The Wish Collector

by Mia Sheridan

  “I know you’re there. I . . . I was hoping you would be.”

  Okay, so she could probably hear him breathing, the same way he could hear her. She could probably see the small slips of blocked light where he leaned against the wall. Hell, maybe she could feel him the way he felt her. Some type of inexplicable magnetism that pulled at him, which made him want to dissolve through the wall and touch her warmth. No!

  No. This was why he’d told her to leave. These thoughts that ran untethered through his brain whenever she was near, the way he could smell her soft scent even underneath that god-awful liniment she sometimes had on.

  Clara sighed. “Fine. If you won’t talk to me, I’ll talk to you.” She paused and he pressed his ear against the cold stone as if she might be whispering under her breath and if he leaned closer, he could make out the soft, secretive sound.

  “I read about what happened, Jonah. I read about Amanda Kershaw. I read about Murray Ridgley and all his victims. I read everything I could.”

  She paused again, and Jonah’s heart tightened painfully with the absolute knowledge that she knew. She knew why he’d called himself a monster. She knew. “I saw your photo, Jonah.”

  His heart skittered, shame arcing through him. “I don’t look like that anymore.” He clenched his eyes shut. He hadn’t intended on the outburst, but he’d heard the gentle, approving way she’d said the word photo, as if she were picturing him right that moment. And that was unthinkable.

  She couldn’t believe he still looked the way he used to. She couldn’t think he was still the man he’d been when women’s eyes widened as he entered a room. Oh, they might still widen now, come to think of it, but it wouldn’t be for the same reason as before.

  When he’d told her he was a monster, he meant in every way. He would not have her coming there because she’d liked what she saw online and decided it was worth dismissing his evil deeds.

  He ran a hand through his thick hair, frowning. That wasn’t the Clara he knew. She wasn’t shallow like that, but . . . why the hell else was she there?

  “No,” she murmured thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose you look the same. The scarring must be”—terrible, hideous, ugly—“considerable,” she finished. “The pain you must have endured . . . I can’t imagine.”

  For a moment, Jonah didn’t know how to respond. He’d heard hurt in her voice . . . sadness. Compassion. It both unsettled him and brought forth a sudden sweeping emotion he couldn’t identify, or perhaps was afraid to. “It’s the very least of my ugliness. Didn’t you read the stories?” he demanded.

  “Yes, but I want to hear about it from you.”

  “Why?” he rasped. What else did she need to know? Every damning and sordid detail was available online. He’d looked it up once when he’d just been released from the hospital. He’d read the comments below the articles, and they’d made him retch into the bedpan that Myrtle had left next to his bed.

  He’d gone back to those comments day after day, forcing himself to read each and every one, every vile word of hate and judgment, knowing he deserved them.

  He’d told Myrtle it was the pain medication that was making him sick and though she’d glanced worriedly at the laptop beside him, she hadn’t said a word.

  “Because everyone deserves to tell their own story in their own voice, and I know I stayed away for a little while and I’m sorry about that, Jonah. I needed time to process, but I hope you trust me enough to share your version with me. I’d like to listen.”

  Jonah was silent as her words wrapped around him. Did she imagine his version would be different somehow than what she’d already read? Was it?

  For the first time since that horrific day, he wondered if it was, even in some small but possibly important way he’d never considered.

  No one had ever asked him to tell his version, and he wondered if he could separate it from the story everyone else had told. And yet, none of the facts were different, so what did it really matter? Hopelessness descended over him like a damp, heavy cloud. “It won’t change anything, Clara. It won’t undo what happened.”

  “No, of course not. You can’t change the past. You can only change the future. But I’m not asking you to do that either. I’m simply asking you to help me see that terrible day from your perspective, not from those who only looked for the villain to cast all blame upon.”

  Jonah sighed, the old familiar weariness coming over him. He leaned his head back against the wall. What the hell? Clara wanted to hear the story from his own lips. Fine, he’d tell it. For the first time, and the last time, he’d tell it. Because it was her asking and no other reason.

