Our Little Secret
Page 18
“Upon advice from her counsel, my client will not be speaking further to this matter.” Tate puts his hand on my knee.
“Oh, it’s not just Mrs. Petitjean that references your client’s diseased state of mind.” Novak’s oily with his own cleverness. “I have another signed statement here that corroborates everything Mrs. Petitjean has said.” He reaches inside his suit pocket and pulls out a white sheet. It’s been folded neatly, like someone’s run a thumbnail down the crease.
“This is the signed statement from Freddy Montgomery, made earlier this morning. Shall we have a read?” Novak unfolds the paper, pressing it flat on the table.
“Angela Petitjean, her mother, and I shared a bottle of champagne in my hotel suite in Boston. At the time she was troubled by what she termed a ‘personality disorder’ and also openly admitted that she wanted to hurt Saskia. She said she ‘wanted her gone.’ I’m afraid I distinctly remember the phrasing.”
I half swallow, looking from Mom to the letter and back. After everything we’d gone through together? “No!” I shout. “That’s not fair! Did he tell you he offered to kill Saskia himself? He said he knew contract killers who could send him her head in a box! Mom, tell them!”
“Oh, Angela, I tried to help you,” Mom says, her face cleaving into sobs once more. It’s a master performance, the likes of which I’ve never seen before.
Novak folds up Freddy’s paper. He’s barely able to contain his utter dislike of me. How can I prove what they did? How?
It’s like the room has tipped and everything’s sliding. I can’t get a proper grip.
“Of course it was Elbow Lake,” Mom says suddenly, her jaw jerky and sour as she spits out the syllables.
“I’m sorry?” Tate says.
“That’s where they found Saskia’s body. Elbow Lake. It’s where my daughter first loved HP.” My mother heaves and crumples. When she finds the stamina to sit up again, she finally looks right at me and there are layers upon layers in her eyes, like filters in front of a lens. Fear is a layer and pain is in there, too, but the thickest of them all is guilt.
Tate turns to me, wide-eyed. My throat constricts and I’m shaking. “We went there for our graduation party, HP and me.” I think of us on the dock, eighteen years old, HP standing on the edge in his board shorts with his back to that clear water. You walk around with your eyes closed, too.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart”—Mom wraps her arms around herself—“but I can’t in good faith protect you any longer.”
I try to think of a single time in my life when I felt protected by her. Never. Not once.
“We’re charging you with first-degree murder and obstruction of justice.” Novak gathers up his paperwork, threading Freddy’s statement back into his pocket. “Within the hour it’ll be official.” He helps Mom out of her chair and she walks with him to the door, her legs stalky as if they won’t bend properly.
Once they’re gone, Tate exhales noisily. “Do you have any idea what the hell’s going on here?”
“It wasn’t me, Tate. I know it looks like it was, and everything’s stacked up against me, but I swear to God, I never killed Saskia. I walked away.” I rub my nose against the knuckles of my thumbs. “There were times when I thought about it, but when I said those words to Freddy, it was me trying to rid myself of the compulsion. And then, suddenly, Freddy and my own mother were hatching a plan, pushing me to it. They even got Saskia, brought her to Elbow Lake, Tate. I could have hurt her but I didn’t, because we don’t all act on our worst intentions, do we?”
Tate scratches his beard, distracted. When he speaks, it’s a throwaway comment, an aside. “If we did, there wouldn’t be enough rooms like this one.”
I want to hug him. He nods and stands, his hands in his pockets. “If you didn’t do this, Angela, how are we supposed to show that they did?”
I close my eyes. “I don’t know,” I say. The darkness feels good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When I was a kid, my parents took me on a road trip to the West Coast and we drove right through the middle of a tree in Northern California. It was an old tree, knotted and stoic from the side view, but minivans were rolling right through the middle of it while kids hung out the windows scraping their Slurpee cups along the ridges of the tree’s calloused innards. I could hear their plastic straws rattling like sticks down a washboard. Mom turned from the passenger seat to explain that the giant sequoia was rotting from the inside out. At the time I didn’t realize the extent to which she was doing exactly the same thing.
