by BETH KERY
“I realize there’s very little I can say in a few seconds to make you understand. I knew this moment would come, eventually. I hoped to be the one to tell you, though.”
“Tell me what, exactly?” I seethed. “That you married me because I look exactly like your dead wife? That you’re a sick motherfucker who decided to ruin a stranger’s life, all because it gave you some sense of happiness—some perverted thrill—to have your obsession in the flesh?”
He winced. “Anna, you don’t understand.”
I gave a hysterical bark of laughter. “Understand? What’s to understand? It was my life, Evan,” I yelled, thumping my chest with my fist. “You manipulated me from the first! You lied to me. You made me think you cared about me, but all along, I was just a face. A body… something you filled up with your fantasies for someone you couldn’t have—”
“No.”
I started at his shout. His face twisted in what appeared to be genuine anguish.
“Let me try to explain, Anna. Please.” He turned and walked to the door.
“No, leave the door open,” I insisted, panicked at the idea of being shut in the room with him. “I’m leaving,” I said, striding over to the bed and squashing down the clothes I’d thrown into the suitcase.
“You can’t leave. Not without letting me explain why.”
“I know why, Evan.”
He grabbed my upper arm. “No. You don’t.”
I paused, searching his face and eyes, trying to discern the truth. It took me a few seconds to realize I was doing it. I did it from long habit. I always hunted every nuance of his expression, looking for clues, searching for answers, so hungry for the truths he withheld. Yes, I saw a wild desperation on his face; I saw an entire universe of grief and anger.
But what did it mean, really? I couldn’t trust what I saw. Not anymore.
I shook off his hold.
“I don’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth. That photo of Elizabeth is all the proof I need. You ruined my life because you’re sick and selfish.” I flung my suitcase closed and tugged on the zipper tab. A piece of clothing got stuck in the zipper. I tugged at it, tears of frustration stinging my eyes.
“What I don’t get,” I bit out angrily, “Is why you tried so hard to make me fall in love with you. Was that really necessary? Maybe so. You couldn’t really imagine that you were living happily with your dead wife if she didn’t worship the ground you walked on.”
“That’s not what I was doing, Anna. I didn’t mean for it to happen. But I did fall in love with you.”
Smack.
The sound of me slapping his face echoed in my ears. I stood facing him, panting. My tingling hand fell to my side.
“Don’t you ever… ever say that to me again.”
Beneath the deepening pink hue from my slap, a muscle jumped in his cheek.
I jerked the zipper past the bit of clothing, tearing a hole in the fabric in the process. My head felt like it’d become my heart, the drumbeat was so loud in my ears. I heaved the suitcase off the bed.
“I can’t let you go like this,” he said when I turned to look for my purse. I saw it on a chair.
“You don’t have any choice,” I told him, walking past him to get the purse.
“I agree that you have the right to be furious. I have wronged you. I won’t deny that. I realize I’ve lost you. But please just let me explain. You think you understand, but you don’t.”
“Did you or didn’t you notice my similarity to Elizabeth on the dating site, and then manipulate our meeting?” I asked, avoiding his stare as I walked back to my suitcase.
“No. I didn’t notice the similarity. I hired a private detective agency to do that.”
My breath hitched. I stared up at him in open-mouthed shock. Misery etched his face.
Get out. Get out now.
“I’m sorry. God, Anna, I’m so sorry. You have no idea. Every day that’s gone by, every hour, I’ve fallen further and further into this hell of my own making, knowing what I’ve done to you.”
“I don’t care if you do burn in hell. I don’t want your apology. I don’t even know who you are.”
I grabbed the handle of my suitcase and started for the door. My lungs had locked. I couldn’t breathe. All my focus and energy was being channeled on forcing my feet to walk away from him.