  “I was a lawyer, you know that.” He told her about finishing college early, about the accelerated law school he’d attended, about taking and passing the bar exam. He told her about being hired on at Applegate, Knowles, and Fennimore, and his lofty career aspirations.

  “Were you always so driven? Even as a boy?”

  He paused, considering that. “Yes. I’d always planned to follow in my father’s footsteps. He was a lawyer, as was my brother, Justin.” Justin’s name ended in a rough whisper and Jonah cleared his throat. “I was the one who emulated my father, and Justin was the one who denounced everything he stood for.”

  “What did your father stand for?”

  “In my mind at the time? Power. Success. To Justin he was greed and narcissism.”

  “You said at the time. What about now? Do you think of your father differently?”

  Jonah paused again, thinking about Clara’s question for the first time. “I haven’t thought about my father very much since . . . I’ve come to live here.”

  He was quiet again for a moment and so was she as if she knew he needed to gather his thoughts and was allowing him the time to do that. “But, now . . .”

  Jonah closed his eyes, picturing his father as he’d been. Dismissive, and then quick to snap, sarcastic, cutting. The things he’d said when he was displeased with Jonah had wounded him. Yes, he could admit that now. And so Jonah had striven to be like him, to make him proud, to stop the pain of his disapproval, with no thought to anything else. God, he’d been a coward.

  Justin had been the brave one. Justin had had the guts to go against his father. “I see that my father had many of the qualities Justin claimed. And because I emulated him, so did I.” Shame was a thousand prickly thorns piercing the underside of his skin.

  You’re choosing a path here, Jonah.

  Ah, yes. Justin had been right. And that path had led him there, to Windisle, to life as an outcast and a monster. But Justin . . . the brave one, the good one, had lost his life. Because of Jonah. Because of the path Jonah had chosen, the one Justin had begged him not to travel.

  “Justin knew who my father was and did everything to be the polar opposite of him. He fought for justice, he took many pro bono cases, and he gave practically every cent he earned to charity. He made the world a better place.” Unlike me, hung in the air between them and somehow Jonah knew she heard the silent sound of the unspoken words too.

  “There are lots of ways to avoid pain,” she murmured. “None of them are healthy if they’re based on fear. A reaction—a rebellion if you will—rather than something from the heart.”

  But he didn’t want to consider what might or might not have been his brother’s faults, what his brother might have been doing solely to avoid pain instead of acting from pure sincerity. He wanted to continue to see Justin as he deserved to be seen: good and righteous. “Maybe,” he said without conviction, pushing the idea to the back of his mind.

  They were both quiet for a moment before Clara said, “Tell me from the beginning, Jonah.”

  The beginning. He forced his mind back to a time when he’d only heard Murray Ridgley’s name on the news, when he was the monster, not Jonah. Not yet.

  He sighed shakily. “When I first started at the firm, there had been several girls found in New Orleans the year before, raped and murdered. The police were still on the h
unt for the perpetrator, but had little to go on. When a girl was picked up on the side of the road, bloody, beaten, half-alive, they got their first break. Her wrists were still bound and the way she’d been tied up, the particular knot that was used, was the same one used on the murdered girls.”

  “Amanda Kershaw,” Clara whispered. “She was the lone survivor.”

  “Yes. She was able to help the police pinpoint the location where she’d been taken, where the man later arrested and identified as Murray Ridgley had raped her and almost taken her life before she’d managed to escape.”

  Jonah’s stomach tightened in distress. To have escaped him once, only to be murdered by him later. The pain of that, the bleak, cosmic injustice in which he’d played a part, still haunted his every waking hour. It was terrible and tragic and wrong. And he could have stopped it.

  “Anyway,” he said, and even he could hear the despondency in his own tone, “when Murray Ridgley contacted the firm, the partners decided to take on his case. And later, they assigned it to me.”

  “Did you believe him to be innocent?” The way she said the final word, quickly and with a soft intake of air, led him to believe she was holding her breath.

