Swim Deep

by BETH KERY

  My hand curled into a fist on the door. I stood there in the silence that followed, unable to breathe until I heard Madaster’s next words.

  “It couldn’t have turned out better. I’ll bet that she left him for good,” Madaster said. “She may have Elizabeth’s looks, and maybe her strength, but she’s not like us—Elizabeth and me. Anna led a sheltered, boring little life. Naiveté practically drips off her. You say she had no reaction when you told her that Evan was her father? Impossible. She must have been horrified to the bone. Put into a state of shock. She got into that car and drove away for good, trust me.”

  “But how did you know she would leave? What if she’d gone up to their hotel suite and realized I’d told them two separate results?”

  “It didn’t matter, you fool! Can you imagine what must have gone through her mind when she heard she was married to her father? I would have been happy with even two seconds of the purest, sheerest horror on her part. To have hours… days… years… a lifetime of that shame, those are all icing on the cake.”

  “But why?” Wes asked. He may have entered into an alliance with Madaster to torment Evan and me, but he’d clearly done so unwillingly. It couldn’t be clearer that he both feared and despised Madaster.

  “Why?” Madaster asked scornfully, as if he thought Wes had just asked him why a heavy object fell when dropped.

  “Why do you want to hurt her, like you did Elizabeth?”

  “Because she’s mine,” Madaster roared.

  In the silence that followed, my skin prickled painfully beneath my wetsuit.

  “She’s just like Elizabeth,” Madaster continued after a charged pause. “I could see the disgust and scorn on her face when she looked at me. Evan has corrupted her into believing I’m the devil, and she’s swallowed it all whole. They both believe I’m some powerless idiot, sitting here in this damned chair, in this tower, looking down helplessly at that girl. But they are wrong. I’m still capable of exerting my will. I’ve punished them both, haven’t I? Evan has lost what he loves. How will Anna ever stay with him, knowing how he married her to get back at me, manipulated her for his own gain, and that it all came to this? You said earlier that he told you he feels her slipping away from him, cringing from his touch. How that must be killing him. He tried to bring me down with a lie. But I fought him with the truth.”

  “You didn’t tell Anna the truth,” Wes said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Madaster replied. “Are you high right now? Did you shoot up before you came up here? Can’t you grasp this, you trembling addict? What matters is that they suffer… that they pay for what they’ve done.”

  “But surely Evan will tell Anna eventually. He’ll tell her, and she’ll know that I lied to her. Evan will show her the paperwork I gave him from the lab. She’ll know that Evan isn’t her biological father. She’ll see firsthand that you are, Noah.”

  Not Evan’s, Noah’s. Not Evan’s, Noah’s.

  The words beat in time to the drum of the heartbeat in my ears.

  Not Evan’s, Noah’s. Not Evan’s, Noah’s.

  No. Neither, I thought. My father is Dick Solas, from Oak Park, Illinois. To me, Noah Madaster was a pedophile, rapist, abuser, sadist, and murderer: a man to be stopped at all costs. Evan had been right about that.

  And that was all Noah Madaster was to me.

  “What matters,” Madaster was saying, “is that Evan recognizes that he’s the source of Anna’s misery. Lord, I’d love to see it: her looking at him with complete revulsion. Even if he had to experience that for thirty seconds before she discovered the truth, it would be sweet beyond belief. It would be a worse punishment than death for Evan. And it’s not as if Anna is going to be happy when she eventually finds out who her real father is. She’ll be horrified, just in a different way. She thinks I’m the devil. Well… She’ll have to live with the idea of being my spawn.”

  It may have surprised Madaster—it might have surprised most people—but I actually was relieved. Profoundly so. My knees weakened and my hand dropped off the door, inert and useless.

  Evan and I hadn’t sinned, even unknowingly.

  “You’re sick beyond belief, Noah,” Wes said. His tone struck me as exhausted. Defeated.

  “You knew what I was ever since you helped me move Elizabeth’s boat that night. Just like I’ve known what you were ever since I caught you shooting up at your office that day, years ago.”

