by Olga Bicos
Holly felt her heart leap to her throat. Vanessa’s eyes were red and swollen. Holly could see she’d been crying.
“Vanessa?” She stepped toward her….
Vanessa fired the gun so that the bullet whizzed past into the wall behind Holly. The woman seemed to rally, standing straighter.
“Sit…the fuck…down,” she told Holly, pointing to the chair in front of the fireplace.
Holly did what she was told. She could see that Vanessa was shaking as she came to sit in the chair opposite her.
“I had a phone call this morning.” She straightened her skirt and laid the gun across her lap. “Very early. It was Daniel.” She shook her head, fighting some strong emotion. “He told me—”
The tight control snapped. She couldn’t seem to choke out the words. She shook her head. “It’s too late,” she whimpered. “Too late.” Making no sense at all.
Holly waited, her hands gripping the chair. “You said you needed my help? I’m here now. I want to help.”
Vanessa put both hands on the gun, almost as if checking to see it was still there. “I did what I was supposed to do, you see. I gave everything up for my husband.” She was talking to herself, almost as if Holly wasn’t there. “That’s what a wife does. He wanted his dream and I made sure my father paid for it. With his life, as it turned out.”
Vanessa stared across the room at the paintings now hanging on the walls. She stopped when her gaze reached Nina’s portrait.
“You look so much like her,” she whispered. “That’s the mistake I made.”
“I’m not anything like Nina,” Holly said, trying to assuage a mother’s fears, hoping she understood. “I love him. With all my heart. I won’t ever hurt him.”
Vanessa looked at her, seeming to judge the truth of her words. Suddenly, she pressed her fist to her eyes, shaking her head. She took a deep breath, her hands returning to the gun on her lap. “I went to see Ryan on his boat. We’d spoken earlier, but the meeting hadn’t gone at all well. I wanted to talk to him again, to tell him that he couldn’t just keep turning me away. I wanted him to understand what I was doing, putting Daniel in charge. I saw you walk out on the deck—”
She shook her head again, suddenly looking beyond all hope, then she raised her gaze to meet Holly’s. “I watched you talking to him. I waited in the car. When you left, I followed you here, to Cutty House. I couldn’t believe you would come here.”
Holly remembered that night, how she’d broken in using Ryan’s special technique. A push at the door, the jiggle of the knob.
“Ryan showed me Nina’s portrait,” she told Vanessa, explaining. “I wanted to come back and see it for myself.”
“I didn’t plan it. I was just so angry, seeing you here.” Her lips twisted, trying to hold back the flood of emotion. “So I used lipstick.” She spoke in a weeping rush. “Childish and stupid.”
Holly remembered the message scrawled on the window in red. Go home!
“I fell through the floor that night,” Holly said.
“Childish and stupid.” Vanessa spoke as if she couldn’t believe she’d done such things. She took a deep breath, her hand once more settling on the gun. “And then I decided that I needed to be more clever.”
“You put the invitation on my desk,” Holly said, piecing it together.
“I always thought Gil sent them, all those invitations for the vineyard functions. Salt on the wound. But Ryan told me quite recently, he’d sent them. My darling boy, trying to make a gesture. And I was so bitter, I never guessed. I would take scissors to them,”
she told Holly. “I’d cut them into these tiny, tiny pieces. But this one, I kept. Because by then, I knew Ryan had sent it. I forged his signature and dropped it on your desk. I wanted to hurt Gil. He took my son. He stole my happiness.”
“You put those crime reports on my desk,” Holly continued, seeing how the pieces fit.
Vanessa nodded, catching her breath. “I had a friend in the district attorney’s office who helped me to get the charges dropped against Ryan. He gave me a copy of the file. I don’t know why, but I kept everything. I doctored some of the pages to make it look like he was guilty. I wanted to scare you away, but I couldn’t. You just wouldn’t leave.”
