False Hope

by Meli Raine

  I'd do the same in his shoes. I make a split-second decision and err on the side of confession.

  They say it's good for the soul, so why not?

  “If you read the documents, then you know that Alice hired me. That Alice was behind the investigation into the Bosworths that’s taken place for decades.”

  “You’re not old enough to have been involved in this for decades,” she says, looking at me like I’m crazy. I’m a guy who’s just supposed to be wallpaper. I don’t like being the center of attention.

  “That’s right,” I tell her. “Alice has been investigating for decades. You knew that from the documents you went through. What you don’t know is my role in all this.”

  “Then tell me,” she insists. “How you were working directly for Alice Mogrett. How Drew thinks you're his guy, but you're not. Who are you, Seamus McDuff? Who are you really?”

  I’ve spent the last nine months trying to convince Lily to tell me what she’s been hiding all this time. And now irony smacks me upside the head.

  Jane’s demanding the same of me.

  We all have a deep, dark secret. We all have a hidden self that slithers inside of us, doing everything it can to avoid detection. Sunlight is the great disinfectant, they say. Secrets lose their power when they’re exposed to the sun. My secret is decades old.

  It’s older than me, stretching back to a time before I was born.

  How do I share a secret that started before I even existed? And yet that’s exactly what Jane’s asking me to do. I give her the truth, because when you’re in free fall, the closest thing to a net is a pair of eyes begging you to spill.

  I’ve tried to be that net for Lily.

  I never expected that Jane would be mine.

  “My grandmother was a contemporary of Alice Mogrett.”

  Jane just blinks.

  “She was the equivalent of a lady’s maid to Alice when they were younger. Gran was about ten years older than Alice and came over here from Ireland when she was just fourteen. She came in through New York and found her way through a series of terrible domestic jobs into the household of the Mogretts. Alice was a wee thing back then, as Gran used to say. My Gran was nineteen and Alice was nine when she first started to work there. They were friends, if you could call it that. More of a nanny-and-charge relationship, but Alice trusted my Gran until the day Gran died.”

  Lily, Silas, and Jane just listen. The open space of their silence is deafening.

  “Decades ago, when Alice began investigating Monica Bosworth and El Brujo–Ignatio Landau–she started with a private investigator. We all know about that. You’ve seen the documents. You found the documents, for God’s sake, in Alice’s papers.”

  I run one shaking hand over my head, rubbing hard, as if I could push the information out of my memory. “What you don’t know is that about ten years ago, when I came back from my last combat mission, Alice recruited me.”

  “Recruited you? What do you mean?” Silas asks.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “It’s always complicated, Duff. Just tell the truth,” Jane interjects.

  “The truth is complicated, Jane. You of all people should know that.”

  I get an eye roll.

  The picture. Lily holds it up. I can barely look at it, a hole in my heart filling with black grief. “Is this the complication? The back of it just says Sean and Wy.”

  I wince. “Yeah. That's me.”

  “You said your name was Seamus,” Jane notes.

  I give her a cold look. “I've had lots of names.”

  “Are you Sean, or Wy?” Lily asks, nose crinkled in concentration.

  “Sean.”

  “Alice had this in a folder with the letter about your work for her. You've known her since you were a little kid?” Jane asks in a tone that makes it clear she and Lily care about different issues.

  “There’s information I can share and there’s information I’ll take to my grave. Torture wouldn't get it out of me.”

  “Don't tempt me,” Silas mutters.

  “Here’s what I can tell you. Alice asked me to work on digging into what she suspected about Nolan Corning, Ignatio Landau, and the benefactors of the Mosner Gallery of Art at Yates University. At the time, that was Monica Bosworth’s parents–the Mosners–and Harry Bosworth himself.”

  “You’re telling me that Alice was investigating my father?” Jane says, gaping.

  “Yes, except not at the time. It’s a web. I know it’s a cliché, but the spider’s web is woven in so many different patterns. Strong and yet almost invisible.” I stare at her. “When Lindsay was attacked six years ago and you were part of it, you received a scholarship to Yates University.”

  “Sure. I had been there on scholarship already. That was explained to me before. My father set it all up.”

  “Your father set it all up, but Alice worked to get you there.”

  “Why?”

  “Alice had a soft spot for fatherless young women. I don’t know if it was because of Gran and Gran’s loving care of her. I don’t know if it’s because Alice felt that her father had never been around, but she saw something in you. She also saw that your illegitimacy was at the heart of Monica Bosworth’s manipulation on her path to the White House.”

  Jane flinches. “You mean Alice wanted to be close to me so that she could keep tabs on the Monica situation?”

  “Yes and no,” I admit. “It’s a bit more than that. She really did love you once she got to know you.”

  “But you’re saying that at first...” Jane says, blinking hard, processing everything. “It was just about getting me to Yates, getting me to where she could get to know me? Study me, learn more about me? Use me as a way of getting to Harry Bosworth and Monica?”

  This is the part that causes actual pain. When you have to lay the truth on the line for someone.

  “Yes,” I admit. “That’s how she began.”

  Jane looks like someone’s kicked her in the gut. I can’t blame her.