  “Does it make you feel better to despise me? As long as you have me, or Ima, or Lorraine, to kick around, you don’t have to look into the pit of your own black soul, do you? You don’t have to face what you did to your own daughter.”

  “You’re defending Elizabeth again, are you?” Madaster asked, sounding still amused by an old, hackneyed joke.

  “You always act like you knew her better than anyone in the world. But Elizabeth was different, when you weren’t around. When you weren’t influencing her.”

  I realized that Wes was close to tears. Wes, Wes. You should have never tangled with the Madasters. Now you’re caught in the web.

  “You always acted like you loved her more than anything else in the world, and yet look what you did to her. Look what you’ve done to Anna, all for revenge against Evan.”

  “I’ve barely touched the girl,” Madaster said dismissively.

  “Evan is worried she might become suicidal, after all the poison you’ve fed her.”

  “Elizabeth and Anna are mine,” Madaster said, his tone so cold, I felt my spine tingle and stiffen. “You’re mine, to do with as I want, as well. I never wanted you, particularly, but the dregs have been forced on me, at this point in my life. I need your legs, hands and eyes, to go, do, and see where I can’t now. Get out of here, Ryder. Looking at you makes me ill. Call Evan this afternoon. Time for you to be his solicitous friend again. Tell him that you saw Anna drive away after you told her the ‘truth.’ I’ll want a good description of how he’s reacting to Anna’s disappearance, and—”

  I put my hand on the door and pushed it open with force.

  Madaster glanced up and saw me. He froze in midsentence, his mouth gaping open. I walked across the Oriental carpet in my bare feet and came to stand several feet in front of him.

  I won’t say here that Noah Madaster’s superiority, cruelty, and narcissism were an act. He was all that, and more. But at that moment, his arrogant façade seemed to melt away.

  I realized what had caused his transformation. Fear. But something else, as well. Disbelief?

  Hope?

  He clutched at his chest, his eyes bulging wide. I saw movement in my periphery and realized Wes had stood and moved behind his chair.

  Madaster gave a shaky breath, still holding my stare warily, as if he thought I’d run at him at any moment. Or disappear, like a ghost.

  “Can you see her?” Madaster rasped.

  I realized he wasn’t speaking to me, but Wes. I glanced at Wes, who looked bewildered.

  “Elizabeth?” Madaster whimpered in a tiny, childlike voice.

  “Is that what you think?” Although I’d expected this reaction, his self-centeredness infuriated me. “You think that your precious Elizabeth has come to pay you a visit? You actually believe she’d seek you out in the afterlife, after what you did to her?”

  “Anna, what—”

  I put up my hand, halting Wes’s question. I stepped toward Madaster, holding his stare. He appeared unaware that Wes had spoken. He seemed utterly transfixed, gazing at me. I knew what he saw. What he thought he saw. He saw a woman who looked exactly like Elizabeth Madaster on the night he’d murdered her—Elizabeth’s face, the shoulder-length hair, the identical wetsuit. He imagined his daughter had finally come back to him, in the way of his Madaster ancestors.

  “You smug son of a bitch. You thought I was Evan’s tool. You thought you’d made me yours. But I’m doing this for us. Elizab
eth and me. She guided me here. Do you know, I think she might have somehow maneuvered this whole scenario? She wouldn’t let Evan forget her. She wouldn’t let Evan forget you. We both know how persuasive, how powerful, Elizabeth could be. Who’s to say she’d stop being who she was, even after you murdered her? Who’s to say she didn’t somehow manipulate all the events that led me to stand here in front of you right now?”

  I saw realization spark in his bulging eyes. His mouth gaped open in his cavernous face. He clutched tighter at his chest with his right hand.

  “Anna,” he growled.

  “I heard you just now,” I said, pointing at the swinging door where I’d eavesdropped. “Elizabeth comes to me. She’ll never appear to you, because she knows how much you’d want it. She knows how much you’d gloat over controlling her, even in death. Hearing her… seeing her, that’d validate all your insane ideas about the superiority of the Madasters, wouldn’t it? And Elizabeth is fed up to the end of the earth with giving you what you want. Never again. Even after you die, you can seek her out to the ends of hell, buy she’ll never let you look on her face again.”

