by BETH KERY
That night, I dreamt of a world of water.
And that water was so cold.
Chapter Twenty-One
The next morning when I awoke, I was alone. I experienced none of the terror I had last night when I’d awakened and thought I was alone at Les Jumeaux with only a ghost for company. I lay in bed, surveying the strange room through these new eyes I’d acquired since yesterday. I saw that Evan had brought me a stack of clothing and my toiletry bag, and had set them on the bureau.
Memories from yesterday and last night swam around in my brain, but the one that stood out the most was Evan’s face when he’d said, “God, I hate him, Anna,” and the alarming feeling of his strong body quaking.
I got up, a little amazed at how relatively calm I felt. I’d grown rootless in the past twenty-four hours. My life wasn’t what I’d believed it to be. But rootless or not, I still looked much the same in the mirror. I still went through the mundane activities of daily life, of showering and brushing my teeth and dressing. I discovered that those basic, unquestioned actions grounded me, anchored me to the moment, and kept me from spinning off into oblivion.
In the kitchen, I saw that Evan had made coffee: another commonplace routine. If we heard on the news that a nuclear bomb had exploded nearby, and that all life would end in a day or two, would we still make coffee in the morning? I thought we would.
A gorgeous, sunny Tahoe day reigned outside on the terrace, oblivious to the sordid, ugly little details and heartbreaks that occurred inside Les Jumeaux’s walls.
“Anna?”
I blinked the sunshine out of my eyes and turned at the sound of Evan’s voice. He walked toward me, wearing a pair of fitted gray slacks and a blue button-down shirt. The weariness that had shadowed his face last night had vanished. He’d shaved. He looked tense, but still freshened from his night’s sleep. Crisp. Achingly attractive…
And concerned, I realized.
“Are you all right?” he asked quietly, stepping close and peering down at me in the bright sunlight.
I nodded and held up my cup. “Just trying to clear my head.” I stared up at him and felt my throat tighten. I laughed and looked away.
“What?” he asked me, and I heard the uneasiness in his deep voice. I understood why. My laugh had sounded brittle. Odd. He probably worried I was going mad.
Just like Elizabeth.
“Nothing. I was just thinking about how we’d probably make coffee even if a nuclear bomb dropped nearby,” I said thickly, blinking unwanted tears out of my eyes and taking a giant gulp of my coffee, burning my throat to distract myself. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he touched the inside of my elbow lightly.
“That’s how this feels to you, isn’t it? Like a bomb has dropped on your life.”
I tried to laugh it off, but it sounded like I was choking. I felt him taking my coffee cup out of my hand. He put his arms around me, his chin resting on my head.
“I’m so sorry. God, I’m sorry, Anna.”
We just stood there, my arms at my sides, his arms wrapped around me in the warm sunshine, until I brought myself under control. I sniffed and snuck my hand between our bodies, wiping off an unwanted tear or two from my face. He must have sensed me breaking the connection, because he loosened his hold on me and backed away.
“Will you come into the office? I want to talk to you about something.” He waved behind him, and I saw the opened French doors that led to his office. I hadn’t entirely been aware of walking out onto the terrace, or where I’d gone. But I’d stopped at the stone parapet just outside of his office.
I followed him inside, thinking how strange it was, entering the male room from this door. Same room, different perspective.
The world turned upside down, I thought, and nearly laughed out loud again.
All traces of hysterical humor vanished when I saw the wooden box on his desk, just where I’d set it the other night. I experienced a strange sense of time stretching into eternity and then collapsing closed violently, like a snapped rubber band.
“It could not have been only two nights ago that I put that thing on your desk,” I muttered.
“Where did you find it?”
“I didn’t. The work crew did while they were doing demolition in the viewing room. One of them brought it up to the kitchen, and Valeria showed it to me later.”
“You opened it,” Evan stated flatly rather than asked.
I nodded.