She was so focused on my life being different from hers. Throughout her marriage to Dad, the years dripped by for her in humdrum mundanity as she traveled farther and farther away from exceptional, becoming little more than a mediocre housewife. Long lost were the days of her glamorous youth. After a few years with Dad, nobody noticed her. For twenty-five years my dad studied Greek while my mom chopped vegetables, and if I think about it now, I get why she was so desperate for me to do something with the chances I had. Claim your life, she told me at every opportunity, before somebody claims it for you. I wonder now if I ever really understood what she was saying. I always thought she was talking about HP.
After I shared the details of what had happened with HP, my mother ran with the drama. She ranted about what I must do next, how I must get my life in order now, show them all up. Finish it, darling, drive it home. Leaving things as they were was lily-livered—what I needed was closure. How carefully she hid her own devastations. She hid her meanings, too, never outright saying what she thought I should do, but lining every sentence with suggestion, like silk behind a curtain. The more we talked, the more insistent she became.
It was her idea for me to invite Saskia to the lake—hers! And Freddy supported it wholeheartedly.
“Elbow Lake is the perfect setting,” she’d said. “It’s so symbolic. Everything began there and now you can finish it there. I love a full circle.”
“What if I don’t want to meet with her? What if I never want to see her again?”
“Forgive and forget.” It had become her mantra, delivered by rote so many times that I think even she had lost track of what she was asking.
Freddy, for his part, must surely have been trying to help me when they first thought up the plan. If my mother’s intentions always had a slant of self-interest—some kind of vindication—his were always true. But here, now, with Novak closing in, he’s reverted to his Machiavellian self: Freddy the businessman, viselike in a pinch. He might have been acting on my behalf at Elbow Lake, but the statement he’s written today is a sellout, nothing more than a wriggle of desperation. He knows I can’t prove him a liar, and I’ll never forgive him for it, or forget.
And beneath everything piled up on top of me, big-eyed and quiet in the wreckage, is Olive. Her sweetness when I slept next to her; the way she tried so hard to give me her mother’s necklace as a gift. Only she really noticed how sad I was, what I needed most. And I’ll never be allowed to see her again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Novak returns to the room alone. He sits down in his chair without speaking, staring across the table at Tate and me as he readjusts the chain of his pocket watch and primps the cuff links in his sleeves.
“Anything else?” he says after a long silence. He’s roostered and smug with triumph.
“You’ve got it wrong,” Tate tells him. “Your case isn’t as watertight as you’d like to believe.”
“See you in court, Tate.” He stands. “It’s over, Ms. Petitjean. Our story has its ending.”
My eyes feel raw and puffy.
“You’ve talked a lot about the years you’ve spent with Mr. Parker; God knows we’re all aware it’s the greatest love affair of the century. But I have to say we’ve gotten to know each other well in the past couple of days. Haven’t we? Perhaps we can be pen pals? You can send me postcards from jail.” He straightens, buttoning the front of his jacket, and doesn’t look back as he walks away.
“I really hate that guy.” He shrugs. “Look, I have to get going here. Let’s try and stay positive. Eat the food they bring you. Stay hydrated. Whatever happened today and whatever Novak thinks, it’s not the end of the story, so no dark thoughts, okay?”
I put my chin on the table, and my eyes feel heavy as they brim with tears.
“It’ll be my word against Mom’s.”
“Yep. Hers and Freddy Montgomery’s.” He sucks the hair beneath his lower lip. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Are you scared?”
“I don’t know what I am.”
My heart feels listless, as if inside my chest there’s a drummer who’s had enough of the beat.
“I’m gonna go now. It’ll be okay,” he says, then ambles out.
Soon they’ll take me out of this room and put me into an even smaller one. I wonder if it’ll have a window. Shards of late-afternoon amber light spear in from outside, cutting the wall into pieces.
Everything in my life is gone now but sadness. Perhaps that’s all I’ve ever really had for company. Mom, HP, Freddy, Dad, even Ezra—they all abandoned me one way or another. I’ve become a ghost story that HP will whisper to himself in the dark. I wonder what he will tell Olive about me, in the future. The steps the two of them take in daylight won’t ever be quite as certain, and I never would have wished that for them. It’s not what I pictured at all. This whole thing began in loneliness and it wasn’t meant to end in it. Oh, Saskia. The universe came for her just as I said it would, but nobody listened to my warnings. And there’s irony at every turn, because here we are at the very end, and Saskia’s still taking everything I have.
