by BETH KERY
I turned out my light, abandoning myself to the cold, black water and trying to ignore the anxiety tightening my chest.
There it was. The tiny light far above me. It shimmered slightly, as though it reflected upon a circular pool of water. The spring. Stark relief, combined with a sad sense of inevitability, swept through me.
I swam up the vertical tunnel, already knowing what I was about to face. I’d already seen it in the mirror in Les Jumeaux.
I used my flashlight to scan the rock walls as I ascended the vertical tunnel. Twenty to thirty feet below the surface of the pool above me, my light illuminated something that made me start. I almost dropped my light into the unknown depth of water below me.
I hung in the water, my flashlight beam trained on her.
Madaster had intended to dispose of Elizabeth’s lifeless body into the void of the vertical drop. But she’d been caught on a suspended rock outcropping. She’d landed in a C-shaped indentation very close to the ledge, one leg bent awkwardly behind her, her torso slumped against the curving stone.
Willing my breathing to even, I slowly approached her.
On the night Elizabeth had disappeared, she’d come here. To see her father. To confront him here, in their secret place. To tell him she planned to cut him out, like a cancer, from her life.
(Daddy didn’t take it well, when I told him that I understood the truth now. Or at least I understood better. Evan, the doctors, the counselors, and other patients had really started to get through to me. I understood better than I ever had before, how horrible my own father had been to me for my whole life. We weren’t gifted because we were Madasters. We were sick. Interbred. Emotional cancers twisted and pierced every cell in our body. But Evan had finally started to convince me I could get better… that maybe, just maybe, the Madaster poison could be eradicated.
When I called Daddy and said I wanted to speak to him, he insisted on meeting here. In our secret place. I think he suspected that I was going to say I never would see him again. That was a truth he couldn’t bear. I think he knew he could hide the truth, in this place only we knew about.)
I saw it now, as if it was my own memory, not hers.
Much like I just had, Elizabeth had left Les Jumeaux on her boat and anchored off the coast, near the drop off and the cavern. She’d made the same dive many times in the past, the adventure of arriving through the mysterious depths beneath Les Jumeaux spiking the excitement of her illicit meetings with her father.
It seemed impossible that her lifeless body had landed in this little shallow indentation and stayed here for seven years without tipping over the ledge. Even in death, Elizabeth exerted her will. She’d stuck tenaciously, when she should have drifted into oblivion. Forgetfulness. Her lifeless body was her story.
And Elizabeth Madaster wanted that story told.
She still wore her dive suit and hood. I could see the shape of her slender, voluptuous body. She was remarkably well preserved, due to the tight suit and the cold, low-bacteria content of the Tahoe depths. I’d read about it once before, how divers lost in Tahoe could be remarkably preserved for more than a decade, due to the purity of the water and the protection of the suit.
Only her skull had fully decomposed.
I remained suspended in the black waters for I don’t know how long, looking into my mother’s face.
Chapter Thirty
Finally, I left her behind—we’ll be back for you, Elizabeth. You held on. Your long sleep in the dark, cold water will be over soon.
I rose to the shimmering pool above me and surfaced. I removed my mouthpiece and dive mask and looked around. It was a round, circular spring inside a granite tunnel.
The spring was natural, but the tunnel wasn’t. Surely the Cornish miners who had labored a century ago to build Les Jumeaux and the grounds had cut through the stone here, as well, with dynamite and pick axes. Some Madaster ancestor had paid the miners to keep the tunnel secret. He’d passed on the knowledge of the deep subterranean passage between the houses only to a child or two from the next generation, and that Madaster did the same to his child, and so on.
Madasters thrived on family secrets.
Family secrets like me.
Elizabeth had learned the power of secrets from the cradle, no doubt. She and I were both embodiments of the skeleton in the closet.
I pulled myself out of the water and removed my equipment. The tunnel was lit by a single bulb. This was the source of the inexplicable light I’d seen when I’d swum deep into the cavern. The LED bulb must have been burning constantly for over two years, to some time before Lorraine had pushed Madaster down the stairs and made her husband wheelchair-bound. He couldn’t afford to have an elevator built down to this level. It would entail letting strangers view his secret place. It would mean possibly exposing his crimes.
Instinctively, I knew that it ate at Noah, burned in him, his inability to access this tunnel, so prized by generations of Madasters for undertaking illicit activities. After Noah had murdered his rebellious daughter, he’d sacrificed her body to that vertical drop beneath the spring. He hadn’t realized that Elizabeth’s body had caught on the rock ledge just feet below the spring’s surface.
I imagined Madaster felt the closest to her when he visited this place, not realizing that she was literally nearby.
I used my dive light to help with illumination and made my way down the tunnel, the granite feeling like ice beneath my wet, bare feet. To the right of me, there was an indentation carved into the wall. It was a stone room, I realized, the shadows hanging thick where the LED light couldn’t reach. I shone my dive light around. I saw a bed with restraints at the four bedposts. It was an antique, wooden bed. How many generations of Madasters had used it?
There was a sensor cap and attached wires lying on the rumpled sheets.
