by Corri Lee
“Emmy, there was an inquest. As you so astutely pointed out, aside from the MS, Natasha was otherwise healthy. With Blaze by your side and uninterested, her mother insisted on an investigation. Threw her money about until she got her way. Yesterday morning, the coroner ruled that Natasha died from a lethal overdose. She killed herself.”
Every hair on my body stood on end, my skin prickling with an uncomfortable iciness that proliferated from the outside right down to my bones. “She can’t have.”
“She did. They took blood for testing and found enough sedatives floating around to kill five people. You may certainly have participated in her death, but you certainly didn’t carry out the execution.”
The words wouldn’t process. I’d been in there, standing in her room staring down at her dead body with a pillow in my hands. “But I’m so sure I did it.”
“Let us rewind then. Your dream—the last thing you remember doing?”
With great difficulty, I recalled that night. “Lowering the pillow over her face.”
“Then when you came to?”
“Holding it.” Numbly, I held out my hands the way they’d been when I’d regained awareness; chest height, clutching the fabric and facing down. “I realised it was there when I went to wipe my face.”
“So you don’t explicitly remember holding it down over her face long enough to suffocate her.” Henry leaned back, drumming his fingers across the wooden table top. “And do you know for sure that she was alive when you entered the room? She may have already passed, or died right in front of you.”
“Or she could have been killed by me,” I argued. “Blood would have been one of the first things they checked—why look any further after that? Would they have even checked for signs of foul play with that answer already? She might have been going to die anyway but I still could have been the reason she died when she did.” She may have only had minutes but I might have stolen them. Maybe. Who knew? I might have tried to suffocate a corpse. How redundant. How confusing. How indefinite...
My bewilderment seemed to win me some pity. My cut and dry situation had suddenly become a whole lot messier in a matter of minutes but either way, it seemed like I was going to get away with it. I needn’t ever worry about anyone figuring it out. It wouldn’t even come up for question. With or without my involvement, she’d have died.
“She really topped herself?”
Finally allowing staff into the room, Henry watched me cautiously between the arms and hands clearing our plates. Someone might have asked if something was wrong with the food but it didn’t really register. I was sure that they’d likely cooked it perfection with Henry there and it tasted great, I just didn’t have an appetite.
“She was a miserable young lady, Emmeline. She knew she’d done wrong to get what she wanted and with her lies exposed, she took the cowards ways out. I imagined she felt the same way about living without Blaze as you did, except she lived a long time wanting love he wouldn’t give her. You have it.”
“She really loved him.”
“Too much or not enough—who knows. You found her out. You beat her at her own game. I won’t placate you by denying that her defeat led to her demise. But her death was not a choice made by you.”
“Wasn’t it?” There was always going to be a chance that I’d just gotten there first. Whether she’d have died or not afterwards, that still made me her killer. It still made me evil and I still hated it. “You have to help me find out. I can’t go on through life not knowing for sure.”
“Emmeline, her family are happy to believe she killed herself and lay her to rest tomorrow.” With the room once again empty, Henry tactfully re-approached the subject of my misdeed. “Imagine the pain you would cause them if you took away their closure at the last minute over a feeling that you might be a murderer. Imagine your mother’s pain—the unnecessary stress you’d put yourself through by admitting to a crime if it turned out Natasha had already died when you went to her. In absolving your guilt, you’d cause greater destruction.”
“So we’ll do it on the sly!” Desperate, I no longer cared how out of character and immoral I had to be to get answers. I couldn’t stand to live with a big question mark over my head. “You’re Henry Tudor; you can do anything!”
“Emmeline, no.” Again, he snapped his order like I was a dog but rather than rebel, I listened. In less than two hours, he’d instilled in me the respect I should have had in him for years. I’d gone to him in a crisis. He was laying out the acceptable options. I had to step down off my soapbox and listen to him because despite telling myself I was better than him for most of my life, I wasn’t. He was the father, I was the daughter, and maybe if I’d not spent my adolescence fighting his authority, I might not have landed myself in this predicament. Tallulah had submitted completely and she’d never have this sort of problem.
“I could help you persecute yourself but I won’t. You have the chance to walk away believing you may not have taken a precious life. Having lived with knowing for sure that I have killed for twenty-five years, I strongly recommend taking the path of ignorance. I would sell my soul to the Devil to undo what I have done.”
“Is that your final word on the matter?”
He nodded stiffly. “Yes, it is.”
“Okay...” Emotionally exhausted, I closed my eyes and took a breath. I’d lived a life of denial for so long that it really shouldn’t have been that much of an adjustment. Really, my chances of being innocent looked pretty good—if she’d already been dead, that just made me weird. That was something I could live with...
With help.
“Blaze...”
Knowing what I was thinking, Henry shook his head sternly and picked up the dessert menu, presumably as a distraction. “Can’t you imagine how terrible he’d feel to have taken you into an environment that has led to all this self-doubt and confusion? He’d feel as responsible for Natasha’s death as you do.”
“Maybe...” Of course he would. He’d feel even more responsible for my suicide attempt, too. That’s just the kind of person he was. “So how do I move forward?”
