God.
But then other thoughts came and I, tourist still, moved on. If this was the key to the mystery word Manos, as seemed likely, why was Gretchen so convinced we were in danger?
You most of all.
It didn’t make sense. Or rather, it made perfect sense up to a point but didn’t explain what had happened to Gretchen or why she had made her odd pronouncements. It explained Maria’s anger when she recognized Melissa, but it had nothing to do with Gretchen’s shredded underwear, and the simplest explanation was that the two things were, therefore, unconnected, that they were separate issues. One was an accident—tragic and perhaps influenced by Melissa’s flirtatious manipulations, but an accident nonetheless, though one that perhaps some local had seen fit to underscore by piling the leaves into the shape of the boy’s name.
It was a poor revenge, I thought, ashamed of myself. We hadn’t even known what the word meant. Maybe that had only been a beginning, and there was more—worse—to come. But if so, if someone blamed us for Manos’s death and meant to do something to us as a result, how did Gretchen know, and why would she think I was the one most in danger?
Thinking of Gretchen brought me back to the other matter. She hadn’t even been with us last time, so ravaging her clothes was either a mistake or was unrelated to the boy’s death. A mistake, though unlikely, wasn’t impossible. I thought of those big windows in the villa. If someone had seen her going to her room, they might have mistaken her for Melissa and targeted her by accident. She did look a lot like her.
But tearing up someone’s underwear to revenge a child’s death? No. It felt petty, wrong. I couldn’t believe it. Either that was an unrelated bit of spite from someone else, or Gretchen had done it herself in a melodramatic—and frankly psychotic—bid for attention.
My gut said that was it, and not just because I couldn’t think of who would hate her enough to do something so mean-spirited and creepy. I had believed her when she told me she knew it wasn’t me who had cut up her clothes. Maybe this was all just willful self-delusion, an extension of the bad dreams she told everyone about in which she had been interrogated by monsters, and that her warning to me about being in danger was just more amateur theatrics. Some people like being at the center of drama, even when it’s the drama of malice and intrigue.
Especially then.
There was no doubt the woman had issues, and I of all people should understand that. She was sad, lonely, overwhelmed by her more sophisticated and glamorous friends—myself, obviously, excluded—and she wanted the limelight. If she had grabbed it in a way that was preposterous and inconvenient for everybody, there was still no more point in attacking her for it than there was in indulging her fantasies. Leaving the bathroom and heading back to the car, I resolved to be Gretchen’s friend until she felt comfortable enough to tell me the truth. After all, if anyone should understand someone lying to make a shitty situation seem better, it should be me.
So I gave her a welcoming smile when Simon led her to the car. He was using his cell phone, talking, I assumed, to Melissa.
“I have her,” he said. “We’re on our way back.”
Gretchen looked wan, her face pale and un-made-up, her eyes sunken and bloodshot. She gave me a weary hi and the kind of shrug that could have been an apology but could also have just been a comment on her lot in life. I offered her the front seat, but she shook her head. She wanted to be as alone as the car would let her. I couldn’t blame her for that.
His task complete—or half-complete—Simon’s mood improved considerably. And he flicked on the radio. By the time we were back on the coast road and speeding toward Rethymno, he was humming along to Pearl Jam and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Gretchen said nothing, just stared blankly out the window as the dusty scenery slid past. She looked numb and exhausted, and she clearly didn’t want to talk. Perhaps later, I thought, I could get her on her own.
I wanted to talk about Manos, to tell them what had happened to him, if only to explain his mother’s bizarre behavior at the restaurant, but I couldn’t. Partly it was the fear that, after a cursory sympathetic remark, Simon would shrug it off as irrelevant to him, to us, that it would make me like him less. But it was partly something else too, a lingering anxiety that Gretchen hadn’t been lying, that there was still something I didn’t understand that made the situation far worse than I could imagine.
Marcus had reacted to the word Manos. The name. Did he know about the dead boy? If so, why had he pretended not to? Why had he lied to me?
I shifted in my seat. I was missing something important, and though I had no good reason to think so, I couldn’t shake the sense that it was something bad. Something terrible.
The thought took hold, and for all Simon’s chipper observations on the weather and the view, I found myself getting more and more apprehensive with each mile we traveled, as if the villa was a kind of prison where terrible things might still happen. I could have escaped, I thought, I could have left the airport bathroom and tried to book myself on the next flight to anywhere or checked into a local hotel and sat out the trip there. I hadn’t because that would have been crazy, a ridiculous and defeatist overreaction to a little strangeness and tension, but I couldn’t shake the idea completely.
You could have gotten away, I said to myself. But you missed your chance. And now? Well, we’ll see soon enough, won’t we?
We rounded a bend in the road and a pair of large pink-faced vultures looked up at us from the carcass they were picking over. A dog, I thought. They had white furry collars, but their heads were bare. Simon pointed without taking his hands off the wheel.
“Cool,” he said.
I just nodded.
Chapter Thirty-One
I freeze in the stairwell, though I know he may be on his way back up, may only be seconds behind me, laboring along the tunnel in his scuba mask, blade at the ready. My legs just won’t move.
You killed your sister. All those years ago. You killed her and your mom, and you’ve been lying about it and everything else ever since.
No.
Yes. It’s true. You know it now. You remember.
I do. I see it. I have always remembered waking up in the darkness of the flipped car, Gabby still and silent in the seat next to me, my mother crumpled in the driver’s seat. A silence that sucked in the whole world, the darkness of a black hole from which nothing can escape. I remember the hell that was the wait for someone to see, strapped into my seat on my side, my face pressed to the window against the road. The Toyota’s frame had crumpled in the roll and my seat belt was jammed, though that was nothing compared with the damage on the left side, which had taken the full force of the impact. I remember the disorientation, not understanding which way was up, and then the slow, dragging horror as I made sense of it all but could do nothing but weep and wait.
Eventually there were lights and sirens and men with tools who cut the car apart and told me I was a very lucky girl. They gave me candy and hot chocolate and sympathy. Lots of that, though it would never be enough. They gave me what they could, and they asked me what I remembered.
And I lied.
That was when it started. I told them my mother was tuning the radio, got distracted, lost control.
Mommy.
I didn’t say I poked Gabby one too many times, a hard stick in her ribs with the forefinger of my left hand. I didn’t say that she screamed. That my mother turned round to tell us that if we couldn’t behave till we got home . . .
And that was all it took. A momentary glance away from the road, and then a curve she hadn’t seen properly, misjudged in the darkness, over compensated, and then off the road and down the steep embankment, rolling into trees.