“Oh, it’s not just Mrs. Petitjean who references your client’s diseased state of mind.” Novak’s oily with his own cleverness. “I have another signed statement here that corroborates everything Mrs. Petitjean has said.” He reaches inside his suit pocket and pulls out a white sheet. It’s been folded neatly, like someone’s run a thumbnail down the crease.
“This is the signed statement from Freddy Montgomery, made earlier this morning. Shall we have a read?” Novak unfolds the paper, pressing it flat on the table. “Angela Petitjean, her mother and I shared a bottle of champagne in my hotel suite in Boston. At the time she was troubled by what she termed a ‘personality disorder’ and also openly admitted that she wanted to hurt Saskia. She said she ‘wanted her gone.’ I’m afraid I distinctly remember the phrasing.”
I half swallow, looking from Mom to the letter and back. After everything we’d gone through together? “No!” I shout. “That’s not fair! Did he tell you he offered to kill Saskia himself? He said he knew contract killers who could send him her head in a box! Mom, tell them!”
“Oh, Angela, I tried to help you,” Mom says, her face cleaving into sobs once more. It’s a master performance, the likes of which I’ve never seen before.
Novak folds up Freddy’s paper. He’s barely able to contain his utter dislike of me. How can I prove what they did? How?
It’s like the room has tipped and everything’s sliding. I can’t get a proper grip.
“Of course it was Elbow Lake,” Mom says suddenly, her jaw jerky and sour as she spits out the words.
“I’m sorry?” Tate says.
“That’s where they found Saskia’s body. Elbow Lake. It’s where my daughter first loved HP.” My mother heaves and crumples. When she finds the stamina to sit up again, she finally looks right at me and there are layers upon layers in her eyes, like filters in front of a lens. Fear is a layer and pain is in there, too, but the thickest of them all is guilt.
Tate turns to me, wide-eyed. My throat constricts and I’m shaking. “We went there for grad, HP and me.” I think of us on the dock, eighteen years old, HP standing on the edge in his board shorts with his back to that clear water. You walk around with your eyes closed, too.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” Mom wraps her arms around herself. “But I can’t in good faith protect you any longer.”
I try to think of a single time in my life when I felt protected by her. Never. Not once.
“We’re charging you with first-degree murder and obstruction of justice.” Novak gathers up his paperwork, threading Freddy’s statement back into his pocket. “Within the hour it’ll be official.” He helps Mom out of her chair and she walks with him to the door, her legs stalky as if they won’t bend properly.
Once they’re gone, Tate exhales noisily. “Do you have any idea what the hell’s going on here?”
“It wasn’t me, Tate. I know it looks like it was, and everything’s stacked up against me, but I swear to God, I never killed Saskia. I walked away.” I rub my nose against the knuckles of my thumbs. “There were times when I thought about it; but when I said those words to Freddy, it was me trying to rid myself of the compulsion. And then, suddenly, Freddy and my own mother were hatching a plan, pushing me to it. They even got Saskia, brought her to Elbow Lake, Tate. I could have hurt her but I didn’t, because we don’t all act on our worst intentions, do we?”
Tate scratches his beard, distracted. When he speaks, it’s a throwaway comment, an aside. “If we did, there wouldn’t be enough rooms like this one.”
I want to hug him. He nods and stands, his hands in his pockets. “If you didn’t do this, Angela, how are we supposed to show that they did?”
I close my eyes. “I don’t know,” I say. The darkness feels good.
chapter
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27
When I was a kid, my parents took me on a road trip to the West Coast and we drove right through the middle of a tree in Northern California. It was an old tree, knotted and stoic from the side view, but minivans were rolling right through the middle of it while kids hung out the windows scraping their Slurpee cups along the ridges of the tree’s callused innards. I could hear their plastic straws rattling like sticks down a washboard. Mom turned from the passenger seat to explain that the giant sequoia was rotting from the inside out. At the time I didn’t realize the extent to which she was doing exactly the same thing.
She was so focused on my life being different from hers. Throughout her marriage to Dad, the years dripped by for her in humdrum mundanity as she traveled further and further away from exceptional, becoming little more than a mediocre housewife. Long lost were the days of her glamorous youth. After a few years with Dad, nobody noticed her. For twenty-five years my dad studied Greek while my mom chopped vegetables, and if I think about it now, I get why she was so desperate for me to do something with the chances I had. Claim your life, she told me at every opportunity, before somebody claims it for you. I wonder now if I ever really understood what she was saying. I always thought she was talking about HP.
After I shared the details of what had happened with HP, my mother ran with the drama. She ranted about what I must do next, how I must get my life in order now, show them all up. Finish it, darling, drive it home. Leaving things as they were was lily-livered—what I needed was closure. How carefully she hid her own devastations. She hid her meanings, too, never outright saying what she thought I should do, but lining every sentence with suggestion, like silk behind a curtain. The more we talked, the more insistent she became.
It was her idea for me to invite Saskia to the lake—hers! And Freddy supported it wholeheartedly.
“Elbow Lake is the perfect setting,” she’d said. “It’s so symbolic. Everything began there and now you can finish it there. I love a full circle.”
“What if I don’t want to meet with her? What if I never want to see her again?”
“Forgive and forget.” It had become her mantra, delivered by rote so many times that I think even she had lost track of what she was asking.
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
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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.