The Telling (42 page)

“But then once she'd helped, the cops suspected her of being involved in
committing
the crime. I hadn't foreseen that. She was livid, said her whole life was ruined. I had to do whatever it took to shut her up. I had to keep her with me. We went to Seattle for weeks, and then I told her that I couldn't disappear for good without leaving you a note. Closure. She was okay with it because she thought we were leaving you behind.”

“We came back to Gant a couple of weeks ago and hid in that cabin in the preserve. But do you know what I saw when I went looking for you?” He lifts my chin with a finger. “You were at a bonfire with those kids. Parker had his arm around you.” His eyes go glacially cold. “You weren't pursuing my killer. You'd moved on.”

I push his hand away. My throat is closing. “I was gutted,” I say roughly.

“Didn't look it. You were drinking a beer and singing along to the lyrics of some pop song. My plan to frame my grandfather for my murder and then reveal myself to you so we could leave Gant was turning to shit.” His voice goes quiet and his hands tuck into his pockets. “You needed a nudge. I had Maggie let herself into the house and leave you that note. Wrote exactly what I told her to. She took my photo album. She didn't care why we were doing any of it. She just wanted to go. Problem was she went through the pack I left behind and found a letter.”

“Hearts and doves, dated March seventeenth,” I say. “We found it in her backpack. You lied to me about not writing to her.”

He looks wounded as he shakes his head. “It was to you. She came out of the house with a stack of letters I'd written and never had the guts to send. Confessions about everything I wanted; what I was planning to do. Can you imagine how pissed she was? She said if we left together that minute, she'd let it all go. I begged her to wait. She threatened going to the cops. She was going to ruin it. I thought, what the hell?
She deserves it.
You needed a bigger villain; you needed one from our stories.”

My hand's at my throat. I'm agitated, can't remain still, at the holler and calm of his confession. “You poisoned her with my rosary,” I say.

He jerks his head, flicking phantom hair from his eyes. “I tried, yeah. It would have been fucking poetic. It belonged to you, but no one was going to trace it to you because no one living knew it existed. I'd taken it from that old chest with some other stuff way back when we opened it. I couldn't use Maggie again to sneak into the house for it. I had to go. Middle of the day. You were out. Cal was gone. Basel growled at me—can you believe that? He knew I wasn't supposed to be there. I smashed up two of those rosary peas and put them in Maggie's canned pineapple. I thought it would be enough. She'd been getting paranoid that I was going to ditch her, though, and when she started feeling sick, she freaked out and ran. And okay, maybe I'd been watching her like I was waiting for it to kick in.

“She went for the cave under the spring that I'd showed her, knew I didn't fit. I would have waited her out, but then there you were.” His expression is absorbed, watching it play out. “It was a colossal fuckup. She could have surfaced and told you everything. There was the way she died, too. You dragged her up. I worried about how long it might have taken her to drown. The police would be suspicious. When you were hauled in, I called in an anonymous tip about the cave. I'd camped across from the house and saw the cops.”

Ben was there, witness to everything. A hollow, black feeling washes through me. “I'd left the rosary in our hiding spot. I don't know why.” He gives a plaintive sigh. “Maybe I'm lying? Maybe I hoped you'd find it . . . guess it was me. You'd see what I was doing and you'd be happier for it. I liked thinking you were my accomplice. But with the police showing up, I thought, what if she turns it in to them? It would have had both our fingerprints, yeah. I was presumed dead, so you would have taken the heat. I would have come clean,
you know that, right? I never would have let you get into trouble. You were never in danger.”

I try to move around him; he blocks me.

“It had to feel real for it to work,” he says pleadingly.

I grab his arms and dig my fingers through his sleeves. “Do you hear yourself? You are admitting to killing Maggie. You are confessing to
murder
.”

A calm settles over him and the night, and the silence pulses in my ears before he says, “I am confessing to you. It's no different from admitting it to myself.”