THE URGE TO DESTROY IS CREATIVE. If only they would shine their flashlight at the actual monster. Everyone in this building has me pegged as the psychopath, the one who destroyed the lives of others. Don’t they know that everybody has the urge to destroy? It’s simply a sliding scale. Put a crowd of a hundred people in a room and wait. Eventually the psychopaths will emerge, and I’m telling you now, they won’t be who you first suspected and there’ll always be more than one. Watch the successful people who push to the front; keep an eye on the hierarchy as it establishes itself. Take Freddy, for example: If I’m a psychopath, then so is he, so is Mom, and do you really think Novak isn’t? Deep inside the fibers of everyone’s brain, where the real stories are told, there’s always dark intent. And Novak said it himself—he wants me in jail, he wants to see me suffer.
But they’ve grappled me into a box now and they’ll spend the remainder of my time here hoping the lid stays on tight. It’s okay. I know how they feel. I’ve been battling demons for so long. No one wants to see the truth: wrong, right, guilty, innocent, honest, dishonest; with the right set of circumstances, we’re all capable of anything.
Just as I’m scraping at the rusted window clasp, scrabbling fingerprints down the glass of the pane, Novak pushes the door open.
“We’re moving you.” He bends back out of the doorway to nod at someone down the hall and give them a thumbs-up. Then he ducks back in. “What did you just say?”
“I didn’t speak.”
“Uh, yes you did.”
“Do you know anything about loneliness, Detective Novak?”
“That’s enough. Let’s go.”
A man in a gray suit passes by and Novak backs out into the corridor again, wedging his shiny shoe into the gap of the doorjamb. I hear the deep pitch of their voices, the lilt of it low, like mooing. Above the door, the video camera continues to log every move I make. Who’s on the other side of that machine? Forty or so hours of my life captured on tape. I stand still with my face turned up to the lens.
Tate says there’s hope yet; he says it like we’re winners. What he doesn’t understand, though, is how steadily people decay. We all look the same on the outside while sadness eats at our core. Dad, HP, Ezra, Mom, Freddy—even Olive—there’s absence tunneling out of each of them. Freddy will walk free—he’ll have the best lawyers money can buy. He won’t contact me again. Mom will creep around Cove in her silk scarf and claim no knowledge whatsoever of any wrongdoing. If the forensic team actually does their job, maybe they’ll find her DNA on Saskia. Maybe they’ll see that more than one person killed her. Mom will spit all the way to jail, trying with every step to take me there with her. If it comes to it and she’s incarcerated, she’ll find some way to create a prison hierarchy, placing herself on top of the rancid pile.
Tate will stick with me. He’ll look me dead in the eye, perhaps because he’s at home on the road of loss. Maybe there’s something still to be learned from him. Buck up! he’ll say, as the days sag toward the trial. You never know what might happen! But that’s the problem: I know exactly what the world can do to a person.
I miss Olive. There’s a certainty in children, a belief that gets lost in adults. Tell a kid there’s a monster in the bathroom and they’ll ask you what color it is. They accept everything and it makes them powerful, not vulnerable. We should elevate our children’s capacity to believe things. Olive Parker, stay pristine: Don’t grow up at the mercy of anything, especially false optimism. I’ll write you letters you’ll never read. I’m your godmother, don’t forget! Your mother turned me into that, too.
Novak steps back into the room, holding the door open with his foot. “Let’s go,” he says again. “It’s time.”
He leads me out into a corridor where the air is cooler. The walls are painted yellow and covered in posters with faces I’d like to spend more time studying. We move quietly along, leaving my fetid room behind.
Novak thinks he’s won and I’m defeated, but the truth is I let something go in that space—all that frantic want, all the obsessiveness—it’s like I’ve talked away a grand tapestry of wrongs. The farther I move now from the interview room, the more the dark thread unravels. I loved one person my whole life, and while everyone else postured and jigged and wrenched their feelings into hostility, here I am emerging with that love intact. I may carry all of the blame, but I still have the memory of true happiness.
