Dead Secret

by Ava McCarthy

  He held a gun straight down by his side, pointed at the floor. As if he was too weary to lift it.

  Jodie felt herself shrivel, every particle recoiling. She wanted to curl up, huddle on the floor. Catatonic, like Lily. Instead, she took a step forward.

  ‘I want my daughter.’

  The gun jerked up in line with her chest. Jodie froze. Held her breath.

  Ethan pushed himself off the doorjamb, kept the gun aimed her way while he moved towards Celine who was looking at him with hollowed-out eyes.

  ‘Sit down, Mom. Come on, you’re shaking.’

  His voice was gentle. He took Celine’s rifle, placed it carefully on the floor, keeping his own gun on Jodie as he settled his mother on the bed.

  Jodie’s brain raced. She stared at Celine, at the quivering folds of skin, the tired, slanted eyes. The woman didn’t know. What if she did? Was there a chance she might help?

  Jodie lifted her chin. ‘She doesn’t know who I am, does she?’

  ‘Leave it, Jodie.’

  ‘She knows I’m your wife, that I’m Abby’s mother. But she doesn’t know what else I am, does she?’

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Mom. I’ve told you how she lies.’

  Ethan locked eyes with Jodie. His gaze looked tortured, and shaded with a note of something else, something unexpected. A note of pleading?

  Jodie looked away. Focused on Celine.

  ‘Ethan is …’ She took a breath, tried again. ‘Peter is my father.’

  Celine blinked, puzzled. Jodie’s lungs felt congested, suddenly choked with the enormity of saying the truth out loud. She went on.

  ‘Tell her, Ethan. Tell her I’m your daughter.’

  He two-handed the gun, steadying his aim. A clammy heat flashed over her. Would he really shoot her in front of his mother? Had he ever actually killed anyone? Zach did most of his dirty work. Even Keith Daggett had probably already been dead when Ethan switched his body into the Bentley.

  Iced rain tick-tacked against the window. Jodie took a deep breath, kept her eyes fixed on Ethan.

  ‘Peter met my mother in Dublin. When you sent him away.’

  Celine frowned. ‘But you’re his wife. I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s a lie, Mom.’ Ethan’s face was slick with sweat. ‘None of it’s true.’

  ‘I can prove it, Ethan. I’ve got DNA results.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘I sent off for a paternity test.’

  ‘Mom, this is all horseshit.’

  ‘I told you I’d do it, Ethan. To prove Abby was your daughter. The lab did a full genetic reconstruction.’

  Celine looked up at her son. ‘Peter, what’s she talking about? What’s going on?’

  Jodie stared at Ethan. ‘Your genes and mine. Conclusive parent-child match.’

  An abnormal case.

  The lab manager’s words stirred up a queasy shudder. She suppressed it and tried to catch Celine’s eye.

  ‘I’m your granddaughter, Celine. Peter is my father.’

  The woman stared, shook her head, over and over, kept on shaking it till the movement became robotic. Ethan shifted beside her. Horizontal lines cut deep into his brow, and his skin was glistening with sweat. He looked a decade older than his forty-two years. But then again, he was. He’d been lying about his age ever since he’d reinvented himself as Ethan. Peter was fifty years old.

  A slurry of nausea slid around in Jodie’s gut. She’d spent so much time longing for her father. But not this. Not this.

  She managed a whisper. ‘What kind of monster marries his own daughter?’

  Celine flinched on a sharp intake of breath. She clapped a hand over her mouth, looked repulsed. Beside her, Peter shook his head, pinned his gaze to Jodie’s. The torment in his eyes seemed to strum the air in the room.

  ‘It’s a lie,’ he whispered.

  ‘You sought me out.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You followed some sick, twisted urge and sought your own daughter out. You engineered our meeting—’

  ‘No! Jesus, Jodie, how could I? I never knew about you, I never knew she was pregnant. Our meeting, it was … it was freakish. A coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  But even as she said it, Jodie realized it was probably true. She’d been looking for Celine’s lawyer in Ives and McKenzie. But Peter had been her lawyer. He’d worked there, then started up his own firm in the same building. Not so improbable that they’d bump into each other there.