  “So it was all a lie?”

  “No,” I correct her. “None of it was a lie. Alice saw that you were at the center of something very dangerous. And that Monica was brewing a series of lies designed to use you as a pawn. Alice wanted to step in and help.”

  “Why? Why would Alice be involved in any of this?”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. The sound comes out like a hiss. “You knew Alice. She had this righteous justice streak a mile wide. She also had the money to do whatever the hell she wanted. Combine those two, and you have a very dangerous person on your hands. Dangerous to people whose lives depend on convincing other people that reality is what they want it to be.”

  “Like Monica Bosworth,” Jane whispers.

  “Exactly like Monica Bosworth. She was ruthless and determined, and she sacrificed so much to position her husband so that he could become president.”

  “But in the end, it was all for nothing. She...” Jane’s shoulders slump, the air slowly leaving her body. The vacant stare in her eyes as she tries to make sense of it all is familiar.

  Too familiar.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she demands.

  “Because you’re making me.”

  “Nobody makes you do anything, Duff.”

  “You found the evidence. I can’t refute that.”

  “When everyone was pointing fingers about the shooting with Lily and everyone was trying to figure out who could’ve done it, so many people suggested that it was an inside job, Duff. That you did it. That you set the whole thing up to make it look like a weird error. That you came in and shot Lily on purpose.”

  “Oh, my God.” We both turn to see Lily standing there, her hand over her mouth, eyes burning with accusation as I meet her gaze. “Did you set this whole thing up? Duff?” she asks, taking one step closer to me and then moving back on her heels.

  “You know I didn't. You said I didn’t,” I tell her. “That day in the stairwell at my building. You said, 'No.�
�”

  Jane’s head whips violently back and forth between the two of us. “What are you guys talking about?”

  I move closer to Lily. She doesn’t step back. “You told me that I wasn’t your shooter, Lily. Why would you question it now?”

  “Why would anyone think that you had done it?” She looks at Jane as she asks the question, but I know I’m the target.

  All three of us look at each other.

  And then Silas steps out of the shadows and says one word:

  “Romeo.”

  Chapter 17

  Jane's said it. Silas has said it. I've said it.

  Lily still hasn't.

  She's the one who counts.

  “Of all people,” Silas says to Jane, “you know what it’s like to be set up. To have a secret cabal of people all working against you.”

  Pain fills her eyes.

  “And to not know who’s doing it or why they’re doing it,” he continues.

  Her eyes flick to me. “Yes, I do. I think Romeo’s setting Duff up.”

  Lily’s face goes pale. “Setting him up for my shooting?”

  “Yes. Not in terms of evidence. In terms of suspicion. This isn’t about pinning the actual shooting on Duff. It’s about innuendo and starting rumors that shake people’s confidence. It’s about manipulating and using people’s psychology against them.”

  Silas looks at me hard. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re trained to do it.”

  “So are you,” I tell him.

  “I know,” he nods. He looks at Jane and Lily. “Will you excuse us? We need to have a private conversation.”

  “There’s nothing that you can tell Duff that you can’t tell me,” Jane insists. Lily takes a step closer to Jane, the two of them a united front.

  Silas doubles down. “Actually, there is. You know if I could tell you, I would.”

  My blood runs cold, muscles tightening. Whatever he’s about to tell me, it’s not good.

  “You swear?” Jane asks him.

  “Of course,” he says.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Lily gasps, her voice filled with frustration. “Two years ago, I was making unicorn arrangements for little girls in the flower shop where my parents raised me. And then one day I was shot because somebody thought I was you,” she says, gesturing to Jane, who flinches, guilt that she doesn’t deserve all over her face.

  “I wake up and fourteen months of my life disappeared, I’ve got a giant scar on the back of my head, my bones are reknitting, and I get stuck with this guy,” she points to me now, “living with me practically twenty-four/seven. My mom and dad are a wreck, my dad has a heart attack, and then when I’m finally getting better, someone tries to shoot me again. And now here I am in Texas, and you guys are all telling me that Romeo is the one who’s responsible for all this?”

  Her rant is good. I’ll give her that.

  I reach for her, grasping her shoulders, turning her towards me and looking down. I move closer until we're eye to eye, our faces inches away.

  “None of this is a surprise to you, so just spit it out, Lily. Quit lying. You don’t need to fake your amnesia anymore.”

  She holds her breath. So does Jane. Silas continues to inhale and exhale, just like I do. The body breathes autonomously and intentionally. It’s one of the few systems in our physiology that does both. It’s something we can control, and yet it’s out of our control.

  Just like love.

  “It wasn’t Duff,” Lily finally says, looking down at the ground, unable to make eye contact with Jane, Silas, or me. “It wasn’t Duff.”

  “You’re sure?” Silas says.

  “Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t say it if I weren’t sure.”

  “You’ve said an awful lot of things that weren’t true,” I point out.

  “Like what? I haven’t lied about anything. I haven’t told you anything that isn’t true.”

  “It’s what you haven’t told us that’s the untruth,” I say to her. “Lies of omission are just as bad as lies of commission.”

