the oil. A wire-mesh door to storerooms and cellars . . .