With every admission, Vanessa seemed to collapse a little more. Holly was half afraid of where her confessions might lead them. “That’s all behind us now,” she said, trying to think of some way to get the gun. “He’ll forgive you. I know he will—”
“No. No, he can’t. He won’t. I drove him away a long time ago. And now, he’ll never forgive me. Because I put you in that car ride at the party.”
The admission stunned Holly. She thought it had been Daniel. She’d been so sure.
“I just wanted you to be scared,” she told Holly. “I thought I was helping him, protecting him from you, another Nina. I thought you wouldn’t stay after that, that you wouldn’t want to play the ghost of Nina. And once the papers got hold of the story, Ryan would understand. He couldn’t live in the past, repeating his mistakes.”
“I’m not a mistake.” Holly had to make her understand. “I’m not Nina Travers.”
“You’re right, of course,” she said. “Isn’t it ironic, how twisted life can be? I thought I was helping him,” she repeated. “But I became the nightmare instead of you.”
“Vanessa. You don’t want to do this. Please. Give me the gun.”
She whispered, “Too late.” She spoke with a sadness that seemed to sink her deeper into the chair.
When she raised her head again, her eyes stayed on the gun and not Holly. “I just wanted you to understand, to tell Ryan. Nina came to me that night. She told me she was carrying Samuel’s child and that he would…divorce me. She would take my place and they would raise their child. Oust me and Ryan both.” She looked around. “I kept this place alive for him, and he was going to throw me out?”
“He couldn’t do that,” Holly said, trying now to keep her talking. Her best chance was that Ryan or Harris would come home, read the note on the kitchen table and come here looking for her.
“This…place…cost me everything.” Her anger was coming through, the last word a cry of frustration. “Always losing money. More money, he’d say. Every time I turned around, he had his hand out.”
Vanessa was staring at the gun, her fingers around the grip. Her words filled the room, crowding it with ghosts.
“If I’d had the courage,” she told Holly, “I would have killed Nina then. That night. But I couldn’t think that way in those days. After she died, I thought it was providence, God’s hand at work. The girl was evil. She couldn’t be allowed to hurt us anymore.”
Slowly, she hunched over the gun, holding it against her stomach. Holly realized she was crying quietly so that, bent over the gun, she reminded Holly of those Japanese warriors preparing to commit hara-kiri.
“I thought she was dead,” she said, the words barely audible. “But then Daniel phoned this morning and I was so furious. I wasn’t thinking clearly. What he told me—I thought, please, God, not again. I was going to put a stop to it, you see? I took the gun only to make Samuel understand. He couldn’t keep doing this to me, couldn’t keep hurting me.”
Holly said, “Let me call Ryan. Please, he should be here.”
“I can’t let him see me like this.” She brushed the tears from her eyes, catching her breath. “His mother.” She held up the gun. “With his grandfather’s gun.”
She was pointing the gun at Holly. Realizing what she was doing, she immediately dropped her hand back into her lap. “No. Oh, dear, no. I didn’t mean—”
Vanessa shook her head. She covered her mouth with her hand, pressing it there as if to keep all that emotion from spilling out. She stared at Holly, her eyes wide.
“I killed her,” she said. “That poor woman. I saw her with him, and I saw Nina. I wanted it to be Nina. God help me, I wanted it to be her.”
33
Harris stood in the hall of
Emma’s apartment, catching his breath. He’d locked Daniel in one of the bedrooms, but had refrained from calling the cops. There would be plenty of time for that later, after he had Emma settled. Not that there was much the police could do about what had happened here tonight. Domestic disturbance—his word against Daniel’s. But hell, he’d give it a roll. Only now, he had this other thing on his mind: Emma, admitting she’d killed Nina.
He came back to Emma. She was seated on the couch, staring into space, one eye swollen shut. Her hand on her lap held a bag of frozen peas as if she didn’t feel the cold. He knelt down in front of her, then picked up the peas he’d taken from the refrigerator earlier and put the bag against her cheek, holding it there.
“Do you want me to call someone?” he asked. “Maybe take you to a doctor?”
She shook her head, winced.
“Careful with that,” he told her.
She gave a small smile. “Sure. Like I deserve any better?”