“Start by answering your phone.”
“What?” I hadn’t noticed the buzzing of my silenced handset in my blazer pocket until he forced my attention to it. With it hanging on the back of my seat, I hadn’t been able to feel it, either. Dazed, I rushed to grab it before it rang through to voice mail and felt a bitter-sweet ache in my chest when I saw Blaze’s name on the display.
“Hi.”
“Hi, yourself.” Ah God, he sounded happy. As glad as that made me, I hated that I could and would probably drag him down again. “Am I disturbing anything?”
“No, I just finished lunch with my dad.” Or rather he’d finished it. “Everything okay?”
“Okay? Well, it’s... Ah, well... Um... Do you remember the audition I did last month while you were in Japan?”
“Of course.” I’d fretted because of it. After making me promise to contact him when I landed, I hadn’t heard from him right away because he’d rushed to Liverpool. It was an audition for the male lead in a movie—a job that could make or break him and the first one he’d be able to accept without serious limitations on his time and travel.
“Well... I got it!”
“You’re kidding.” Oh, my love. He was finally getting the good luck he deserved. “When do you start?”
“Filming starts in June; probably for three months but that’s a provisional guess. The script is amazing, the director is really keen. I’ll meet him next week, and provided conditions are met...”
“Conditions? What conditions?”
“Well...” Grunting softly, Blaze audibly moved into another room where he was and closed a door behind him. “The filming is in Chicago, cupcake.”
“Oh...” Jeez. We’d have been married for all of five minutes and we’d be torn apart for another three months. The circumstances might have been better than last time but that kind of distance would be a strain on any rel
ationship.
“Yeah. So I told them that unless they can arrange for you to take three months out of work and get both of our visas and accommodation sorted, I’m out.”
I took a moment to hear, rehear and comprehend what he’d just said. “Did you just say ‘our’ visas and accommodation?”
“Well, sure. If they can’t make arrangements for you to be with me, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Holy shit.” He was insane. He had to be. “They went for that?”
“Well, as far as I know, there’s someone on the phone to your assistant clearing your business calendar. You will come, won’t you?”
“Come to Chicago?” Follow him around and sit on the sidelines, watching runners moon after him while he acted his ass off for the silver screen? Swank around, being the movie star’s wife wearing designer sunglasses and designer dresses, smartphone in one hand, coffee in the other and a pretentious tiny dog tucked inside my giant Fendi handbag? Pretending life was perfect when I’d assured it could never be?
Henry tapped the table between us to catch my attention and mouthed one word. Go. Maybe he believed that it was my way forward, or else the best method of distraction or denial I could hope to be offered. I was blessed with the chance to go on an adventure, one I’d never have had a part in if Natasha had been alive. Blaze wouldn’t go without me and if I refused to go with him in some silly mission not to enjoy life, what was the point of killing her at all?
“I’ll follow you anywhere, Blaze. You know that.” And saying that filled me with the greatest yet strangest sense of completion and pride. Spending three months in Chicago would make him happy, and that was all I now aspired to. Anything I had to do to know he was smiling on his end of a phone call, I’d do it because wasn’t that my motive all along? Whether I’d killed Natasha or not, I owed him for the turmoil I’d caused. If I had, I owed him for doing something unspeakable—if not, I was just an attentive partner. As long as the only outcome was his joy, it didn’t matter what it was built on. I’d act the same way in either case.
“So it’s a double celebration tonight. Isn’t it?”
“It is. We’ll get our money back soon enough.”
“Why don’t we make it a hat-trick then? I’ll round up the guys and book a table somewhere. You can bring your parents and Ivy can ‘accidentally’ let slip about the wedding.”
The wedding... Something else that made him happy and something I’d been trying to avoid addressing. I guessed the time for wishing it would go away had passed. It was going to happen. It wasn’t like it was a bad thing—I did love him.
We spoke for a couple minutes more to make and solidify dinner plans. When the call had ended, I stared at the phone in my hand for a while, mulling over my future.
I had two options. I could fight against happiness and make the rest of my life very difficult in the name of a guilt I may well be needlessly carrying around. Or I could go with the flow, let it all happen as it would and just hope it turned out that there was nothing to catch up with me later.
“Problem, love?”
I blinked dopily and lifted my gaze to Henry. Did problems even come into it anymore?
“No, I just...” A distracting idea jumped to the forefront of my mind, one more important than thoughts of the future. “Plausible deniability. It wasn’t the funeral you didn’t want Blaze to tell me about. You didn’t want me to know how Natasha had died.”
“You’re right,” Henry agreed sullenly. “You’ve been through the mill already, far worse than we even knew. You didn’t need the burden of that additional guilt.”
“I see...” If that didn’t prove that my hell was of my own making, I didn’t know what did. Without that realisation, I’d have convinced myself there were secrets I had no right to pry into. I’d never feel privy to the darker side of Blaze’s life and that would inevitably have caused a rift between us. He wouldn’t want to bother me with his problems for fear of pushing me over the edge and I wouldn’t want to ask. We may as well have shot our relationship down at the paddock like a lame horse if that was going to happen.