  Peter’s breathing grew rapid. He adjusted his grip on the gun.

  ‘That cold wall you have, so fucking remote all the time. You never told me about your past, not for months! You never told me who you were looking for that day. You never opened up!’ His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. ‘By the time you did, it was too late, we were … I wanted …’

  Celine made a faint, horrified sound. Jodie’s gut turned over. Early memories swirled up inside her, like a sickening fever: the heady attraction, profound and magnetic; the shared gestures; shared intimacies; the instinctive sense of belonging together. Samantha’s words seeped through the vile delirium.

  ‘Genetic sexual attraction … a natural tendency to mate with our own tribe … attraction between family members separated until adulthood … overwhelming … primordial … ’

  Jodie shuddered, repelled.

  ‘You should have stopped it,’ she whispered. ‘When you knew, you should have stopped it.’

  Peter’s gaze shifted, slid sideways. Something dark crept into his eyes. Something furtive and cunning. A flash of the monster.

  Jodie felt herself shrink. ‘You didn’t want to stop it, did you? You discovered you liked it, was that it? Got some sick charge from being with your own daughter. Just like Elliot.’

  Celine gasped as though she’d been whipped. She stared at her son, her face white with shock. ‘Peter?’

  He wouldn’t look at her. Jodie went on.

  ‘It’s your worst fear, Celine. It’s what you were always afraid of, isn’t it? That he wouldn’t be normal. That he’d turn into his father.’

  Peter jerked up the gun on a level with Jodie’s face. His eyes looked stony. ‘Don’t ever say that!’

  Her heart jolted. Samantha’s voice drifted on through her head.

  ‘ … trauma imprinted on the child’s brain … hard-wired in … they go on to re-enact it, just repeating what seems familiar and normal.’

  Peter’s knuckles whitened. The anguish in his face was haunting. Jodie flashed on the sketch of the damaged little boy. Blanked it out.

  ‘It’s why you sent him away, isn’t it?’ she said to Celine. ‘You were afraid he was turning into his father.’

  Peter’s jaw tensed. ‘No!’

  Celine was silent. She looked old and shrunken, and her colour was ghastly. Peter took a swift step towards Jodie.

  ‘Go get Abby, Mom, we’re leaving. I’ll deal with this.’

  Panic swooped up inside Jodie’s chest. ‘Don’t let him take her! She’s not safe with him, you must know that!’

  Celine gaped at her son, looked half-dazed with shock. Peter stepped closer to Jodie, loomed over her, blocking her view of his mother. Jodie flattened herself against the wall, her chest pumping.

  ‘Think about it, Celine! Elliot went on to abuse Lily’s daughter. Little Anna. When she turned eight years old, just like the others.’

  No answer.

  Please God, let her listen!

  ‘Peter will do the same to Abby, can’t you see that?’

  Peter’s eyes flared. He shot out a hand, grabbed Jodie by the throat, slammed her head back up against the wall. She gagged, choked, felt her eyes bulge. Harsh breaths tore past her throat. She gaped at Peter. Saw up close what his hair kept covered: a deformed right ear, its outer edge jagged. As though a bullet had once torn it, just missing his head.

  She forced out a strangled whisper. ‘You’re going to hurt Abby, aren’t you?’

  Dark colour
suffused his face. She waited for his denial, for his fingers to tighten. Her jugular throbbed high in her throat. Then Peter went still. His eyes turned glassy. Vacant. The blood leached from his face, left it deathly grey. Jodie could almost see his mind locking in, reaching back, reliving past horrors. Horrors that likely shaped every thought, every action, every yearning, every minute of his life.

  Jodie matched his stillness. Watched his mouth turn ugly with disgust. Self-loathing? Then his eyes sharpened, fixed back on Jodie. They were black, impenetrable. He shoved the gun into her face.

  ‘This is all your fault.’

  Dr Jekyll, Mr Hyde.

  ‘If you hadn’t tried to leave,’ he went on, ‘if you’d just stayed with me, we could’ve worked things out.’

  His fingers dug into her throat. Jodie gasped for air. Tiny sips. The gun was a whisker away from her eyes, and she stared, mesmerized, down the barrel, unable to look away. Her vision flickered, the room seemed to quiver.