I shrink away. The horror of what I thought Ben had done was less when Ben was dead and returned. He was changed into some not-quite-living thing. And you don't blame a ghost for acting ghastly. Then I saw Becca and it became unforgivable. And impossible. It wasn't real just like our stories—they
weren't
supposed to be real. Make-believe allowed me to slay the monsters in my imagination; it built me up. This violence is cutting and it only tears down. Ben is not a vengeful hero from a story. He is flesh and blood and murder.

“I didn't know you were going to the spring until I saw you leave that morning. I watched you dive. You were proof, Lan. It was working. You were braver. Daring. Yourself.”

I can't stand his face. His eyes ignite with the lantern light, giving him a duplicitous, cat-eyed look. I watch the light-touched clouds above our heads in the silver and navy sky as Ben's voice rumbles along like distant thunder. “I felt certain that you'd found the rosary. You were trying to put it together. But you hadn't come looking for where Maggie had stashed the photo album, so you obviously hadn't found her note yet. I'd told her to leave the note somewhere only you'd see.

“You weren't coming clean with the cops about the link between our stories and the murders. I figured it was only a matter of time till you connected the stories with someone in my past. You'd understand that whoever told me the stories would be the killer. The album was the oldest thing I had; you knew right where I hid it. Then Parker's party. I was in the trees behind the house, and there you were with Ford. I heard you tell him off. It was like you were talking directly to me, asking me to take care of him next.”

“I wasn't asking you anything,” I say. “I stuck up for myself. It was enough.”

“No, it wasn't. He was worse than his brother. And he was out there, staggering home. Hammered. I used enough poison that time, shoved it down his throat, but it was going to take the cops a couple of days to run tests. I wasn't even sure they'd tell people he was poisoned like Maggie. I couldn't be sure you'd find out. I set Fitz busy catching all those birds. I killed those yappers to give you a push. You'd see more fragments of our stories, and the link to my past would be in your face. Undeniable.” He is silent for a moment. Then he says, reluctantly, “I admit that Becca was partially because I saw you and Parker kissing that night. I had to follow you. Had to know if I was getting through to you.”

“Stop,” I say.

“Fuck, Lana.” He tilts his square chin high, defying me. “You free that eagle for me, and then you kiss him up there for the whole island to see.
I lost my temper.
”

“I mean it, shut up,” I say louder.

He does shut up. The line of his mouth blurs as he holds the admission in. He starts up again as a whisper. “I almost jumped Josh.
Except that wasn't what this was about. Maggie had gotten you to focus. Ford had it coming, and it was the revenge you deserved. You hadn't come to look for the album, which meant you hadn't found the note, which meant you hadn't searched my room. I couldn't make it easy; you had to be the hero tracking down the villain for this to work. You needed a more obvious connection to our stories. I needed the victim to deserve it—and she did—and you needed it to be someone you would fight for. Becca was the obvious choice.”

I try to force the pieces to snap into place so that an alternative explanation takes shape. So that I do not have to believe what Ben is confessing to.

“You'd tell the cops that Becca's murder was identical to a story I'd told. They'd rattle Diane until she spilled about my grandfather and his stories and house of horrors. Or you'd find the note, hunt down the album that was always just waiting for you in the cabin, and demand the truth from her. Your trail, the cops' trail, they'd both lead back to him. And he was a phantom.”

An alternative explanation isn't coming together. But one unlikelihood occurs to me. “I could have been hurt in the cabin fire. You would never hurt me.”

He shakes his head adamantly. “I put the photo album by the door. You hardly needed to go inside. I didn't think you'd bring all of them with you. I only needed the fire as a distraction so I could get away. I knew you'd go for it. The way you looked running through the trees toward it . . . you were amazing.”

“I might never have found that place.”

“You knew right where to look. We explored those cabins together. It was near the spring where Maggie died. If you hadn't
found it, I would have figured something else out. I'm not saying the plan was flawless. It evolved. It was a moving target.”

I want to slip into the water below; make myself scarce and invisible. If there is less of me to listen, there will be less of me that knows what Ben has done. “You killed three people.”

“It saved you.” His profile is silhouetted against the lantern. He's still exquisite. “I'd do it again and again to bring you back.”