“I know you think that I married you because you look like Elizabeth. You believe that I was so in love with her that I wanted her double after she died. But you’re wrong, Anna. Things had gotten so painful and toxic between Elizabeth and me toward the end. The last thing on earth I wanted was to be reminded daily of her, of the ashes or our marriage, or how helpless I was in stopping how bent she’d become.”
My feet stopped moving. I didn’t make a choice to look over my shoulder, but suddenly I stared at his face.
“I didn’t fall in love with you because you look like her. I fell in love with you despite that, Anna. Please,” he said, coming toward me slowly. “I know you feel like you can’t trust me right now, and I don’t blame you. But pause a moment. You’re angry now, and hurt. But that’s not all of your feelings. Once you walk away, once time passes, you’re going to realize that. And you’re going to want to understand. You’re going to want to make sense of it all, at the very least. If even a tiny bit of what you’ve felt for me was real, couldn’t that be enough for you to listen to my explanation for why I did it?”
“My feelings for you have nothing to do with this. This is about what you’ve done. This is about how you’ve manipulated me.”
“Yes,” he agreed emphatically. “I have manipulated you. In the beginning, I was coldhearted and ruthless about it, too. But that was before I met you. Before I understood how honest you were… how talented… how clean of spirit. God, you were everything that my life wasn’t, everything that could have been before I came here, before I met Elizabeth,” he gave a wild glance around the room. “Before I’d begun to breathe and eat the corruption and sickness of this place.”
I almost looked away, his misery—Pretended misery. It’s faked suffering, Anna—was so palpable. But at the same time, wasn’t this what I’d longed to see for so long? My husband without his guard up? Evan exposed?
Witnessing it now was horrible, but riveting.
“What have you got to lose by hearing my side of the story?” He waved toward the window. “It’s raining out right now, anyway. You should at least wait until it stops before you travel.”
The last tactic struck me as ridiculous, given the enormity of our situation. I laughed bitterly. “That’s what you bring up at a moment like this? My safety driving in the rain?”
“I bring it up, because believe it or not, I care about you. More than I’ve cared about anything in my life.”
“I told you never to talk about your supposed feelings for me again.” I turned to go, but he grabbed my elbow.
“I say it because it’s true. I’ve been worried sick about you ever since I brought you to Les Jumeaux.”
I rounded on him. “But not worried enough to tell me about your twisted plans to replace your dead wife with a double.”
He gave a rough moan and abruptly released my arm. He pressed his hands to his face, before fisting them into balls and dropping them to his side.
“It is twisted, all of it. Me. Elizabeth. Noah most of all. That much, I’ll admit with no argument. But it kills me to hear you say I wanted to replace Elizabeth? Why would I want to replace her? Elizabeth repulsed me, toward the end of our marriage.”
A shiver tore through me.
“That’s the real kicker of all this, Anna. The single most amazing fact, the one thing I still can’t wrap my head around? I fell in love with you, even when you look so much like the woman I’d grown to hate at times, and pity at others. You’re genuine and kind and unspoiled. You’re the type of light that cou
ld never touch her. No, he had choked off the possibility of anything truly good coming from Elizabeth years before I ever arrived on the scene.”
Chapter Sixteen
Despite my anger, I found him convincing. It terrified me, my vulnerability to him. He may be telling me the truth. He may be lying, as he’d clearly done before.
But the only tool I possessed was honesty.
“I don’t want to be hurt by you anymore, Evan. Let’s just say for the moment that you do care for me, which I doubt,” I added sharply. “Why wouldn’t you just let me go now, if that’s true? You’ve admitted that you’ve drawn me into something you shouldn’t have, that you’ve come to regret involving me in… God knows what? If you really cared, you’d let me go.”
One second passed. Two.
“You’re right. If you really want to go now, I’ll take you to the airport in South Lake. I use a private plane service out of there. I’ll arrange to have you taken anywhere you like.”
It felt as if someone pulled a plug on me. My legs went weak. I clamped my eyes tight against a surge of emotion.
“Anna?”
I fought against the thick concern I heard in his voice. I struggled against the warmth of his hands on my shoulders.