“I’m sorry. Again,” he exhaled in obvious frustration. “Always.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. My emotions were bubbling up to the surface again. I wasn’t as calm as I’d convinced myself I was.
“You apologize. Does that mean you had something to do with it? The box?” I asked him.
“No, of course not. The things in that box were from Elizabeth’s domain, not mine.”
“Then why did you apologize?”
“You know why. Because I brought you here. I exposed you to it all.”
“Could you put it away?” I asked, my voice sounding unusually high.
“Of course,” he said, moving quickly. I saw him whisk Elizabeth’s box—the Sex Box—as I’d come to think of it in my mind, off his desk and open a cabinet all through the periphery of my vision.
“I’ll get rid of it later,” Evan said a moment later.
“You shouldn’t,” I said, turning to face him. He stood behind his desk. I noticed his questioning look. “Get rid of it. Maybe there’s some kind of proof on those discs.”
“Proof?” Evan asked blankly.
“Clues. I don’t know. Information about Elizabeth’s disappearance. Something about Noah that you could take to the police,” I tried to explain.
“I told you. I don’t care about that anymore,” he said, coming around the desk. “All I’m thinking about right now is you.”
I laughed again. I honestly don’t know why I kept doing it, except to say it seemed to be my body’s natural way of expelling tension and distress. Maybe there was a good reason that crazy people laughed so eerily.
“You can’t honestly expect me to believe that you’re going to abandon this whole… mission you’ve been on,” I said.
“I’ll prove it to you. We’ll leave now. Today. We’ll never speak of Les Jumeaux again, Anna.”
“Never speak of Elizabeth?” I asked softly.
“If that’s what you want.”
I found myself staring out at the sunlit terrace. Was it what I wanted? For some reason, a vision flashed into my mind’s eye of an old, disheveled woman hovering over me.
“You never wear your hat.”
“She thought I was Elizabeth that day. Lorraine Madaster,” I said. “She saw me up at the overlook, and in her confusion, she took me for her daughter.” I met Evan’s stare and saw his discomfort. “You lied to me after that. You made it seem like she was some random crazy lady who wandered around here. One of many lies you told me. When Wes told me she was Lorraine Madaster, I was forced to face the fact that you’d been lying to me about other things, too. That’s what made me want to go to the library, to try and figure out what other lies you were telling me.”
His mouth tightened and then opened.
“Don’t,” I said, stopping him. “I don’t want more apologies right now.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
“Did Elizabeth love her? Her mother?” I finally asked.
“Like I said, Noah poisoned that relationship. Lorraine became a shadow… a cutout figure of a wife and mother. She’d served her purpose by giving him Elizabeth. After that, she was something to be tolerated. Elizabeth and Lorraine’s relationship was distant. Cold. But to answer your question: yes,” he added after a pause. “I think down deep, Elizabeth loved Lorraine.”
I thought of the gentleness of Lorraine’s touch on my
cheek, at her impatience and hurt when she thought she was being rebuffed for the simple act of nurturing, for worrying that her daughter was getting a sunburn. No one does what I ask.
She had been eliminated from the basic, biological right of mothering her child.
“What about you?” I asked him. “Did pity for Lorraine ever figure into your need for revenge?”
“Yes.”
I blinked at his quick, concise reply, not expecting it. Maybe I’d been imagining, at least in part, that his vendetta with Noah was purely a testosterone-driven thing, a primitive male right to show who was the alpha of the pack.
“I came to care for Lorraine in the years I was living here. She seemed so alone. Maybe I realized our similarities, given Elizabeth and Noah’s exclusive relationship.” He shrugged. “We never spoke of it directly to each other, but I think we both knew that the other one suffered. Anyone would, being in the vicinity of Noah. And maybe we understood instinctively that we’d both lost Elizabeth. Or that we’d never had her.”
Our gazes locked in the silence.