Nausea struck me. But then a cold, hard anger chased it away. I shone the light into a corner. On a table, I saw bottles of pills and liquid, and syringes for IV drug use. At what age did Madaster start drugging his own daughter for the supposed purpose of his “research”?
(I was too young to remember the first time.)
Behind the table, someone had hung a long mirror with a wooden frame. The bed was in the reflection, a mirror for Madaster to witness his own depravity. I stepped up to the mirror and blocked the reflection. I removed my hood and studied my face. My damp hair fell in curls. Acting on some instinct, I shut off my dive light.
The image in the dim reflection was eerily familiar. My hair had always curled when it was shorter, but straightened out to waves when it was long. Now that I’d cut it, it sprang into ringlets, even damp. The tendrils just brushed my shoulders. I looked like my own nightmare standing there, my black wetsuit gleaming, my hair coiling into wet curls that my terror-filled, dreaming brain had interpreted as Medusa-like.
I knew that I looked exactly like Elizabeth at that moment. I recalled Madaster staring at me with hungry glee.
“So alike. And to think… you never even knew her. It’s all a matter of genes. Those amazing, perfect genes.”
I clicked on my dive light, and my image resolved into that of a young woman whose eyes looked bug-like in her pale face. Of course I was terrified. But it took my own image to hit it home.
What if I, too, had committed incest?
What if Madaster had been right? What if that depravity had been coiled into my genes somehow, a secret biological explosive waiting to detonate?
But… no. That’s not how life worked. That was Noah Madaster’s delusion. I was innocent. Evan and I had been ignorant. I may have the genes of the Madaster family, but I had the life of a Solas. I had the love, security, and respect of a family, something Elizabeth had never known.
(Yes. You are the light from darkness.)
In the way of dreams, or my activated unconscious mind, Elizabeth hadn’t just been telling m
e where to find her body. She was also telling me what I’d meant to her. I was the clean part of her, sent away to thrive in the light.
I wasn’t my biological mother, no matter how much I looked like her. Evan had been right when he’d said I might as well have been from another planet; I was so essentially different from her. I wasn’t responsible for the cancerous corruption that Noah Madaster had passed on to his daughter, and which—I believed—had probably been passed on to Noah by some other Madaster ancestor, and that Madaster by a previous Madaster, and so on and so on, back through the centuries… through all the spidery tendrils of that elaborate, malignant family lineage I’d found in the North Twin library.
I had a vivid image flash into my brain of all those Madasters, and the complicated flourishes of various colors beneath their names. I recalled that Elizabeth’s was, perhaps, the most complex of all, the scroll done almost exclusively in scarlet.
Why did I suddenly have the suspicion that Theodore Madaster’s choice of colors and the design of the embellishment somehow were associated with the supposed “purity” of the entrant’s genes? Had the nearly exclusive use of scarlet ink on Elizabeth’s entry somehow been associated with how many Madasters had participating in her ultimate creation?
My scroll might have been even more scarlet, had it ever been drawn. But it wouldn’t. This ugly cycle was about to end.
I left the room and headed in the direction that I believed led to the South Twin.
I walked perhaps a hundred feet down the stone tunnel, my light bouncing off the pale gray walls. I finally arrived at a mundane looking wooden door. Anxiously, I tried the knob. What if the entrance was locked? I wanted the element of surprise in confronting Madaster. But also, I eventually, I wanted to show police the tunnel. I wanted to show them Elizabeth.
I heard a distinct click, and swung the door inward. Relieved, I walked into what appeared to be a large subterranean room with some boxes, an ancient sawhorse, two old pickaxes, a bunch of folded tarps, and an ancient looking lantern. The walls were made of stacked, interspersed slate stones of various sizes. I turned my flashlight behind me, and was shocked to see that the door on this side was also made of the same slate, pieces of stone protruding irregularly at the edge like jagged teeth.
A thought struck me, and I shut the door into the wall. It was like sliding two perfectly matched puzzle pieces together. I heard the click of the latch.
The door had disappeared. I stared at a seamless slate stone wall. Noah had hid his secret well. Did a similar room and door exist in the North Twin? I’d never seen one. But this room had to be farther underground then the beach-level floor that I had always considered the lowest level of the North Twin.
I needed to find stairs.
I found them easily enough with my dive light. I ascended up not one, but two steep flights of rough wooden stairs. At the top of these was another door. I entered a room filled with natural light. I realized it was a changing room, with benches and hooks for clothing. Sure enough, when I looked out the window, I saw the beach. I was inside the South Twin proper now. When I pulled the door shut, it blended into the white, wood paneled wall of the changing room.
Not a half a minute later, I strode through the shadowed, musty-smelling great room toward the steep staircase, and Madaster’s tower.
Chapter Thirty-One
I neither heard nor saw any one as I made my way down the nearly pitch-black hallway on the second floor. Hopefully, Lorraine was on one of her walks.
I recalled that the small elevator motor had been quite noisy. The mechanical hum would surely give away my presence to Noah or his nurse. Moving stealthily, I opened door after door along the hallway, shining my dive light inside one unused room after another.