  Don’t faint, not now!

  The light waned. Flickered again. And suddenly, an image replayed in her head: a large branch, weighed down with ice, crashing across power lines. She held her breath. Clenched her fists. The light fluttered in snatches. Dimmed again. Then the room snapped into darkness.

  Jodie lashed upwards, connected with the gun in a two-handed punch, jerked it skyward. A shot tore through the ceiling. Peter cursed, Celine screamed. And somewhere in the dark, the gun thudded to the floor.

  Jodie struggled, twisted free, dived, scrambled. Peter grabbed her by the hair, yanked her head back. Pain screamed through her scalp, her neck, her throat. She ignored it and stretched along the floor, scrabbled with her fingers. Felt hard, blessed metal. Then in a single rolling movement, she wrenched her head around, flipped onto her back, arms fully extended, and trained the gun upwards into Peter’s face.

  He went still. Released his grip on her hair. Slowly, he straightened, took a step back.

  ‘Don’t do it, Jodie.’

  Her eyes adjusted to the dark. Shadows shifted, resolved into the gaunt hollows of his face. Celine was moaning somewhere behind her. Peter whispered,

  ‘You won’t do it, you can’t.’

  ‘I did it before.’

  ‘They’ll put you back in prison. You’ll never see Abby again.’

  Novak’s words floated into her head. ‘… you’re not a murderer … start over.’

  She couldn’t go back to prison, she had to take care of Abby. Jodie gripped the gun tighter.

  Just do it!

  For an instant, she was back in the Bentley: the flicker of headlights, the screaming engine. ‘I die, you die.’ Jodie groped again for that dead, flat place, that cold zone where she stored up her hate. She couldn’t find it. Instead, felt an eerie awareness of Peter’s pain.

  Do it! It’s what you’re here for, to kill him again!

  The gun felt heavy. Her head buzzed with voices: Nate’s, Samantha’s, Momma Ruth’s.

  ‘ … if you had the chance to do it over again, would you really do anything different?’

  ‘ … our mistakes are hard-wired into our DNA … ’

  ‘ … imprinted on the child’s brain … hard-wired in … ’

  ‘ … wasn’t in my blood to make different choices … ’

  ‘ … I got choices. And I choose to call that bullshit … ’

  Jodie clenched her jaw. Pull the damn trigger!

  Peter held out a hand. ‘Come with us. You, me and Abby. We can start again, can’t we? That’s what I’d always planned. When I took Abby away. I thought maybe some day … But then you chose to leave.’

  Jodie glared up at him. Adjusted her sights on the gun. He peered at her face, and whatever he read there made him falter. Slowly, he let his hand fall back. When he spoke again, his whisper was cracked.

  ‘All I ever wanted was for us to be together.’

  Then, like a doused light, his expression went blank. Fatalistic. As though he’d checked out. As though he knew he’d lost everything.

  Jodie stared up into the shadows of her father’s face. Squeezed her fingers on the trigger.

  The shot, when it came, exploded into his chest.

  39

  Jodie’s eardrums pounded, hammering with hard, bullet-crack echoes.

  She gaped at Peter’s motionless body. Felt deaf, sluggish. Drowned in sound. Dazed, she turned her head to look at Celine.

  The recoil from the rifle had jolted the woman backwards. She was listing to one side, still sitting on the bed, her right shoulder dipped as though in pain, the gun held loosely across her arms. Her face was a mask of resignation. Of hopeless loss.

  Jodie blinked. Her ears were still ringing, the hum weighing her head down. With slow, small movements, she struggled to her feet, still holding on to Peter’s gun. She backed away from his body. Stared at Celine. The woman hadn’t moved.

  Jodie inched towards her, her shoes shushing on the dust sheet as she crossed it. Her limbs felt so heavy. It took effort to put one foot in front of the other, as though she was walking underwater.

  She stopped by the bed. Time had dilated, slowed right down, and the hush in the room felt eerie. Celine’s eyes looked glazed, her face slack. When the woman finally spoke, her voice was faint and hoarse.

  ‘I gave him life. My burden to end it, not yours.’