“Lorraine was a distant Madaster cousin, you know. She married Noah when she was very young, in some medieval-like, dynastic alliance,” he said bitterly. “She had Elizabeth within a year and a half, and then was cast off, for the most part. She lived here but was unacknowledged, except as a nuisance. Like I told you, it’s no wonder she went mad. After Elizabeth disappeared, I asked Lorraine if she wanted me to take her away from here. But her deterioration escalated a lot after Elizabeth went missing. I don’t think she ever really accepted her death. She flatly refused to leave Les Jumeaux. She wasn’t talking all that much, by that time, but I had the impression that she seemed to think it would mean abandoning Elizabeth somehow, if she left.”
I sat down heavily on the couch behind me. My feelings of sadness and pity for Lorraine Madaster went deeper than I realized or understood.
“What is it, Anna? What are you thinking?”
I blinked and glanced up, amazed to see Evan kneeling in front of me.
“She deserves better,” I said honestly. “Lorraine Madaster. I thought it, even that first time I woke up to see her hovering over me. She’s completely alone in the world. No one is taking care of her. It’s not right.”
He nodded. He touched my cheek, very softly. I held my breath.
“Evan… Anna.”
I jumped at the unexpected interruption. Wes Ryder stood at the entrance to the room, looking typically rumpled and frazzled, but also worried.
“I’m so sorry for barging in like this. I tried to call,” he said, giving Evan an entreating glance.
Evan stood slowly. “What is it, Wes?”
“I was wondering if I could speak with you, Evan? Privately?” he asked, his glance striking me and then bouncing away.
Evan stared at his old friend with narrowed eyelids. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“When I heard the… uh… news,” he faltered, his gaze shooting to me again. “I thought I should come. I spoke with Valeria this morning, and she said you’d called and asked her to take a few days off. I talked her into giving me the entry code. Can I talk to you, Evan? Privately?”
“Not now,” Evan said in a clipped tone.
“It’s all right,” I said, standing up from the couch. “I told Valeria yesterday that I’d found out Elizabeth and I were doubles… That you’d married a replica of your first wife. Valeria undoubtedly told Wes that the cat’s out of the bag,” I said to Evan, giving Wes a weary, irritated glance. I retrieved the coffee cup Evan had brought in from outside and held it up. “I’ll just go warm up my coffee.”
“No, Anna. I don’t want you to go,” Evan said.
“It’s all right,” I told him, holding his stare for a second so that he could see I meant it. “I’m not going anywhere, except to get some sunshine on the terrace.”
I gave Wes a cool glance as I passed him. I had the impression he wanted to back away from me… give me a wide berth, but that he held his ground with effort.
He sees a ghost when he sees you.
And then quick on the heels of that: Wes slept with Elizabeth.
Lake Tahoe was cobalt blue on this late summer morning. I stared out at that perfect alchemy of water and sunlight, wondering about those seemingly random thoughts that had popped into my brain while I looked into Wes Ryder’s big, glassy eyes as I passed him a few minutes ago. Maybe my thoughts weren’t as random as I’d initially thought they were. I recalled the way he’d talked about Elizabeth up at the overlook, the obvious admiration and more subtle tinge of longing and loss in his tone.
I remembered something Evan had told me last night: “She slept with more men than I could count over the years. Guys we’d grown up with, and gone to school. My friends… She needed sex. She needed the desire of men, like an addict needs a drug.”
I didn’t second-guess the knowledge that Wes Ryder had been one of Elizabeth’s conquests, any more than I doubted that she’d left an indelible mark on the doctor. Elizabeth may have considered Wes to be a passing fancy—a quick fix—but Wes would remember her until his dying day.
Poor Valeria.
The thought was distant and somehow unconnected to me.
Movement to my left caught my attention. I was so numb that I wasn’t surprised when someone rose up a stone stairway to the left of the terrace. I didn’t think much of anything at all as the dark-haired woman with a stocky build walked toward me, as though she’d known she would find me there. She looked solid and real enough in the blinding sunlight. Her white Velcro tennis shoes gleamed on the gray stone pavers.