  He paused because something inside of him knew it was very important he be truthful, not necessarily for Clara, but for himself.

  He’d described their talks as a sort of confessional and though he’d never expected to confess this to her, if he was going to, and if any small crumb of redemption was available to his blackened soul, he must first be truthful.

  “I wasn’t positive—there was no concrete evidence, only a mountain of circumstantial—but I knew it was a possibility.”

  Jonah heard the small whoosh of air as it flowed from Clara’s lungs. “Did you withhold evidence, Jonah?”

  “No. God, no. I wanted to win, Clara, so I was focused on that. But I didn’t lie or cheat to do it.”

  He thought back to the whispered words behind closed doors, the way the partners had ceased talking when he walked into a room, and he wondered again if they had been keeping something from him . . . The thought flitted through his head, but he let it go without attempting to catch it. What did it matter now anyway?

  “The thing that ultimately got him acquitted was Amanda Kershaw’s testimony.”

  Jonah clenched his eyes shut, letting his head fall against the stone with a heavy thud. “Yes. She . . . she wasn’t strong, Clara, and I knew that. She wasn’t like you.”

  He paused, thinking back to the first time he’d met Amanda at the courthouse, the way she’d shaken when she spoke, the way her eyes had darted around, the way she’d drawn her shoulders in as if to appear smaller, as if to hide from the world. He’d seen the way she pulled at her sleeves to conceal the needle marks on her arms, and he’d used that too.

  “I used her weaknesses against her when she got up on the stand.” He banged his head against the stone again, a dull thud, and he heard Clara shift. “I demolished her. They practically had to carry her away, she’d gotten so emotionally distraught. She appeared unstable and unreliable—almost insane—just as I’d planned. The partners all congratulated me later. They slapped me on the back and told me how brilliant I’d been.”

  Jonah laughed, but it was a raw scraping sound, no humor infused in it at all. “Brilliant. I’d brilliantly obliterated a girl who’d been the victim of a horrific crime that most people wouldn’t have survived.”

  You’re choosing a path here, Jonah.

  His heart beat hollowly in his chest, the reminder that he was still here, living, breathing, and the further reminder that life held no true justice. Or maybe it did sometimes. He brought his hand to the half of his face that was ruined and ran his fingers over the ridged and melted skin covering the planes of his bones, tipping his head back as he gazed up at the stone structure that kept him separated from the world. Yes, maybe it did.

  For maybe this is worse than death.

  “Then what?” Clara whispered. She knew. She already knew, but she wanted to hear it from him. And he’d come this far. He just needed to go a little bit further.

  “The jury acquitted Murray Ridgley.” He closed his eyes again, picturing that day. “I felt . . . I don’t know. I expected to feel happy . . . proud, but I just felt kind of . . . empty I guess. I attributed it to what I knew Justin’s reaction had probably been. I knew, to him, the news would have been very bad. But I didn’t take his calls. It was why I didn’t take his calls.”

  “You felt ashamed.”

  “I . . .” Had he? Had he felt ashamed for winning? Maybe. Maybe it had been teasing the edges of his conscience, though he hadn’t allowed himself to fully consider it.

  Winning had been his intention, and win he had. Only, it hadn’t felt like victory.

  He’d thought maybe it would be a delayed reaction. He was tired. After all, he’d been working like a dog since he’d been put on the case. “Yes, though I didn’t admit it to myself at the time. And truthfully, I might have just let it go if things hadn’t . . . taken the turn they did.”

  “What about the video?”

  “The video was a lie, Clara. I did plenty of disgraceful things, but that wasn’t one of them, nor did it truthfully portray the way I was feeling after Murray Ridgley got off, despite that his acquittal was largely because of me.”

  The video had been part of every news story that aired about the case. It was a clip of Jonah popping the cork off a bottle of champagne as he and the partners laughed and cheered.

  “A legal secretary who worked there shot it after a case we’d won many months before, a case that I hadn’t even worked on. It was in no way associated with the Murray Ridgley case, but of course, the news didn’t care about that, nor did they bother to fact-check.”