“I’ll listen to you,” I got out in a choked voice. “But I’m leaving as soon as you’re done. And I don’t… “ I sobbed raggedly, pushing at his forearm, “want you to touch me.” I backed away from him. “You’ve lost any right you had to do that.”
We went to the seating area, Evan taking the chair and me sinking straight-backed into the corner of the couch. For a few seconds, he just stared blankly at the empty hearth of the fireplace. I thought of how many times I’d imagined us being in this exact spot come fall or winter, of relishing the warm fire and each other’s company.
I hated myself for my stupidity. I despised myself in a way I hadn’t known was possible before I’d looked at that photo of Elizabeth Madaster today.
“I’m sorry,” Evan said hoarsely. “I don’t know where to begin. I’ve never spoken out loud about most of this to another person.”
“If we’re going to do this, then do it completely. Start at the beginning. And Evan.” He glanced over at me with those quicksilver eyes of his. “Don’t leave anything out. Don’t give me anything less than the truth. If you lie to me again, and I find out about it… ”
I shook my head, unable to say exactly what the consequences of that action would be.
“It’ll make things worse,” I said simply at last. “If that’s possible.”
“I have no desire to keep you in the dark. Not anymore.”
A thought occurred to me. I laughed, the sound seeming shrill and off-balance in my own ears. Who cared? It was either laugh or go insane, given the thought I’d just had.
“What is it? Anna?” Evan asked, sitting at the edge of his chair, his elbows on his knees, looking like he was ready to spring off the seat.
“You wouldn’t make love to me in the daylight. Not at first, you wouldn’t.”
He inhaled slowly, as if the action pained him.
“I couldn’t stand to touch you and see her face. At first, anyway,” he admitted. “But part of me knew, even from the beginning, that you weren’t the same. In reality, you might as well have been from another planet, you were so essentially different from Elizabeth.”
Even though his expression appeared fixed and grave, I saw the difference in him. I sensed it. His grief, even if I did question its veracity, was openly, unbearably, on display.
Rain peppered the windowpanes as Evan began his story. He told it uneasily, but doggedly, like each word, each morsel of knowledge had to be dug out of the dark places of his soul where they’d been wedged, and where they now festered.
“I realize you think that my feelings for you are associated with Elizabeth… that everything goes back to her. In a way you’re right, but not in the way you imagine.
“I was thirteen when I first saw Elizabeth. It was at a junior women’s golf tournament at my parents’ country club. I’d heard the name Madaster before. Noah was a member of my parents’ club. But at that time, they still lived on their ranch in the Carson Valley. Elizabeth went to school in Carson City. But that summer, the Madasters moved permanently here, to Les Jumeaux. They started showing up at the club regularly.
“I remember the exact moment I first laid eyes on her to this day. I was in the crowd with some of my friends. We all gawked in stunned silence while she holed out of a sand trap on the sixteenth.
“I’d never seen anything like her before. Every move she made, it was like a goddamn movie sound track started playing in my teenage brain.” Despite the self-derision in his tone, I caught that faraway hint of residual awe.
“She was graceful, but also purposeful. Forceful, even. Her will was like a brand on you. Beautiful doesn’t come close to describing her; she was something more. So full of—I don’t know—style, I guess. You felt her confidence. Her influence. Her charisma.
“And Elizabeth knew you felt it. Even then, she was extremely aware of her power over people… especially men. She knew perfectly well on that day that she held the crowd at that tournament in the palm of her hand. She was older than I was by two years. To a thirteen-year-old, she seemed like an adult. Like something from another world.”
“Was Wes with you on that day? At the club?” I asked.
He blinked at my question. “He was. What makes you ask that?”
I shrugged, trying to mask my bitterness. “It was the way you were talking just now—like you’d witnessed a goddess or something. I heard the same tone with Wes on the first day I met him, when he talked about Elizabeth.”