“Self-flagellation. I like that,” he said, going with it. “Because you’re some big deranged killer now.” He touched her hand. “Come on, Emma. What were you? All of fourteen?”
She didn’t take her eyes off him, clear-eyed in her confession. “I’m not a kid anymore, Harris. I grew up a long time ago. But I kept that secret. And I let Ryan take the blame.”
She looked down at her hands, suddenly realizing Harris was holding the peas. She took the bag from him, held it to her cheek and eye.
She sighed, the sound coming from somewhere deep. “I would tell myself, it’s not like he’s in jail, Ems. They dropped the charges, right? And he seemed happy enough at the vineyard, helping Gil and Marta. Then other times I’d think I drove him away from his home and family. He was in exile and it was my fault because I didn’t have the courage to just admit what had really happened that night.”
She was holding on to the bag of peas for all she was worth. He’d made her take a couple of aspirins earlier, but he figured the real pain hadn’t hit yet, that she was still in a state of shock.
“So tell me now,” he said gently. “What really happened that night.”
“Daniel—but not in the way you think,” she said, again giving him a tired smile. “I had this…mad crush on him the whole time I was growing up. I used to follow him around when he was at work. He had no idea, of course. That’s how I found out about him and Nina. That he was seeing her. That he was—in love. Though now I wonder if she wasn’t just part of his great race to become Ryan. The competition thing. I was only fourteen, but I knew Nina was bad. For him…for anyone. Only, I had to make sure, you know? Gather my evidence so I could tell Daniel what a mistake he was making. So I started following her, too.”
She dropped the bag of peas back in her lap, the effort of trying to get better just too much.
“The party was at Moore Manor,” she continued. “My father still worked for the family and I was helping him. I overheard Nina arguing with Ryan. They were having a full-out screaming match in one of the parlors. That’s when I found out she’d been sleeping with Ryan’s father. I hadn’t known about Samuel. She told Ryan she was pregnant. That the baby was his father’s.” She shrugged. “She’d told Daniel the baby was his.”
“She was a real piece of work.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. She moved the peas to the cushion beside her and rubbed her hands together as if suddenly feeling cold. “I couldn’t imagine her lying about the baby to Daniel, though later, after the autopsy, Daniel claimed the baby was his. At least, that’s what he told me. At the time, I didn’t want her to get away with it, using Daniel. So I made up my mind to confront her. She couldn’t treat Daniel like that. He was fragile, and she was going to break him.”
“You wanted to protect him?”
“You have no idea. It was all I could think about back then. I couldn’t keep my father from drinking himself into the grave, but Daniel, I could help. Yeah, I wanted to make sure he was okay. So I waited by her car. I wanted to catch her before she left. But when I saw her, I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. She was crying real hard, like when you can’t catch your breath. Crying and drunk, mascara running down her face like some badass clown. She took one look at me and told me to get in the car. When I hesitated, she said she was in a hurry.”
“When did Ryan show up?”
“After we pulled out. He came running, screaming for her not to be stupid. She was in no condition to drive. I hid down in the seat, afraid he’d see me. I wasn’t really supposed to be there. I kept thinking how mad Daniel would be if he found out. That he wouldn’t like me anymore.”
She pressed her hands together. Harris didn’t need to read her body language to know she was telling the truth, reliving the nightmare that had brought her here, beaten up by the man she loved.
“We drove for a long time. At first, she was really upset. She said she’d done something terrible and that Ryan would never forgive her. The thing with Daniel, sure. That Ryan would forgive. Hell, the guy had practically begged her, he wanted a piece of her so bad. It hadn’t been her idea. That’s the way she talked, real crude. But Samuel. She was crying when she talked about him. How she knew Ryan would never forgive the thing with his father.”
“No kidding.”