I didn’t hurt anybody, not really, not the real kind of hurt. The tapestry of my sins is small. Can’t you see the filament, Novak, looping heavy along the corridor as it comes undone? Let it unwind, let it unspool around me, because wherever we’re going, Novak, whatever dark little hole you put me in, I’ll close my eyes and know that I’m free. The spiders aren’t crawling anymore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was warm as we drove out to Elbow Lake. A warm night, full of the leftover heat of the day. Mom’s CD blared as she spoke to me of peace, of letting toxicity go, of all the ways I could forgive and forget.
At the bottom of the bumpy, tufted hill, Saskia was already sitting on the dock. We parked and Freddy greeted us, his face flushed with possible absolution. He rubbed his hands together as if it were cold. “I know it’s not your top choice, but you’ll feel so much better once you’ve spoken with her. At times like this, Angie, it’s important to just do what needs to be done.”
Near the shoreline, the mud was wet underfoot. Saskia’s shirt billowed out behind her, her frame thin and vulnerable. She wasn’t wearing shoes.
She waved from our dock—an uncertain wave, but there was still hope in her fingers as they trailed the air.
“Off you go, dear.” Mom released me toward the water like a dove. “Do everything we told you. Say all the words we’ve practiced, and it’ll all be fine. You’ll be amazed how easily you can let go once you’ve properly apologized.” She nodded with her eyebrows raised. How proud she would be of me if only I’d do this one thing.
I walked past the char of the old stone fire pit, blackened with fires of grads I no longer knew, and crossed the slats as they stretched out over the water. My legs were stiff, my joints rigid. Rusted nails jagged out of the wood,
the grain fibrous and mealy and damp.
“Thanks for coming. I was hoping you would,” I said, and she shook her head, her eyes so giving, so trusting, so evolved. She held a pebble in her cupped palm, rolling it around against her love line and life line. She looked at me then, almost apologetic, almost contrite. I didn’t move closer.
“Freddy said you wanted to chat,” she said.
“That’s right. More or less.” I turned to see Mom and Freddy leaving, my mother’s arm threaded through his. They walked back up the hill to Freddy’s car and both got in, their belief so absolute in the power of forgiving and forgetting. Saskia and I watched the car creep up the bumpy ground and then gather speed as it found the road and was gone. I took a deep breath and turned back to Saskia.
“I’m trying to get over what you did,” she said.
“Can you?” I asked. HP had skimmed stones, bare-chested, beautiful, exactly where she stood.
“I’d like to think we can be bigger people. Both of us,” she said. She whipped her pebble into the lake. By her ankle was a thick, heavy rock, sharp and fated and waiting.
With her back to me, she didn’t even realize I’d picked it up.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Nita Pronovost and Sarah St. Pierre for eventually managing to get me to the right picnic, and for all the fun along the way. And to my agent, Carolyn Forde, who’s tireless and amazing and with whom I’ll one day tour Europe. I also need to thank Almeda Glenn Miller and Adrian Barnes for their inspiring classes at Selkirk College: They lit a fire under me, and here we are. Kristen Webb helped me with early ideas for nasty things characters could do; Kate Walker was my chapter-by-chapter reader, cheering me on; and Linda L. Richards gave me a great first edit. Tracey Mozel is my constant tech support, and I owe her much more than the Leo’s Greek Pizza and red wine with which I repay her. Thanks, also, to Jo Lyle in Sydney, who reminded me of how Australians form sentences when I got rusty after a nine-year gap. Thank you to Chevy Stevens, who’s held out a writerly hand to me, and has fast become one of my favorite people to text: She makes me laugh when I’m meant to be panicking. To the Nays in Canada and my family in England—Jonathan and Sue Watt, Jo and Sal—thanks for all the love and reinforcement, and may you never read any of the rude scenes. And finally, most of all, thanks to Clint, Cash, and Ruby. It’s really all for you. Everything is. Thanks for not waking up when I tiptoed past your doors at five a.m. to write in a quiet house.