“You asked me to tell you the truth. I’m just trying to give you the full picture. Elizabeth’s allure… her sexual power. It’s key to understanding this story. Little did I know that my attraction to her, which started innocently enough, would become like a cancer that slowly started to eat away at me.
“I know that now, but back then, I was just a stupid, blind, dumbass kid. I worshipped her. It hurts more than I can explain, as I sit here right now, to have to admit that.”
“Why was she so special?” I asked. I’d been listening to all of this with a mixture of anger, jealousy, and absolute fascination.
“She wasn’t like anyone I’d ever known. She didn’t care what other people thought. I assume because most people either adored or envied her. The few who didn’t, hated her, more than likely because they’d encountered her venom in some way. But she just laughed at them. She saw their hatred as a weakness, a sure proof of her victory over them.
“She was wild. Daring. Noah had given her a rare, vintage Ferrari Spider when she got her driver’s permit. Cherry red. She wasn’t even old enough to get her license yet, but he let her drive it without adult supervision. It was a hugely inappropriate gift for a fifteen-year-old. He’d just smile when anyone—including his wife—brought up the fact that she was driving without a license. Noah would say that Elizabeth drove with more skill than 99.9 percent of the drivers on the road. He knew she was safe to drive it, and to hell with what the law said.
“A few weeks after I first met her, Elizabeth took me for a ride around the lake in that Spider. Noah was right, at least about her skill. She handled that car with the precision of a world-class race car driver. I don’t know where she got her instincts, but they were sharp as a knife. She knew perfectly well she was scaring the hell out of me that day, driving as fast as she did.” He paused and shook his head. “But she’d just smile and accelerate through the next twist in the road.”
“She didn’t just scare you. She excited you.”
“She did. I’ll admit it. My only excuse is that I was a child in the beginning. By the time we married, I was almost twenty-three. By then, some of her glamour had started to fade. I’d begun to see her complexi
ties and vulnerabilities. Her many scars.”
“What, Evan?” I prodded when he paused, a shadow crossing his face.
“Unfortunately, understanding her complexities and her pain only made her more attractive to me. I wanted to protect her. Worse, I wanted to save her,” he admitted, his harsh tone telling me that he recognized this as a personal shortcoming, a deep flaw in his character.
“It was a new hold she had over me, an even stronger one than my desire for her. And she knew how to use this hold to her advantage every bit as well as she knew how to manipulate for attention and sex.”
My stomach burned at what I heard in his voice at that moment. Not just bitterness.
Hopelessness.
“Why did she need to be saved?” I asked.
“She needed saving from her father,” Evan stated bluntly. “At first, I just thought it was his unhealthy hold over her, a grip that Elizabeth both fought against and seemed to relish at the same time. Later, I understood it was much more.”
He glanced up, and saw my confusion. He grimaced.
“Noah had been abusing Elizabeth. Since she was nine years old,” he said.
“Sexually?” I asked, not really sure I wanted to know.
“Sexually. Emotionally. Physically. He regularly drugged her, all for the sake of his sick ‘research.’ What he did to that girl… that woman…” The muscle in his cheek flickered again. “It was diabolical. It was torture. I can’t think of any other way to describe Noah and his intentions. He didn’t want to just control Elizabeth. He wanted to own her. Body and soul. Every thought she had. Every desire. Every dream, he wanted to stamp himself on it. He even wanted to own her occasional rebellion against him.”
“I don’t understand,” I told him honestly.
“No,” Evan said dully. “I wouldn’t expect that you would. And I’m not sure I want to tell you, now that the time has come.”
I stared at his gray face, a visage of bottled misery.
“You brought me here, Evan. You brought me here and made me part of this story. You owe me the truth. Make me understand about Noah Madaster. Make me understand Elizabeth. Make me understand why you did this to me,” I demanded. I was a little taken aback by the authority in my voice, but it seemed to cut through the cloud of misery that surrounded us in that moment.