  She was staring at the floor, arms trembling from the weight of the rifle. After a moment, she went on.

  ‘You were right, Elliot twisted him. There’d been incidents … young girls … I had to send him away.’

  She looked up at Jodie. The anguish in her eyes was harrowing. ‘But Abby … I couldn’t let him …’

  Celine’s mouth trembled. She seemed unable to go on. Then she clutched at Jodie’s arm, her gaze full of pleading.

  ‘He was in such pain,’ Celine whispered. ‘Did you see that? My boy was in such pain.’

  Jodie nodded slowly, her head still heavy. She glanced at the rifle that was now resting on the woman’s lap. Jodie held out her hand for it, but Celine shook her head.

  ‘No, you mustn’t touch it.’

  She released Jodie’s arm, clasped both hands around the muzzle. Jodie watched the woman’s fingers, afraid she might turn the weapon on herself. But Celine showed no signs of ducking her pain.

  Jodie eased herself down on the bed beside her, her limbs still leaden. Celine scanned her face, and Jodie recalled Lily’s words: ‘ … you’re way too old.’ The only child of Peter’s they’d known about was Abby.

  Celine whispered into the dark.

  ‘Peter never showed me photos of his wife. You look …’ Her gaze held Jodie’s. ‘You look like my mother.’

  The room felt shadowy, insubstantial. Celine went on.

  ‘Her name was Mai. Her father came from Nishio, in Japan.’

  Jodie stared at her grandmother. Flimsy shadows hovered in the room like smoke. She exchanged a long look with Celine. A look of mutual recognition. Acknowledgement of shared pain. Both married to abusers, both grieving over children. Both ready to slay the monster.

  They stayed like that for some time. Then a door crashed open somewhere below them. Jodie caught her breath, dragged her focus back. Footsteps pounded on the stairs, racing, urgent. Cold air seeped all around her, washed into the room from the ice storm outside. She whipped her head around, in time to see Novak skid to a halt in the doorway: stocky, dishevelled; cheeks ruddy from the freezing cold; woolly cap jammed over wild hair; eyes shining, dogged, vigorous, brimming with life.

  The shadows vanished, and the room became solid and real.

  PART FOUR

  40

  They wouldn’t let her see Abby.

  The police had crashed up the stairs after Novak, weapons drawn, radios squawking, and had hustled her away to a holding cell in the county jail. Celine and Novak were arrested too, and no one listened when Jodie begged to be allowed next door to see her daughter.

  Celine had collapsed in custody soon afterw
ards. According to Jodie’s lawyer, she wouldn’t live long enough to stand trial. But Celine had made a full statement, confessing to the murder of her son, Peter Rosen, and confirming his previous identity as Ethan McCall.

  ‘Your conviction’s being overturned,’ Jodie’s lawyer told her, a dry, cynical man by the name of Finch. ‘Just a matter of red tape. Since your husband was alive for the last two and a half years, they can hardly uphold a conviction that you murdered him.’

  ‘What about Abby? I want to see my daughter!’

  Finch looked uncomfortable. ‘Let’s just get you out of here first.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘Well, there’s a wrinkle. The New Hampshire Attorney General is considering another indictment. Attempted murder, this time.’ Finch lifted a wry eyebrow. ‘On the basis that you wrote a letter that fourth of July clearly stating your intention to kill your husband.’

  Jodie stared, and Finch went on.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m cutting a deal.’

  ‘What kind of deal?’

  ‘You’ve served over two years for a wrongful conviction. I’ve threatened to sue—’

  ‘I don’t want to sue—’

  ‘They don’t want you to either, believe me. They’re falling over themselves to settle. I’ve made it a condition that no other charges are brought.’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘No jury would convict you, and they know it. The mitigating circumstances are far too emotive.’ He started blocking out headlines in the air. ‘Attorney General hounds heroic young mother after wrongful conviction.’

  Finch gave a sardonic smile and got up to leave.

  ‘They tell me the AG’s seeking reappointment at the end of his term. Last thing he needs is a media witch hunt.’

  The days went by.

  Jodie paced the cold, dank cell, blocking out the familiar clatter of deadbolts, the din of clamouring inmates. Why wouldn’t they let her see Abby?