  It had made him appear giddy and excited. They’d mixed it with a video of the carnage that occurred later, showing it again and again, and the story it told was awful and shameful. But it was only partly true.

  Clara paused as if soaking that information in. “Tell me, Jonah. Tell me about that day.”

  That day.

  That day.

  That day.

  The words rang in his head the way the gunshots had, the way the screams still did.

  That day. He’d thought he’d never ever talk about that day, but here he was. And it occurred to him that only this girl, in this way, could have made him do it. And he wondered if it was a blessing, or a curse.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Clara waited with bated breath for Jonah to speak. Her heart filled her throat, her arms wrapped around her body as he told his story, as he bared his soul, for she knew that’s what he was doing—though she still wasn’t sure whether her final grace would be given from near or from afar.

  Jonah had called her brave, and she wasn’t sure why he had that opinion of her, because recently she hadn’t felt courageous at all—just lost and uncertain.

  But she was a girl who followed her heart, and she would do so in this case as well. After all, it was her heart that had led her here in the first place. To Windisle. To the weeping wall. To Jonah.

  “I was going to the courthouse for something involving a new case that day. I was . . . distracted, tired I guess . . .” His words dwindled away.

  She’d heard the same hesitation in his voice when he’d described his feelings about winning the case. He’d been troubled by the outcome, and confused by his ambivalence, or at least that’s what she suspected. But she didn’t want to put words—or feelings—on his tongue, and she didn’t want to assign emotions to him that he hadn’t already assigned to himself. Not just because it wasn’t her job, but because she didn’t want to let him off any hooks of which he didn’t deserve to be let off.

  Clara followed her heart, yes, but she wasn’t willing to knowingly be a fool or an enabler.

  “I don’t know,” he finally continued. “But anyway, I didn’t notice the news conference until I’d reached the courthouse steps where it was being held
. I saw my brother first. He was on the steps listening. He didn’t see me. He was watching Amanda Kershaw who was there with her lawyers and they were answering questions, talking about the grave injustice of Murray Ridgley being acquitted. Amanda looked . . . uh, in shock I guess. She was just . . . staring at the crowd. And then her eyes widened in this way . . .”

  He let out a sharp raspy breath. In shock, Clara repeated in her mind. Drugged more likely from what she’d read about the woman’s past. She’d been a drug addict who prostituted for her habit on occasion, though Jonah hadn’t mentioned that just then or when he’d spoken about tearing her apart on the stand, and Clara wondered why.

  He had used her weaknesses against her once—from his own mouth—but seemed unwilling to now. Apparently, Jonah Chamberlain was bound and determined to carry every ounce of blame.

  “I followed Amanda’s gaze and that’s when I saw him. Murray Ridgley standing at the edge of the small crowd, all the way at the back. Time seemed to . . . slow and I watched him reach for something in his jacket and then it was just . . . gunshots and screams and people scattering everywhere, diving for cover.”

  Clara’s throat closed as she pictured that moment in her mind’s eye—the sheer terror, the sudden chaos as Murray Ridgley pulled a gun from his coat and began firing first at Amanda Kershaw and then into the crowd.

  Jonah paused for so long that Clara tipped her head toward the wall, listening for his movement, wondering if he was going to continue, sensing his pain even through the thick barrier between them.

  “I couldn’t get to him fast enough. People were fleeing, bumping into me. I . . . fell and got up and that’s when I saw the wires going from under his jacket to his pocket. He had a bomb. I ran toward him as fast as I could, but it . . . it wasn’t fast enough. I tried to tackle him, but he was already pushing the button in his pocket and then . . . I don’t remember much after that.”

  The silence lingered, thick and heavy like the blood that had surely pooled on the courthouse steps that day. A dreadful blemish that could never be completely removed even when it had been scrubbed away. A stain that would forever remain between the cracks and crevices, in the deep, unseen places that could never ever be reached. Is that what it feels like inside, Jonah? Deep in your soul? “Why did you run toward him instead of running away?”