My anxiety was all in my own head. Problems fabricated in complication-free areas because of my own negativity. I’d been blowing everything out of proportion.
I hadn’t been my old self since the night I walked into Natasha’s house and that needed to stop. Blaze wanted to marry the woman I’d been on that observation deck weeks before, not the far more neurotic mess I’d become since.
He’d once told me that our scars were the symbols of the hope we had inside us. Now, I had an impressive couple of additions to my collection, I should have now possessed enough hope to carry us both through a freer fate I’d, one way or another, created.
Whether his romantic cliché was true remained to be seen. But it had to be worth a shot.
Under a grey sky that cried with a hazy sleet, I stood alone. My eyes were trained down to the half-covered coffin lowered into the plot in front of me, one that had been bid a goodbye by treasured family and friends but now just left neglected to be taken care of by another. Someone else’s problem.
How depressing, that once someone close to us dies, we entrust them to indifferent strangers who can’t discern one body from the other, when we really ought to be tending to them more carefully than we had before for the moments we have left with the vessel holding an exiting soul. We die and our bodies are no longer precious. Our value lies in the memories we left behind.
Stepping back, I felt a dampness on my palms and looking down, I realised they were covered in earth. Checking myself over, I noticed my knees were muddy as though I’d been kneeling and my face felt caked with mud.
It was like I’d single-handedly dug that grave myself. And the casket within? One Natasha Valentine. Her fate was sealed the moment she walked into my life.
Semi-dazed, I woke from my dream and staggered stiffly through to the lounge area. The smell of fresh coffee instantly roused me, as did the sound and sight of Blaze singing along to the tunes banging out from a radio station.
We’d fallen asleep together the night before in reparation for the time we hadn’t had for each other the previous day. After our respective meetings, we’d gone almost immediately to Esme’s bar as a meeting point, then on to a social club afterwards. Ivy had joined us and that invariably resulted in the hyperactivity level of an evening cranking up from five to ten. With permission to start announcing our fast-approaching wedding, she’d had both Blaze and I bouncing between her high-society acquaintances for introductions and gossip. She was a vicarious partier who needed the presence of young people to fully break out of her trophy wife shell. When she was on the town with cause to celebrate, everyone knew it.
That hadn’t given us a lot of time together and unlike in the days passed, we couldn’t compensate for that with binge drinking and rampant sex. As long was he was ‘on duty’ as my carer, Blaze wouldn’t touch a drop of alcohol and my body was still recovering from the trials of nearly dying, blood transfusions and general injury. All I’d had the energy to do was cuddle up to him and finally trade smaller details of our day, reconnecting and planning like we’d been able to before all hell broke loose. It was like none of it had ever happened.
The time we’d had before we’d fallen asleep had been blissful but Blaze had the same nightmare that had driven us to separate beds before. I didn’t suppose I could begrudge him that. If I knew my man, he was blaming himself for Natasha’s suicide as much as I was, having constructed the evening that had led to it. If it been the drugs that had killed her and not me, the proverbial blood was on his hands, too. He was too kind a spirit to not be tortured by that.
Oddly, I actually kind of hoped it was me who’d done it so I could remove that culpability from his mind. No matter what, I had to take some of the blame and I wouldn’t have wished that sense of responsibility on anyone.
Thankfully, my drowsiness was only a side-effect of the painkillers I’d been trying to wean off and, more mo
bile, I’d been able to drag myself out of bed before the nightmare made Blaze violent again. I accepted that separate beds might be a necessity sometimes and really had no right to complain when I’d made such a massive contribution to that situation. It was really far easier to not take offence, tell the distressed sleeping demigod next to me that I was okay—whether the reassurance reached him in sleep or not—and make a sleepy way to the other bedroom for the night.
The amount of racket he was making suggested he’d heard it, or at least that he’d just not been worried when he’d woken up without me. Blaze was distastefully cheerful for a man about to bury his wife and I told him so with a wry look when he spotted me and sped forth with my morning java.
“Behave yourself today,” I warned him. “You might be happy she’s gone but however painful it was for you when you thought I was leaving you forever, her family’s grief is worse. Mona lost her daughter. For good.”
“I know, I know.” He rolled his eyes and led me over to the breakfast he’d served up. It was like he’d known I’d wake... “And I’m not sadistic enough to be that happy about saying a permanent goodbye. I’m just in a good mood.”
“Okay...” Doubtfully, I took a revitalising sip of coffee and tried to shake off the residue of my own dream. I could still feel the thick dirt of the grave on my hands, which was utterly ridiculous. By choosing to die, Natasha had dug her own grave—not that she even had one. She was being cremated.
“Are you okay?” Blaze brushed the hair back from my face and pressed a quick kiss to my temple. “You’ve been very complacent since yesterday afternoon.”
“Have I?”
“Yeah... It’s like something in your mind has resolved but you’re sad about it.”
It was a struggle not to raise an eyebrow at his observation. He didn’t miss a thing. It was unnerving. If he could tell that much without me giving any conscious hints, there didn’t seem to be much point in denying it. “Dad told me how Natasha really died.”