  “You little bitch,” Madaster muttered, spittle oozing from the corners of his mouth.

  “I found her body. Elizabeth led me to the tunnel,” I continued, ruthless, even in the face of his vulnerability. “I’m going to show the police. You’re going to prison for murdering her, Noah. It’s going to be all over the news, how you raped Elizabeth when she was a little girl, how you brainwashed her into a sick, incestuous relationship for most of her life, and how when she finally got the support she needed to leave you for good, you murdered her. All of it is going to come out, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. How does it feel? To know you’re trapped? Helpless?” I asked. I’m ashamed to say I heard that familiar gloating in my tone, that eagerness to witness suffering. It was his tone. My father’s. My grandfather’s. I hated it, but I have to admit.

  In that moment, it felt fantastic.

  Madaster jerked his stare off me, looking to Wes.

  “Stop her. If you let her talk to the police,” he said in a thick, clotted voice, “I swear to God I’ll tell them everything you’ve done. That you’re a morphine addict. That you helped me the night Elizabeth died—”

  “I had nothing to do with Elizabeth’s death,” Wes defended himself, looking at me with panic in his gaze. “I only helped Noah move her boat that night. She’d anchored just offshore from the South Twin. He told me that he’d have my license to practice medicine revoked if I didn’t do it. I had no choice.”

  “I’ll tell the police how you caused that landslide, and locked Anna in the sauna—”

  “Again, because you insisted I do it,” Wes shouted. He looked at me pleadingly. “I never meant to cause you any real harm. I wouldn’t do that, Anna. He said it was all just to scare you, make you feel uncomfortable and unhappy at Les Jumeaux.”

  “You did those things, Wes?” I asked.

  “Noah wanted you scared.”

  “Was Valeria in on it with you?”

  “No. It was just a convenience, that she could… ”

  “Act as an informant in the North Twin,” I stated grimly, not even bothering to tell Wes that Evan had been using him for something similar in the South Twin.

  “He wanted you to leave Les Jumeaux… at first, anyway,” Wes said. “When he thought you were just some random woman who resembled Elizabeth, recruited by Evan to torture him. But then he spoke to more and more people, researched who you were, and how Evan had met you, and he started to suspect—”

  “That Elizabeth had a child that spring twenty-four years ago, after she went away to school at sixteen, in San Francisco,” I finished for Wes. I looked at Noah. “Elizabeth was always slim. At Christmas that year, she was able to keep the truth hidden before she went away to school again. She knew she couldn’t keep the child.”

  (Light from my darkness. I sent you away for your own good. But I never forgot you.)

  “You don’t know everything,” Madaster said. He was breathing heavily, his nostrils flaring and pinching tight. “She did tell me she was pregnant. She told me that she’d had an abortion. And that afterward, she wasn’t able to have children anymore.”

  “You taught her how to lie even before she could walk. Evan told me that he believed Elizabeth couldn’t have children, as well. Maybe she couldn’t, after she gave birth to me. Maybe something went wrong. Or perhaps she had a hysterectomy afterward. I don’t know. All I know is, she gave me up for adoption because she wanted her child raised somewhere safe. Somewhere clean. She couldn’t bear the idea of that child being exposed to you.”

  “That’s a lie. Elizabeth loved me,” Madaster wheezed.

  “She hated you with a white hot passion. You convinced her, with your cursed machine, that feeling was love. That’s one of your cruelest, sickest sins, Noah. When Evan and the doctors started to help Elizabeth to name her feelings for what they were, she couldn’t wait to cut you out of her life. But you couldn’t allow that, could you?”

  “It was Evan’s fault. He turned her against me. She started spouting the foulest things that night, in the tunnel. I had to make her stop… ” He faded off, panting. He’d slumped in his wheelchair.

  I suddenly saw it in my mind’s eye: the things Elizabeth was saying against him, these lies they’d put in her head, the hatred and revulsion he saw in her eyes.