  “That Irish grandmother of yours was Catholic, huh?” Jane says, her voice bitter.

  “Yes.” Might as well own up to it.

  “I’ve never told anyone something that wasn’t true.” Lily looks at Silas. “Duff didn’t do it.”

  “And you know who did it?”

  This is the moment.

  This is months’ worth of patience, investigation, anticipation, and terror. Terror for Lily, at least. We’re in Texas, surrounded by some of the best security in the country. Only the president of the United States has better.

  But he also has Romeo, the guy who I now know pulled the trigger on Lily’s defenseless back.

  Lily breaks away from us and starts to pace, moving closer to the light, to Alice’s large paintings, and then back towards us, her head shaking, her body moving rapidly with more symmetry than I’d expected.

  She’s recovered. Healed. But her memory hasn’t.

  Not that she doesn’t have the memory. She does. But the trauma associated with that memory is still trapped inside her. I should know. I have my own, stretching back twenty-three years. The heat's off me for a few minutes, the memory of my mother, father, and brother being packed carefully back into the locked box where they live in me.

  I'm focused on Lily now.

  I have to be.

  She’s on the edge of an abyss, and if she jumps, she doesn’t understand that there is a net. That we’re the net.

  How do I convince her?

  It turns out, I don’t have to.

  It turns out, she has more courage than I ever anticipated.

  Because Lily just goes ahead and jumps.

  “If I tell you what I know,” she says, hands in the air, flying, “then everything changes. If I tell you what I know, this cascade of ripples goes all the way out into my life. My mom, my dad, my brother, my sister, everything. Everything changes.” Her fingers flow outward, mimicking water and waves on a pond.

  “But, Lily,” Jane says, grabbing her arm mid-pace and stopping her, compassion her chief feature. “If you tell us, we can stop him.”

  “How?” Lily says simply. “How can you stop someone who’s hidden in plain sight all this time?”

  “You’ve been holding this in all this time? You were paralyzed on that hospital bed almost two years ago and woke up one day, terrified to say a word? Why?” Jane challenges her.

  “Why?” Lily yells. “Why? Because I woke up and he was there, standing right behind you!” She points at me, confirming what I already know.

  She doesn’t even have to say his name.

  “God damn it. I am so stupid,” I grunt.

  Silas looks at me. I can tell from his face that he’s thinking the same thing.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” he asks.

  “I just told you why I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “You’ve been faking amnesia all these months, lying to neurologists, speech pathologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, everyone? Is this why you don’t want to be in therapy? Because you couldn’t hold the lie in with a trained professional?”

  Lily looks at me. “I did it with you.”

  “Barely,” I chide her. “I figured it out a long time ago.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because that’s not how this works, Lily. I don’t come to you and say, ‘Even though you’re faking amnesia to everyone here, I figured out that you really know who your killer is.’”

  “He didn’t kill me. He’s my shooter.”

  “Are you really going to get nitpicky about semantics?”

  This time, she’s the one who marches up to me and grabs my shoulders, standing on tiptoe. Her pain is so hot, so blazing, I can feel it on her skin. She looks at me, laser-like, with a begging that makes me want to kidnap her and take her away to be safe.

  “If I told you who it was,
he was going to kill me. Then he was going to kill Mom, Dad, Gwennie, and Bowie. Then it would all be my fault.”

  “No,” Jane says, but Lily holds up one hand, stopping her.

  “I knew from the second I saw him in my room that I was dead if I 'remembered.'” Finger quotes accompany the word. “And now it looks like I’m dead even if I don’t.” She squeezes my shoulder. “You told me that the spider found in my hospital room was poisonous.”

  “What spider?” Silas asks.

  I wince. “I’ll tell you about that later.”

  “You never told them?” Lily’s voice is filled with outrage.

  “I kept it to myself,” I admit.

  “What’s this about a poisonous spider?” Silas asks.

  “There was a moment early in Lily’s awakening when I found a spider crawling on her chest. I killed it. Turns out it was poisonous,” I explain.

  “That’s because Romeo put it on me.”

  Jane and Silas gawk at her.

  I smile, biting my inner cheek. Damn. Fooled again.

  “I suspected,” is all I say.

  “You never told me!” Silas protests.

  Chapter 18

  Silas’s phone buzzes with a text. He looks down.

  “It’s Drew. He wants a meeting with us.”

  “Us?” I bristle. “I’m not leaving Lily here.”

  “He’s already on the way. Says they just landed,” Silas explains. Jane looks at him with surprise. “If Drew’s willing to come here and leave Lindsay and Emma alone, it must be big. I suspect he views this place as more secure than...” he pauses, “...than the alternative.”

  “Which is? His own office back in California or the one in DC?”

  Silas shrugs. “Either.”

  “It’s all connected to Romeo, isn’t it?” I ask, keeping my voice low, as if Lily and Jane shouldn’t hear. Habit. Can’t help it.

  “That and more,” is all he says. We’re cryptic.

  It comes with the job.

  “Do we get to be in on this meeting?” Jane demands.

  “What do you think?” Silas asks her.

  “I think Drew is an egotistical control freak who—”

  Silas shuts her up with a quick kiss.