“You killed two innocent little dogs. You killed birds. How could you be capable of all that?” I tangle my hands in my hair and pull. “How could you say you did it for me? It's hateful. Becca, Ford, and Maggie were people. Becca had friends. She had a mother who's alone now. Maggie and Ford might have grown up to become decent people,” I say. “You ended their lives.”

“They were villains,” he says emphatically. “The hero kills the villains. And those kids you've been bashing around with? You think I didn't see them at parties or at school? You think I don't know Carolynn Winters or Rusty Pipe or Duncan Alvarez? Becca, Ford, and Maggie were cruel to you. They went first. Maybe I should have picked Carolynn? Or Parker?”

“Josh never did anything to me.”

“You had it bad for him for years and he didn't know you existed until . . . until . . .”

“Until what? Until your murder was spooky and people were whispering about it? Until the tragedy reflected on me and made me more interesting to them?”

“You said it, not me. I didn't want to hurt you. None of this was to hurt you.”

He reaches for me. I slap his hand away. “What about Fitzgerald?
Was this supposed to hurt him?” I yell. “He's being charged with four murders.”

“I told you. He was only to buy me time. He knows everything. He hates this place. They've treated him like an animal.
Worse.
I was kind to him. He knows I won't leave him in there. You disappearing with me
is
his fail-safe. You vanishing will be enough for them to know they've got the wrong guy.”

“You are a lie.” I move from the railing. I'm gathering courage as I grow angrier.

“I didn't know the truth well enough to tell it.” His voice breaks, he swallows, and then he continues steadily. “I didn't know which parts were Diane's paranoia and sickness and which were her father's. Those stories—his stories—stuck inside of me. He infected us with nightmares. There were no heroes. I had to get them out of my head or else I'd explode. I gave them the endings we deserved.

“I would brood over Gant and stop just short of telling you that I couldn't stand to hear you trying to convince me that you were happy. I wanted to tell you. I was so close. ‘Hey, Lan. My universe is shrinking here, watching you shrink.' I went away for three months thinking that I could get over you. If I could breathe without you, I wouldn't need to go through with it. I'd forget you existed. Except every fucking day there you were.” He jabs two fingers at his temple. “You were here. Always. What food you'd like. What you'd call the color of the sky. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, thousands of miles from you, and think I heard you breathing. I got back and you were electric at the airport. Laughing and talking on and on. The instant we drove off the ferry, you disappeared. It was Gant. It was killing us both, but you wouldn't leave with me. That little girl with
the freckles down her nose and the shifty eyes and the quick hands that could always steal cookies, she would have left. That girl would have followed me anywhere. The letter in your journal was a last-ditch effort. Spill it all; risk everything.”

“I didn't find it until a month ago. It's the only reason that I got out of bed,” I whisper. It feels like a memory of a memory I had in a dream.

“I hoped it would have that galvanizing effect before I
died
,” he says. “I couldn't stand that you couldn't—that you wouldn't—admit what you wanted from me. Here's the awful truth, Lana.” He opens his arms and says in a booming voice, “I am selfish. I was sick and boneless without you. I need you with me. I did this mostly so that you'd be brave enough to admit what you want from me.”

I shake my head. “I don't want anything from you. How could I?”

“That last night, you were about to tell me. But Maggie showed up half an hour early. She was nervous about having you in the backseat. She was scared that she wouldn't be able to keep you in the car and that you'd get out and ruin everything.”

“Why would you do that to—”

“To someone I love?”

“To me,” I say. Love seems too straight a word. If this is love, then it's the crooked kind.

“You had to see it. It had to be terrible and
enough
to jolt you into yourself. You were supposed to be awake. I was going to get out of the car; the attack was going to start on the road, from a distance, so you'd see the red face but you wouldn't recognize Fitz in the dark. The kid safety locks were on, and Maggie was going to crawl behind the steering wheel and drive you away. But you were asleep and listening
to music. We went for something more dramatic, spraying the blood in the car; it would be scarier, better. I miscalculated, though, and you couldn't make out the blood on Fitz's face, and Maggie screwed up calling it paint. You didn't connect it to the story.”