  He had to stop it at all costs.

  I saw his hands at her throat, choking off this new reality that threatened to snap his narrow, narcissistically driven world.

  “You strangled her to death,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Noah panted.

  “Anna, I think he’s—”

  “Maybe you did mean to. Maybe you didn’t. But you had to make her stop talking,” I said, cutting off Wes. “You couldn’t take it. You were too fragile to hear the truth. It killed you, knowing how much Elizabeth had come to despise you. The blindfold you’d put on her from the day she was born had been removed. She saw you, that night down in the tunnel. That’s why you had Wes lie to me about my paternity. You wanted me to think I’d slept with my own father. You did it because you relished the idea of me looking at Evan the way Elizabeth looked at you the night you murdered her: with utter revulsion and hatred.”

  Madaster shouted and lurched forward in his chair, nearly spilling from the seat. Suddenly, Wes was there, pushing him back into a sitting position. I saw Madaster convulse. I watched the scene as if through a long, narrow tunnel.

  “Anna, call 911,” Wes said, two of his fingers at Noah’s throat. “He’s having a heart attack.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Wes sat across from me in the waiting room at the hospital. He’d just given me the news. He’d said that Noah Madaster had died of a massive coronary only minutes after he’d arrived at the emergency room.

  I experienced neither remorse nor triumph at the revelation.

  It struck me that we both looked like human husks, Wes and I, sitting there in that sterile, unfeeling room.

  “Anna, I want you to know… I never knew all the details about what Noah had done to Elizabeth. I only knew that he murdered her,” he said after a long, numb pause.

  “Because you helped him move her boat away from the vicinity of Les Jumeaux?”

  “Yes.”

  I swallowed and sat forward, forcing myself to focus on this shell of a man.

  “If you tell the police what you did that night, how you helped Madaster, I won’t tell them about what else you did. The landslide. The sauna.”

  His anxious gaze bounced off me.

  “How did you do it? How did you keep me in that room?” I asked, unable to suppress my curiosity despite my zombie state. “Wes?” I prompted when he didn’t immediately reply.

  “Noah owns a traveler’s door lock. It’s
a portable lock that will hold a door fast.”

  “You almost killed me, you know.”

  He met my gaze reluctantly. “I’m sorry, Anna. At that point, he was desperate to make you leave Les Jumeaux.”

  I exhaled, feeling exhausted. “Well? Will you tell the police? About how Noah asked you to help him move her boat that night? You owe it to her, Wes. You owe it to Elizabeth.”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding shaky. “I’ll tell them.”

  “And about what he confessed, when the three of us were in the tower together? About strangling her?”

  He hesitated, but I held his stare. This is your chance, Wes. This is your chance to make your life something other than a lie. Take it.

  Finally, he nodded. I’d already called the police, just after we’d arrived at the hospital. Wes wouldn’t have long to wait, before his confession. Not long, to have doubt and his addiction steal up on him, and convince him to change his mind about admitting the truth.

  “I won’t tell them about what Noah said about your being addicted to morphine,” I said. “But if you don’t check into rehab, and soon—like tomorrow—I’ll feel obligated to tell the authorities. You realize that, don’t you? I’m thinking of your patients. Like Lorraine. They deserve better.”

  His chin trembled at that. We just sat there for a minute or two, both of us caught up in our miserable thoughts, no doubt.

  “What about Evan?” Wes asked. “Does he know? That you went to confront Noah?”

  I shook my head. “But I’m going to tell him,” I said, flinching slightly at the idea of having to tell him the details of what had happened.

  “Anna? Is it true?” Wes asked me uneasily after a pause.

  “What?”

  “That stuff you and Noah were talking about in the tower, about how you see Elizabeth. About how she talks to you, and that’s how you found her body.”

  I sighed and leaned back in the uncomfortable chair.

  “No,” I lied gruffly. “I just said those things to get Noah to confess to murder. I knew he was obsessed with the idea that his relatives could communicate to living Madasters. You must realize he was mad.”