She wasn’t a particularly attractive woman. But the expression on her face as she glared at me made her appear downright ugly.
“You ought to be ashamed of what you’re doing,” she accused.
I blinked at the sheer venom in her tone. I found myself staring at the thick, tight bun on her head. I recalled seeing the outline of it in the car leaving South Twin.
“You’re his nurse, aren’t you? Noah Madaster’s nurse?”
“This is from him,” she said. She shoved an envelope toward my midriff. I reached for it unthinkingly. The nurse turned and marched away, disappearing down the steps as rapidly and inexplicably as she’d arrived.
I became aware of the envelope in my hand. It felt warm, like the heat from the woman’s anger had been absorbed by it. I lifted it and stared at the writing scrawled on the paper.
Anna Solas, it read.
A chill passed through me. Not Anna Halifax. It was inscribed with my maiden name.
Which meant that Noah Madaster had been researching who I was.
“Anna?”
I turned to see Evan walking across the terrace. I folded the letter in half and shoved it in my shorts pocket before I faced him.
“I’m sorry for the interruption,” he said as he approached me. He hitched his thumb back toward his office. “Wes is still in there, making some phone calls.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He blanched slightly at my indifference. “It does matter. Everything—all of it—matters.”
“I suppose Wes knew all along? About your vendetta against Noah Madaster? I guess he’d have to be told something, given the fact that I look exactly like Elizabeth. You’d have to tell Wes, or he’d blurt out something stupid when he saw me.”
Evan squinted at the lake. “He doesn’t know about my plans in regard to Noah, no. He just thinks that I met you and… ”
“Fell in fake-love with me because I look like Elizabeth?” I finished for him.
“I’m not sure what he believes, exactly. I haven’t been very forthcoming on the subject of you. I just told him about the resemblance, and asked him not to show shock, because you didn’t know about it yet. And yes. I told him that I was in love with you. In love. Not fake love,
Anna.”
I laughed harshly. “Wes wouldn’t have any trouble believing that, I can imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I look like Elizabeth. And Wes was in love with her, just like you were,” I said recklessly. “He slept with her. Right?”
I liked his startled expression. It was nice, not to always be the stupid, naïve one.
“How did you know that?”
“I see the way he looks at me. Like I’m a ghost. Like part of him wishes like hell I really was her, while the other half wants to turn tail and run. I heard the way he talked about Elizabeth.”
For a few seconds, Evan didn’t respond. The narrowed crescents of his eyes glittered as he stared out at the sun-gilded lake.
“Wes was the first,” he admitted gruffly. “Not the first ever—I doubt there was a time that Elizabeth was ever faithful to me—but Wes was the first I found out about. He was the one we went to therapy for… the only one we really ever worked as a couple to get past. Or so I believed at the time. After that, I didn’t really focus much on the identity of Elizabeth’s men anymore. It wasn’t the individual man who mattered. It was her desperate hunger. Her need to be desired. It gave her a semblance of control over men. Over her world.”
“A control that her father had stolen from her years before,” I added.
I absorbed it all for a moment. Wes may have been a blip on Elizabeth’s sexual radar, but she’d been a game changer for him. Somehow, I just knew that.
“How can you still be friends with him?” I asked Evan.
He seemed unsurprised by the question. I realized it was because he’d probably asked himself the same thing many times before.
“Wes and I have a long history. Our friendship goes back, even before Elizabeth entered the picture.”
A thought occurred to me. “You knew he was Madaster’s physician, didn’t you? Before we ever came here?”
He met my stare squarely.
“I did, yes.”
“Of course you did. You called Wes and renewed your friendship because you knew he could offer you inside information about Madaster and what was going on in the South Twin. You were using him, like you used me. How else could you possibly find out what effect your plan was having on Madaster? What effect I was having on him.”