Finally, I found the back stairs that hopefully led to Noah’s tower.
When I reached the top, there was another door. It opened when I tried it. I peeked inside and looked around, anxious that someone might be in it. It was empty. I was in a bedroom, furnished simply with a double bed, nightstand, and chest of drawers. On the wall was an old-fashioned pewter bell contraption—a maid’s bell, I realized. Someone could ring from a distance in order to request service. A pair of tennis shoes with Velcro straps was tucked just beneath the bed.
Ima’s room.
I left the nurse’s room and padded silently in my bare feet down a carpeted hallway. Just as I reached the entrance to a small kitchen on my right, I heard a voice in the distance.
“That will be all. Go,” I heard Noah Madaster say curtly.
“I have some laundry to do. If you should need me—”
“I won’t need you. Leave us be, ” Noah cut off Ima impatiently.
Us? Who else was in the tower room with Noah besides his nurse?
I stood in the middle of the short hallway, panicked for a moment. Was Ima about to walk through the wooden swinging door ahead of me? I swiftly moved into the kitchen and hurried to the shadowed depths. A second later, I heard the slight squeak of the hinges on the swinging door. I held my breath, sure Ima was about to switch on the kitchen light and reveal me standing there stupidly.
Instead, I watched from the shadows as she walked past, her face set in that severe expression I recalled too well.
I heard a door shutting at the other end of the hallway. Cautiously, I left the kitchen and went to the swinging wood door. Standing an inch away from it, I put my ear to the crack.
“So you told them both. Separately? As I told you?” It was Madaster’s rasping voice. He sounded eager.
“I saw Anna walking in the distance when I pulled up in the car.”
I started slightly, recognizing Wes Ryder’s voice. Had he come here to give the results of the genetic testing to Madaster? “Evan said she’d gone for a walk, and he was worried about her.”
“So you told Evan first?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me,” Madaster ordered, and I realized he didn’t sound just eager. He was greedy. He relished this moment. “Evan first. How did he take it? Give me every detail.”
“He was devastated, of course,” Wes said. “It was just like you said. He was consumed with worry for Anna, frantic about how she would take the news.”
“The fool is in love with her. Maybe even more than she’s in love with him. He thought he could manipulate her for his plan, all while keeping her at a safe distance from me. Maybe Evan even thought he could keep Anna at a distance from himself while he carried out his revenge. But he couldn’t. She caught him, good and hard. And he never guessed the truth. He thinks of himself as a protector and savior of his wife, but he ended up being the one to plunge the knife into her.”
I realized I was fisting my hands so hard, I was digging my nails into my skin. I forced myself to unclench them.
“It was the same with when he was married to Elizabeth,” Madaster continued. “Always the knight in shining armor. He looks down his nose at me, he judges me, but he’s the one. It’s his interfering self-righteousness that is harming his wives. And now he knows it. Now, he’ll have to live with the fact that he’s hurt Anna—maybe irreparably—for his entire worthless life.”
I placed my hand on the door and started to push, but then Madaster said, “Now Anna.” He sounded like a kid fingering his Christmas gifts beneath the tree, savoring that first hedonistic rip of the paper. “How did she take the news that you gave her?”
“How do you think she took it?” Wes sounded angry now. I didn’t understand the part he was playing in all this.
“Just answer the question, you weak, useless addict. I don’t keep your secrets—or keep you supplied with morphine, or cover your gambling debts—in order to hear your worthless opinions.” He used the same tone as when he spoke so dismissively—so cruelly—to Ima. There was a pregnant pause, and I wondered if, unlike his nurse, Wes would stand up to Madaster.
“
Please tell me you didn’t take one look at her and go as spineless and moony-eyed as you used to do with Elizabeth,” Madaster said.
“I told her. You son of a bitch.”
Madaster laughed. “She’s gotten under your skin, hasn’t she? Just like Elizabeth? Well, she’s a Madaster. Many times over.” I heard the pride in his tone, and felt the ripples of revulsion just beneath my skin.
“You sicken me,” Wes said.
“The feeling is mutual,” Madaster boomed, sounding almost jovial. “But where would we be, without each other?”
“Cell mates?”
“We’ll both end up in our graves before that ever happens, me from this damn broken body, and you because your heart has stopped from a self-inflicted overdose of morphine. That or a bullet from my gun. Now stop your sniveling and tell me how Anna reacted when she heard the news.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but she didn’t say much at all.”
“She had to say something… react somehow, to news like that.”
“She thanked me for having the testing done and delivering the news.”
“That’s it? After you told her that her biological father was her husband? That is what you told her, isn’t it?”
“Yes, damn it. She seemed to be expecting it. Dreading it, but expecting it,” Wes said, under his breath. “I don’t understand how you knew.”
“How I knew?”
“That she’d leave. I thought your idea was stupid, because surely Evan and Anna would talk once they were together. Surely they’d realize I’d told them two different stories.”
“So she did leave? In a car? By herself?”
“Right after I told her,” Wes said uneasily. “I acted like I was going to my car, but I watched her, from behind some trees. She got into Evan’s car and drove away.”