But Emma looked up. “She said it was a mistake, that she’d been drinking, completely out of it.” Here she stopped, taking her time, dropping the bombshell. “She told me she’d thought he was Ryan. They looked a lot alike back then. So it was just this terrible mistake. It was the first time I thought maybe she did love Ryan because she was that upset. Like she wished she could take it back, you know? But Samuel wouldn’t let it go. He kept hounding her, just like Daniel, so that she was afraid he’d tell Ryan if she didn’t just keep sleeping with him. And then she found out she was pregnant.”
“Jesus.”
She nodded. “Yeah. She was in an awful mess. But I didn’t see it that way. Not back then.”
“And Ryan? Where was he?”
“By now he was following us in his car, though it took him a bit to catch up. When she saw him in the rearview mirror, she really floored it, like they were street racing or something. I was scared, but I was determined, too. I wanted to have my say before it all came to an end. I told her what I thought of her, of what she was doing to Daniel. But she just laughed. And she wasn’t crying anymore. Instead, she looked kind of excited by the racing and by the fact that Ryan had followed her. Like maybe he still cared?”
And there was Emma, Harris thought, all of fourteen and stuck in a car with a woman who was completely unbalanced, racing through the streets.
“How did the accident happen?” He didn’t believe for one minute that Emma had killed Nina.
“She started talking to me, saying she’d seen me watching her with Daniel. She said all these horrible things about how when I grew some tits, maybe Daniel would ball me, too, and she could finally get him off her back. She said it like that. Trying to shock me. Doing a good job of it, too. Then she started swerving in and out of the lane. It was late, no traffic. But I was so scared. And Nina, she just fed off of that fear, laughing when I started screaming for her to stop.”
“She lost control of the car?”
Emma shook her head. “I grabbed the wheel. I don’t even know what I thought I could do. I just wanted her to stop. Whatever it took, I wanted it all to be over. I was so scared.” She took a deep breath. “I jerked the wheel straight toward the edge and jumped out.”
He came to sit beside her, taking her hand. “That’s not murder, Emma. That’s called survival.”
But she was shaking her head. “I wanted her to stop.” She looked straight at him, making sure he understood. “Not just the car, Harris. I wanted her to stop everything she was doing to the family.”
And in that instant, at the age of fourteen, she’d made her choice.
He gave it a minute, letting the idea that she’d wanted Nina dead, or had convinced herself she did, sin
k in. “Ryan never saw you?”
She shook her head. “I must have blacked out. I just remember waking up on the ground, hidden by the fog. By then, Ryan had already pulled up. He was screaming Nina’s name, climbing down the embankment to where the car had gone over the guardrail.”
Harris tried to imagine what it must have been like for her, jumping from the car, blacking out. She’d woken up and realized what happened. And, of course, she’d run.
She could see what he was thinking. “Yeah, I ran away. It felt like forever before I managed a ride into town, hitchhiking. I went looking for Daniel. By then, he’d already heard about the accident, heard that Nina had died at the hospital. I was going to tell him the truth, but when I saw him, saw how upset he was, I knew I didn’t want to be the one responsible for that much pain. So there I was, trying to admit what I’d done, trying to find the words. And when I couldn’t, Daniel stepped in and pieced it together for me. The car going over, Ryan following us. He told me Ryan must have done it, forcing her off the road. He made me call the police and tell them just that.”
Of course, she went along with it. Daniel would make sure of that.
“The next morning,” she said, “I realized what I’d done. I went immediately to Daniel. I told him that he’d misunderstood. It was my fault. I fought Nina for the wheel. I caused the car to go over, not Ryan.” She was shaking her head, the tears coming. “But he wouldn’t listen. He kept saying I was wrong. And when I insisted, he completely freaked out. He told me that if he really believed I had killed Nina, he didn’t know what he’d do.”
“He was warning you not to mess up his story.”
She nodded. “He had his own agenda by then. And when we started sleeping together, that was pretty much the end of that.”
A way to control her, so she’d keep to the story. If you love me, you won’t tell…
“I don’t know when I started to think like Daniel,” she told him. “That maybe Ryan leaving the family was his own doing. Nobody forced him, right? And when Vanessa asked Daniel to step in, take over the family business, I almost thought…”